At the Library, Stanford Disdains The Humanities Once Again

THE STUDENT who sets out to explore West Campus will quickly stumble upon the shiny new buildings with ceiling windows and delicious cafes — the centers for research in such glamorous subjects as neuroscience, biology, and bioengineering. Stanford can’t get enough of those: in fact, more and more Stanford Medicine buildings are bound to be “renewed” in the next few years.

Move a bit away from the sciences, though, and the picture looks quite different. Back in 2019, Provost Drell announced that Stanford would stop subsidizing its University Press — a move that failed only thanks to professors’ activism. The King Institute, which publishes MLK’s papers, is housed in a makeshift building and has had to make do with a tight budget. And this year, Stanford Libraries — the backbone of all humanities research in the university — appears to be the new target of the Stanford administration’s disdain for the humanities.

Annoyed with right-wing comments on the Daily? Then revolutionize college admissions

WHO ARE college newspapers’ most avid readers? Judging by their comment sections, it’s not college students. From the Stanford Daily to the Harvard Crimson, from the Daily Californian to the Yale Daily News, we see comments from off-campus right-wingers all over. They range from the informal to the erudite; from the funny jab to the disgusting insult; from the cliché of the young troll to the diatribe of the concerned boomer—and there are a lot of them.

Editor’s Opening Statement, Vol. 3

THE LUXURIOUS quinceañera after a field trip to the slums. The bus packed just with women—all domestic workers—heading back from the rich part of town. The school employees who called us children “doctors” out of deference. You didn’t have to be particularly disadvantaged to find social injustice in Brazil. It was everywhere.

My leftism was born out of moral indignation. It felt immoral that I could get a tech internship at age 16 and make more money than half the country. It felt immoral that I was guaranteed a spot in college, while many paulistanos didn’t even know that the University of São Paulo existed. At some point, I realized that Brazilian society demanded radical wealth redistribution. And so, I became a socialist.

14 Must-Take Courses This Spring: Remote Edition

IN THIS unprecedented quarter filled with uncertainty, the Sphere is back to help you get the best experience out of Zoom sessions. Whether you intend to discover paths toward democratic socialism, sharpen your theorizing about gender, or master the art of Mask, we have you covered. Enjoy our picks for this spring, listed in no particular order.

How Your Classmate Became a Con Artist

THE FIRM. That’s what they call McKinsey & Company, and the leading F in Firm is richly deserved. The consultants are everywhere. Corporations, governments, the most prominent NGOs… Consultants apply their know-how and unimpeachable credentials to the problems of every company with the money to afford their fees. And they do indeed solve problems—they boil the data down to transferrable sets of questions that allow inexperienced recent grads to pretend to make a difference.