The DEI war on fun

Opinion
The DEI war on fun
Opinion
The DEI war on fun
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What does a college mascot have to do to get suspended by a university? Well, if you are the Stanford Tree, all it took was unfurling a banner on the field during the homecoming game’s halftime show.

And the banner didn’t even have any vulgar words on it. It simply said, “Stanford hates fun,” which apparently is too controversial a subject for a college mascot to be raising.


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The most immediate cause of the Stanford Tree’s displeasure with the university’s leaders stemmed from the delay of an annual fraternity party. But frustration with the school administration’s control over student life has been growing for years.

Even before COVID-19 shut down
Stanford
’s campus in 2020, the administration had been systematically kicking fraternities and other themed housing groups off campus, replacing them with soulless numbers. So, for example, what had been the Sigma Chi house for decades is now just “550.” These rebranded houses were then filled with random students who had no real connection to each other except for the fact that they went to Stanford.

The administration saw
COVID-19
as an excellent opportunity to accelerate the destruction of these smaller chosen communities, and so they announced their new ResX plan — think of it as Stanford’s own little “Great Reset.” Under ResX, each Stanford student is randomly assigned to a “neighborhood” to live in, and each of these neighborhoods has a letter: S, T, A, N, F, O, R, and D.

Except the assignment to each neighborhood isn’t so random. There is a reason ResX’s first “core principle” is “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The ResX mission statement even indicates that the new system is designed to “diminish the stereotype of the ‘Stanford student’ or ‘Stanford culture’ that may harm historically underserved communities on our campus.” The entire purpose of ResX is to break up naturally forming student communities and replace them with one cookie-cutter, mono-woke culture.

And this woke culture doesn’t have time for parties. According to the Stanford Daily, there were just 45 on-campus parties registered with the administration so far this year, compared to 158 for the same period in 2019.


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The administration does seem to be aware that it is killing fun. That is why it created a “Student Social Life Accelerator Task Force” in April to restore Stanford’s “fun, irreverent, whimsical social scene.” But an administrative committee created by bureaucrats to increase whimsy on campus has been just about as successful as you would expect it to be.

It is hard to feel sorry for the overwhelmingly wealthy and privileged students of
California
’s top elite private university, but these students will go on to be their generation’s leaders (well, at least inside California), and everyone should be very scared about what new rules they’ll try to make the rest of us live under.

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