Stanford University campus trip report

It’s tough to understand how the Ivy League universities, even with top scholars such as Claudine Gay, have managed to retain prominent faculty. The lifestyle of a Stanford professor is so far superior that it is tough to understand why Stanford hasn’t recruited all of the world’s smartest academics. Yes, the California government spends tax dollars in ways that are offensive to some Americans, e.g., performing trans surgery on minors, but roughly 94% of elite academics are progressive Democrats (Harvard Crimson). Tax rates are higher in California than in the states where most elite universities are, but progressive Democrats should be happy to pay their “fair share”. Speaking of “fair”, it looks like the folks who purport to champion female rights and achievement and decry the unfair gender pay gap choose to pay women substantially less (source):

See also, from stanford.edu, “Countering Masculine Defaults to Close the Gender Pay Gap” (“organizational cultures can counter this tendency by equally valuing qualities traditionally associated with femininity, like warmth and agreeableness”), “Women paid less than men even at highest levels of academic medicine”: “These women are at the top of their game,” said Eleni Linos, MD, MPH, a professor of dermatology at Stanford. “They are skilled leaders, outstanding managers and experienced negotiators who have reached top positions in their medical schools. Gender pay gaps are often blamed on women’s personal choices to reduce work hours or leave the workforce, household responsibilities, childcare or suboptimal negotiation skills. This study challenges these traditional explanations because our sample of medical department leaders have navigated these complex challenges and broken through the ‘glass ceiling.’ Yet they are still paid less than their male peers when controlling for many factors. Our study shows the pervasiveness of gender inequities at all levels of academic medicine.”

Note that one of the photos includes the Graduate School of Education, where Jason Arday might have worked if he were still alive. What can one learn there?

[Professor] Subini Ancy Annamma[‘s] … research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color

She teaches CSRE 439: Critical Race Theory in Education (EDUC 439):

This seminar will examine the foundational tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytic framework to study of inequities in P-20 education. … we will explore CRT’s focus on identifying and disrupting white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and interlocking inequities (re)produced in education.

Stanford is so rich that the campus can be randomly strewn with Rodin sculpture:

If you don’t see enough Rodin while out walking around, stop into one of the art museums and see another 200 or so. The Cantor Arts Center (free to the public; named after Palestinian-American B. Gerald Cantor, founder of Cantor Fitzgerald, 68 percent of whose employees were killed in the not-Islamic peaceful 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center):

“This looks just like the foyer of the house where I grew up”:

The museum features a painting ridiculing the British for voting to leave the EU:

It’s by an artist from Kenya:

The artist seems to have been correct. The British thought that they were voting to reduce immigration, but instead their leaders actually increased the immigrant flow, substituting African, Middle Eastern, and Indian/Pakistani immigrants for EU immigrants:

How about this courtyard with a Richard Serra?

Here’s an unusual Georgia O’Keeffe:

(Wikipedia says that her career got a big boost when she began spending time with an older man, Alfred Stieglitz, who was a prominent art dealer. He was married when they met, but ultimately O’Keeffe managed to take over the wife role.)

The front entrance:

The famous bell tower is closed on weekends so we couldn’t go to the top, but perhaps it is just as well since doing so would have been hazardous:

How does the campus look from the top of the hills just to the west?