At Stanford, the New Applied Science Is Social Engineering

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recently named Stanford University the worst higher education institution for free speech in the United States. Sadly, this problem is only one of many that are eroding student life at Stanford. Over the past several years, Stanford’s activist administration has sought to transform almost every element of student life radically. The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.

The current assault on student adulthood began six years ago with the adoption of what are euphemistically called Stanford’s “Standards of Excellence.” With these standards came social contracts and performance agreements that today apply to almost all Stanford organizations. Nonperformance can be assessed and penalized. Stanford’s “student customers” have been transformed into something more akin to marionettes.

The latest development is a program called ResX. Each new student now receives a university-mandated assignment during his or her freshman year to a “neighborhood” where students are to remain affiliated for their entire undergraduate careers. This “reimagining” of student life now determines—when students live on campus—where they eat, sleep, and socialize. Administrators are thereby centrally planning what they deem to be acceptable residential cultures.

From ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community),” students are sorted by singular attributes and shielded from those who look different and think differently. Not too long ago, liberals would have called such school-sanctioned isolation and discrimination “segregation.”

But residential life is only one area where Stanford administrators have seized adulthood from the students. Administrators aim to run their social lives as well.

In 2021, they imposed stronger regulations on students’ activities outside the classroom. They now require students to register any party they host while also banning get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals. Officials have banned hard alcohol and made drinking games a punishable offense. Even students 21 and older must abide by these restrictions.

These measures are overbroad and even counterproductive. They have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends. These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.

This year, Stanford administrators established new policies that require fraternities and sororities to lobby to remain in their houses on campus after three years. And organizations that want to return after a hiatus face steep challenges. Since Stanford requires freshmen to live in university housing, only three years remain in which students can choose. Fraternity members are now being arbitrarily banned from living more than two of those years in their fraternity, forcing organizations to rush 50% more members.

Stanford dedicates resources to various student causes, activities, and organizations, but it finds little reason to strengthen Greek life. Yet numerous studies demonstrate that students who join Greek organizations graduate on time more , are more engaged in the classroom, are more likely to participate in internships and faculty-generated research projects, maintain higher levels of mental health, and are more likely to have interactions and discussions with people different from themselves.

Stanford enrolls young people who spent much of their youth sacrificing to win admission. But these days, it tells adult students where they must live, how they may socialize, and with whom they may associate. These students, finally embarking upon adulthood and a future they can design for themselves, have been left no choice but to adhere to stringent rules that neither enhance their education nor prepare them for life after college.

Embarrassingly, the motto of Stanford is, “The winds of freedom blow.” Yet Stanford, like so many elite educational institutions, has moved from the study of social ideas and behavioral practices to putting coercive utopian experiments into effect on campus.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14191&omhide=true&trk=title

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Teachers, parents want real discipline as NYC student suspensions fall

A progressive push to soften school discipline has caused student suspensions to plummet — and made city classrooms more chaotic and dangerous than ever, parents and teachers charge.

Suspensions of five days or more meted out by principals and superintendents plunged more than 42 percent from the fall of 2017 to the fall of 2021, from 14,502 to 8,369, Department of Education data shows.

As suspensions declined, taxpayer money allocated to “restorative justice” — a system that sends badly-behaving students to mediation, conflict “circle” meetings, and guidance counseling, rather than boot them from classrooms — soared. The city in February pledged to sink $1.3 million more into such programs.

“That’s the reason everything’s in the toilet,” one Queens educator, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “They were saying people of color were disproportionately affected by suspension, but to completely take [suspensions] away from everybody in every instance is doing more harm than good.”

Black and Hispanic kids are suspended more often than their peers, according to a 2021 report, and some advocates have cheered the drop in kicking kids out.

But fewer suspensions mean more mayhem in the classroom, according to educators and parents.

“We have teachers getting kicked at, spit at, cursed at, things thrown at [them] and the kid is back the next day like nothing happened,” said the teacher, who didn’t give her name for fear of retaliation. “And the teacher is asked, ‘What did you do to trigger the child?'”

Pressure from the DOE has prompted administrators to downgrade incidents or sweep them under the rug, educators charge.
The fact that educators now have little recourse emboldens misbehaving kids, said one teacher.

“Right now, with the way the discipline code is, it’s basically, ‘Stop doing that or else we’ll ask you again,” said Queens teacher Kathy Perez. “The kids know that there are no consequences.”

Kids who want to learn, the vast majority, get cheated.

“Everyone is so concerned with the rights of the two or three upstarts in the room, that the other 30 kids — their rights to get an education … to be able to sit in an environment that’s not intimidating, that’s not scary, that’s not filled with noise” don’t matter, said Perez, a reading specialist who won a $125,000 legal settlement from the city after she was hurt by out-of-control teens in class. “No one has ever had an answer to that.”

Olivia Ramos said her son was assaulted five times at Manhattan’s 75 Morton, a West Village middle school which pushed restorative justice.

“There’s no punishment to the kids who misbehave,” she said. “He was calling me from the bathroom, in seventh grade, scared because there were fights in the bathrooms, in the hallways, in the staircases, really bad fights.”

She eventually secured a safety transfer for her child, Ramos said.

The reasons for falling suspensions also include rising absenteeism and reduced enrollment since the pandemic. But the problem is only getting worse under the woke philosophy of “restorative justice.”

“The schools were out of control starting with de Blasio,” said Gregory Floyd, head of Teamsters Local 237, which represents the city’s school safety agents. “He decided to reduce suspensions by not suspending students for infractions they should have been disciplined for. This is part of the reason why we have what we have today.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/teachers-parents-want-discipline-as-nyc-student-suspensions-fall/

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Silent panic alarms could be coming to NY schools after ‘Alyssa’s Law’ passes

Albany pols passed a law Saturday requiring school districts statewide to seriously consider installing silent panic alarms to alert law-enforcement authorities during emergencies.

The state Assembly approved “Alyssa’s Law,” named after 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff, who was shot and killed in 2018 during the Parkland, Florida school massacre.

“Schools should be a safe place for our kids to learn and grow,” said Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie in a statement announcing the bill’s passage.

Alyssa’s Law will force each school district’s safety teams to consider installing panic alarm systems and other direct communication technologies as part of their mandatory regular reviews of safety plans.

The measure had previously passed in the state Senate and now heads to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams, said the city currently doesn’t believe it needs panic buttons in Big Apple schools but will review the measure.

“Our children’s safety is our top priority, which is why all our public schools have School Safety Agents assigned to them,” Levy said in an email.

“SAAs are members of the NYPD and, thus, our schools already have a direct line to police in case of an emergency. We don’t believe there is a need for legislation to supplement the good work we’re already doing in New York City public schools, but we will review this legislation.”

https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/panic-alarms-could-be-coming-to-ny-schools-after-alyssas-law-passes/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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