Entrepreneurship as Humanitarianism

Stanford politics magazine JUNE 2019 | ISSUE 08 STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG

“Entrepreneurship as humanitarianism”

ARE STANFORD STUDENTS ACTUALLY CHANGING THE WORLD?

TOP 10 POLITICOS • FACULTY SENATE • REVISITING SEXUAL ASSAULT

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EDITOR’S NOTE Stanford Politics’ third and final magazine of the academic year—and my final magazine as an SP staffer—tackles an important and timely question. As yet another class of Stanford students prepares to graduate and take on what lies beyond the walls of this eminent institution, we have found ourselves wondering: Are Stanford students actually changing the world? In this issue’s cover story, incoming editor in chief Roxy Bonafont, staff writers Wilson Liang and Kyle Wang, and chief of staff Harrison Bronfeld pursue this question, exploring the somewhat paradoxical idea of “entrepreneurship as humanitarianism.” In a piece inspired by Anand Giridharadas’ best-selling book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” featuring interviews with several students and leaders of campus groups such as SENSA, SWIB, and CS + Social Good, these writers analyze to what extent Stanford graduates are actually innovating and contributing to society as opposed to simply preserving the status quo.

In addition to our cover story, this issue of Stanford Politics Magazine includes an interview with Faculty Senate Chair Stephen Stedman on university governance, a follow-up on last year’s second issue of the magazine, which explored the many ways in which the university—both historically and presently—has failed victims of sexual assault, and our long-awaited list of the top 10 campus politicos. During a time in which countless students are getting ready to say goodbye to Stanford—be that temporarily or more permanently—we’ve decided to keep this edition of the magazine grounded in the university, delving more deeply into some of the most important issues on our campus.

It has been a great pleasure to serve as the editor in chief of Stanford Politics this year. I have learned and grown more than I could have ever anticipated, and I have had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented, driven, and dedicated people on this campus. I want to thank every member of the Stanford Politics team who contributed to this effort—your commitment has not gone unnoticed. In light of that, I could not be more thrilled to pass the torch onto Roxy, my successor, who I am more than confident will continue to take Stanford Politics to even greater heights. Most importantly, serving as EIC has allowed me to dedicate myself to something I hold very close to my heart: high-quality journalism. Thank you to Stanford Politics for being my home for the past three years, and thank you to our readers for their constant support. You are the reason Stanford Politics matters, and we would not be where we are today without you.

Daniela González Editor-in-Chief

MASTHEAD EDITOR IN CHIEF DANIELA GONZÁLEZ

MANAGING EDITOR JAKE DOW

CHIEF OF STAFF HARRISON BRONFELD

MAGAZINE DIRECTOR NATHALIE KIERSZNOWSKI

SENIOR EDITORS EMILY KATZ JULIAN WATROUS ASSISTANT EDITORS ALLIE DOW SIERRA MACIOROWSKI

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER LANDON ELLINGSON COPY EDTORS NATHAN LEE REBECCA SMALBACH NICHOLAS WELCH AMBER YANG

TOP 10 POLITICOS COORDINATOR MADDIE MCCONKEY INTERVIEWERS THOMAS PFEIFFER LUCAS RODRIGUEZ

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CONTENTS

OUTGOING FACULTY SENATE CHAIR STEPHEN STEDMAN ON UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE

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LUCAS RODRIGUEZ

“ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS HUMANITARIANISM” Are Stanford Students Actually Changing the World?

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ROXY BONAFONT, WILSON LIANG & KYLE WANG

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TOP 10 POLITICOS

A Look At Stanford’s Most Influential Undergrads EDITORIAL BOARD

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STANFORD ONE YEAR AFTER #METOO

How Stanford’s Response Failed Victims of Sexual Assault WILSON LIANG

ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE COVER STORY Roxy Bonafont is a sophomore and prospective English major and political science minor. Her interests include modernist literature, political and ethical philosophy, and folksy music.

Harrison Bronfeld is a junior majoring in computer science.

He is excited about technology, politics, and New Jersey. He is also a co-host of the Stanford Politics Podcast.

Wilson Liang is a freshman majoring in mathematical and computational sciences. He is interested in international politics, development economics, and scary movies.

Kyle Wang is a freshman and a prospective English major and CS minor. His interests include East Asian philosophy, a cappella, and creative writing.

All in-text references are cited online at stanfordpolitics.org.

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Stanford Politics is a student publication at Stanford University. All views expressed in the magazine are those of the authors and interviewees only and do not represent the views of Stanford University. Copyright © 2018 by Stanford Political Journal. All rights reserved. No original article or portion herein is to be reproduced or adapted to other works without the expressed written consent of the editor of Stanford Politics.

“I keep running into these kindS of moments where I think to myself: what are they thinking?”

OUTGOING FACULTY SENATE CHAIR STEPHEN STEDMAN ON UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE

LUCAS RODRIGUEZ

STEDMAN Just over fifty years ago, the Academic Council at Stanford University created, for the first time, a Faculty Senate in order to more effectively carry out the Council’s governance mandates. Now with 56 elected members and 15 ex-officio ones (including three students), the Faculty Senate has grown, somewhat quietly, into one of the more powerful governing institutions on campus. It has the broad authority to way in on a host of University-wide issues, from general education requirements to policies for undergraduate admissions and financial aid.

In an attempt to understand this unique institution and the faculty’s role in governance at Stanford, Stanford Politics sat down with outgoing Faculty Senate chair Stephen Stedman. Stedman is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; a Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science; and a Resident Fellow in Crothers. In our conversation, we discussed issues ranging from the University’s Long-Range-Planning initiative to the faculty and student roles in University governance writ large.

What follows is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length. A slightly lengthier version of the interview may be found online at stanfordpolitics.org.

STANFORD FSI

You’re somewhat of a lifelong Stanford person.

You did your undergrad and graduate work here and then came back to start teaching in the ’90s. You’ve served as a Resident Fellow in a freshman dorm and now as one in Crothers, and you run an undergraduate honors program. What has your experience in the Faculty Senate, and as its chair, taught you about this University that you did not get from your other perspectives and roles?

weeds and implement things all because those people are waiting to find out from the higher ups what “the plan” is.

So I have this theory that, when too much emphasis is on planning, it creates an enormous amount of arbitrariness down below at those implementation levels. I don’t know; maybe it’s just me.

But, over all the time that I’ve been at Stanford, it just seems like now I keep running into these kinds of moments where I think to myself: what are they thinking? And it’s not from the Provost or President’s office. Instead, it’s from a lot of people who now have a lot of authority making some really puzzling decisions because no one is paying attention.

You know, I think I’m just coming to the realization of how huge of an enterprise it is to run Stanford. If you think about everything that goes into this institution and all the different mandates between education, research, and then having a hospital, and then having an athletics department, and then having real estate, and then having investments. They have to simultaneously try to keep an eye out for the big picture while making sure that all the details and the weeds are getting attention as well. It’s pretty staggering actually. It’s a huge endeavor.

I do have some worries right now, though, in part because of how long this long range planning process has taken. The long range plan has sort of become more of a long term planning exercise. I think my fear is that when long range planning takes so long, it creates a lot of uncertainty for people as to what direction our programs are going in. Like should we continue to do what we’re doing, or what? And some programs, like ResEd, just went completely on hold because of the ResX task force — they had a hiring freeze, nobody knew what was going to be coming, morale went down, and so a lot of people just left.

They’ve hollowed out the lower levels and their ability to do the

Can you talk a little bit about the ways that the faculty senate has interacted with the long range plan? How are you all interfacing with University administrators to ensure that the input they’re getting for the long range plan is in accordance with what you all want to do regarding your mandates?

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You know, it’s actually not working that way. When the long range plan started there was an enormous amount of excitement; there were all these suggestions from people coming in, and it seemed like the whole process generated some two thousand ideas and recommendations. Then we had to think: well what do you do with all that? So it got thrown into these working groups and stuff, and seriously, for the first two years I found it incredibly frustrating at the Faculty Senate because we would hear these presentations where people would come in and say, “Well we don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve heard a lot of ideas and we still have to think through all these ideas.” Or, they would say, “Well we really can’t say much at this point. We don’t really want to reveal anything and

STEDMAN don’t want to say anything because we don’t know exactly how this will proceed.”

So, when the Senate Steering Committee and I were setting the agenda for the upcoming Senate term, I was telling them as Chair that I don’t want anybody coming in the long range plan until they have real actionable stuff. It ended up being kind of weird because we were told ResX was going to be done fairly early, that they would have it together by October. So we put them on the Senate agenda, and then they couldn’t say anything about what their plan was— they couldn’t even say what they were discussing. I had senators looking at me like, what? Why are they here? So that’s where we are.

I mean we keep hearing that eventually the long range plan’s Committee on the First Year experience is supposed to report, and the Committee on the Majors are going to have really good ideas.

We just haven’t seen them yet.

When they finally do have something to report, then it’s going to become interesting because it’s still not going to be a done deal.

They’ll come in and present their ideas, but ultimately the Faculty Senate will have to vote on anything having to do with the curriculum, for example. And there are various committees we have that have an important role in these matters, like our Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (CUSP). CUSP will have a huge say in what the final package of recommendations will look like.

I remember around 10 years ago we had a similar report come in from a University committee, and that went into CUSP. CUSP ended up altering the recommendations from that report before presenting them to the full Faculty Senate, and then one particular Senator, Russ Berman, altered them again through motion amongst the full Senate. So we ended up voting on something pretty different from what was in that initial report that was brought to us.

I think a similar back-and-forth is certainly within the realm of possibility with regard to the long range plan. Up to this point, the actual interaction with long range planning has been pretty minimal because we’re just in a waiting game. But, the decision to do long range planning outside of the Faculty Senate committees that deal with these matters means that there’s going to be a gap between what the University wants and what the faculty wants. That gap will have to be filled at some point, just like 10 years ago.

We’ve been talking a lot about committees, and, if I count correctly, there are eight committees on the Faculty Senate. On top of that you have University administration committees, and various task forces, and working groups.

Do you have any general thoughts on the effectiveness of all these committees? I’m curious as to whether you think they work for running a University, and for dealing with the big ideas and the in the weeds stuff you’ve been talking about.

You know, there are several things that I would change, and it would really need some work. For instance, my feeling is that, as of right now, there are way too many committees at this University.

There are just way too many committees. It’s not just Faculty Senate committees. Each Vice Provost has committees too: there are VPSA committees, VPUE committees—the deans probably also have their own committees. It just seems like everyone has extra committees. On top of that you have these special groups that are supposedly one-offs regarding long range planning. Then you have the occasional search committees and the occasional task forces and working groups. It’s a lot.

To me the first issue is that it’s pulling faculty away from what they actually should be doing. They should be researching and teaching. They should be participating in university governance, too, but they should do it efficiently. What we have right now is not efficient.

For instance, when I was chair of the Committee on Committees in the Faculty Senate, which is the Committee in charge of placing faculty on the other Faculty Senate committees, we would often find that when we wanted to nominate somebody to be on one of the Faculty Senate committees, they would say they couldn’t because they were already on two or three other committees. We would respond by saying, you know, that’s weird, because you’re not on any of our committees. They would say, well, yeah, but I’m on these other University committees.

“THERE’S GOING TO BE A GAP BETWEEN WHAT THE UNIVERSITY WANTS AND WHAT THE FACULTY WANT.” - DR. STEVE STEDMAN

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STEDMAN The Committee on Committees is responsible for putting faculty onto University committees, and I think that mandate should really be for all University committees above the department level. So, if VPUE or VPSA or the Dean has a search committee for a high-level position they want faculty input on, the Committee on Committees should be choosing the faculty to serve on that committee.

The Provost or Vice Provost should not be able to cherry-pick the faculty that get to serve on that committee because if they’re smart — and they are smart individuals — they could just get the perspective they want by choosing the right faculty member to be on the committee.

Here, there’s actually a good parallel to the ASSU. ASSU’s Nominations Committee should also be responsible for placing students on any kind of University committee. Again, it doesn’t work that way right now; right now, there are tons of University committees with students on them that were not placed by the ASSU. But it shouldn’t work that way. ASSU should have sole authority to place students on committees because they represent the students.

The one thing about our influence at the Faculty Senate that’s important to note is that we have no real budgetary power. The shared governance concept you were talking about really works when the faculty keep to a fairly limited scope of issues and don’t make too many recommendations that involve unfunded mandates. In the past, the University had been very good when it comes to working with us on something like curriculum. We, the Faculty Senate, said we need a new Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) as a component of general education, that meant the University was going to have to go out and pay for a whole bunch of lecturers and other support systems that will have to go into that. And for those kinds of things, the University had always done that, so that works well.

So for curriculum type stuff, it works well, but one of the issues we’ve been dealing with at the Faculty Senate this year has to do with taking the burden off of professors and departments when it comes to OAE accommodations. Things with really big lecture courses like the natural sciences or computer science are really hit by this. It is amazing how much time it takes up for faculty, administrators, and sometimes graduate students to ensure that all of the OAE accommodations are met. We had this session at the Faculty Senate where everybody was speaking about how much time it adds to what they’re doing. That means less time teaching and less time researching.

To do anything about it, though, is going to take real, dedicated resources. One of the ideas put forward was to maybe have a testing center like the University of Michigan does. There, they have a testing building where all the accommodations are done in a centralized location with a dedicated staff. But if our University or Provost decide that’s not where they want to spend our resources, then nothing is going to happen.

At the Faculty Senate you have this committee called CUAFA, the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid. Its mandate says that CUAFA “shall establish the standards and policies by which applicants for admission and

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applicants for financial aid are to be selected and shall assure itself the University policies on undergraduate admission and financial aid are being executed.”

This year the Faculty Senate, via work done by CUAFA, voted on a bill supporting need-blind admissions for international students. Can you talk a little bit about how this dilemma between University-controlled resources and the desires of the Faculty Senate plays out in this context?

Yeah, so I think there are two things going on related to the charge of CUAFA. Let’s take it one at a time.

First, a bunch of these mandates to the Faculty Senate were written in the 1960s and 1970s. They have all this language about faculty authority, preferences, oversight and all this stuff, right. But the fact of the matter is, today especially, we also have a lot of professional management from the University, and CUAFA is a great example of this.

We do have all this language about faculty authority in admissions, but the fact of the matter is we have Dean Shaw who is a real professional, does a terrific job, and has his own way of doing things. At any given moment, the ability of any one member of CUAFA to say you should do something different is extremely limited because anyone transitioning into CUAFA first has to take a lot of time to just figure out how all of admissions actually works, to learn the ropes, really. We meet once every six weeks, so it’s hard for a faculty member to just parachute into CUAFA and say, no, Dean Shaw, this is actually how you’re going to do your job. That’s just not going to happen right now.

That being said, CUAFA did have an incredibly important role early on in its existence because they were the ones that decided to end the quota on women being admitted into Stanford in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. The faculty on CUAFA told admissions that they had to get rid of the quota, that the faculty wouldn’t accept it, and that changed things. Since then though, CUAFA hasn’t done a heck of a lot.

And this is something that we’re actually going to try and rethink and just do a bit differently. There’s an institution tied to the Faculty Senate called the Policy and Planning Board (PPB). The PPB can be activated by a decision of the current chair and the past two senate chairs, so in my case right not the would be Deborah Satz, Elizabeth Hadley and myself. Activating the PPB creates yet another committee, an ad-hoc one, that is supposed to step away on an issue, do a separate deep dive on it, and come away with some big picture. We’re gonna use it for two issues starting this summer. One is on campus climate and how to, you know, promote and respect diversity while also being true to academic freedom. The second is on undergraduate admissions. We’re not just going to replicate what CUAFA is supposed to do. The PPB is intended to give faculty the opportunity to step back and ask, well, what are our preferences when it comes to undergraduate admission? What do we think?

Hopefully this will empower anybody in the future who is going

STEDMAN

to be on CUAFA to be able to know, right from the start of when they join, what the faculty generally wants when it comes to admissions. The faculty are really excited about this. The current chair of CUAFA, David Lobell, and next year’s chair, David Grusky, are both really enthusiastic. And this is really how it should go. The faculty need to come to their own minds and enter into a discussion on admissions at CUAFA in a somewhat educated and empowered manner. I don’t what the PPB will come up with, but everything should be on the table because all the stuff coming out of the scandal recently indicated that everything should really be on the table.

At the beginning of the year, you commended Stanford’s shared governance system in an interview, but you said it works only when the faculty senators are active. Do you think the past year has been particularly active in some respects? What more besides these ad-hoc committees and such could you all do moving forward to get back up to speed and be active?

I think it’s been a good year. I think we’ve had a lot of great debate and discussion this year. The President and Provost come to most if not all of our Senate meetings — I actually don’t think the Provost has missed a single one. They get to hear what the senators are saying, and we’ve dealt with some pretty tough issues this year.

I made use of panel discussions as a way to try and bring several perspectives in on an issue at once and then have the faculty react to the range of perspectives that’s been put forward. Everybody has really jumped in, which I’ve been pleased by.

In past Senates I’ve been on, we’ve had sessions where nobody has any questions to ask. That’s not really been a problem this year.

Everybody has been raising their hand and has had something to say or some question to ask. I think those respects it’s been quite good.

The other good thing is that we’ve had very active senators that have let me know what’s on their minds and what issues they want to see us discuss. One example is this recent Stanford University

Press decision. I must have had like 60 emails or something come in while it was all happening; it was incredible. All these people were doing whatever they had to do, and they all thought the Faculty Senate ought to know and do something about this. That suggests to me that faculty really see the Senate as a venue for putting forward objections, ideas and questions. I think that’s very good.

On the other hand, I think faculty, again, do have to be realistic if their ideas involve a price tag. Even if the faculty think something is a good idea, you often need more than just a Faculty Senate decision to make that thing happen, and international financial aid is a good example of this. We can say we want this to happen, that it’s really high priority for the faculty, and that we really believe in it. In the end, though, the budgetary decision is going to be made separate from the sense of the Senate.

And that’s not usually how governance works, right?

Right. But I actually do think this year has been a good one for the Senators doing their homework and showing a willingness to engage in debate, discussion, and dialogue.

I guess my next question is, if you just had a resolution coming from the debate/dialogue that was simple and said the faculty wants X with respect to issue Y, do you all do any sort of follow-through once it’s in the hands of University administrators?

Oftentimes when things happen, people’s concerns are addressed, and they’re happy, and all is good. But, they’re not all happy endings. One of the professors who presented on that OAE accommodations issue said he came forward three years ago with recommendations and nothing got done. He complained that the issue wasn’t just going away, and he’d rather not just put forward concerns and recommendations if nothing is going to be done with them. So that’s one example of an area that needs more follow

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STEDMAN through.

You know if you’re running a university, there is all the big vision, big initiative, transformational stuff you have to think about, but you also have to figure out how this place works on a day-today basis. You have to make that day-to-day work hopefully not just arbitrary. That’s again what I keep coming back to. I really worry because I’m seeing a lot of inefficiencies and arbitrariness in the day-to-day running of things. With this OAE thing, for example, the University has heard the same complaints about this large burden twice in the last four years, and they still have not done anything.

If you read the Stanford Daily or Stanford News Service coverage of the Faculty Senate, it really centers around these debates and discussion. You read a lot about stuff like, well, today the Faculty Senate heard about this report or from this panel, then this Senator said this in response and this other Senator joined in or disagreed. That’s usually how the articles end, though. Sometimes they talk about votes on resolutions, but I think from the student perspective it would be helpful to better understand the faculty’s “legislative process” or whatever the parallel is. What’s the next step after a discussion or a debate? What happens after that?

So sometimes it is just a resolution or policy vote. Other times it actually goes back down to a committee for them to put forward what the eventual resolution will be. For instance, there was recently this ad-hoc committee or task force on the plight of lecturers at Stanford. This is a big deal; we use lecturers for all kinds of key courses. The play an instrumental role in this university, but they’re not academic council members, so they don’t get any housing benefits or stuff like that. Affordability is obviously awful in the Bay Area. How do we make sure that these people can be here, survive, and feel like they’re valued parts of the community? Really important issue.

So we hear this task force’s report, and they have a couple of recommendations having to do with the status of a particular professor line of teaching. For us be to able to take action on that recommendation, though, we have to involve the Committee on the Professoriate, they have to be the ones to first weigh in on all of this, then come forward with their own recommendation. So that’s what happening right now with that, and you can tell that it really just varies a lot by issue.

We spent a lot of time, for example, on issues of diversity, academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the eventual resolution that came from all that was that we want the PPB to spend another year on this and come up with actual concrete recommendations about how we further these goals at Stanford. So with this issue it’s going to be up to the PPB to come up with the actionable recommendations.

Do you find that what seems like an omnipresent focus on long range planning from the University is impeding their ability to follow through on some of the more day-to-day concerns that just aren’t getting addressed?

Well, yes, because attention is finite, right? I mean, I’ll just give you some of examples of really small things that just make me scratch my head and wonder why this is happening. One of them has to do with the Office of Student Activities and Leadership (SAL) under the Vice Provost for Student Affairs (VPSA). The decisions SAL makes seem to me oftentimes incredibly arbitrary.

Recently, they had a new student group on global poverty and development trying to get started. These kids did everything they needed to do, filled out all the forms and went through every hoop imaginable, then were told no by SAL. SAL said that it needed to merge with the student group on global public health. Well, global development and poverty alleviation is not the same as global public health. They can look at different tiers of countries — global poverty and development look at the lowest income countries, while global public health looks at all sort of countries. They’re also looking at pretty different things in general, so why do they have to merge? It’s like, okay, “global” is in both names, that’s good, I guess, but is that the decision rule? I just don’t know, it’s a head-scratcher.

“FACULTY REALLY SEE THE SENATE AS A VENUE FOR PUTTING FORWARD OBJECTIONS, IDEAS, AND QUESTIONS. I THINK THAT’S VERY GOOD.” - DR. STEVE STEDMAN 8

STEDMAN This may not be as related to the Faculty Senate per se, but as the Chair of the Senate it seems like you’ve really been immersed in these weedy issues that come to your attention through various avenues. I think, on these kinds of issues, a lot of students are pretty frustrated with the lack of transparency on the University’s part. We get these arbitrary decisions from administrators and hear little reasons as to why they occurred, or if we do hear a reason it’s one that was never made properly clear beforehand. How do you think the University can go about being more clear about how their administrative decisions get made?

For me, actually, a lot of hearing about these issues come from being in the dorms as a resident fellow for as long as my wife and I have been. The benefit of being a faculty member, and of being on Senate in particular, is that the Faculty Senate allows us to ask the same questions you’re asking to administrators. As part of the Senate, we have question time with the President and Provost, and one of the big frustrations I still have with our Senate is that they don’t use that question time productively. There are times when nobody has any questions for the President or Provost when they really should. Do you really have nothing you can ask them? Nothing on your mind? Nobody has been suggesting to you that there is an issue that you may want to have a better understanding of the decision calculus behind that issue? We have this venue to ask those tough questions, but we don’t use it.

Your ASSU presidents are ex-officio members of the Faculty Senate; they could ask those questions there too if they wanted, but they don’t.

So you’re clearly someone who’s been in the dorms here as both a student and an RF, which I’m sure makes you especially partial to the student experience. I’m curious how you think the Faculty Senate balances advocating directly for the students versus for themselves?

I think there there are a lot of faculty here who care a lot about students, and ultimately I think that’s what this really rests on.

For something to be of the purview of the Faculty Senate it’s supposed to be related to faculty — surprise surprise. But, it’s pretty easy to make the argument that much of the student experience does relate to the faculty and is something that matters to them.

Sometimes, though, people don’t see that connection.

Several years ago, when President Hennessy and Provost Etchemendy wanted to ban hard alcohol in all residences, I wrote a long eight to 10-page memo to every Faculty Senators explaining why this was a bad idea. The issue was not brought up in the actual Fac-

ulty Senate meeting because the agenda was already kind of full, but some people did write back to me. They asked if this was really a concern of the Faculty Senate. My answer was yes, because you care about the safety of your students. You care about their performance in your classroom, and, really, there are bunch of reasons why we, as the Faculty Senators, should actually have a say in this decision.

It’s not a slam dunk to say this relates to student affairs and student life only. It certainly has lots of implications for faculty members. It undermines the role of resident fellows, for example, if you simply impose something like this and expect them to just implement and enforce it. There’s all sorts of stuff there, and this is just one example of how this unfolds.

It’s actually much better if students advocate for students. I mean, for all kinds of reasons, students should speak for students.

But we also run into issues here. A couple years ago when the Who’s Teaching Us movement was happening, there were some people in the Faculty Senate that wanted the students from that movement to come speak. My feeling at the time though was that the students already had representatives they voted on, called ASSU Presidents and Senators, that could do that. Why would we give the students from this movement a specific channel to speak when in fact it should the elected representatives of the student body that should be speaking?

For me, one of the ways you can empower the ASSU is to give them an enhanced role. Give them a role in these sorts of discussion instead of bypassing them because other student groups get created and make a lot of noise. I think if you really wanted to improve the student voice at Stanford, you would really want to strengthen the ASSU.

What do you think are the best ways to do that?

That’s tough, I think I’m way out of my league on that one.

Guess it’s the question of the time.

Yeah, you know, I remember all kinds of different ideas that have come about at different times. One was actually going to an election system that prioritizes some sort of constituency where people live, like make representation dorm-based, or something like that. I don’t know, there’s lots to talk about there.

I will say this, though: I think one thing that we had to watch at the Faculty Senate was opining on things that are happening in the world. That’s not why we get chosen, We don’t get voted on to pass resolutions that say what’s happening in Washington D.C. is awful. We shouldn’t be doing that unless there is a direct connection to what the University does, and sometimes this happens, like the travel ban or funding for the sciences. In cases like those, it’s absolutely essential that we come out and say something, but we should really try to focus on what’s happening at Stanford.

Lucas Rodriguez, a senior studying political science, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.

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“ENTREPRE NEURSHIP as

H U M A N I TA R I A N I S M ” ARE STANFORD STUDENTS ACTUALLY CHANGING THE WORLD? ROXY BONFAFONT, HARRISON BRONFELD, WILSON LIANG, & KYLE WANG

“All around us in America is the clank-clank-clank of the new,” writes Anand Giridharadas in the prologue to his 2018 book “Winners Take All.” “But these novelties have failed to translate into broadly shared progress and the betterment of our overall civilization.”

The claim is substantial, and Giridharadas levels the full weight of his criticism on the “win-win,” market-based solutions to social problems championed by tech entrepreneurs, consulting firms, and thought leaders. These solutions are characterized by their profitability and by what he claims to be their failure to ask essential questions about the roots of the problems they seek to address. Harnessing rhetoric that emphasizes changing the world and co-opting the language of grassroots activism, economic elites are privatizing a toothless brand of social progress that doesn’t threaten the status quo they continue to profit from.

It’s the cynical product of a neoliberal culture that increasingly lacks faith in public sector solutions, Giridharadas argues—the belief “that capitalists are more capable than any government could ever be of solving the underdogs’ problems.” And if it goes unchecked and unchallenged, he warns, society’s winners will have free reign to engineer and sustain a system that will only ever benefit the world at large to the extent that it continues to benefit them.

By asserting that the products they help create are abstractly “making the world a better place,” employees at major corporations avoid more serious discussions about their complicity in perpetrating injustice and inequality. An employee at Facebook can claim that their work promotes global interconnectivity even as the company faces accusations of facilitating housing discrimination, promoting gentrification, and undermining democracy; employees at Amazon might argue that the company has created a revolutionary online marketplace while the creation of that marketplace has systematically crushed other small

businesses and corporations.

“Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship-as-humanitarianism more entrenched than in Silicon Valley,” Giridharadas writes, “where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian.”

Stanford was founded, per its mission statement, “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization, teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law, and inculcating love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But its graduates, like those of its peer institutions on the east coast, are overwhelmingly drawn to work primarily in tech, consulting, and finance. 19 percent of the undergraduate class of 2017 went on to work in “Computer and IT” industries, according to data published by Stanford BEAM, and another 19 percent were employed in “Business, Finance, Consulting, and Retail.” The list of graduates’ “top employers” is overwhelmingly composed of tech, finance, and consulting giants, including Google, Facebook, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs. The mean starting salary of a Stanford graduate in the class of 2017 was $85,000.

That Stanford serves as an institutional pipeline to prestigious, high-paying corporate positions is hardly a revelation. Despite the overwhelming numbers of graduates working for the world’s largest corporate institutions, however, the university still touts its founding mission statement. Moreover its students speak the language of disruption, social entrepreneurship, and, always, “changing the world.” But what, exactly, does changing the world mean—and what, if anything, is actually being changed?

WINNERS TAKE ALL

S O C I A L ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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or some, this change comes through the idea of social enterprise, a type of commercial organization whose primary goal is social benefit, rather than profit. Based on an idea which became especially popular in the past decade, social enterprises differentiate themselves from traditional non-profits by relying on business revenue rather than donations. As a result, they can sustain themselves indefinitely by reinvesting profits into their mission goals, at least in theory.

While social enterprises can be implemented in many different ways, at Stanford the term has mainly been used in the context of tech startups. Anywhere on campus, from classrooms to dorm rooms, you’ll hear the term pop up in student discussions as a potential path after graduation.

While working at a large, profitable, and socially minded firm like Tesla—whose mission statement is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”— is no doubt a dream for many students, the reality is that many social enterprises will never grow into the Fortune 100 behemoths which Stanford graduates pour into after graduation. Yet, the term’s popularity among the student body is an indication of how its promises of sustainability and social impact have conveniently aligned with stu-

dents’ desires to “do good” with traditionally lucrative fields like finance and tech.

Kathryn Rydberg ‘18 is the president of the Stanford Social Entrepreneurial Student Association (SENSA). SENSA’s mission is to “promote and enhance Stanford’s social entrepreneurship ecosystem.” For example, the club hosts a Social Impact Night where students pitch ideas for potential enterprises to solve social issues. One freshman pitched an app which allows users to sample the quality of water in their area, and share it with scientists for research purposes. She is planning on working on the project for the summer.

For SENSA and Rydberg, social entrepreneurs can be more successful than government officials at solving many problems.

“This is not only because they tend to have ‘business skills,’” Rydberg said, but also because they are are forced to make a profit “in a way that nonprofits and the government are not.”

This belief directly mirrors the “winwin” doctrine in “Winners Take All”: that socially minded business can simultaneously do good for the world and keep their shareholders happy. Rydberg said, “[they] are often poised to make a bigger social impact using fewer resources than the government,” by measuring and optimizing for impact. Because social entrepreneurs “are forced to decide how to make the biggest impact on the smallest budget,” Rydberg concedes that some large scale problems, like climate change and human rights, must

be addressed with the power of governments that social enterprises simply do not have. Still, she is optimistic about the power of social enterprises, especially when they work in collaboration with the public sector.

Here, Rydberg shows an belief in what Giridharadas calls MarketWorld: a culture “defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.”

“These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common,” Giridharadas writes.

Proponents of social entrepreneurship like Rydberg are wary of a government that she perceives as “really slow and big and hard to make changes in.” And she’s not alone: a January 2019 Gallup poll of American adults found that a combined 63 percent of respondents reported having either “not very much” trust in the federal government’s ability to handle domestic problems, or “none at all.” Increasingly, the socially conscious are turning to the private sector, and putting their faith in the mythic power of “business savvy” as the antidote to persistent and often systemic inequities.

Rydberg cites, for example, SENSA’s partnership with the startup SIRUM, a platform founded by Stanford graduates which facilitates the donation of unused medication to clinics for low-income patients. Such a social entrepreneurial project is doubtlessly well-intentioned, but it operates, as many such market-based solutions do, comfortably within the status quo. A company like

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KRIS KRÜG / FLICKR

Giridharadas speaking at PopTech 2011.

SIRUM does not meaningfully address why there is a segment of the population that cannot afford prescription medication, question the comparatively high price of prescription drugs in the United States, or attempt to challenge the system that creates and perpetuates such an inequity.

“We aim to get medications to all 50,000,000 people who skip their prescriptions due to cost in the U.S.,” announces a graphic on home page of SIRUM’s website.

There is no language that implicates any actors—pharmaceutical and insurance companies, for example—in this statistic.

Of the three co-founders listed on SIRUM’s website, all Stanford graduates, one worked previously at McKinsey and another at the Clinton Foundation.

Despite the optimism that Rydberg has about the power of the private sector to do good, many students ultimately do not choose to pursue a career in social enterprise. Rydberg estimates that 60 percent of those that initially express an interest in social entrepreneurship no longer think it’s a viable option post-graduation. Musing on the possible reasons for this change, she

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said, “the Stanford prestige puts pressure on people to make money,” which she attributes not only to Stanford’s status as an elite school, but also a student culture of pining after lucrative internships as something “you’re supposed to do.” Stanford’s reputation for fostering the next generation of tech billionaires, combined with the financial reality of being a college student in the modern era, pushes students towards traditional corporate players that offer prestige and financial security.

The multitude of career-oriented clubs and organizations at Stanford reflect this reality. A quick search through Stanford’s complete list of clubs reveals that there are nineteen different groups dedicated to “business,” and an additional seven committed to “entrepreneurship.” CS + Social Good works “to empower members of our community to leverage technology for social good.” Stanford Women in Business (SWIB) serves as a “community for empowering women in business.”

Grace Isford and Tashrima Hossain, the co-presidents of SWIB, spoke with Stanford Politics about how their mission of female

empowerment relates to a desire to “do good.” “[Members] may be entering profit or nonprofit fields, but at top of mind they are thinking of ‘what is my larger purpose and how can I create change beyond myself,’” Isford said. However, she and Hossain also noted the difficulty of the “risk averse nature of high-achieving students”, who “see a mission beyond themselves but end up not finding ways to implement it.”

“Everybody wants to be validated and at the same time create some impact,” Hossain said, which leads people to Google or Goldman because “that’s just something people celebrate.”

SENSA aims to foster social impact work while still participating in and embracing Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture.

“We’re totally at the intersection of people who want to do service and people who are interested in business,” Rydberg said.

But does that intersection actually enable meaningful social change, or is it just a euphemism for compromise?

CS + SOCIAL GOOD

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think this kind of hyperbolic language about changing the world [and] saving people’s lives has been around since the inception of Silicon Valley,” Matthew Sun ‘20, president of the student organization CS + Social Good, told Stanford Politics.

According to its website, CS + Social Good was founded in 2015, and “grew out of the need for a unified and coordinated effort at Stanford to organize and connect students using technology to take action and collaborate on the world’s most pressing problems.” Like SENSA, the organization helps run classes, host events, and connect students with off-campus opportunities.

Echoing Rydberg, Sun said that “our mission is to build a tech for good ecosystem on campus by building change and fostering dialogue at the intersection of tech and social impact.”

Unlike SENSA’s emphasis on for-profit work, however, CS + Social Good partners largely with nonprofits, and “also [tries] to dabble in public sector work as well,” Sun said. The driving purpose of the organization is to make students studying and working in tech more thoughtful about the social impact of their work. For Sun, this also means promoting a more collectivist mindset in a culture that primarily idolizes self-made, solitary geniuses.

“I genuinely believe we have so many smart and talented folks here at Stanford and I think a lot of us at Stanford are biased towards thinking of our role and our impact in a very individualistic framework,” Sun said. “I think that’s just what a lot of capitalism sets you up to do is [think of] yourself as like one agent acting in this kind of a game of life.”

Sun is not shy about acknowledging the limits of computer science to fix the world’s problems. “I am very tired of having tech companies tell me that they’re solving the hardest problems,” he said. “The hardest problems are inherently social problems. They’re not like, building a server that has like three milliseconds less of latency…. Everyone needs to have a more sober view of the impact they’re going to make.”

What Sun is pointing to is the real trouble with social entrepreneurship, and the thing that most concerns Giridharadas. The problem isn’t the desire to have a positive impact, and it isn’t ul-

timately about the desire to make money either. What’s worrying is that when social entrepreneurs claim ownership over changing the world—when students assert that they can do more and better than the democratic system—they’re sapping public faith away from the idea of systemic change; and those that profit from treating the symptoms of social ills should perhaps not be trusted when they claim that we are cured. The call for sobriety, for a transparent and self-aware evaluation of the limits of social entrepreneurship, reflects the need to acknowledge and address the roots of injustice—which is not something that Stanford’s pre-professional attitude is overly concerned with.

CS + Social good was featured last year in a piece in The Atlantic that lauded the program’s stated goals but questioned the true social impact of a club whose members overwhelmingly “[choose] a comfortable, low-risk lifestyle over work that directly addresses injustice.”

Sun is also involved with the housing justice organization SCoPE 2035, and emphasizes in particular the power that engineers have to organize for change within the industry. The Tech Workers Coalition, for example, is an organization of Silicon Valley workers pushing a variety of political and social justice agendas by applying pressure to major corporations like Google and Facebook. In May, activists with the Tech Workers Coalition protested Palantir, the data-mining company founded by Stanford graduate Peter Thiel, for its work with US immigration authorities.

“I think there is a difference between believing there’s a market-based solution to a lot of problems and believing that tech workers in the industry can organize for change,” Sun said. “I think those things are kind of different. I think you don’t need to have a market-based solution to believe that organizing and activism can be powerful in the private sector.”

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WINNERS TAKE ALL

WO R K I N G T H RO U G H T H E S YST E M

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t first, Allison Tielking ‘20 tried working through the system. During the summer after her sophomore year, she was sexually harassed by three different Lyft drivers while interning in Boston. Her experiences with Lyft’s customer services inspired her to write an op-ed in the Daily entitled “Why a $15 Lyft Coupon Won’t Fix Sexual Harassment.”

Initially, Tielking reported two of the cases through Lyft’s help bot, and each time after she submitted her reports, she received an email from Lyft customer support promising that they would take the “required course of action.” Frustrated with Lyft’s response, Tielking pushed her worries aside. There was little she could do, she decided, to get recourse for what went wrong.

Not long after the Daily published the article, Lyft’s COO reached out to Tielking directly. She was invited back to Lyft to give a presentation on her experiences. In a room full of company executives, Tielking, and her friend Elizabeth Gray ‘20—a product design major— presented a prototype with alternatives to Lyft’s reporting interface as well as several stories which Tielking had compiled from other victims of ridesharing sexual assault.

It was the perfect launchpad for her to begin pushing for internal change. Following her presentation, Tielking thought she had gotten through to the executives: the COO told her that he had taken the job in part because his own daughter was worried about being alone on the road and not knowing what to do with unsafe, predatory drivers. She was paired with an engineer, and for the first several weeks, she corresponded often with Lyft customer support, who gave her frequent updates. Soon, the engineer had developed a prototype for a new reporting interface.

Then Lyft’s responses grew increasingly sporadic. The engineer could only do so much—her team had pushed aside the discussion surrounding the prototype—and Tielking felt increasingly help-

less. While the MarketWorld approach initially seemed possible, Lyft appeared to do little more than pay lip service to the general changes Tielking had suggested. To make matters worse, Tielking’s own power to facilitate changes was growing increasingly unclear.

Although Lyft had promised Tielking the freedom to create her own project, they soon reneged, instead offering Tielking more generic roles in software development and marketing.

For their part, Lyft did eventually enact some of the changes which Tielking and Gray proposed. The help bot was eliminated, and the app now requires half the number of steps which it once did to report an unsafe or predatory driver. But in spite of the changes made to sexual harassment reporting by both Lyft and Uber, the problem of unsafe and predatory drives persists—according to a 2018 report from CNN, 103 Uber drivers alone were accused of sexual assault or abuse. And as an article from The Ringer notes, Uber and Lyft may face a fundamental conflict of interests in screening drivers intensively at all: in prioritizing efficiency, both companies need “as many drivers serving as many riders as possible—above all else.”

Tielking doesn’t entirely believe that this profit-maximizing ethos consciously drives the day-to-day decisions made by software engineers. She was, after all, paired with an ordinary engineer at first, who seemed genuinely excited to help. Even as some engineers individually expressed their concerns about sexual harassment, however, Tielking sensed that the company lacked the internal motivation to enact large-scale changes.

“I get it,” Tielking said, “especially when [Lyft] is trying and really struggling to make money from the current system, there isn’t an incentive.”

“The hardest problems are inherently social problems.

They’re not like, building a server that has like three milliseconds less of latency.”

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WINNERS TAKE ALL That engineers are generally paid well at companies like Lyft further reduces their incentives to consciously examine company practices. As an intern at Facebook, Tielking had noticed a similar willingness among the employees to blindly accept decisions from company leadership. “I don’t think people ever really questioned or dissented. They were kind of happy to just eat the food,” she said. “It’s a struggle to find a company that’s supportive of individual voices.” Giridharadas explains this basic conundrum in “Winners Take All”: those with wealth and privilege will seldom examine the sources of their power even if they claim to care about promoting social good. If companies pay employees well while promising to “make the world a better place”—so much so that software engineers are among the highest paid workers in the modern workplace—the employees

themselves have little incentive to truly question the company’s social impact.

Tielking has since shifted her focus to promoting regulatory changes for ridesharing companies. She recently started the Instagram account TakeBackTheRide to both share the stories of other survivors and to give inspiration for legislators to act. Having worked with company management, Tielking understands that companies like Lyft and Uber often lack the incentives to make internal changes of their own volition. “I’m definitely in favor of more regulation of tech companies in general,” Tielking said. “They can always promise that they’ll make changes but it’s not enough.”

Despite her experiences, however, Tielking remains hopeful that Lyft’s reforms

can come from the inside—her dream is to someday become an executive at a company like Lyft where she’ll have the power to push for such changes herself. But as time has gone on, Tielking has come to understand that companies like Lyft and Uber might ultimately choose to pursue other concerns. “It’s just like right now, I’m a little voice, and I got frustrated a lot because it’s like ‘why aren’t they listening?’” she said.

“But it makes sense—I’m in college and I don’t have that much experience, so my career goals are to be able to get to that position and make bigger changes.”

Looking a h e a d

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o Giridharadas, the central values of MarketWorld can be summed up with a simple quote: “You could change things without having to change a thing.”

The graduating class of 2019, like the classes that came before it, will overwhelmingly pursue careers in finance, consulting, and tech. They will learn essential business and problem-solving skills at McKinsey—perhaps believing that the job is only a necessary pit stop on the way to true world-changing—and develop well-intentioned apps that seek to revolutionize some market to be more equitable or more efficient while also remaining profitable.

They will become industry leaders and coveted speakers. Perhaps a handful will run for office. Maybe a few will become activists, labor organizers, or public defenders. But if they weren’t already members of the global corporate elite when they arrived at Stanford, there’s a good chance many of them will be joining it when they leave.

Most of the students we spoke to did not consider Stanford itself to be particularly influential in generating a “MarketWorld” culture on campus. Sun acknowledged that Stanford “might be complicit” in the dominance of corporate superpowers at career fairs, but stressed that Stanford’s student body is a self-selecting group that

tends to “value prestige.” But it’s worth questioning whether Stanford is living up to its founding mission, and whether it is effectively intervening to ensure that the next generation of world-changers has the world’s best interest in mind.

Every year Stanford administers an extensive survey to outgoing seniors collecting data about where Stanford students go after graduation, what they plan to do, and how Stanford has gotten them to that point. The administration did not respond to repeated requests from Stanford Politics to see this data, before informing us that the survey information is never made available to the media, to students, or to the public.

This data may hold the answers to many of the questions Giridharadas is raising. As Stanford students pursue prestigious careers with established corporate players, to what extent will their “social entrepreneurship” ever question corporate dominance? As Stanford itself benefits from the prestige and riches of Silicon Valley, to what extent will its students ever seek to “disrupt” the Valley’s established structures? As Stanford students plan to “change the world,” how will our entrenched institutions and values frame the scope of our world changing? Will we change anything at all?

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Stanford politics PODCAST Bringing you insightful commentary on campus and national news as well as interviews with Stanford professors and administrators, student leaders and political figures.

LISTEN TO US ON ITUNES, SOUNDCLOUD OR WHEREVER ELSE YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS!

Past guests have included former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA); Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ); Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs; New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar; terrorism theorist Max Abrahms; economists Thomas Piketty and Kenneth Arrow; Law School Professor Michele Dauber; University Provost Persis Drell; the presidents of Stanford Democrats, Stanford Conservative Society and Stanford College Republicans; the ASSU president and vice president and more!

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Politicos STAN FOR D’S MOST I N FLU E NTIAL U N D E RG RAD S

At the end of each year, Stanford Politics highlights 10 undergraduates of impact, the Politicos. In the past, these Politicos have hailed from campus media organizations, activist groups, student government and more.

This year, we interviewed a shortlist of over 30 students (selected from an even greater number of nominations by the student body) before our editorial board decided to recognize the following list of ten individuals and groups — profiled below by members of the staff of Stanford Politics — as this year’s most influential undergraduates at Stanford.

01 Shanta Katipamula SENIOR, ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING As ASSU Executive, Shanta Katipamula has been an extraordinary advocate for the needs of the student body. Most importantly, she prioritized using the ASSU Executive Cabinet’s power to advocate for both undergraduate and graduate students. One obvious way of doing this was choosing to run with Rosie Nelson, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, as the ASSU Executive Vice President. With a cabinet comprised of a diverse group of students, the pair has been uniquely successful in tackling similarly diverse issues, including Title IX advocacy, FLI work, CAPS reform, and tackling the graduate student affordability issues. This success has greatly benefitted from Shanta’s extensive knowledge of university processes and levers of power. Shanta focused on appointing students as voting mem- bers of university committees, submitting official comments, and recommending budget changes in the most import- ant areas for the next fiscal year —including increases for CAPS staff, AADS, and OAE.. Shanta has also led the way nationally among student body presidents in protesting and commenting on the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed Title IX changes. Over the last few years, Stanford Politics has emphasized the role of the ASSU Executive in curating institutional knowledge, and building lasting relationships with administrators. Shanta elevates this knowledge and these relationships. She came into the role with solid working relationships and as a trusted student advisor to Vice Provost for Student Affairs Susie Brubaker-Cole and Provost Drell. Those relationships have only strengthened over the year. Shanta has normalized the practice of administrators seeking the ASSU Executive’s advice on budget matters, just one example of Shanta’s professionalism and effective advocacy. For her institutional influence in a complicated role, we recognize Shanta Katipamula as our #1 Stanford Politico for 2019.

POLITICOS

02 Maia Brockbank SopHomore, Political Science As Sexual Violence Prevention co-chair for the ASSU Executive Cabinet, Maia Brockbank took the lead in advocating for student survivors on campus. She fought to extend the amount of time victims are allowed spend with their lawyer, restructure Stanford’s Title IX unanimity requirement, allow students to file complaints for sexual harassment, and ensure rape kits are available at Stanford Hospital. She advocated for more transparency around every step of the Title IX process. Notably, she spearheaded the effort to ensure the administration enacted their promises around the AAU Campus Climate survey. She encouraged 1100 other Stanford students to write comments to the U.S. Department of Education about the importance of Title IX, and created a comment-writing toolkit that was used by at least fifty other schools to invite their students to participate.

03 JIANNA SO SopHomore, PRODUCT DESIGN Jianna So’s advocacy as a cofounder of the Campus Workers Rights Coalition is especially impressive, beyond her role serving as a member of the 28th Undergraduate Senate. As a leader of the group, she served as the go-between for students and the local SEIU chapter which represents hundreds of campus workers. She helped the organization create and administer worksite surveys, gather and publish worker’s life studies, passed a unanimous supporting resolution through senate, and collected tons of student signatures on a petition supporting the workers in their negotiation. She also helped plan and execute the May Day SEIU rally that marked the beginning of the negotiation. Her work reminds students about the immense role that staff play in university life and that all workers deserve dignity and respect at Stanford.

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POLITICOS

04 ARACELI GARCIA SopHomore, CHICANX/LATINX STUDIES Araceli served as an Ethnic Theme Associate in Casa Zapata this year, and led the campaign to fight for equal pay for all student residential staff members, whether they are Residential Assistants, Peer Health Educations, or Ethnic Theme Associates. She and other leaders have met with the ResX task force frequently over the past two years. These meetings resulted in a $1000 pay increase for Ethnic Theme Associates next year, and full pay equity in the year following next. The Ethnic Theme Associate campaign sparked campus conversations about racialized and feminized labor, localizing a national conversation about valuing all labor equally.

Additionally, she serves as one of the students on the steering committee working on reforming the Cardinal Conversations speakers program. On the committee, she serves as a vocal advocate for communities of color who have felt unheard and unsupported when controversial speakers are invited to speak on campus.

05 JEFFREY RODRIGUEZ JUNIOR, POLITICAL SCIENCE Jeffrey was a behind-the-scenes leader making waves on behalf of the FLI community this year. He served as the FLI Office Special Projects co-chair, the ASSU executive cabinet’s FLI Community Outreach Director, and a leader of the FLI Conference workshop committee. Jeffrey has focused his efforts on tackling expensive, burdensome course fees and material costs from multiple angles, meeting directly with administrators, writing policy proposals, collecting and presenting data on the issue. He’s part of a team of leaders continuing to press for an official FLI community center, ensuring food security for all students during the school year and breaks, and increasing the ability of all students to participate in dorm activities. Jeffrey is certainly not the only leader advocating for the FLI community, and he’d like to thank Josh Pe, Ian Macato, Mustafa Khan, Jessie Seng, Becky Liang, and Zak Sheriff, and other FLI community student leaders for their work. But this award recognizes his quiet leadership on issues that influence the daily lives of FLI students at Stanford.

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POLITICOS

06 ANTONIA HELLMAN SopHomore, Political ScienCe & ECONOMICS

& CHRISTINA LI SopHomore, ECONOMICS Stanford students have a particularly poor record of voter turnout. Less than one-fifth of students voted in the 2014 midterms, placing Stanford far below the national average. Antonia Hellman and Christina Li resolved to change this trend coming into the 2018-2019 school year,. Along with support from the Haas Center, the two sophomores founded Stanford Votes, a campus movement meant to increase student voter turnout for the 2018 midterm elections. Stanford Votes worked to increase both the excitement around and accessibility of voting. They set up the ‘Wall of Democracy’ in White Plaza, which asked students to write why voting mattered to them.

The group also encouraged voter registration through NSO activities, tabling in White Plaza every Friday of fall quarter, and creating voting incentives with pizza parties; they even got the Stanford Tree to wear the Stanford Votes logo to a football game. Stanford Vote’s largest event was the ‘Party at the Post Office’, whose purpose was to help students vote through absentee ballots. Stanford Votes increased undergraduate student turnout by 150%, from 1420 in 2016 to 2200 in 2018. Hellman and Li are far from finished, and aspire for Stanford Votes to expand its reach to make voter registration and participation a stronger norm on Stanford’s campus.

07 REBECCA BEHRENS SENIOR, ATMOSPHERE & ENERGY After four years and a lot of patience, Rebecca Behrens engineered a strategy to get Fossil Free Stanford’s divestment request back in front of the Stanford Investment Committee. In 2014, Stanford divested from coal-related investments, but announced later that they would not divest from oil and gas. Rebecca helped Fossil Free get back on Stanford’s agenda by focusing the group’s efforts on the long range planning process comment period held last year and the school’s re-examination of its divestment standards.

Over 450 faculty members have signed onto the official letter supporting divestment, and in last year’s referendum, over 75% of Stanford students support the effort. Fossil Free held a large rally during Admit Weekend to mark the official resubmission of their divestment request and report.

We anticipate that Fossil Free will be vocal next year in building student pressure to influence the committee’s recommendation.

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POLITICOS

08 GABE ROSEN SENIOR, PUBLIC POLICY

& ANTONI RYTEL SOPHOMORE, ECONOMICS & COMPUTER SCIENCE Antoni Rytel and Gabe Rosen are being jointly recognized for their efforts at increasing Stanford voter turnout. As a Senator, Gabe has been recognized for his deep institutional knowledge and ability to maintain ASSU’s financial viability. This year, his most important initiative was passing and instituting a mandatory voter registration course hold on every student’s Axess account in the fall, with the support of Provost Drell.

Antoni Rytel is the current Deputy Director of GovTech Polska in the Polish Prime Minister’s Office on top of his full undergraduate course load and activism. He negotiated and created a program that works with European governments to fund Stanford students interested in participating in any European Union or national election to travel down to the consulate in LA, vote, and fly back, same day.

09 CARSON SMITH SENIOR, POLITICAL SCIENCE As co-chair of the Stanford American Indian Organization, a Social Justice Fellow at the Native American Cultural Center, and a member of the ASSU Constitutional Council, Carson Smith has focused on bringing techniques and practices to resolve conflict used in native communities to campus. Currently, anyone in the Native community at Stanford can request to go through a Peacemaking process with a trained facilitator, for interpersonal issues and when handling larger issues within the community. This reform was put into practice when Carson facilitated a conflict resolution process between members of the Junipero Serra renaming committee and members of the Native community. When the decision about the renamings became available, the committee cited the Peacemaking circle as a critical part of the decision-making process.

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POLITICOS

10 MARISOL ZARATE SENIOR, POLITICAL SCIENCE Marisol Zarate served in the ASSU Executive cabinet as the Director of Community Centers and Diversity. In this role, she helped begin to institutionalize diversity training for Stanford professors, helping faculty to understand the experience of their students in the classroom. Zarate is also working to evaluate possible ways to reform the Acts of Intolerance process, in order to mitigate future interpersonal conflict within dorm communities. She serves as a Residential Assistant in Zapata, was part of the Ethnic Theme Associate equal-pay campaign, and helped plan teach-ins and the May Day rally as a member of SCOPE.

HONORABLE

MENTIONS

SERJ - STUDENTS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL & RACIAL JUSTICE Formed as a coalition of members from different environmental spaces on campus, including Fossil Free Stanford, Students for a Sustainable Stanford, and SCOPE, SERJ has identified itself as the foremost group tackling environmental justice through student action. This spring, they circulated a petition calling for the hiring of five new faculty focused on environmental justice issues, which culminated in a large rally in White Plaza.

MATT WIGGLER Matt Wiggler used his term on the Senate to focus on anti-semitism, veterans issues, and ASSU election reform. Most notably, he developed a new discussion model in response to Cardinal Conversations, called Deliberative Dinners. Through his research, he identified six principles he believes foster safe political conversations in a polarized environment: community, continuity, inclusion, equality, accountability and a specific conversation topic. Wiggler’s deliberate attempts to reform sources of campus political dialogue and the success of Deliberative Dinners are hopeful signs for the future of the campus.

HANNAH ZIMMERMAN Hannah is well-known around campus for her national political work: she played a large role in youth organizing on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and serves in her local county government as the youngest elected official in the state of New York. On campus, Hannah has taken a more academic approach to advocacy. With the help of her advisor Bruce Cain, Hannah helped teach several classes this year, teaching students to become organizers and mobilize around political issues. Topics of these classes included labor organizing, (where students learned about and worked to influence the labor negotiations currently happening between the university and the local SEIU chapter) and campaigning in the 2018 midterm elections. We were impressed by her unique approach to advocacy and hope these classes will continue to help Stanford students learn about and pursue active participation in social and political movements.

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Stanford One Year After #MeToo How Stanford’s Response Failed Victims of Sexual Assault A little over a year ago, Stanford Politics Magazine published a cover story titled, “Fairly Normal and Routine,” which described fifty years of Stanford’s history with sexual violence.

In the wake of #MeToo, two former Stanford professors were accused of sexual misconduct.

The first was Jay Fliegelman, a late English professor who was suspended in 2000 after one of his graduate students accused him of rape. The second was Franco Moretti, who was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by former students across three campuses where he had taught.

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t started with a phone call.

Seo-Young Chu, an associate professor at the Queens College Department of English, was sitting in her New York apartment when her phone rang.

Chu remembers that a woman’s voice had spoken when she picked up.

“Hi, Seo-Young? I’m calling from Stanford to ask about your experiences while you were here.”

And from there, Chu said, the story “tumbled out.” In 2000, she accused professor Jay Fliegelman of sexually assaulting and raping her while she was a graduate student at Stanford.

Following Chu’s accusations, an investigation took place. Fliegelman was eventually found guilty of violating university sexual harassment policies and suspended for two years without pay, during which time he continued to meet with the graduate students he was advising. Given the nature of Chu’s accusations, it was surprising that Fliegelman had any direct contact with graduate students during that time—Fliegelman was, after all, Chu’s adviser when she accused him of raping her.

Kyle Wang

#METOO The phone call was just one of many stories which Chu shared in an essay titled, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe” in Entropy Magazine.

Published in the wake of the #MeToo movement, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe” chronicled the aftermath of the rape and Stanford’s response—which Chu found inadequate.

In August of 2007, Jay Fliegelman passed away in Menlo Park, CA. Shortly after, Stanford passed a memorial resolution in his honor; on May 20, several students held a ceremony celebrating his life. They called it a “JayFest”—a “[celebration] of his influence on us as scholars and teachers.” At the time, Fliegelman’s suspension was not known to the public, and Stanford made no mention of it. By 2013, the American Studies Department had begun giving out the “Jay W. Fliegelman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Honors Research.”

Part of Chu’s frustration and anger—her reasons for writing the piece in Entropy—came from Stanford’s limited response to Fliegelman’s wrongdoing. In a follow-up piece to “A Refuge for Jaein Doe,” published in Johns Hopkins University’s ASAP/Journal, Chu highlighted several excerpted conversations from Facebook posts and private correspondences she had shared with Stanford.

Though she openly praised several individuals who had offered formal apologies, Chu also noted that Stanford itself had remained largely indifferent to her requests: Chu had initially hoped to establish a dialogue with Stanford discussing the broader, systemic imbalances which had allowed a professor like Fliegelman to take advantage of her.

In an email to Stanford Politics, Chu wrote that the Stanford English Department had yet to explain the reasons why Stanford had held a “JayFest” in spite of their knowledge of Fliegelman’s assault.

“I want to believe we live in a world where the Stanford English Department is capable of answering my questions in a clear and respectful manner,” she said.

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round the same time that Chu’s piece was published, another Stanford professor, who had recently retired, was facing similar allegations of sexual misconduct.

Franco Moretti was, in the words of The New York Times, a “revolutionary.” At Stanford, he had helped found the Stanford Literary Lab, a research lab which sought to understand historical texts through a process known as “distant reading,” a computerized analysis of up to thousands of texts at a time.

In the midst of the hype surrounding Moretti’s work—a hype which drove The New York Times Magazine to write a profile on his research—another story emerged. Kimberly Latta was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1984-85 while Moretti was a visiting professor. It was her first semester as a graduate student, and she had signed up for a seminar which Moretti was teaching. Moretti, she recalled in an op-ed published by Entropy, had taken a surprising interest in her, which she had initially thought was purely intellectual. As their academic relationship continued, however, Moretti’s advances became more readily apparent. According to Latta, Moretti took advantage of her later that semester and raped her on two separate occasions.

Latta’s piece—like Chu’s in Entropy—expressed her frustrations

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with the apparent lack of effort made by academic institutions to prosecute sexual predators. She had initially planned on coming forward, but recalled that Berkeley’s Title IX officer at the time—a friend of Moretti’s—had cautioned against it. She soon decided to drop the issue entirely, and no formal investigation was ever opened.

After Latta’s allegations publicly resurfaced in November of 2017, two more stories surfaced detailing Moretti’s behavior. The Daily reported about one woman who recalled she had set a dog loose to stop Moretti’s unreciprocated advances; in that same Daily article, another graduate student at Johns Hopkins University said that Moretti had inappropriately touched her.

Moretti continues to deny these allegations. In an email exchange with Stanford Politics, he was quick to note that “only Ms. Latta has accused me—falsely—of assault.” He made no mention of the other two cases, or of the word “rape,” which Latta used to describe the encounter.

Despite the allegations, in September 2016, Moretti was appointed by the former Dean of Humanities at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a senior advisor, helping the Swiss research institution define global strategy.. When the allegations surfaced a year later, current Dean of Humanities, Bela Kapossy, noted that Moretti notified EPFL immediately and provided them with a public statement of denial. His students at EPFL were also informed, Kapossy said, per Moretti’s request.

Following Latta’s letter and #MeToo, however, EPFL moved forward with Moretti’s teaching as it had before. Though a single allegation had been enough for Johns Hopkins University to rescind its offer to hire Moretti, neither EPFL—nor Berkeley or Stanford— moved to open an investigation into Moretti’s past behavior. “As you know,” Stanford University spokesperson EJ Miranda wrote in an email, “the allegations were related to other institutions and predated Moretti’s joining the Stanford faculty. Professor Moretti is retired and has no activities on the Stanford campus.”

According to Professor Mark Algee-Hewitt, the current director of the Stanford Literary Lab which Moretti founded, the lab no longer maintains any formal connection with Moretti. Nonetheless, its website continues to list Moretti as an off-campus associate. This is admittedly standard practice for the Lab—once members retire or move off campus, they are automatically relisted as off-campus associates.

The website’s “About” page also ends with the following declaration: “The Literary Lab strives to create an open, collaborative environment that supports the rights, safety, and personal integrity of all those who work in or with the Lab … no unprofessional behavior, harassment or abuse will be tolerated from any member, and we expect all participants to adhere to and further these values.”

The addendum did not appear on the website until November of 2017—after the allegations against Moretti had surfaced.

In his email to SP, Moretti appeared to welcome the opportunity to speak publicly about the allegations. “As there have never been formal proceedings in connection with the false allegations, I have not had a meaningful opportunity to address and disprove the accusations,” Moretti said. “I can only repeat, again, that I wholeheartedly deny them.”

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hen SP asked Miranda about the concrete changes which Stanford had made in the context of #MeToo, he pointed to several revisions of University policy regarding faculty-student relationships: in 2014, the University formally barred romantic relationships between faculty and students in all cases “when the faculty member has had, or can ever be expected to have, academic responsibility for the student.” These changes were not, Miranda admitted, made in direct response to either Latta’s or Chu’s accusations, but were nonetheless “important to note.”

Kimberly Latta personally found the changes made in 2014 to be fairly meaningless. To begin with, she wrote, the nominal changes barring faculty-student relationships had existed at Berkeley in the 1980s when she was Moretti’s student. “Moretti didn’t care. He was above the law, and he got away with it,” she said.

After finishing her graduate studies at

#METOO Berkeley, Latta went on to receive a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1998.

She began working her way up through the academic world, starting as an assistant professor at Saint Louis University and eventually becoming the Director of State Relations at New York University. Moretti’s fame only continued to grow in the meantime—in 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

And despite Latta’s growing success, however, she still feared the repercussions of speaking out against an academic rockstar like Moretti. “Since Franco Moretti threatened he would destroy my career if I spoke about [his behavior], I have been very afraid. I was afraid I would be punished somehow for speaking out, and that nothing would happen.”

And, to some extent, nothing did happen to Moretti. Per Miranda’s email, the fact that the allegations predated Moretti’s time as Stanford faculty gave the Title IX office little reason to open a direct investigation into his behavior at Stanford; currently,

UNCLEAR ANSWERS

Chu’s recent experience dealing with the Stanford administration has been anything but easy. She has been passed off to different point persons throughout the process, lacking clear understanding of the university’s intentions.

In early 2018, Chu met with senior university officials, hoping to gain some clarity regarding the University’s handling of the Fliegelman case. Although Chu had requested to meet with then–Department Chair Alex Woloch, Stanford sent two other individuals: the General Counsel and the director of the Sexual Harassment Policy Office.

the Stanford English Department website lists him as an emeritus faculty and former holder of the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship in the Humanities. There is no mention of any of the allegations which were made against him.

To this day, Moretti teaches at EPFL, where he remains in close contact with students. “No one has even slapped his hand,” Latta claims. “Certainly not Stanford. They claim that because he raped me when I was at UC Berkeley, but not at Stanford, that they are not responsible and that it is somehow not their place to take further action.”

In Latta’s piece for Entropy, she mentioned the story of another person—“presumably at Stanford,” she wrote—who was assaulted by Moretti. When SP asked her to clarify these statements, she confirmed that “more than one” Stanford-affiliated individual has yet to come forward due to the allegations.

“Has Stanford created an environment in which victims of sexual assault can feel safe coming forward?” she said. “Absolutely not.”

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n early 2018, Chu met with senior university officials, hoping to gain some clarity regarding Stanford’s handling of the Fliegelman case. In her words, it was a far cry from the dialogue she had envisioned having with the English Department—and Stanford—following the accusations she and several other students had made. Although Chu had requested to meet with then–Department Chair Alex Woloch, Stanford sent two other individuals: the General Counsel and the director of the Sexual Harassment Policy Office.

Chu remembered wondering why the Department Chair Alex Woloch wasn’t present: she had, after all, requested to meet with him personally. In an open letter on Facebook, Chu had written that Woloch was present when Fliegelman first began to make his nonconsensual advances. He was, in her words, complicit and responsible for Fliegelman’s behavior.

Woloch refused to respond directly to inquiries from SP. All questions, he wrote to us, were to be directed to University spokesperson EJ Miranda. Miranda offered little explanation as to why Woloch himself was not present the meeting with Chu despite her requests. He merely referred back to University policy which stated that academic departments would not conduct their own internal investigations: because the English Department was not conducting an investigation, there was no reason for Woloch to be present.

And yet Chu had not asked for an investigation: her orig-

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

People walking through the arcades at Stanford University.

inal inquiries to Stanford asked for a “dialogue” with the English Department regarding its treatment of sexual misconduct cases.

According to Chu, however, no members of the English Department were present at the 2018 meeting.

The email ended an addendum which appeared to defend Woloch. “There has never been a formal complaint against Professor Woloch by Dr. Chu,” Miranda wrote. “Professor Woloch has consistently maintained that he had no knowledge of an issue of sexual harassment between the two and that he is in no way responsible for Professor Fliegelman’s actions.”

Since she made her initial accusations, Chu’s expectations for Stanford have changed. At first, she had hoped for an apology—not only for Stanford’s lenient punishment, but for its decision to celebrate Fliegelman’s work as they had following his passing: it seemed almost as if Stanford had willfully forgotten his suspension when it memorialized Jay Fliegelman.

Even now, though, Chu still hopes to have an open dialogue with Stanford regarding its treatment of sexual harassment and assault cases. Later in 2018, Chu made a $50 donation to Stanford requesting the aforementioned dialogue. She has since requested a full copy of the investigation report detailing the case against Fliegelman as well as the letter of censure he received. Chu was denied both the letter and the full report and was instead provided with a summary of the case—a response which, according to Miranda, is standard university procedure.

After reading the case summary, Chu was left with more questions than answers: the summary noted that Fliegelman had been found guilty of sexual harassment and nothing more. There was no mention of the word “rape” or of Chu’s hospitalization, even though the report noted that Fliegelman forced himself onto Chu. Although Chu initially requested a full copy of the investigation re-

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port, she later offered to cease all requests if Stanford donated one million dollars to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN)—a request which Stanford has ignored.

By contrast, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), whose Graduate Student Caucus had named its “Excellence in Mentorship” Award after Fliegelman, came forward with a public apology immediately after hearing the allegations.

To this day, its webpage describing the criteria for submitting the award contains a note explaining the Graduate Student Caucus’s decision to remove Fliegelman’s name from the award. “We deeply regret and sincerely apologize for the violence enacted in the 2009 naming of our Graduate Student Mentorship Award in honor of Jay Fliegelman, and we are grateful to Professor Chu for coming forward with her experience,” the note reads.

Chu spotlighted ASECS’s email in her follow-up piece for ASAP/ Journal. Many students at Stanford, including the graduate students of the English Department, expressed their support for Chu’s cause.

Provost Persis Drell even made a personal contribution to RAINN. Nonetheless, no institution—academic or otherwise—has opened a new public investigation into the behavior of either Moretti or Fliegelman in the wake of #MeToo. Unsurprisingly, both Latta and Chu ended their emails to SP decrying Stanford’s—and the academic world’s—response to #MeToo. “Faculty sexual harassment is still a big problem, and the universities still have their heads in the sand,” Latta wrote. “It often seems as though no one is listening.”

Kyle Wang, a freshman studying English and computer science, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.

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