The Stanford Daily Magazine
VOLUME II
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Issue 1
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September 22, 2017
Parent Problems Stanford students with children say the University can do more to help them. p. 10
the endowment p. 6
affirmative action p. 26
toxic fandoms p. 22
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Contents
The Stanford Daily MAGAZINE
Volume II, Issue 1 September 22, 2017
OPINIONS 4 on free speech and engagement Our thoughts on how institutions might express their values 26 Affirmative Action Amanda Rizkalla describes merits of and debate surrounding contested policy News 6 The Endowment Learn exactly how Stanford earns and spends its money
8 photo gallery Daily photographer Michael Spencer travels to Ecuador. (pictured: As part of the second annual Fiesta De La Luz in Quito, Ecuador, the iconic Basílica del Voto Nacional is illuminated with light in a celebration of art and culture.)
ARTS & LIFE
10 Parent problems
SPORTS
Neel Ramachandran investigates the major challenges faced by Stanford students with children
16 an unexpected blessing SPORTS Read about highly touted recruit Daejon Davis’ rise to fame and unexpected journey to the Farm
the GRIND 28 VSCO v. Instagram Julie Plummer examines photojournaling in the age of social media
20 women’s lacrosse coaches wins gold Stanford lacrosse coaches on the US women’s lacrosse team’s gold medal-winning performance at the World Cup
22 Toxicity and empowerment in fandoms Olivia Popp explores the massive appeal of fandoms and describes how negativity can grow alongside love Creative 30 POETRY Poems submitted by Bryan Cheong and Claire Francis
On the cover: Liesel and Holt Peterson have fun in the Quad. Photo by Avery Krieger STAFF: Editor-in-Chief Ada Statler-Throckmorton Executive Editor Samantha Wong Managing Editors Hannah Knowles, Fangzhou Liu, Sydney Shaw, Jose Saldana, Olivia Popp, Elizabeth Gerson, Stephanie Chen, Georgina Grant, Robert Shi, Michael Spencer, Janet Liu LAYOUT Joshua Wagner, Jacob Reiter, Janet Liu CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Do-Hyoung Park Chief Revenue Officer Kevin Martinez 3
Note from the Editorial Board: ON FREE S
A
s we return from the summer, some of the most talked-about news events have brought back into national focus a number of issues that have long dominated discussion on college campuses. Violence broke out after white supremacists marched onto the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, and a counterprotestor was killed in a car attack during a rally nearby the next day. A Google engineer was fired after publishing a memo criticizing the company’s diversity policies and suggesting that biological reasons were to blame for the gender gap in tech. UC Berkeley student groups’ on-again, off-again plans to host Milo Yiannopoulos have brought the issue of controversial speakers and violence on college campuses back to the forefront. While each of these events sits in its own context and its own web of complex questions, they all raise the question of how institutions
Sustained action matters. Bold public statements without any follow-through are effectively useless and often end up trivializing the issue at hand.
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express their values. Free speech and expression of opinions is of fundamental importance to democracy, and as such, individual free expression is generally under strong legal protection from the American government. But the speech of institutions is much more complicated: How and when should they take stances on their values, and what obligation do they have to provide a platform for the expression of their constituents — or employees, or users, or students? As a newspaper, we have — and always will have — a duty to defend free speech, but we also recognize that we bear a certain responsibility in promoting speech that is constructive and useful. To that end, here are some of our thoughts on how institutions — including Stanford — might best express their values. Scope of influence matters. The more power and influence an institution has, the more it needs to carefully consider the stances it takes and the ways in which it expresses those stances. The stakes are high, whether for a web hosting company deciding whether to allow hate groups to easily and cheaply establish themselves on the internet or for a university deciding whether to give or refuse to intentionally controversial speakers the same stages given to Nobel recipients. Public stances set
norms. When President Trump, for example, declined to condemn white supremacist groups when addressing the events in Charlottesville, he sent a message heard not only across America but around the world. Here on campus, given the leading role Stanford has established for itself in higher education, both administrators and students should recognize that every public stance taken — on issues ranging from racism to sexual assault to fossil fuels — can be enormously consequential and should be carefully thought out. Institutional history matters. No one can be expected to take a clear stance in every single debate. But public statements and actions are always in historical context, and for an institution to speak or act without consideration of its own history is just careless. We should expect UC Berkeley to have taken into account its role as the birthplace of the free speech movement of the 1960s when deciding to alternately host and cancel Yiannopoulos on its campus, just as we should expect Google to have considered the tech industry’s history of gender inequity when firing James Damore. Earlier this year, Georgetown decided to explicitly address the role of slavery in its survival by offering preferential admission to the descendants of slaves sold to fund the school, as well as creating a memorial and an
E SPEECH & ENGAGEMENT institute for the study of slavery. History doesn’t always have to be a burden on an institution’s actions for its future, but it should always be taken into context. Sustained action matters. Values should be meaningful; stances taken on those values should produce meaningful action. Bold public statements by major institutions are often essential to get people talking sufficiently about a problem, and discourse is necessary to create solutions that really work. But bold public statements without any follow-through are effectively useless and often end up trivializing the issue at hand. Companies, universities and others need to commit to their values rather than just providing a good PR moment. Institutions should also carefully consider the actions produced when they give public platforms to their constituents, or those invited by their constituents. Violence is never an acceptable consequence of free expression; this is true whether that expression comes in the form of a speaking event or a protest or a rally. While The Daily does not endorse the viewpoint of every speaker invited to address Stanford students, we unequivocally condemn those who wish to rebut such viewpoints with violence rather than arguments, with fear rather than discourse or action. What does all of this mean more
concretely? In one example: Following last year’s presidential election, the former Daily Editorial Board expressed regret about not speaking out about Donald Trump earlier but wrote that “in this moment, it is important not to disengage from politics or to retreat from this nation that we share.” And almost a year later, this current board believes that “this moment” isn’t over. As a newspaper, our actions are our words, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go beyond empty statements. We commit to staying engaged, to following up on the issues even when they are no longer as sensational as when the first headline broke, to keeping ourselves and the institutions around us accountable. We commit to continuing our internal discussions on our values and how we can make our paper better while widening our impact. We ask that the University consider the above thoughts when deciding what public stances to take. Stanford’s voice is prominent in itself, but its actions also set an example, and so we ask that the University go further and model policies that protect its community and that preserve the integrity of research and intellectual pursuits. Likewise, we ask that students, when challenging the administration — as we often should — take the same level of consideration.
Given the leading role Stanford has established for itself in higher education, both administrators and students should recognize that every public stance taken can be enormously consequential and should be carefully thought out.
University stances and decisions should be questioned, but we should do so deliberately and thoughtfully, with the aim of open and reasoned dialogue. This is an idea that has popped up frequently in the last year, in both national and local conversations, and for good reason: It’s the best way to move beyond words into concrete actions. This is the kind of expression that makes a difference. — Vol. 252 Editorial Board Contact the Board at opinions@ stanforddaily.com.
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MONEY MATTERS: MATTERS: MONEY
stream of annual payout for current spending and sustaining the funds in perpetuity. The Trustees use a formula that also takes market conditions into account. by LARK WANG & GILLIAN BRASSIL “Payout from the endowment is a critical source of funding for virtually every activity at Stanford — undergraduate and graduate tuition. education, research, arts and athletics,” On the other hand, the endowment funds Livingston said. some University operations and pays part of 2017-18 University Expenses The endowment grew 0.8 percent to $22.4 60 faculty salaries, which means these costs don’t Source: Stanford University Budget Plan 2017/18 Executive Summaryfiscal year due to billion in the 2015-16 go into tuition either. investment return, donations and transfers Compensation: “Stanford’s tuition is lower than the actual 50 Financial Aid: to the endowment, minus annual payout. cost of educating a Stanford student, in large 62% 5% returns surpassed the Although investment part because the endowment subsidizes much Debtpreliminary Service: returns of U.S. colleges 40 median of the total cost,” Lapin said. 3%overall endowment growth According to Livingston, about 8,000 distinct and universities, was less than the growth needed to support 30 funds from donors make up the endowment. University operations after taking inflation This includes individual scholarships, into account. In this year’s budget, Provost 20 fellowships, professorships and funds for other Persis Drell included a $4 million endowment specific purposes. Almost every fund is tied mitigation, or supplement Other to the endowment,10 Prince to a purpose set by its donor — for example, 56% Operating Expenses: to cover where the endowment falls short a fund for an undergrad on a full scholarship for departments that depend on endowment 0 can’t be used for the sociology department. 30% Source: Fi funds. Growing the endowment Drawing up the budget The endowment directlyRevenue fund Change indoesn’t University and Expenses Over Time The budget is the University’s overall plan expenditures — the returns from investing it (in millions of dollars) to set money aside for spending and saving does. SMC combines the 8,000 separate funds 8000 each year. Budget items range from short-term and invests them in the Merged Pool (MP), operating costs; to medium-term plans, such and part of the overall return from the MP 7000 as expanding available housing to alleviate the funds the individual purposes designated by faculty and staff housing crunch; to long-term donors. The MP also includes investments planning efforts. Revenue 6000 Health Care and Lucile from Stanford Packard As long-term planning is in development, Children’s Hospital. the budget has increased less for new initiatives The other 5000 20 percent of the endowment is in comparison to previous years. The budget represented in the value of endowed lands. also includes spare funds in case of reductions Expenses Stanford has holdings on Sand Hill Road and 4000 in government research funding. El Camino Real and in the Stanford Research Areas of development include supplementary Park that generate income. salary allocations for faculty who are struggling 3000 inflation into account, Lapin After taking with housing affordability, and for purchasing said that SMC must generate a 9 percent Source: Stanford University Budget Plan 2017/18 | *projected | +planned apartments and homes around Stanford to annual return in order to stably distribute a provide more affordable housing. Stanford 5.5 percent dividend from each of the funds also plans to build more graduate housing in that make up the endowment. The required Escondido Village. dividend is set by the Board of Trustees each With housing comes safety. Part of the year, balancing the aims of providing a steady
GUIDETO TOSTANFORD’S STANFORD’SFINANCES FINANCES AAGUIDE “Endowment (noun): the action of endowing something or someone.” Thanks, Google. The average Stanford student might not know what exactly the Stanford endowment does, or how it differs from the annual budget. Sorry if we shook your reality there — the endowment is a pool of invested funds that helps to cover University expenses in the long run, while the budget is a plan of yearly revenues and expenditures. In this issue, The Daily seeks to clarify what the endowment is, how it feeds into this year’s budget and why it is important. What is the endowment? Stanford’s endowment is older than Stanford itself: The first endowment was provided by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885, before the University opened in 1891. “The endowment exists to support the University in perpetuity — literally forever,” said Lisa Lapin, Vice President for University Communications. The endowment is handled by the Stanford Management Company (SMC), the University’s investments office. The SMC summarizes the endowment goals, University portfolio and asset statuses for Stanford in a yearly report. One major use of the endowment is to help keep down the cost of a Stanford education. On one hand, the endowment alone comprises around 50 percent of funding for University financial aid at any given time, according to Randy Livingston ’75 M.B.A. ’79, Vice President for Business Affairs and chief financial officer at Stanford. Since the endowment funds financial aid, it offsets a chunk of tuition for the majority of Stanford students, and for some students, all of their 60
Percentage of Expenses Covered by the Endowment
50 40
15 10
20
0
5
Princeton 56%
Harvard 36%
Yale 34%
Stanford 23%
Source: Fiscal year 2016 financial statements
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25 20
30
10
Annual Real Rate of Return on the Endowment
Source: Stanford University annual financial report & Stanford University investment report
Graphics by JANET LIU/The Stanford Daily
0 -5 -10 -15 -20 -25
Stanford Fund/President’s Fund: 8%
planned
of Return on the Endowment
rinceton 56%
Percentage of Expenses Covered by the Endowment
Harvard 36%
Yale 34% Other: 44%
Stanford und Thus, even th are not actua of of the real costs associated with a -Sta Stanford undergraduate education. Thus, even those paying “full price” are not actually paying the full cost of four years at Stanford.
Stanford 23%
-Stanford’s Endowment FAQ (2015-16) p. 7 General Contingency: 27%
Helps respond to potential changes in federal research funding; provides capacity to address initiatives emerging from the Long Range Planning process; addresses potential shortfalls in endowment payout.
ce: Fiscal year 2016 financial statements Increases in continuing costs for salaries, benefits, non-salary costs and the operating costs of facilities.
General Contingency: 27%
New Facilities Debt & Operations: 2%
er: 44%
TUITION of the real covers only about
Expendable Gifts:
1% Endowment budget has been set&aside for funding the investment Thereport 2017-18 budget includes funding for sity annual financial report Stanford University Income: ADAPT system in development, the Graduate the Faculty Development Initiative, which 47% Financial Planning System and Stanford Web encourages recruitment of underrepresented Services. These additional anticipated costs groups, as well as three more years of full align with the addition of a sworn deputy for funding for the Markaz: Resource Center. Public Safety and increased patrol security Meanwhile, community centers and the Diversity and First-Gen Office continue to seek ment around parts of campus. “Annualinvestment giving and report the endowment is increased funding to expand their programs Stanford University what really enables Stanford to be as great of and outreach, alongside competing needs and a university that we are,” Livingston said. “It priorities. allows us to increase the value of education Although financial jargon may not be your without going overboard on tuition.” cup of Philz, where Stanford’s endowment According to Livingston, money matters comes from and where the money goes affect when it comes to making Stanford the place every aspect of academic research, student life that it is — but students might argue that and countless other areas, fiscal year by fiscal its allocation does too. Funding from the year. University is an important source of support for initiatives that promote student and faculty Contact Lark Wang at larkw@stanford.edu and diversity, an issue that some student activists Gillian Brassil at gbrassil@stanford.edu. have drawn special attention to in the past.
Endowment Mitigation: 5%
Helps respond to potential changes in federal The costs of bringing Funding new facilities onlinefor in Financial Aid Sources 2017-18 University Expenses Supplements shortfall from the research funding; provides capacity to address ases in continuingthe costs for year. The most significant coming 60 from the endowment initiatives emerging Long Range for certain departments Source: Stanford University Budget Plan 2017/18 Executive Summary Projected for 2017/18 ies, benefits, non-salary costs addition is the Bass Biology Building, which Planning process; addresses potential the operating costs of facilities. is expected to open in Stanford late 2018. Source: University Budget Plan 2017/18 Compensation: shortfalls in endowment payout.
Financial Aid: 5% es Debt & Unrestricted Funds: Debt Service: Outside 10% of ringing new facilities online in Awards: Includes: staffing and operational costs in the Office 2% 3% Affairs; ear. The most significant Community Engagement and Diversity within Student
50
62%
Department Sources: Operations: 2% Student Support: 2% 1%
California State Scholarships: e Bass Biology Building, financialwhich aid for master’s 1% Federal Grants: open in late 2018. Education 2% Stanford Fund/President’s Fund: 8%
Percentage of Expenses Faculty/Academic & Research Support: 9% Covered by the Endowment Continues our investment in the Faculty
Endowment 40 Mitigation:Incentive 5% Fund and the Faculty Development
Initiative Supplements shortfall from the to encourage ongoing recruitment of underrepresented minorities and women to the 30 endowment for certain departments Total family students in the Graduate School of faculty. Enhances were also made to the faculty contributions:
child care programs.
27%
Faculty/Academic &20Research Support: 9% Systems & Security: 3%
Continues our investment in the Faculty Administration: 8% Reflects additional funding for the ADAPT system in development, the 10 Faculty Incentive Fund and the Development Princeton Harvard Yale Other Stanford Expendable Gifts: Graduate Financial Planning System expansion and for Stanford Web ng and operational costs in the Office of 56% Initiative to encourage ongoing recruitment of 36% 34% 1% Operating Expenses: 23% Endowment Services. This category also reflects the addition of a sworn deputy ngagement and Diversity within Student Affairs; underrepresented minorities and women to the Income: 0 position in the Department of Public Safety and the expansion of security or master’s students in the Graduate School of covers only about were also madeFiscal to theyear faculty 30%faculty. Enhances 47% Source: 2016 financialBudget statements patrols in parts of the campus. Source: Stanford University Plan 2017/18 child care programs.
port: 2%
TUITION
General Funds Additions
Systems & Security: 3%
onal fundingChange for the ADAPT system inRevenue development, in University and the Expenses ncial Planning System expansion and for Stanford Web (in millions of dollars) port category also reflects the addition of a sworn deputy 8000 Department of Public Safety and the expansion of security s of the campus.
7000 6000
Revenue
Administration: 8% Over Time
of the real costsGeneral associated with a Additions Compensation: Funds Stanford undergraduate education. Source: Stanford University 62% Budget Plan 2017/18 Thus, even those paying “full price” are not actually paying the full cost of four years at Stanford.
5000 4000 3000
2017-18 University Expenses Source: Stanford University Budget Plan 2017/18 Executive Summary
Expenses
-Stanford’s Endowment FAQ (2015-16) p. 7
Department Sources: 1%
Unrestric
Other Expenses: 30%
by Graphics Expendable Gifts: by Janet Liu & F
7 Change in University Revenue and Expenses Over Time
(in millions of dollars)
General Contingency: 27%
Source: Stanford University Bu
Outside Awards: 2% Operating California State Scholarships: 1% Federal Grants: 2% Stanford Fund/President’s Fund: 8%
ENDOWMENT 101
Source: Stanford University Budget Plan 2017/18 | *projected | +planned
Financial Aid: 5% Sources f Funding Debt Service: Project 3%
8000
1%
LIGHTROOM By Michael Spencer
The Nature and Culture of Ecuador
Parque de las Iguanas: One of the many attractions in Guayaquil, Ecuador; El Parque de las Iguanas is home to nearly a hundred iguanas basking in the sun for public view. The iguanas are recognized as some of the oldest and most prominent species in Guayaquil.
Mt. Pichincha: An afternoon view of Quito, Ecuador as seen from Mt. Pichincha. Clouds can be seen rolling into the nearby valley as they do most nights right before sunset.
Top Left: Cerro Santa Ana Houses: Pictured here are several of the vibrant and colorful houses that make up the community of the twin hills, Cerro del Carmen (pictured) and Cerro Santa Ana. 8
Cerro Santa Ana hill: Taken from Cerro Santa Ana hill, Cerro del Carmen (pictured) and Santa Ana were home to numerous Ecuadorian artists, inspiring the artists’ work with their breathtaking views.
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3
2
1- Fleeing the Crime: A bird is seen flying away from the fishing boat from which it ate some of the day’s catch. 2 - The Point: The twisting Point Building in Guayaquil, Ecuador is located where the Babahayo and Daule Rivers converge into the Guayas River, which later flows into the Pacific Ocean. The unconventional architecture of the building is meant to represent the swirling waters of the nearby converging rivers, which serve to connect Guayaquil to Pacific trade ports. 3 - Breaching humpback: Off the coast of Puerto Lopez, Ecuador, this lone Humpback whale can be seen breaching the water before heading off with the rest of its pod. The whales in the area are just one part of the amazing biodiversity near the Galápagos.
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AN UNEXPECTED
BLESSING Four-star basketball recruit Daejon Davis’ journey to the Farm by Benjamin Chen
16 Photo courtesy of Daejon Davis
O
n his way to the Stanford media room for the first time, Daejon Davis is all smiles. He waves to every staff member he walks past. He pokes his head into the sports trainer’s office. “Get ready for what’s coming!” he says, laughing. Allegedly, the friendly playersversus-staff wiffle ball matches can get pretty intense.
“When I was 5 years old I was taken to a park. My stepdad handed me a basketball... I started shooting hoops and literally didn’t do anything else the whole time I was there.”
To any observing eye, the 6-foot-4 fourstar, top-50 recruit is already a big part of the Cardinal family. Yet just over four months ago, things could have turned out very differently. Previously committed to the University of Washington, Davis was set to don the purple and gold. Even though he would decommit from Washington, Davis was still determined to be a Husky as he again committed to the school. Basketball was an early love for Davis. “When I was 5 years old I was taken to a park,” he said. “My stepdad handed me a basketball... I started shooting hoops and literally didn’t do anything else the whole time I was there.” After discovering her son’s interest in the sport, Davis’ mother was quick to sign him up for the local Boys & Girls Club. From then on, his passion for the game stuck, never wavering to other sports. “My mom wouldn’t let me play football... I was in track for half a season but I was just like, ‘Nah, I don’t like this,’” he said. “It was always pretty much only basketball.” Living in Seattle with its huge basketball community gave Davis many influences to go down this path. With a mother who attended Garfield High School, a state basketball powerhouse, he grew up watching the city’s young stars in admiration, such as Tony Wroten, Peyton Siva, Joshua Smith and Tramaine Isabell, all of whom earned statewide honors during their successful high school careers. “We watched these players go through the same process I went through: start at an inhouse league, AAU, then we get on the circuit — I always dreamed of playing in the circuit and being what they were,” he said. “That era
of basketball players made me want to go to Garfield.” Not only did he have high school role models, but Davis could also see evidence that his ultimate dream of making it to the NBA was possible. Basketball was nearly as entrenched in Seattle’s culture as coffee, so it was no surprise that a few dreamers were able to make it all the way. Professional basketball players from the area, including Jamal Crawford, Brandon Roy and Will Conroy, often would return to their roots and witness the emerging sprouts that would potentially take their places in the future. “[They] helped motivate me to be like them — they would always come back to the community and hang out with us as little kids,” Davis said. “The fact that I was able to receive such support at home kind of makes me appreciate home more than anything.” Still, despite self-motivation and inspiring influences, it was an upward climb to grasp that torch passed down from his Garfield
“Pressure? No. It’s basketball. I’ve been playing all my life. At the Boys & Girls Club — same basketball... If you put in the work, you should be confident of your skills no matter what level you’re at.”
idols. Some of that pushback came from one of his biggest supporters — his mom. Always looking out for her son’s future, she had already had Davis enrolled in private school in eighth grade and encouraged him to apply to other private high schools. Little did he know that it was this focus on academics that would bring him to Stanford several years later. “I got accepted to Lakeside [Private School] and my mom was like, ‘You’re going here,’” he said. After some initial resistance, he agreed to spend two successful years of high school there. Junior year, then, was the turning point in his basketball career. “My mom finally allowed me to transfer and that’s when basketball really took off for me,” he said, smiling. “From that point on, it was just that much more fun to be doing it for a culture more than just myself.” As he went into a historically great Garfield school that had won 11 state championships and produced NBA-level talent, it would be understandable if Davis felt some pressure as a newcomer trying to prove himself. Not him.
“Pressure?” he said with a confused look. “No. It’s basketball. I’ve been playing all my life. At the Boys & Girls Club — same basketball... if you put in the work, you should be confident of your skills no matter what level you’re at.” Davis kept this message to heart as he joined the Garfield varsity team but surprisingly didn’t start right away. “I was second-team All-Metro as a sophomore, so everyone expected me to come in and start, but Coach [Ed] Haskins made me work for my spot,” he said. To win his coach over, he had to do more of the little things to prove himself. “First game at Les Schwab [Invitational], I had a lot of points, but something like 18 rebounds. Coach was like, ‘He’s really working hard and not even caring about his scoring,’ so after that game he put me in the starting lineup.” To him, basketball has always been about two things: winning and having fun, which often went hand in hand. “I always wanted to be the best,” he said. “I’m really competitive.” With his win-first mentality, Davis was always willing to go the extra mile for the sake of the team. “I always knew I was an unselfish person,” he said. “You get way more joy out of winning a championship with your team than winning an MVP trophy.” More than anything, he learned to embrace each aspect of the game and the excitement that came with it. Basketball became more than a sport — it was an identity. “Everything about basketball... everything is just so fun,” Davis said. “It’s crazy how each level just gets more and more people watching you, and I really enjoy that.” In no game did more people watch him than in this year’s Washington 3A State Championship game against the No. 1 team in the nation, Nathan Hale. As crowds of scouts and fans flocked to watch Nathan Hale’s star, top recruit Michael Porter Jr., Davis felt right at home. “I’m just out there on the court. I don’t care who’s watching,” he said. “There’s not much pressure playing basketball unless you put the pressure on yourself. It’s supposed to be a fun,
“I’m just out there on the court. I don’t care who’s watching. There’s not much pressure playing basketball unless you put the pressure on yourself. It’s supposed to be a fun, competitive game.” 17
“People always said, ‘What are the odds you’re going to become a Division I basketball player?’ ‘What are the odds you’re going to make the NBA?’ I mean — odds are out there and... if I really want something, I work as hard as I can to get it.”
competitive game.” Unfortunately for Davis, his team did not get the result he hoped, losing 68-51. While the loss still lingers in his mind, it only serves as motivation for the future. “Second place does not feel good,” he said. “It’s just a learning experience — I just know if I ever get to that point again, I don’t want to lose.” Despite the loss, Davis looks back on the year as a success. “The entire season was so much fun,” he said. “The whole community rallied behind us because of all the hype around Nathan Hale — it brought the community closer.” Overall, high school was a chance for Davis to learn his most important lesson to date: to believe in himself.
Photo courtesy of Stanford Athletics
“Just the whole process of high school from where I started to where I am now is all a blessing,” he said. “People always said, ‘What are the odds you’re going to become a Division I basketball player?’ ‘What are the odds you’re going to make the NBA?’ I mean — odds are out there and... if I really want something, I work as hard as I can to get it. “I proved to myself over and over that I can pretty much achieve anything I want, as long as I put the work in and I’m confident in my abilities.” Like many kids who were focused on the NBA, the thought of college basketball didn’t come until he got older. When Davis reached middle school, he witnessed some of the high school players he followed go off to ACC schools. “Then as I got into high school, the Pac-12 began to get more competitive — a lot of guys were staying home,” he said. To get noticed around the country, Davis would play in the Nike EYBL (Elite Youth Basketball League) circuit outside of high school. “It’s a different atmosphere. High school is more of a time to play for your school pride and have your college coaches who are recruiting you come watch you play,” he said. “AAU is typically for getting more hype around your name, getting noticed by coaches more — it’s a bigger group of games... mostly another place to have fun for me.” Over the course of his development, he was able to build some key relationships at these tournaments and around town, notably with
former Washington coach Lorenzo Romar. “Always someone who’s been around me. From when I was young, working out with my cousin who attended there... at the gym, AAU tournaments, Boys & Girls Club,” he said. “Had many conversations with [him] prior to even being recruited by him. Ask me how I’m doing, how’s basketball doing, how’s school doing.” Romar’s ability to develop strong relationships with players helped him build UW’s top-notch recruiting class that included Davis as well as No. 1 prospect Porter. Davis first committed to his hometown school in August 2015 before backing out the following April. “Me and my mom weren’t sure,” he said. “We had never been on another college campus. We loved everything about Washington, and it wasn’t a decommitment — I didn’t take them off my list like I didn’t want to go there anymore.” Davis simply wanted to go out and explore more options. “Every time I was asked, I was so happy to be recruited I was like, ‘Oh, I’m okay with going away from home,’ but I never really knew what it would be like to be away from home.” So Davis decided to keep it on the West Coast and, for the most part, in the Pac-12, with a final five of Stanford, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Gonzaga. “Every school except Stanford was there from junior year on,” he said. There was a good reason, however, that
Photo courtesy of Stanford Athletics
Stanford was late to the party. Former Stanford head coach Johnny Dawkins didn’t recruit Davis, as it’s hard to take Seattle-based players from Seattle, and Dawkins didn’t really get a chance to recruit him. Dawkins was let go after a disappointing season in 2015-16. “I get a call junior year spring. It’s Stanford,” Davis said. “It’s a totally new coaching staff — I had no idea.” That new coaching staff belonged to new men’s basketball head coach Jerod Haase. “Right after I got the job... when he decommitted, that’s when I heard about him,” Haase said.
“You get way more joy out of winning a championship with your team than winning an MVP trophy.” Despite recruiting him for the shortest time, Stanford was able to capture his interest. “All the trips to see me, the genuine interest in me... they were the most efficient and effective in building a true relationship with me and earning my trust,” Davis said. But it wasn’t enough the first time. He recommitted to Washington and Coach Romar in November, this time signing a letter of intent. “He was someone I really trusted who I was confident could develop me as a player and as a person,” he explains. So when Romar was fired as Washington’s coach in mid-March, things turned upsidedown for Davis. He, along with three of the other four top recruits for the school, were released from their letters of intent. “More than anything, my mom didn’t want me to settle for anything. That’s a big reason my recruiting process was so — .” He trails off,
making an up-and-down hand motion. Only one UW recruit stayed: his high school teammate and top-70 recruit Jaylen Nowell. While many saw Davis and him as complementary teammates, the relationship between the two ran much deeper. As best friends that fell in love with the sport together, they’ve almost never played basketball apart — from elementary school to middle school and eventually Garfield, to even their AAU teams — making this upcoming season understandably tough. “Just so many memories,” Davis said, sighing. Some fans still give him a hard time for leaving his hometown and best friend, but the noise doesn’t faze Davis. “At the end of the day, I’m the one who has to live with the decisions I make,” he said. He has learned from numerous players who remained set on their commitments despite being unsure, resulting in a transfer a year or two into college. “That can all be prevented by being a man or a woman and deciding what you want to do,” he firmly states. After decommitting from Washington, Stanford became an easy choice, in no small part due to his mother’s input. “It’s a really good balance. Everyone said it: academics and athletics,” he said. “They have the quote, ‘This is not a four-year decision; this is a 40-year decision.’ I really believe in that. “This is a place where I feel like if I put in more work now, it’ll pay off more in the long run.” Going into the future, there’s a lot for everyone to be excited about when it comes to Davis. For Haase, that means seeing his recruit being able to contribute immediately. “Perimeter players capable of getting to the paint... and then the on-ball defense right now is so big in college basketball,” Haase said, “And he really thrives in those areas.” Haase recalls his initial impression of Davis during his first meeting with him, and one word came to mind: dynamic. “Great personality, looks you in the eye when talking to you,” he said. “I’ve learned since then that you can put him in any situation and he’s very comfortable — a 10-year-old kid or 90-year-old grandmother.” As for what position Davis will see time at, that’s not set in stone. Davis is listed by many scouts as a “combo guard,” meaning he plays as both a point guard and shooting guard. “I have no preference. I feel like my skill set better fits a PG,” he said. “Not limiting myself, but I feel like any scout that watches me play can see that... but I’m a basketball player. I can play whatever position I want and still help out.” Haase agrees with Davis’ self-assessment. “Offensively, his passing has been a pleasant surprise. He’s a high level passer but also has
the ability to break down defenses off the bounce... he’ll certainly play time at the point because we don’t have as much depth there.” Of course, Haase is not limiting his versatile recruit. For all four of his incoming recruits, a common theme has been the ability to play multiple positions, which has become crucial
“Perimeter players capable of getting to the paint... and then the on-ball defense right now is so big in college basketball... He really thrives in those areas.”
in today’s game. “Play him at the one or the two, and he has the length so that you could put him at the three if you wanted,” he said. Although players are limited to just two hours a week on the court and six hours in the weight room over the summer, Haase can see the development already. The biggest thing he looks for during these short summer sessions is how a player adjusts. “The jump from high school to college for any player is always a significant one, but the fact that we have him here for the summer is great,” he said. “Get him used to playing hard on every play.” Davis feels the same way about the summer training so far. “I’ve definitely developed a lot as a player, and we haven’t really even been taught that much,” he said. “Growing as a person, living on my own without my mom — it’s a whole new thing, but the transition has been made much more pleasant by all the coaches.” Davis’ goals for this season? “To win,” he said. “Anything else that happens is a blessing. Winning opens up doors for everyone and individual accolades... but more than anything, I came here to win and make a difference.” “The big thing is people in the Stanford community are gonna love being around him,” Haase said with a smile. “He has a wonderful personality and infectious smile that people are really drawn to, and I think that’ll really show in his time here.” Contact Benjamin Chen at thebenchen10@ gmail.com.
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CARDINAL WITH CARDI
Student Student parents say Stanford canp Student by Neel Ramachandran
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n 2013, after nearly two years of field research in Southern California, graduate student Forest Peterson M.S. ’07 couldn’t wait to get home to Stanford. Peterson, a married father of three and current Ph.D. student in civil engineering, had visited his family so infrequently that his young children had forgotten who he was, and his pregnant wife had begun to resent him for being away. But according to Peterson, his return to campus did not go as smoothly as he’d anticipated. Within a month of being back at Stanford, he received an email notifying him that he would be unable to renew his housing after six years — a time limit he said he’d overlooked, misunderstanding Stanford’s policies. A single student would have stopped the clock on his housing contract while away, but Peterson, loath to uproot his family, had continued using the one year of University housing and five years of housing lottery priority that Stanford guarantees to its Ph.D. students. Now, Peterson would need to house a family of five in Silicon Valley on a student’s budget. “I call it being evicted,” he said. Peterson believes his experience with housing — and what he criticizes as the University’s lack of flexibility for his particular circumstances as a student parent — is part of a bigger problem at Stanford, where the Bay Area’s high costs of living put particular strain on families’ budgets. Graduate students with children who spoke to The Daily said that they feel they are being overlooked and that the University could do more to meet their needs. In 2016, Peterson and a group of parents with similar concerns formed the Student Parent Alliance (SPA), an advocacy group that aims to improve Stanford’s resources and accommodations for this special subset of the community. The SPA now has several hundred members, including faculty and administrators. University officials say that Stanford is dedicated to collaborating with the parents to address their concerns. This year, the University formed the Student Family Working Advisory Group (SF-WAG), a specialized task group that begun to work with the SPA on issues such as access to housing, lactation spaces and child care, among several others. Some students questioned if the University is doing enough. “Being a parent is part of our identity, in addition to racial, ethnic, cultural and class backgrounds that we come in with,” said Tina Cheuk M.A. ’07, a Ph.D. student who helped Peterson create the SPA. “It is part of who we are, and there are things the University could do better in being a leader and supporting the
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diversity of the student population.”
Housing challenges
Stanford’s graduate housing shortage and an expensive Silicon Valley housing market pose challenges for many students, not just those with children. But difficulties in finding housing may fall especially hard on families, student parents said. Even for student parents who do not pursue field research, completing degrees within the time period allotted for housing can be an immense challenge, Peterson said, citing the extra demands of attending school while raising a child. While the University grants master’s students with children an extra year of housing priority, it does not make the same
“Being a parent is part of our identity, in addition to racial, ethnic, cultural and class backgrounds that we come in with. It is part of who we are, and there are things the University could do better in being a leader and supporting the diversity of the student population.”
provisions for students pursuing Ph.D.s. “These limitations are necessary to manage much greater demand for university housing than we are able to accomodate,” wrote Jocelyn Breeland, a spokesperson for Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE), in an email to The Daily. “Although we are aware there may be students — with or without children — who take longer to complete their studies, these priorities are intended to meet the needs of most students.” Students who lose priority can still enter the housing lottery. According to Breeland, changes to the priority system that began in part last year and kicked in fully this year allowed all students with children who requested on-campus housing — even those without priority years left — to receive it in the housing lottery for 2017-18. R&DE accommodated those who wanted off-campus assignments too, Breeland said. Stanford has housing designed for families in northern Escondido Village, and gives families preference for two-bedroom apartments in Escondido South.
The housing lottery hasn’t always been able to place all student parent applicants. Last school year, 13 student parents who applied for on-campus or subsidized off-campus housing were unassigned in the initial lottery, including the seven who applied without priority or a special medical need. However, those student parents’ predicament was part of a broader housing crunch affecting all kinds of graduate students, which the University hopes to combat with an Escondido Village construction project expected to add 2,000 beds in 2020. Parents made up just a small portion of the 724 total (11 percent of) students who sought housing but went unassigned that round. Peterson said he did not receive housing when he entered the lottery in 2013 and again the next year. In 2013-14, between 21 and 36 student parents were on a housing waitlist each quarter. About a third got off the list. For Peterson, losing his campus housing meant moving five times in the following years, as a lack of stable income made it hard to secure a long-term living arrangement. “How do you get a lease without a job? Nobody will give you one,” he said. “You have to have a down payment and first month’s rent… Plus I didn’t have any credit because I didn’t have a job.” Breeland noted that Stanford provides support to students who choose not to live in or aren’t able to get university housing. R&DE compiles off-campus housing listings and other resources, and Housing Assignments staff can advise students one-on-one. The Financial Aid Office awards some graduate students loans of up to $6,000 throughout their Stanford careers to help with move-in costs, such as a first payment on an apartment. The Bay Area, however, remains expensive. This year, the Mercury News reported that the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto was $3,600 per month, with down payments typically requiring at least an additional month’s worth of rent. Benjamin Shank Ph.D. ’14, a former graduate student in the physics department whose housing contract also expired, said he was unable to find living arrangements in the Bay Area and sent his family across the country to live with his in-laws in 2012. Shank spent his final year at the University subletting Stanford housing from other graduate students and living in his office. “I had stashed some clothes in an unused corner of an adjacent lab, and the office had a full-sized couch and a mini-fridge,” Shank said. “There was a shower [in the building], so the only real issues were laundry and loneliness.” Shank would not wish his experience on another family. “I got a lot out of [my] program at
“I’m supposed to focus on my research; that’s why I’m here. But I can’t focus on that if I’m trying to figure out how to feed my baby... All these issues add up, and as women we have to work that much harder.” Stanford, but I have had to honestly advise students who are about to get married that they should probably look elsewhere,” he said. “Had I been single, I could have easily handled a loss of housing. Right now, Palo Alto and Stanford are not places I could send a young family without strong financial resources in good conscience.” With the help of a supportive advisor and coworkers, Shank was able to finish his degree and “leave as soon as possible,” he said.
power and status dynamic that is a barrier, period.” An April email from Graduate School of Education staff reminded GSE members that the school’s Wellness Rooms are meant for nursing mothers, those feeling ill or people briefly meditating — not for lunch breaks,
Tina Cheuk, graduate student, spends time with her daughter.
Obstacles for mothers
While any student parents can eventually lose housing, SPA leaders feel extra burdens of pursuing a degree as a mother are emblematic of broader institutional barriers women may face in keeping up with their male counterparts in academia. They pinpointed two examples of resources that Stanford can expand to help mothers: maternity leave and lactation space. The University’s maternity leave policy grants graduate students leave from teaching assistant or research assistant duties after giving birth. Because fathers and other partners are excluded from the program, the SPA argues, mothers have to make a tough choice: Take the six weeks and fall behind male colleagues or pass on the leave in order to remain competitive, a decision that student mothers said can have harmful effects on the early stages of a newborn child’s development. One of the SPA’s initiatives, listed on the group’s website, is to expand maternity leave to a general parental leave, thereby leveling the playing field and providing families with more flexibility in deciding how to raise their child. Some student mothers said that childbirth is only the first in a series of challenges they face as they work toward degrees. Cheuk, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education (GSE), said she struggled to find a good place to pump her breast milk when she arrived at Stanford in 2014 as the mother of a newborn. Needing to pump milk throughout the day to feed her child when she got home, Cheuk inquired about lactation spaces on campus. She said she expected to find designated spaces in her building for women with the same predicament but was instead directed to bathrooms, cubicles and conference rooms. When she voiced concerns about privacy, she said, people higher up in the GSE told her to hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign and prop a
Photo by Jamie Soja
chair against the door to prevent people from entering. The GSE did have one designated lactation space in the School of Education Building, Cheuk said. But the distance made it less accessible for Cheuk and other members of her school who spend their time primarily at the Center for Education Research at Stanford. According to Cheuk, the space was also located in an old, dusty basement. (“I was surprised there weren’t rat droppings,” she said, half-jokingly.) “I’m supposed to focus on my research; that’s why I’m here,” Cheuk said. “But I can’t focus on that if I’m trying to figure out how to feed my baby.” The experience prompted Cheuk to launch what became a two-year effort to improve the quality of lactation spaces in her department, during which she contacted 18 university administrators through email and in-person meetings, she said. Cheuk said she was met with sympathy but made little progress in her goals until 2016, when the University agreed to work with Cheuk to design two new “Wellness Rooms” in her department. Still, she said she and her colleagues have found it difficult to ensure that these rooms are used for their intended purpose. Cheuk has often seen the rooms used by male coworkers as a quiet space to take calls or naps. “Mothers who needed to use the space had to ask people to leave,” she said. “There’s a
conference calls and sleeping. According to Priscilla Fiden, associate dean for administration at the GSE, the Wellness Rooms now have signs notifying users that lactating mothers have first priority in all cases. In a survey sent to GSE students last year, 11 mothers reported using the space to lactate regularly. Still, Cheuk feels that the Wellness Rooms are not fully suitable lactation spaces, citing sanitary concerns over pumping breast milk in rooms shared with people that might be sick. She said her frustration over lactation options over the last few years has raised doubts in her mind about her intended career path in academia. “All these issues add up, and as women we have to work that much harder in these systems to be successful,” Cheuk said. Lisa Hummel, a graduate student in sociology and fellow SPA member, voiced similar concerns, arguing that gender imbalances in industries such as tech and academia are often rooted in the institutional barriers new mothers face at universities. Hummel does not have children but said she supports SPA’s initiatives because she realizes the policies it advocates may play a role in her future. “I’m 30 and I’ll be in [my] program for five to seven years, so if I want to have a family, it will likely be during this time,” Hummel said. “These things will impact me.” 13
Forest Peterson, graduate student, with his kids Liesel, 10, and Holt, 7.
AVERY KRIEGER/The Stanford Daily
Currently, Stanford lists 26 designated lactation spaces on its website, and states that “[a]ny space that is private and is not located in a bathroom can be considered for lactation space use” with permission. According to University spokesperson Ernest Miranda, the University’s Human Resources department has begun drafting a new policy on accommodating lactation and is partnering with campus organizations such as the SPA to ensure a “culture of support for breastfeeding” for the entire Stanford community. The University’s Title IX office also serves as a resource for students with concerns over lactation support, Miranda said. Cheuk no longer needs lactation spaces, but said she is glad her two-year campaign will benefit future students. However, what she describes as the University’s inertia in responding to her complaint has left her feeling — like other members of the SPA — that the University can
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afford to ignore issues they raise and continue to attract top-tier talent. “Unless they start losing graduate students to other top institutions, it’s not really their problem,” Hummel said.
Child care access
Access to affordable child care remains a worry for some student parents in addition to housing and lactation space. Last year, the University announced its decision to close Rainbow School and Pepper Tree After School Program, two of the eight child care centers on campus. The programs were the only two at Stanford that granted the highest priority in enrollment to graduate students and reduced tuition — regardless of income — for residents of Escondido Village, where graduate students are concentrated. Stanford will grant the land opened by the demolition of Rainbow School and Pepper Tree After School Program to Children’s
Center of the Stanford Community (CCSC), an independent nonprofit program that will grow its enrollment from 144 to 255 children. Stanford is also partnering with the Palo Alto Unified School District to increase the capacity of Palo Alto Community Child Care (PACC), an after-school program that operates one of its child care facilities at Escondido Elementary School. “In regards to the closures of Rainbow and Pepper Tree, we greatly appreciate the love that exists for these programs, and the decision to close them was not undertaken lightly,” said University spokesperson Lisa Lapin in a statement to The Daily. “We made the decision to maximize the expansion opportunity for CCSC because not only does this bring infant and toddler care into the [Escondido Village] neighborhood, but it also allows us to grow a program that has consistently high demand,” Lapin said. Phyllis Pires, senior director of WorkLife
Strategy at Stanford, told The Daily previously that graduate students at centers besides Pepper Tree and Rainbow receive priority for child care after faculty. For the first year after Pepper Tree’s and Rainbow’s closures, families are getting either priority to move to PACC or “additional priority at all of our child care programs to ensure their children can have a continuity of care,” Lapin said. Still, SPA member Hummel, a former child care research specialist at WorkLife, was critical. “It’s not a long-standing commitment by the University to give graduate students with children priority enrollment,” she said, discussing the University’s promise of extra priority for next year. “It’s just [for] the students currently being affected by the change.” An email obtained by The Daily from a PACCC administrator stated that the center will not give priority to graduate students beyond children entering the program this year and their siblings in future years. Graduate students get discounts on Stanford’s child care programs based on their income. According to Lapin, about half of the
subsidies on yearly income does not account for the fact that “people come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.” “My husband has student loans [from undergraduate school] and took out more loans [at Stanford],” she said. “When you start to think about the different expenses that families with different backgrounds come to Stanford with, the fact that they have these income requirements to receive support for child care isn’t an adequate representation of the needs of students with families.”
Working with the University
The SPA’s formation prompted the University this year to assemble SF-WAG, the task group that will work with the organization to address its concerns. Led by Pires from WorkLife Strategy and Ken Hsu, assistant vice provost and director of the Graduate Life Office, SF-WAG met with the SPA in April for the first time. “Stanford is committed to supporting students with children and dependents, recognizing that these students have unique challenges, particularly in Silicon Valley, where housing, health care and child care costs have
“I’ve found that people don’t always want to share that they are a parent, because they want to lead with the fact that they are a researcher and a scholar. There are still biases in education. If you’re a parent, there are assumptions that you will leave [work] earlier, and that you won’t work as hard because you have a family at home.” school’s graduate student families currently benefit from tuition reductions of several hundred dollars each month. Only University faculty and staff are eligible for grants of up to $5,000 per year through the Child Care Subsidy Grant Program (CCSG). Without reduced tuition, the cost of child care at a center like CCSC can become prohibitive for some graduate students. During the 2016-17 school year, the center charged between $1,850 and $2,445 per week for fulltime care, depending on the age of the child. “The tuition at the Stanford child care programs on campus is benchmarked against market rate for high-quality child care,” Lapin said. “We recognize the degree to which this expense is challenging for many families in the Bay Area.” Ericka Weathers, a student in the Graduate School of Education, said her family feels the strain of paying the full cost of tuition for her two children at Stanford Madera Grove Children’s Center. Because her husband has a job, her family falls above the income cutoff for tuition reductions, she said. Weather argued that basing child care
increased markedly,” said Hsu and Pires in a statement to The Daily. “During [the meeting in April], the participants all agreed that the way to move forward most swiftly — to identify actionable items and to prioritize them — is to establish a collaborative working group whose membership represents the key university offices that share resources and responsibilities for students with children and dependents, including lactation accommodations, child care, information and resources for students who are parents, financial aid, and health care,” Hsu and Pires said. SF-WAG intends to present a “special report and set of recommendations” to Patricia Gumport M.A. ’82 ’86 Ph.D. ’87, the vice provost for graduate education, during winter quarter of the coming school year. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” Cheuk said of SPA’s newfound collaboration with the University task group. “I have to give Stanford an opportunity to try to address these issues, but at what point does their lack of action warrant more action on our part?” In Cheuk’s view, more transparent data
on student parents at Stanford could help the University address concerns. Currently, neither the SPA nor the University have a precise number for students at Stanford with children, making it difficult to allocate appropriate resources to a population of unknown size. SF-WAG calls “strategies for accessing and collecting student family data” one of its immediate priorities. Gathering parental status poses particular challenges. Unlike other demographics such gender and ethnicity, which tend to be static variables, parental status can change at any point during a student’s time in college. Furthermore, Cheuk said, student parents may not be forthcoming about having children out of worry for how peers perceive them. “I’ve found that people don’t always want to share that they are a parent, because they want to lead with the fact that they are a researcher and a scholar,” Cheuk said. “There are still biases in education. If you’re a parent, there are assumptions that you will leave [work] earlier, and that you won’t work as hard because you have a family at home.” Despite the obstacles in collecting such data, Cheuk believes the University should do more to obtain it. The SPA has lobbied to include marital and parental status as optional demographics on Axess, Stanford’s web portal for everything from grades to tuition billing. Currently, Axess requires students to input their ethnicity and, optionally, state their religious community affiliation as part of a yearly “Student Check-In.” “If you don’t count us and the data isn’t tracked, nothing will be done,” Cheuk said. For parents like Cheuk, organizing meetings — she and Peterson report attending over 60 between the two of them since 2014 — in addition to pursuing their degrees and taking care of their children is worthwhile if it creates change for future parents like Hummel. Cheuk envisions the eventual funding of a graduate student family center to serve as a comprehensive resource for student parents. Other universities such as the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley have similar centers. Cheuk likely won’t see this plan executed during her time at Stanford, but she has begun drafting a longterm proposal for its implementation. “Stanford is training us to be future leaders, and as such we will take the policies and practices we learn here to wherever we go,” Cheuk said. “How can Stanford be a leader and be really transformative and push issues to teach us to do the same things as future leaders in other institutions?” Contact Neel Ramachandran at neelr@stanford. edu.
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Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Bring Gold Back to Stanford by Sydney Shaw
The perfect storm
July 22, 2017 – It was a rainy Saturday afternoon at the Surrey Sports Park in Guildford, England. The buzzer sounded in the 2017 FIL Rathbones Women’s Lacrosse World Cup final. The U.S. team celebrateed its 10-5 victory over Canada and its eighth gold medal with a dog pile. “It had not rained almost the entire time leading up to the final game and then it poured,” said Amy Bokker, Stanford women’s lacrosse head coach and the U.S. team assistant coach, “It was the perfect storm.” The U.S. had just won gold on the biggest stage of international lacrosse. In the slippery conditions, the U.S. offense was held to its second-lowest output since 2009 but still clinched the title. With that victory, the U.S. improved to 60-6-1 in World Cup competition, proving its dominance in the world of lacrosse. “We were playing for something bigger than ourselves,” said Stanford women’s lacrosse assistant coach and U.S. defender Kristen Carr. “And there were so many emotions.
Being able to hold up the trophy at the end, having achieved what you worked for was indescribable. And better yet, to be able to do it with 17 other people is an incredible experience.” Entering the final, the U.S. had competed in 10 days of pool play along with 25 nations. The U.S. averaged 18 goals per game before it met Canada in the gold medal game and had already defeated Canada 17-3 earlier in the tournament. The gold medal game was also a rematch of the 2013 World Cup final, where Carr and Bokker earned their first U.S. gold medals. After a few days of celebration, the U.S. team traveled to Poland for the World Games, where the team made its debut on the world stage of the international multi-sport event organized by the International World Games Association.
Path to Olympic recognition
July 30, 2017 – On a Sunday afternoon in Wroclaw, Poland, the U.S. team competed in The World Games final. It defeats Canada, this time 11-8. The crowd erupted as the U.S. team
Head Coach Amy Bokker joined the Cardinals in 2009 and has since lead the team to five MPSF titles and six NCAA tournament appearances. Bokker has also assisted Team USA to three gold medals.
Bokker and Carr duo
Stanford Assistant Coach, Kristen Carr was one of USA’s most dominant defenders this summer. Carr has been a member of the U.S. team since 2008 and has won three gold medals. 20
Photo courtesy of Ady Kerry
became the first ever women’s lacrosse two-time world champion. A week later, the U.S. was back at it again. This time, they were among five other countries, including Poland, Canada, Australia, Great Britain and Japan, competing for the first time in the World Games, an event that is considered a springboard on the path to Olympic recognition for a sport. In this multisport tournament, teams attempted to vie for an Olympic bid as members of the Olympic committee evaluated the sport. Women’s lacrosse is not yet an Olympic sport, but many hope it will become one. The U.S. national team ultimately trains to compete in World Cup play, but with the chance to showcase its sport internationally and compete for another medal, it seized the opportunity to participate in Poland. One of the differences between the World Cup and the World Games besides the composition of the teams playing is the rule adjustments. Teams play with a 15-person roster instead of an 18-person roster and with 10 players on the field as opposed to the standard 12. The Federation of Lacrosse made these slight rule adjustments prior to the World Games in an attempt to appeal to the Olympic committee. “With a smaller roster, it is easier for other countries to pick up teams,” said Bokker. “And with less people on the field, the game is easier to understand and more engaging.” Prior to the start of the World Games, there was an opening ceremony in which over 100 countries were honored for various sports. The crowd roared and fans stood up in awe when the U.S. lacrosse team was honored. “The stadium erupted when we walked through and little kids were giving us high fives," said Karr. "I remember thinking how that was really what it is all about. "It was a moment I will never forget.”
Photo courtesy of Ady Kerry
[Earlier:] January 17, 2017 – A regular Tuesday afternoon practice at Stanford, only a few days out from the last three-day U.S. Women’s National Team tryout. Carr got a call from the U.S. women’s lacrosse head coach, Ricky Fried. She was named to the 18-player World Cup roster. Carr’s Stanford team circled around her and jumped in excitement and awe. The World Cup journey for Carr started in August 2016 when she was selected out of 100 contenders to the 36-player roster of the preliminary U.S. training squad, which participated in the Team USA Spring Premiere. This Premiere, in which the U.S. played against top NCAA teams Florida and Notre Dame, was the last showcase for the U.S. players before final cuts for the World Cup team were made. Having been a member of the U.S. team
Photo courtesy of Ady Kerry
Team USA holds the trophy after defeating Canada 10-5 in the FIL Rathbones Women’s Lacrosse World Cup. since 2008, Carr was no stranger to the intense U.S. selection process. Carr won her first goal medal in Canada at the 2013 World Cup, where she had a pair of goals and tied for the team lead with 10 ground balls. After graduating from North Carolina in 2010, she was named an IWLCA First Team AllAmerican and first team All-ACC and held the single-season (64) and career (174) draw control records. With this tremendous lacrosse resume, the decision to put Carr back on the 2017 World Cup roster was a no-brainer. “She is one of our most physical defenders,” said Bokker. When asked what it meant for her to have been a part of the World Cup roster again, Carr responded humbly. “I felt honored,” said Carr, “There are many incredible players in our country and to have been one of the final players selected to represent Team USA is a dream come true. That pride is felt every day and has inspired me to be the best version of myself.” After selections in January, the team only met once for training over Memorial Day weekend before the World Cup. Players were responsible for keeping up their skills and fitness throughout the months leading
up to England. Carr, who was in the midst of Stanford’s season, had to find the time in between coaching, film and traveling to put in that work. Coaching Stanford at this time allowed Carr to stay close to the game with a stick in her hand and made her eager for the summer ahead, when she could step onto the field in a different role. She found value in the transition between her roles on both teams, because as a coach, she was able to see the game from a different perspective and apply it to her own game. “Being both a player and a coach, I can see both sides. I try to use that to my advantage and really put myself in the shoes of the players I coach at Stanford,” said Carr. Carr was not alone in balancing her focus between Team USA and Stanford. Bokker was also coaching Stanford to a 12-6 season while preparing for a World Cup. Bokker joined the national team staff in 2009, around the same time she became the head coach at Stanford. Since then, she has helped the U.S. capture three gold medals and has established the Cardinal as one of the West’s foremost programs with five MPSF titles and six NCAA tournament appearances. For Stanford, having two coaches as part of the
U.S. lacrosse organization and as gold medal winners is a tremendous achievement for the athletic department. It is also an inspiration to its program’s players to play the game at the highest level. “For me, I view [coaching the U.S. team] as the opportunity to have exposure to the game at that level," said Bokker. "Also being able to coach both teams keeps me fresh and gives me the opportunity to work with high-level athletes, see what they are capable of and test them with new strategies and skill sets, which is then, in turn, pushing me to bring my best as a coach. “From that standpoint, in relating the two teams, I would say that my goal is for my Stanford players to aspire to play at the level of the U.S. team. I have a good taste of what that is. And my players are also being coached and playing alongside Kristen in practice, so they are able to see what it takes to play at that level”. Contact Sydney Shaw at sshaw17@stanford.edu.
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toxic
empowerment By Olivia Popp
SUNNY LI/The Stanford Daily
I
’m addicted to television. And yes, I can’t say for sure that, by a true psychology definition, I’m truly addicted, but in your general WebMD (or, quite aptly, Internet-based) search queries, I’ve exceeded obsessive behavior and have reached the point of addiction. Sometimes it’s frightening to me that I’m happy to readily admit this. At other (read: most) times, I’m secretly glad that I find myself obsessed with such a medium. As a quick rundown, TV for the most part was discouraged when I was younger, usually due to the classic “It’ll rot your brain!” nonsense that I always heard floating around. But as I have discussed time after time with many people over the years — it’s 2017. Why is television not a valid artistic medium? And that’s when I stumbled upon fandoms. For those of you hoping that I’ll be answering the question in the last paragraph, you’re going to have to stop reading, because that would require a whole other story. Nevertheless, a discussion of fandoms might give you a small glance into the incredibly complex world of television and its audience. Let’s start with the most basic of terminology: geek. The word “geek” has been, in a sense, reappropriated from its original derogatory slang meaning, now typically used proudly to describe oneself as an enthusiast of a certain field. For those whose obsessions lie within entertainment, this field of interest is thus called a fandom, often associated with a TV show, film, comic book series or other art. Many self-described geeks also embrace the original connotation of being “different” and “eccentric,” reveling in being set apart from the average person due to their fascination of and place within these fandoms. (From this point on, I’ll be using the all-encompassing but, to my knowledge, unofficial term “geek fandom” to describe 22
this phenomenon, and “fan” to describe those involved in the fandom.) TV show fandoms are only one type of geek fandom, but they are a great example of how these fandoms attract so many members. Geek fandoms have a lot in common with celebrity fanbases, not unlike your stereotypical depictions of screaming teenage girls fawning over Harry Styles or whoever the new guy is the day after tomorrow. Nevertheless, the one thing that separates geek fandoms from other fanbases is the nature of the artistic medium. To unpack this, we’ll need to start back a little farther, and I’ll use myself as an example. I often attribute a large part of my personality to how television has influenced me. When people meet me, they sometimes struggle to piece together how a cynical, sarcastic person like me could love the over-commercialized world of pop culture and mass media so much, and I typically try to defend myself and say that no, I prefer to purely indulge in television. Yet the lines between television and pop culture as a whole are so intermingled and the spaces so connected that I no longer have the ability to make that distinction. I would consider myself a member of a large number of geek — for me, television and movie — fandoms, which often have crossovers, especially with the advent of such “cinematic universes” such as that of Marvel Studios. Still, it’s strange to think about that up until just a few years ago, I hadn’t watched a lick of “Parks and Recreation” or heard of “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” But as a confused, stereotypically nerdy high school teen, I quickly found myself in need of a space where I felt like I could try to understand myself and the world and for me, that was the world of television. Rather than shy away from geek culture, I instead literally convinced myself to watch every franchise-based movie and TV show I could possibly think of. In a sense, I had forced myself to become a fan — and thus a
geek. Nevertheless, this is a little bit of a misnomer now that more and more traditionally geek material is becoming more mainstream (think “Star Wars”). Is geek culture now equivalent to pop culture? In a sense, yes. It’s hard to draw a distinction between the “Harry Potter” series, which started out as literature and transitioned into a huge film franchise, and the Marvel films and shows, which also started out as literature (albeit visual literature in the form of comics), and also transitioned into a massive franchise. “Harry Potter” is fantasy, featuring a young protagonist and often considered a children’s book but is globally revered by readers of all ages. The Marvel world, debatably a form of science fiction/fantasy, features — in the case of the nowfamous protagonists — mostly adult characters, first consumed by children and adolescents during the 20th century, but currently enjoyed by many people in both comic and visual form. So at this point, whether or not convincing myself that being surrounded in a world of television made me the flexible definition “geek” or not is irrelevant. Rather, because the usage of “geek” can reasonably substituted with “enthusiast,” I tend to call myself a TV geek. For many, TV is considered a form of relaxation and escapism from the outside world, and I’m no exception. I would say that television not only contributed to the development of my personality and general self but also contributed to helping me get through some difficult times. This is a common phenomenon for many — people have read books, watched films, seen TV shows or experienced other art that have helped them examine their relationships, views of the world, sexuality, life path, political preferences and so much more. Looking back, I’d say that my choice to rely on television as the sole way to cope with my own issues was relatively sketchy — but as a teenager who didn’t know what was going on, I turned to the only thing I knew might be a feeble
reflection of the outside world. As stated before, because of the nature of these worlds and the saturation from all these outlets, it’s easy to get swept away. Again, I’m not an exception. Because I have become used to watching so much television and getting swamped by all these worlds, it has engrained itself as a part of my everyday life. I must admit that my TVwatching habit is unhealthy, yet I don’t want to stop. I’d personally prefer to not be on the side of defending television against critics of the medium, but as a lover of all things TV, I can only say that it’s my artistic medium of choice. I often pause to consider if this is destroying my academic, personal or social lives, but my only defense is that outside of sucking up extra time where I could be reading a book or engaging in other artistic endeavors, it’s doing little to no harm in my life, and I feel like it contributes to helping me develop my own confidence in a world of mixed signals. So why stop? For me and others, it’s the material at the core of the geek fandom that first sucks people in. Some of the key factors in this “individual + geek fandom = fan” equation are the narrative format and the nature of the people involved. Geek fandoms are often best facilitated by plot-based, visual art forms — especially TV and movies — for a number of reasons. Similar to a book, narrative-focused mediums often draw people into these “alternate worlds” that individuals love so much, creating whole fictional characters completely defined by a few hours on a screen. TV especially encourages this worldbuilding because of its episodic nature, providing more hours and material than films, typically week after week (or in the case of Netflix, all of once, giving a virtual tidal wave of fandom material), which promotes active participation and viewership. On top of this, unlike a book, the visual nature of TV shows and films allows
viewers to put a real person behind this character. In this case, passionate viewers have now invested themselves in two worlds — one that is fictional and one that is the reality in which we live, tying together the captivating worlds of narrative-based art with the magnetic nature of celebrity power. The Internet then allows fans to either directly interact with the individuals behind this art (actors, directors, producers and many more), or at least take part in and observe a slice of their lives (reading Tweets, seeing what they post on Instagram and going to conventions and events, among other things). This introduces us to the whole “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” deal — many individuals enjoy seeing their favorite celebrities engage in everyday activities, and being able to interact with these people on social media or through other digital or in-person outlets is — I’ll admit, to me as well — both humanizing and especially delightful. From here, fans are now empathizing and associating with fully fleshed-out fictional characters as well as real people who also play these characters, creating a complex web where it’s sometimes tough to distinguish what’s real and what’s not — but this simply contributes to the authenticity of the fictional world and the geek fandom that surrounds it. Thus, by engaging in online platforms, fans can not only interact with creators (a general term used to refer to those involved with the conception of a TV show, film, comic book or other form of art), but they can also interact with fellow passionate fans. Individuals may then suddenly find themselves utterly surrounded by a geek fandom (often driven by a need to commercialize the art in order for it to be profitable). For any one fandom, this may include the show itself, the artists involved, other fans, events with the artists in attendance, fan fiction and fan art, discussion forums, fancreated memes and videos, fandom apparel and
merchandise, news from entertainment outlets and probably plenty more I can’t think of. By this point, people are practically drowning in material from a fandom. Who would have guessed that they’d become obsessed? Many go so far as to transcend the traditional “fan” for a more apt term. For younger readers or those well-versed in the terminology of geek fandoms, you’ve probably heard of the concept of the “stan,” typically described as a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan,” although the word has more nebulous origins (Eminem, anyone?). Stans (also a verb — you might also “stan” a celebrity) are typically devoted followers of particular actors, musicians, celebrities or other individuals, but may also consider themselves stans of certain fictional characters or ships (relationships). Many celebrities respond very positively to stans, even those who go above and beyond to profess their love and admiration for them (examples include tattoos, cosplay and more). Because of the accessibility of creators and other artists involved with the making of TV shows, films and other fandom-based art, fans can choose to try to engage with actors, for example, at conventions or over the Internet. Some actors love to respond directly to their fans online, while others choose to avoid social media altogether. Unfortunately, the dangerous side of stanning is the possibility for it to turn dangerously obsessive — stalking, repeated attempts at unsolicited contact or aggressive criticism of the individual’s choices. Again, because of the very visual nature of geek fandoms, many fans will follow actors (most specifically) on social media platforms, create fan accounts or character role-play accounts. Pages upon pages of forums, discussion boards and online databases litter the Internet, filled with fan and canon (the “official” storyline used in a geek fandom, as opposed to a fan-created story based on the original) material. Interviews with actors and clips from shows and films are watched again and again, commented on, made into fan-edited
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videos and used to make memes and gifs for all to see. This thus marks the tip of the iceberg into the truly magical — and sometimes rather overwhelming — world of a geek fandom. So why do people really love fandoms so much? A fandom can be so incredibly powerful, both for good and bad reasons. It can become a community of supportive individuals who love what you do — somewhere you can find acceptance in your own beliefs, your likes and dislikes and engage with it for hours on end and never get tired because there’s always going to be someone else out there waiting to contribute to the discussion. For me as well as many others, characters often embody moral values, personality traits and other either admirable — or unlikable — distinguishing characteristics. By seeing them onscreen, it’s an extension of the power of art, especially visual mediums like television, theater and film. In this case, when you’re experiencing these deep feelings and emotions of confusion, self-discovery, self-acceptance, empathy, understanding and everything in between, you’re not there alone — there’s a whole army of people who are probably going through a very similar experience. Unlike real life, you’re immersed in a world where people know what you’re talking about because the art form creates a baseline level of understanding. Even when people do differ in their preferences on, say, something as simple as who their favorite character is — they’re in it together and have mutual respect for a piece of magnificent art that they both love. Some people are inspired to make massive life changes, push them towards a personal goal, or help them work through physical sickness or mental illness. There are thousands of fan stories that you can read about, and each one is different, but each one is also so poignant. To those outside a fandom, sometimes it’s a ridiculous mystery why a character and person you’ve never interacted with can push someone to improve themselves or make such a drastic change. But to those in the fandom, it’s simple: The fandom is something that they love and cherish, and seeing someone they love and respect inspires people to do 24
amazing things. It’s a different experience for everyone, but almost always a positive one. (It’s art and social entertainment tied into one — who could resist?) Fandoms can act as a form of small, welcoming refuge from the outside world. Many (often adolescents or younger fandom members) who feel disenfranchised or not represented in the world often turn to geek fandoms, and when viewers are portrayed in their own likeness on screen, plenty of fans treasure these characters with all of their hearts. Many follow and even go on to stan these specific characters, seeing these characters’ lives as a version they’d love to be living, especially if it’s one filled with adventure and excitement and within a world without bigotry, hatred or discrimination. I prefer to liken geek fandoms to less of a self-medication and more of a sounding chamber. Once these feelings and situations have been worked through, they can be translated to interactions in the outside world, serving not purely as a place to hide but a space to grow emotionally for the sake of bettering one’s own personal life. For many, it quickly is no longer a fictional world — it’s an entirely new and 100 percent real one. Nevertheless, this empowering world can turn that same seemingly innocuous difference in choice and preference into harmful consequences for all parties involved. Because people value these worlds so much, an attack on one’s fandom or, more often, within a fandom, can seem like an attack on one’s personal character. Some fans begin spewing hate at those who don’t share their opinions on the material in a fandom, and then suddenly, we’re back where we started, defeating the point of having a positive fandom environment. People start to devolve into a form of obsessive madness, protecting their views as if the world depended on it — and to many, sometimes it feels like it does. Although this is not exclusive to fandoms, the extremes of empowerment and toxicity are particularly polarizing because of the overwhelming passion of fans and the complete over-saturation of fandom-based content. Much of the time, it’s so much easier to fight and
defend one’s right to an opinion than tolerate a different opinion and admit a form of defeat, but when you’ve voluntarily joined a world so often built to block out the world’s outside hate, this turns deadly. The sounding chamber of well-crafted thoughts and carefully formulated opinions becomes a sealed, soundproof room in which insults and hatred ricochet through the depths of every single social media platform on the Internet, yet still only seen by geek fandom members because of the obscurity and specificity of these artistic mediums. It would be easy to chalk it up to something like cyberbullying, but when fans are defending their views within a fandom, it’s more than just preying on weaker individuals for a thrill. Oftentimes, the hatred and sending of threats and messages is mutual, and this only serves to escalate the situation. People begin to spiral downward into hateful, arguably useless spats that they believe are necessary because of what they love, and it begins to consume their experience of the fandom and even their daily lives, going from a positive takeaway to a poisonous, all-enveloping fight ring. They’re no longer just hurting others, but themselves as well. Now, this is where things get tricky. I could spend hours detailing the most recent ComicCon controversies, debates and fan meltdowns surrounding certain geek fandoms, but let’s be honest — you can probably find that yourself on the Internet and you can formulate your own hot take (for the intrepid reader, Google “TV fandom controversy” or “Comic-Con fans angry”). Each one is different and has various parties involved with its individual nuances, which is why I believe that if you are interested in these particular fandom disputes, you should go in equipped with a framework of how geek fandoms function and then come out with your own opinion. I’ve personally spent hours — sometimes I wonder why — reading rants and complaints from fans that litter Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr, all a simple hashtag search away. It’s fascinating, and admittedly, almost a guilty pleasure, to read and see what people are discussing — and sometimes yelling at each other
about. For a lot of younger viewers, when their idols or favorite celebrities make a mistake or say something controversial, they can either come to the individual’s defense or blame them outright. A lot of times, it’s the latter choice. The gray area also appears when it’s tough to tell whether an apology is sincere or whether it’s simply a media stunt to regain fans. Because there are so many artists involved in the creation of a geek fandom, unlike a boy band fanbase, when fans will rush to a singer’s defense until their dying breath, a lot of geek fandom members can afford to blame those they can and move on to a new favorite within mere seconds. When these young viewers are still struggling to be heard in their households, in their schools and in their communities, they want to voice their opinions. They want their opinion to matter. Some of these television shows are whole alternate realities they look forward to every day after school or think about when they are upset or disheartened by what they see around us. When someone — whether that be a creator, an artist or a fan — disrespects this, it feels terrible. I will not defend nor justify malevolent behavior because there’s no truly no defense for hateful opinions, but I will say I can understand the root of where it is coming from. Unfortunately, the emotion and the resulting action are two completely different things, and when the response to a debate is to start sending threatening and hateful messages, that’s where things become toxic. Because of the all-encompassing nature of the fandom, fans can also get carried away with their own personal visions of the artistic material (for example, in the form of fan fiction or ships). But when creators don’t choose to match these fan preferences for what really happens in the fictional universes, fans also lash out — and whom else to lash out at but the people who are in control of these worlds? Situations like these become even more complicated when a creator makes a decision about beloved characters, relationships and plot lines. Creators have varied opinions on reading and responding to criticism and fan feedback, some preferring to avoid it altogether for the sake of preserving their own vision for the art. Many creators still enjoy interacting with fans and seeing the impact that their work has on others. Nevertheless, while creators like to see fans enjoy their work, it’s another thing to say that all creators truly want to — or can — please all fans all the time. There’s never going to be a situation in which a creative choice is going to please everybody, and creators are going to have to make an artistic decision one way or another. A creator’s work is just that — the art of a creator and no one else. The lines also become blurred when fans are directly supporting an artist’s work such as financially through Kickstarter. Fans often become very possessive of fandom material, and whether or not they are directly supporting the
creators, many demand a certain outcome. The question still remains as to whether creators are indebted to their fans. For many artists, the consensus is that no, creators have the capacity to make anything they want. For many fans, however, they feel that their investment in a show gives them a say in the matter. I do not have the jurisdiction to say one way or another, but that’s not the point — the line between disagreeing with a creator’s choice (as well as voicing this) and sending or posting spiteful content against a creator is the fine line between critique and simple hatred. Unfortunately, situations like this are still more complicated than they appear. Because the continued existence of art — especially commercial art — including shows and films ride on their economic success, many creators are pressured by networks or studios to appease viewers. This is sometimes a way for fans to “justify” their attacks — gathering a large group and demanding that a certain storyline pan out otherwise they will refuse to watch, attend events or participate in the geek fandom. This method typically has little effect other than stirring up drama on the Internet, but it often gets the attention of a large portion, if not all, of the fandom. When your love of a fandom forces you to begin to hate, this is much less of a “free speech” issue and rather an issue of turning this empowering passion into one that is toxic. As an artist myself, I see how difficult to deal with and how distracting it is to have unwanted opinions and critique thrown at you, let alone a massive fandom army scrutinizing every second of your work. As a devoted supporter of many creators and fandoms, I have my own opinions and would love to see certain possible storylines pan out. Nevertheless, after seeing so many people getting completely and unnecessarily bashed about their opinions and personal lives, I tend to stay away from engaging too much on the Internet, let alone voice my opinion to a creator. For some, it might be easy to steer away from participating in this geek fandom-driven tossing of insults and novel-length forums filled with digital screaming matches. For others, a desire to voice one’s opinion as a form of building selfconfidence and self-expression can quickly tip itself over into a extremely harmful wormhole. Nonetheless, especially today, it’s hard to brush off a fan’s criticism of an artist without deeper investigation. If an actor plays a supervillain on a TV show, and this character engages in violent activity, does this mean the actor clearly encourages this behavior? Not necessarily (and I certainly hope not). If this actor defends this character’s actions in an interview and talks about how the character’s troubled childhood may explain the violence, is the actor endorsing this behavior? Not necessarily. If a creator decides to kill off a certain character who embodies certain values or has certain traits, does this mean the creator is bigoted in a certain
way? Not necessarily — but this is not blanket encouragement to blindly follow your favorite public figures. If an artist does in fact condone inappropriate and hateful behavior or support harmful stereotypes and tropes, this is a much deeper issue to be discussed. Nevertheless, directly targeting an artist — or fan — simply because you disagree with a decision or opinion not based in hateful thinking is toxic and instills the idea that fans have the privilege to be hateful because they support a piece of art. For those who don’t engage with fandoms, much of this may seem like common sense, but when you’re so involved in something, it’s hard to pull your head out of the sand. Instead of outright condemning this behavior, anger and frustration should be channeled elsewhere. Many creators also become disheartened by fans’ purely hateful responses to something that was simply a choice rather than something that warranted thoughtful criticism. Remember — just as fans love the art they consume, the creators probably their art just as much. As I sit and write this, I find that this is sparking in me something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. As an aspiring artist, I want people to enjoy, agree, critique, criticize and disagree my work, but I’m frightened that I will, too, be on the receiving end of unwarranted hate targeted towards me as an individual, especially for a creative decision that I made thoughtfully. It won’t stop me from making my art, but it’s something many creators consider when they do. If you believe in me as an artist, then I hope you will respect my artistic choices as well. Therefore, let this be encouragement to people to cherish their fandoms (or go find one!) and let themselves feel empowered by art. Let this also be a call to all fans out there who love their geek fandoms just as much as I do with the plea to give back to the creators and art what you take from it: something meaningful. This message is unfortunately much more optimistic (and cheesy) than is probably realistic, but I stand by my point, especially with regards to these beloved fandoms. So as long as the art I consume still empowers me but doesn’t convince me that I have the privilege to tear down the artists I love and the fans I respect, find me obsessively watching TV and engaging in the fascinating worlds of my favorite geek fandoms until I die or the world comes to a fiery end — whichever occurs first. Contact Olivia Popp at opopp@stanford.edu.
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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: A SEAT AT THE TABLE by Amanda Rizkalla
W
hen it came in the mail, I looked at it a while before opening it. The packet, white-enveloped and Cardinal red, contained a letter that, on weighted paper, read, “It gives me very great pleasure to invite you into the Stanford family as a member of the Stanford Class of 2020!” Embossed and sleek, the words felt so special. I felt special. I was part of the 4.69 percent, one of the 1,700 students selected from over 40,000. It felt like a blessing; it felt like luck. When the news got around, some met my acceptance with a sigh and an “Of course you got in.” Friends said that my acceptance made sense — not because of what I did or who I was, but because of the boxes I checked off in the “Family Background” section of the Common App. I was a half-Mexican, half-Egyptian, lowincome student — the first person in her family to go to college. Socioeconomically, I was desirable to the institution. Ethnically, I was almost necessary (how often do Mexican-Egyptians apply?). But all you would need to do would be to change the color of my skin — to make me white — and I wouldn’t be holding the same letter. Add a few extra thousand to my family’s annual income and I would not be afforded the same regard in the admissions office. Or so some insisted. That certainly wasn’t the first time people have sought to discredit the accomplishments of people from similar backgrounds. Guillermo Camarillo ’20, a close friend and fellow Quest Scholar and Leland Scholar, received considerable attention from the media last year after he wrote a letter to his dentist via Facebook post detailing his dentist’s attempt to credit his admission to Stanford solely to affirmative action. After asking where
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Guillermo would be attending college and receiving “Stanford” as the answer, the dentist grew cold as he started asking for Guillermo’s ACT score. The dentist insisted that he had gotten accepted because he came from a poorer area; meanwhile, his daughter (presumably from a higher socioeconomic background) applied with a higher ACT score and received a rejection letter. “You belittled me. You labeled me,” Guillermo wrote in his letter. "Little do you know that I grew up in a house where Spanish was only spoken. I had to learn English on my own. I grew up in a household where at times we couldn’t afford to pay our rent or didn’t have enough food for the whole week… You are neglecting that all odds were against me.” With over 61,000 “likes” on Facebook, the post garnered national attention, bringing first-generation and low-income students into the headlines, however briefly. It brought up a years-old conversation: Does affirmative action have a place in college admissions? And if so, to what degree? Let’s start with the basics. What is affirmative action anyway? Most of us have a general idea — it has something to do with the way race plays into admissions to institutions of higher learning and employment in general. It could mean favoring certain groups of people, while necessarily excluding others. Cornell Law School describes it as “a set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination between applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination and prevent such discrimination in the future. Applicants may be seeking admission to an educational program or looking for professional employment.” Prescribed as a means to right past
wrongs and aid those disadvantaged in their educational and employment pursuits, affirmative action stands strong in the strides it has made for underrepresented communities. It’s not about discriminating against white applicants — it’s about leveling the playing field. For the first time in history, Harvard admitted a majority-minority class; that is, more people of color and underrepresented backgrounds comprised
“You belittled me. You labeled me… You are neglecting that all odds were against me.” the class than their white counterparts. But now comes the question, why is this a good thing? Why does it matter that more minorities occupy those coveted roles in undergraduate and graduate institutions? We need people from every walk of life in every aspect of life. We are so much the product of our environment, shaped indelibly by our experiences, that to deny leadership of that range of diversity is to set it back. Diversity among collaborators creates a web of relation that is equal parts beautiful and strong: a resilient connection between identity-sharers and an opportunity
for differences to strike an inclusive chord. To do otherwise would be a disservice to ingenuity, a deprivation, a sprint toward counterproductivity. The collaboration that affirmative action makes room for also makes room for new ideas — a type of learning and innovation unrivaled by ideas coming from a set that is overwhelmingly the same. It gives narrative permission to inform novelty, and it is where life experiences make for breakthroughs.
We need people from every walk of life in every aspect of life. To deny leadership of that range of diversity is to set it back. Moreover, we get to know the narrative of a mass and its identity very well through the individual and their own interactions with that identity. That is not to say that each person bears the burden of representation, that the only Latina in the room has to represent the entire Latina experience. That’s
not the point of having her in the room. In his research paper “Intersectionality 101,” Ahir Golpaldas argues that diversity sees “beyond race, class and gender to include age, attractiveness, body type, caste, citizenship, education, ethnicity, height and weight assessments, immigration status, income, marital status, mental health status, nationality, occupation, physical ability, religion, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and other naturalized — though not necessarily natural — ways of categorizing human populations.” All of the above are the ways in which she exists and interacts with the world around her, and they’re brought to us by the way in which her race shapes how she forms her own identity — it’s the first thing we see when we look at her, maybe it’s in how she speaks, it’s in her name. It’s how her identities interact and morph and mesh that make her valuable. From a productivity standpoint alone, it makes her useful. It might appear that considering the narrative of people of color alongside that of others is where the subject gets touchy for some, and it’s where the phrase “reverse racism” gets thrown around. Is favoring diversity in the classroom and workplace a form of discrimination against white applicants? In light of recent policy proposals, Donald Trump certainly seems to think so. By the nature of how college admissions works, a lucky few are accepted. The rest are denied. The same works with employment; not everyone gets the job. Are all of those people — the vast majority of applicants — who receive a rejection being discriminated against just because they were not accepted? Not at all. It’s discrimination when, in the 1960s, African Americans were denied
quality jobs to such a great extent that they lived on average seven years shorter than white Americans and were twice as likely to be unemployed. It’s discrimination when only 15 percent of Hispanics aged 25-29 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 41 percent of whites. The problem starts when the people who rise to the top are consistently similar: middle-to-upper class, white and male. When there isn’t enough room for people of different backgrounds and identities to thrive in the leadership roles filled by their white counterparts, something has to be done to make sure that no one is taking more space than they should. Diversity always comes up when the conversation turns to college admissions. It was in the admissions letter I read a year ago: “At Stanford you join a diverse, joyful and collaborative campus community with a shared determination to change the world.” And that’s why it’s so important — it’s a shared effort. If everyone is welcome at the table, everyone needs to be at the table. Otherwise you’ll never know what they could bring to it. Contact Amanda Rizkalla at arizkalla@ stanford.edu.
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VSCO v. Instagram:
Photo sharing in the age of social media by Julie Plummer
I
have always had a fear of losing memories. Generally, this manifests itself in journaling — a way for me to combine my love of writing with my anxiety around forgetting precious moments in my life, all in one messy jumble of thoughts, quotes and people from my days. But I also have a secret love of photographs. The idea that an entire experience can be contained in a single image is beautiful to me. I took a camping trip with a close friend this past summer, and I recently returned to a photograph of our tent nestled between a grove of pine trees. Immediately, the cool forest air was in my nostrils; the crunch of leaves in my ears; the smooth wood of the log seats on my hands. I don’t mean to say that this visceral return to a specific moment in time cannot be achieved through writing, but I think our photographs carry a special sort of nostalgia that tugs us back to who we were when the picture was taken. When I relayed this secret obsession with photography to a friend awhile ago, she told me to get an Instagram. Instagram, she told me, would allow me to share my life with my friends, capturing the moments that were most important to me and letting others see them as well. While I understood what she was trying to say, when I got an Instagram, I soon realized it was not for me, and ultimately deleted my account. I liked seeing my friends’ photos, but I felt too much pressure to conform to the Instagram norm of perfectly tailored pictures and carefully selected captions. The social aspect of Instagram also stressed me out — all of my close friends had extremely high numbers of followers and pages they were following, and I was used to hearing their complaints when a picture didn’t get as many likes as they’d hoped. I’m not trying to completely undermine Instagram’s merits. I understand that it’s a very successful social media platform, and I respect friends who enjoy using it. But something
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about it didn’t really click with me and the way that I interact with the world. Soon after my failed attempt to use Instagram, however, and right before I began my freshman year of college, I came across VSCO. Somewhat similar to Instagram, VSCO is a photography app that allows users to upload and edit pictures. However, VSCO has virtually none of the social media elements
through fun memories on my phone, and adding cool filters and lighting to places and people I love. For someone who fears losing memories, VSCO became the perfect way to create a visual diary of the great times I’d had throughout my first year at school. I didn’t feel any of the pressure I had on Instagram to pick perfectly curated pictures that I thought my friends would enjoy or that fit the Instagram standards of editing perfection. Editing and posting on VSCO felt much more like a personal process that allowed me to reflect on what moments in my recent history had been important to me. And for somebody who loves keeping journals, VSCO became a wonderful alternative to a written journal during the year when I didn’t always have the time or energy to sit down and write. But despite my enthusiasm for VSCO, Instagram remains vastly more popular. When I talked to a classmate at Stanford about this, she explained that for her, Instagram simply felt better for our age group — a simpler, easier way to interact with friends than platforms like Facebook, while still allowing individuals to message each other and talk directly. This difference between VSCO and Instagram is mainly one of function: One of Instagram’s main purposes is to allow for connection between users. VSCO has ways to foster collaboration — you can add other people’s images to your “collection” and thus share photos between users. However, its main focus, from my understanding, is JULIE PLUMMER/The Stanford Daily more one of individual creation. that Instagram boasts. While you can follow Don’t get me wrong — there’s definitely another user’s account, there’s no way to see something powerful about this creation, and how many followers others have or to like VSCO has a main feed in which it reposts or comment on another user’s photographs. various photographs from VSCO users across Because of this, it’s a much less interactive the world, creating a beautiful collage of interface than Instagram. individual worlds coming together. But when For me, however, VSCO became the perfect it comes to a platform that easily facilitates catharsis at the end of a long day. If I hadn’t connection with people you already know, uploaded pictures in awhile, I’d snuggle up in Instagram is a much better option. bed and upload some photographs from past When individuals my age meet for the first adventures. There was something so satisfying time, a common method of connection is to about listening to good music, flipping collect each other’s social media accounts.
JULIE PLUMMER/The Stanford Daily
Instagram usually makes this cut, while VSCO never does. Given that my generation is a huge percentage of the current population of social media users, and knowing how much my peers and I value social connectivity, I doubt that VSCO will ever achieve the same level of popularity as Instagram unless it vastly changes its interface (which, in my opinion, would remove a lot of the merits unique to VSCO). However, I think VSCO still has the potential to serve as a powerful alternative to Instagram as a photo-sharing app without some of the perceived pressure that comes with curating a highly social online presence. And while there are ways to use Instagram without being overwhelmed by the social aspects of the platform, VSCO’s more understated presence in each user’s life reminds us that collaboration and creation can take many different forms. Contact Julie Plummer at jplummer@stanford. edu. JULIE PLUMMER/The Stanford Daily 29
Lagunita Almost too careless, my foot nearly stepped on the wilting mushrooms of a fairy ring. In the dry lakebed of summer, the reeds and bare scrub branches cracked like potsherds underfoot as I walked in the bottom of this bowl of land. The horizon ends a hundred paces from me on every side. But the rains have come, and the hundred paces of my sky are filled with sodden clods of cloud reflected from the brown lake of no inlets and no outlets. The salamanders sun themselves at the edge of the water. A heron lands, and nods his head, then flies above the trees. Lagunita, the rains are come again to scatter the blossoms of the reddening plum. Until summer comes again, may you dream of fishes swimming in the freshly-fallen waters.
-Bryan Cheong
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Storyteller You stride through an airport gate in Houston with a sunburn and dirt deep in your injured fingernails, hair bleached like the bones you spent all summer cleaning. There’s watery light on your face, more like the paling balm of September than the August glare that (you think) should be slanting through the wide windows. A knot of triumph wedges itself behind your sternum, glowing against your ribs like a nightlight as the balls of your feet slap the floor’s linoleum tiles. You’re not settled, exactly, (not yet) but there’s an understood grace that anchors you to your skin as you hover in the bubble of these three minutes. You’re hoarding your loose threads in your hands, scrunching them into a globe and ironing them flat. You’re under the “Arrivals” board now, immobile under whitewashed light, wriggling text clashing with the story you keep and keep trying to write behind your forehead like television static. There’s a reinforced poise in your spine this time, though, a product of your pride in the embryo curled in the cracks of contemplative road trips and in the contradiction of graffiti dates intended to last forever. It offers you a readiness, an unfamiliar (but welcome) surety in loose hair and thrill-seeking and choice. You’re content to swing in limbo, a gleeful and greedy wanderer. After all, who would ever want to forget the world? Forget the strange timelessness of Bart Simpson scrawled in paint on crumbling walls, or the dissatisfaction that had burned, deep in your throat, as you doused it with a vodka lemonade? You decide that there’s an overwhelming sense of affirmation in haphazardly serrated mountains that aren’t yours, rock faces slashed with deep grooves like someone mishandled a pocket knife. It’s like (you say to yourself) the world has been Photoshopped to be gently washed out, an over-correction after someone dialed up the brightness on their computer screen and found that they couldn’t bear it. That’s the new narrative that takes shape, you think – one of straight-backed refusals and desperate curiosity that worms into your skin as you blink yourself back into the fluorescent light. -Claire Francis 31
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