An essay published last week in Palladium, titled “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” is well worth your time. The author, Ginevra Davis, is a recent graduate of the school and describes the growth of the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy’s systematic destruction of almost every redeeming aspect of campus social life: “Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.” She goes on to write:
What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.
The school’s “new social order,” Davis writes, “offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference. . . . It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.” Amid all the talk of campus wokeness, this is an important aspect to note: The diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology — what some have taken to calling “safetyism” — is not just totalitarian and illiberal, although it often is both of those things. It’s also fundamentally anti-human. It’s driven by a radical conflict-aversiveness that robs life of joy — “born,” as I wrote back in October, “from what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott described as the ‘anti-individual’ impulse”:
That impulse, Oakeshott wrote, is an anxiety about the experience of individual liberty itself — a “revulsion from individuality” that drives a desire for “a solidarité commune in which there [is] no distinction of persons and from which no one [is] to be exempt.”
The anti-individual distaste for the conditions of a free society — a visceral horror at the possibility that someone, somewhere, is living differently from oneself — has always animated a certain kind of technocratic progressive but has potentiated and spread alongside the virus itself. As Oakeshott observed in his seminal book, On Human Conduct, “the determined ‘anti-individual’ is intolerant not only of superiority but of difference, disposed to allow in all others only a replica of himself, and united with his fellows in a revulsion from distinctness.” For the anti-individual, the politics of conformity and radical sameness are preferable to those of self-determination — his anxious neuroticism is incurable unless it is “imposed on all alike,” as Oakeshott wrote in another essay. “So long as ‘others’ were permitted to make choices for themselves,” Oakeshott added, “not only would his anxiety at not being able to do so himself remain to convict him of his inadequacy and threaten his emotional security, but also the social protectorate which he recognized as his counterpart would itself be disrupted.”
So it is at Stanford — and in so many of our other elite institutions. A world without risk is not a world worth living in. And that, at its root, is why the bureaucratic campus ideology is so poisonous.