Philosophy: "The Farm" Arrogance

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I sometimes get very frustrated when I read the Stanford University Alumni magazine "Stanford". It's not that I don't think highly of Stanford. In fact, the best times of my life so far took place while I was living "on the farm," as the campus is colloquially known. It's that sometimes the writing in the magazine reminds me of the people one encounters on campus that think Stanford is the greatest place on the planet and that the whole world should be like Stanford.

I'm not sure I disagree all that much with their first premise, though I suppose I'd like to see better cuisine at "the greatest place on the planet," better surrounding geography than "the dish" (a satellite dish that rests on a hill visible from a surprising proportion of the campus), and maybe a better transportation system in and out when one actually has to leave. Yet, even if it probably isn't the "greatest" place, it's a very good place. In the final analysis, people should think the place they live is the greatest place whether it is or not anyway, right?

It's the arrogance and lack of realism in the second premise that has always rubbed me the wrong way. First of all, the world can't all be like Stanford because its population is self-selected. Through student admissions and job interviews, the university effectively chooses who it wants to be there, and then those that come to be there get to perpetuate the selections. I don't have a problem with how that process occurs (How could I? They let me in!), but that can't be done in the real world. In a broader community, the people that aren't desired in a given place can't just be told to cease to exist. They have to be somewhere, and right there, by definition, wherever they are will not be like Stanford. Stanford has become what it is by virtue of its selectivity. The world cannot be so selective, short of an ethical code that I wouldn't spend one second contemplating.

Furthermore, this idea that the world should all be like Stanford is in conflict with the very commitment to diversity that makes Stanford what it is. In order for Stanford to be such a great place, it has to bring together people from stunningly different backgrounds--those from East Los Angeles and Hollywood, Israeli Jews and West Bank Palestinians, rural farmers and inner-city renters. If the rest of the world were all like Stanford, "the Farm" could not exist!

There are plenty of other arguments against trying to turn the world into Stanford, but there's one other aspect that strongly annoys me. It is simply arrogant of people of this mind-set to suggest that the rest of the world should want to be like Stanford. There are other great universities in the world--some, like the University of California at Berkeley, aren't even that far away. While I personally would rather be at Stanford than Harvard or Oxford or Berkeley, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with someone that prefers Princeton, the Max Planck Institute, or Foothill Community College. Those institutions have plenty to offer to the world, and I don't want them to change in a way that would diminish their unique character.

Part of the reason that Stanford can foster such an attitude is that it physically is isolated from the rest of the world more than an average university. The main portion of campus doesn't spill out into a surrounding community as at most North American universities. Instead, the Stanfords very consciously placed the campus about a half-hour's walk or more inside the property that they owned. In fact, the story goes, when Palo Alto--whose downtown area now sits just down Palm Drive from the main entrance to campus--started allowing saloon-type businesses that the Stanfords did not approve of, they decided not to build Palm Drive and instead built roads radially from the main quad toward the surrounding communities of Menlo Park and Mayfield (which was later annexed by Palo Alto and is now known as the California Avenue area of Palo Alto). Only after Palo Alto established more control over the atmosphere in its downtown area was Palm Drive upgraded and the radial streets faded away, with only traces remaining today.

The reason that this seemingly-benign love of Stanford bothers me so much is that the attitude is paralleled in the United States at large. Americans seem to think that their country is the greatest country on the planet, and that every other nation should want to be like the United States. Again, it's hard to take issue with the first premise. While the Chinese, Swiss, Brazilians, and just about every other nationality on the planet including Canadians would argue with that, there's nothing wrong with thinking highly of one's own nation.

The problem is the second premise. The arrogant view that the world wants to become the United States not only offends many people across the world, but has led the United States to pursue misguided policies like trying to impose US-style democracy on Iraq in hopes that it would take over the Middle East. Maybe someday all of the world's nations will have representative governments of some kind, but the US needs to look no farther than Canada and Mexico to see that other styles of government can function just fine.

To a large extent, the United States has a self-selected population, native peoples and forced slaves excepted--it wouldn't exist if not for the rest of the world. As with Stanford, the physical isolation of the United States, oceans away from most of the rest of the world and bordered on two sides by substantially peaceful nations not all that different than itself in a broad view, helps to foster arrogance. Many Americans haven't experienced the greatness of other places or had any opportunities to interact with foreign people to understand how others' preferences might be different than their own.

In the end, we are all world citizens whether we want to be or not. There is a great deal of diversity in the world, and we should experience, celebrate, and foster the aspects of that diversity that we come to appreciate. Only because of that diversity can special places like Stanford University and the United States exist. No matter how much we like them, we should be humble about them, not arrogant.