Culture: Good Times at the Farm

Students played Ultimate Frisbee at Roble Field on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California on 9-January-2011

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA - It's not immediately obvious walking around campus on a Sunday afternoon, as I did last weekend, but it's a good time to be on the Stanford University campus, colloquially known as "The Farm." A smaller number of students than I typically remember was playing Ultimate Frisbee on Roble Field, and the path around the former Lake Lagunita was nearly empty, but there was a certain vibe on campus that was undeniable.

The reason was obvious only when heading to the upstairs area in the Stanford Bookstore where athletic gear was sold. The mood had started to become super-enthusiastic when the Stanford women's basketball team defeated the University of Connecticut on 30-December-2010, ending the Huskies' record-setting 90-game winning streak. While the victory was at Maples Pavilion walking distance from here, it wasn't particularly close--71-59, and by all accounts, it felt better than that for the Cardinal. Interestingly, the last UConn loss had been to Stanford as well. Within days, the bookstore here had been stocked with t-shirts proclaiming "All Good Things Must Come to an End."

The biggest reason for the good mood, though, comes from the performance of football team. The Stanford team may have a long history, with its first Rose Bowl appearance in 1902, but for most of my life, it's been at best a mediocre team, overshadowed in the strong Pac-10 conference by contenders for the National Championship like the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, or this year, the University of Oregon. Their last Rose Bowl appearance was under coach Tyrone Willingham in 2000 (a loss); their last season ranked in the top 10 was 1992 under coach Bill Walsh.

This year, under coach Jim Harbaugh, the Cardinal (remember, that's the color) had its best season in terms of win-loss record since 1940, losing only to Oregon. I was amazed to see the team creeping up in the rankings, and ultimately qualifying for a Bowl Championship Series bowl, the Orange Bowl. On my second night back in the Bay Area, the game was played, and after listening on commercial radio for a time, I realized that I really should have been listening on Stanford's own radio station, KZSU at 90.1 FM. By that time, the outcome of the game was not in doubt, and the announcers had become somewhat casual. Stanford would win the Orange Bowl 40-12 over Virginia Tech, its first bowl victory since the 1996 Sun Bowl.

As students were just gathering on the Farm to start winter quarter, this was quite a way to begin a term. I can only imagine the celebrations in the main quad. Of course, it didn't take long for the Stanford bookstore to come up with Orange Bowl champion t-shirts--but by the time I was on campus about a week later, that would be the only tangible evidence of the accomplishment.

Politics: Death to Traffic!

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Travel writer Rick Steves is more willing than many of his peers to talk about the political implications of what he learns when he travels. While his most out-spoken political position may be on the legalization of marijuana, two stories he told on various radio shows and on a blog about his trip last spring to Iran say more about potential relations between the US and Iran than anything heard in the news.

While taking a van around the capitol not after his arrival in Tehran, Steves found himself in a traffic jam. Iran is not immune to western-style slow-downs; this back-up was so bad that cars in a portion of the highway would not move for minutes at a time. (Traffic engineers sometimes call this "level of service F"--I always wondered what they would call it at Stanford, where "F" grades are not allowed, but I digress.) Passengers in a car next to the van noticed that there was a foreigner inside. At one point, they rolled down their window and handed over a bouquet of flowers for the van's driver to give to Steves--they wanted to apologize for their traffic. Can you imagine that happening on the Gardiner Expressway, the 101, or even I-35W in Minneapolis?

Perhaps the most frightening vision of Iran in the American psyche is that of Iranians chanting "Death to America!" But what does that phrase really mean? Steves gained considerable insight in another traffic incident. When caught in yet another traffic jam, his "local guide" (they didn't like the term "government minder") suddenly blurted out "Death to traffic!" Seeing a confused look on Steves' face, he explained, "Because we can do nothing about this traffic, we can all say 'Death to Traffic'." In other words, he didn't literally mean he wanted to kill all the other drivers, but to succinctly express frustration with something that was beyond his control. It rather puts the frightening "Death to America!" saying in context--it's an expression of frustration with something beyond their control, the actions of the United States government.

Somehow, I suspect if I say "Death to Cold!" that people around here won't understand that I just mean to express frustration about something beyond my control. Yet such simple explanations could go a long way to changing impressions about people in a culture that Americans have had little reason to try to understand.

For more of Steves' impressions in Iran, read his Iranian travel blog.

Philosophy: Being "Of" Stanford or MIT

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Not long ago, in a job interview, I was asked if I felt I was more "of" Stanford University, where I earned an undergraduate degree, or more "of" the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I earned a graduate degree. While I had little doubt about my answer, the question does require one to evaluate what being "of" either of those universities means.

While some would say that there may be a difference between "techies" (those studying science and engineering) and "fuzzies" (those studying everything else) at Stanford, I never actually found that to be true at the undergraduate level. Instead, there was simply a very healthy level of curiosity about all subject matters. Many people tended to choose their majors late or change majors as they explored different possibilities, sometimes even across the techie/fuzzie divide. Such exploration was encouraged by policies such as late course dropping deadlines and the ability to take most classes "Pass/No Clue" (actually "No Credit"--there was no "F" grade at Stanford). Department boundaries themselves were loose; it was not uncommon for professors to hold appointments in multiple departments, or switch departments.

Underlying it all was a very clear sense of humanity. I will never forget when famous Chemistry professor Richard Zare publicly stated that he thought students should be allowed to remove one grade from their transcripts "because sometimes people fall in love."

The end result when I graduated was that Stanford graduates tended to be very interdisciplinary in their thinking, willing to draw connections between things that traditionally did not go together, and were very open to any new ideas. Many were quite entrepreneurial and willing to take risks. They wanted to live their lives fully, and wanted others to do so as well.

The vibe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was completely different. Departments had very clear boundaries that were not crossed lightly. Once a major was chosen (though that process seemed pretty open), that put one in a group of people that was comparatively isolated. But, what really distinguished MIT was focus on quantitative data. Everything at MIT has a number. I remember sitting a computer in an Athena cluster and marveling that the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer in front of me was 18{for MIT}.{building number}.{room number}.{node number}. The order of the whole thing was almost out of control. It's not a coincidence that the original modern concept of hacking--one that includes the ethic of doing no lasting harm--originated at MIT. People really did just enjoy technology there, whether they were just studying how it worked or were hacking it. A student from MIT could credibly sing Kip's Wedding Song from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, honoring technology.

Underlying it all was a fundamental brutality. The "look left, look right, one of the three of you will graduate" routine had been history for decades, but it hadn't been completely purged from the culture. It wasn't a very human place. I'm not sure I heard anyone talk about their feelings the entire time I was on campus.

The end result was graduates who could become very focused on whatever technical task was before them, really analyze what the underlying technologies were doing or could be doing, and then find creative ways to use technologies to do the original task--or something much more exciting and valuable. It is a much more intense, goal-oriented culture.

Compared with the average North American, I might care more about technology, but I didn't care nearly enough to fit in at MIT. I'm not interested in technology that doesn't help me do something practical in life. So, I'm not visionary enough to be a MIT-style entrepreneur. On the other hand, I often don't see boundaries between disciplines. Bringing disparate ideas together to get something done, Stanford-style, is something I could do every day if given the opportunity.

I answered that I was "of" Stanford.

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.

Margin Notes: Grungy Art Deco White Christmas

The scene in a Bellevue, Washington backyard as snowfall continued on a White Christmas, 25-December-2008

BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON - The rain and wind storm yesterday morning cleared the roads and caused most of the snow to disappear, but the Seattle area did see a rare White Christmas, as evidenced by the photo above. Arguably, this was the first "real" White Christmas of my lifetime in this area, as there was snow on the ground at dawn and snowfall during the course of the day; only one of those elements had been in place in any previous year.

* * * * * *

It was a Seattle Christmas, though. While wandering downtown Seattle last Saturday, a group of street artists near Westlake Center were noted performing Radiohead's "Creep". Where else but the grunge capitol of Seattle could someone sing "I'm a creep / I'm a weirdo" on the streets and not only avoid arrest but expect to earn money?

* * * * * *


"Nutcracker" by Randy Bollanger in Pacific Place was part of the Downtown Light Spectacular in Seattle, Washington on 27-December-2008

More conventional holiday entertainment came in the form of the Downtown Light Spectacular, a series of forty LED light displays depicting various toys. While most of the "Toyland Display Gallery" was dispersed outside throughout downtown Seattle, a few were inside including the "Nutcracker" which mixed in with a variety of Nutcracker figurines at the Pacific Place shopping mall.

* * * * * *


Seattle, Washington's 1930-era Exchange Building exemplified the Art Deco style on 27-December-2008

Also mixing the inside and outside was the reason for my visit downtown, a tour of Art Deco Seattle by the Seattle Architecture Foundation. Looking at such architectural gems as the Seattle Tower and the Exchange Building from both inside and out demonstrated how the ornate and vertical nature of Art Deco structures contrasted with the classical and international styles much more common in Seattle.

* * * * * *

One of the first buildings that comes to my mind when thinking of Art Deco is Palo Alto's railroad station, the public transit gateway to Stanford University. Holiday travel is the time I usually use to catch up on reading "Stanford" Magazine. Had I not read recent issues, I would not have known that Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina, Air America and MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow, and KUOW-Seattle producer Sage Van Wing all went to Stanford.

* * * * * *

For more detailed coverage of radio in 2008, Scott Fybush's well-known Northeast Radio Watch came out with its Year in Review this week. The highlight of Fybush's reviews, especially for those outside of his region of focus, is the Year-End Rant which often has significant insight into the state of the broadcasting industry. With the economic downturn, one might think this would be a pessimistic article this year, but Fybush has managed to insert some optimistic thoughts that are worth reading.

Transport: The Farm is on Board

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA - Last night I headed into The City--that's San Francisco, for the unfamiliar--to have dinner with an old friend. To get there, I used Caltrain, the commuter rail service that runs frequent service between San Jose and San Francisco. For the first time, I was able to take a "baby bullet," or express train that passes other trains, on the northbound trip, and was impressed that the train averaged 50 mph--including stops--on the run. A typical commuter train in North America averages about half that speed. The "Baby Bullet," cruising through some stations at 70 mph, is a rarity outside of some services in the northeastern US and Chicago.

I had to return on a local train, and remembering the days when two of the four cars in late-night trains would be kept closed and dark, was surprised to find the doors on all five cars of the train open when boarding in The City. This wasn't an oversight; the train would be about half full. A group of three decided to fill the seats around me.

As much as I try not to stereotype all the time, I knew as soon as the group sat down that they were Stanford University students. They weren't wearing any clothing with "Stanford" on it, but I could just tell. Sure, Stanford students are a relatively regular fixture on the Caltrain service returning from The City, but age alone didn't identify them. They could have easily been Santa Clara, or San Jose State students.

No, I could tell by way they looked around the interior of the car that these students had a certain zeal for life and insatiable curiosity about the environment around them that seems to be a hallmark of Stanford students. Any doubts that I had faded as they started their conversation as it covered a wide range of topics, each of which would seem pretty random. They covered everything from what mechanisms sharks use to find their prey to whether and how Stanford names its on-campus restaurants to the oxygen-free dead zones that are forming in bodies of water worldwide including the Gulf of Mexico.

When a male of Asian descent mused about trying to find frozen yogurt after they got off the train, I couldn't resist entering the conversation. "When I went to Stanford," I stated, "People didn't talk about Frozen Yogurt, they talked about FroYo." That prompted a long digression about famous acronyms and contractions in use on campus. I had to admit that "FuMuOnQu" was a rare one in my time on campus, but I had heard it to refer to an event normally known as "Full Moon on the Quad" in which freshmen head for the quad in hopes of being kissed by a senior.

After an hour of additional random conversation about everything from the shipping of plastic bottles overseas for recycling to how some jellyfish become transparent when resting on coral, the group left the train in Palo Alto, leaving me to contemplate all my long walks down Palm Drive in the dark for four years of my life. Someday, one of these students would likely be in my place, and who knows what random thoughts future Stanford students might bring to the conversation--but I bet they will still be recognizable as Stanford students.

Blog: Origin of the Title

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The title of this blog originates from the commentaries I did for KZSU, Stanford University's student radio station, in 1994 while in the news department. They were entitled "In the Margin," and often included the phrase "way out there" after the title. Of course, many of the subjects of those commentaries, while regarded as marginal at the time, would later move mainstream. I believe I had only read about Ratko Mladic and Arkan in the Christian Science Monitor at the time of airing a commentary about them, but ultimately the world would recognize them as war criminals.

An author can always hope that comments made "in the margin" may prove of greater value down the road...