The End of Stanford?

Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.

Stanford has been heading in this direction for a while. As Ken Auletta reported in this magazine a year ago, the connections between Stanford and Silicon Valley are deep. Federal Telegraph was started by a Stanford grad a hundred and four years ago. William Hewlett and David Packard started inventing things as students, as did the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I was a student in the late nineties, and I worked for a start-up soon afterward. Classmates of mine went on to manage epic failures and astonishing successes in technology. Instagram was founded by Stanford graduates. When Auletta was reporting his story, he talked with a student, Evan Spiegel, who had an interesting start-up that was just beginning to grow—Snapchat, which now has at least sixty million photos a day flowing through its servers. Stanford feeds Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley nurtures Stanford. You can’t have one without the other.

But what’s the point of having a great university among the palm trees if students feel like they have to treat their professors as potential investors, found companies before they can legally drink, and drop out in an effort to get rich fast? Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? And Stanford has, in its day, produced a great variety of graduates: compost-flipping hippies, novelists, politicians, liberal firebrands, conservative firebrands, brilliant dropouts, and, of course, athletes. (The full name of the University is Leland Stanford Junior University, and people used to joke that the campus included two schools: Stanford University and Leland Junior College, the latter of which involved a set of courses that even the most dedicated of athletes could complete with reasonable grades.)

Now, though, it seems like all the myriad identities are being subsumed. Students can still study Chaucer, and there are still lovely palm trees. But the center of gravity at the university appears to have shifted. The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

Maybe the university should change its name to something quirky and techy. Star Fond? It’s an anagram, it sounds like an incubator, and, best of all, the Twitter handle is available.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Nicholas Thompson