It is the inalienable right of every college student to complain, complain, complain. Fashions and causes and administrators come and go over the decades, but the list of student peeves at Stanford has remained remarkably constant: dorm food stinks, classes are too big, the campus post office is inefficient, the football program can't keep pace with the University's other winning teams.
Here in the '00s (will somebody please come up with a decent name for this decade?), students may have to search for new grievances. The good news, it seems, is that much of the bad news is history. Take dorm food. (Please.) Trashing the cafeteria chow is a hallowed campus tradition. And, usually, for good reason; I still get hives remembering the California Casserole I consumed in the early '80s. As an adviser to freshmen and sophomores, I occasionally join them for meals, and I assure you: the food has improved. But you don't have to take my word for it. We asked San Francisco magazine food critic Tori Ritchie, '81, to put a typical dorm meal to the taste test. Her review accompanies Sherri Eng's story on the new ambitions of Stanford Dining Services (hint: they fancy themselves restaurateurs).
Big deal, you're thinking -- the University finally figured out how to provide decent food for students whose board bill now comes to $7 to $9 per meal, depending on the plan. But that's only an appetizer. Remember the long lines and sometimes-surly service at the post office? A renovation project that begins in January amounts to a "total remodel" of the White Plaza location, says the Palo Alto postmaster. The revamped branch will feature additional vending machines and a retail store for packing supplies; customers will get to their post office boxes from a lighted interior lobby open 24 hours a day. (Downside: the project will take 10 months, during which the post office will be housed in a tent on Flo Mo field.) Or how about the huge lecture courses that prevent all but the most persistent underclassmen from getting to know professors? Today, thanks to Stanford Introductory Studies, every freshman and sophomore can take at least one seminar from a senior faculty member.
The good news on campus is part of a broader, far more significant national trend. Violent crime is down, teen pregnancy rates have plummeted, unemployment is at a 30-year low. But, as the New York Times noted recently, Americans remain pessimistic. Apparently we've grown so accustomed to bad news that we can't acknowledge new realities.
Few are more accustomed to bad news than Stanford football fans. Simple fairness would suggest that the Cardinal, as a member of the Pac-10, ought to make it to the Rose Bowl once a decade. But who ever said life, or football, is fair? This year, the team paid its first visit to Pasadena in 28 years. For Peter Bhatia, '75, the wait has been agonizing. A resident of Portland and executive editor of The Oregonian, Bhatia's a Cardinal season-ticket holder in football and basketball who can name every Stanford quarterback since Jim Plunkett. His Rose Bowl essay will remind you that "fan" is short for "fanatic."
Despite the outbreak of good news, students have no trouble finding things to gripe about. An informal Stanford survey (okay, we asked our two interns to talk to some of their friends) unearthed a host of complaints from undergraduates today. The University, they grumble, is suffocating Greek life, cracking down on the Band, neglecting the humanities and prohibiting freshmen from bringing cars to campus. "Students are generally happy on the Farm," says Dean of Students Marc Wais diplomatically, "but they can typically find at least one area in which to suggest improvements."
Even, we discovered, the weather. "I hate winter quarter," says senior Avid Larizadeh. "Everywhere you go, you get wet." Perhaps, but when Stanford's sun-dappled students start bemoaning the weather, things must be pretty peachy.
Of course, life on the Farm isn't perfect. No one knows that better than the hardy employees who commute to campus each day all the way from Modesto. As campus news editor Christine Foster painfully discovered, that's 41
