‘These actions were wrong. They were damaging. And they were unacknowledged for too long.’
On October 12, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued an institutional apology after a task force report confirmed that in the 1950s, Stanford took measures to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to the university by suppressing admissions from two heavily Jewish high schools in the Los Angeles area. The advisory task force and report stemmed from a document a historian had found in Stanford’s archives. The 1953 memo to Stanford president J.E. Wallace Sterling, PhD ’38, from the assistant to the president, Fred Glover, ’33, indicates that director of admissions Rixford Snyder, ’30, MA ’34, PhD ’40, had stopped by to convey his concerns about the high number of Jewish male applicants to the university. “He says that the situation forces him to disregard our stated policy of paying no attention to the race or religion of applicants,” Glover wrote. The number of students enrolled from the two schools in question subsequently plummeted.
The task force, chaired by Ari Kelman, an associate professor of education and leading expert on Jewish life in America, was established to delve into the history of Jewish admissions and to recommend opportunities to enhance Jewish life on campus today. Those include making a public apology for the past suppression of admissions; clarifying Stanford’s relationship with Hillel; better serving the religious and cultural needs of students, for example, in dining halls and with regard to electronic dorm keys on the Sabbath; and ensuring that the start of fall quarter does not coincide with the Jewish High Holidays. “What allowed antisemitism to exist in the administration in the 1950s was silence and secrecy,” Kelman told Stanford. “And our job is to daylight that—to do everything we can to have a frank conversation now, to integrate it into conversations about diversity, to make Jewish students feel at home on this campus.”
London calling.
Rishi Sunak, MBA ’06, is the United Kingdom’s new prime minister. Voted in by Parliament’s Conservative Party members, Sunak is the first Stanford alum to hold the office. He’s also the U.K.’s first prime minister of color, its first Hindu prime minister, and, at 42, its youngest prime minister in more than 200 years. Prior to his nomination, Sunak headed up the country’s treasury, a post that came after a career in investment banking. He assumes the role as the U.K. struggles with a cost-of-living crisis and a deeply divided Conservative Party. But the big question on many minds is a bit fuzzier: How well will he share the spotlight with Larry, the official resident cat and first chief mouser to the cabinet office at 10 Downing Street?
Survey says . . .
The U.S. midterm elections are around the corner. Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political science and of communication, is one step ahead, looking to 2024. Iyengar and the University of Michigan’s Nicholas Valentino lead the American National Election Studies (ANES), which since 1948 has had a terrible acronym and also has surveyed Americans about their political views before and after presidential elections. The 2024 edition, which is funded by a $14 million award from the National Science Foundation, will have hundreds of questions, many of which are tied to the times we are in: not only candidate preferences but also views on the economy and the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. (The 2020 survey included questions on misinformation, urban unrest, and COVID-19 policy.) Ahead of the midterms, ANES has published a webpage detailing the evolution of the public’s views over the past several decades. Within the data are stark trends revealing increasing political polarization, especially when it comes to participants’ self-identification as liberal or conservative, their views of the opposing political party, and their beliefs that the parties are different. Back here in 2022, the Stanford News Service has published a collection of recent stories about researchers studying what influences American voters and why.
No icebreakers needed.
Photo: David Gonzales, ’93
In October, Reunion Homecoming brought back to campus more than 7,600 undergrad alumni and their guests. In addition to old favorites like class parties, Classes Without Quizzes, the Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and a (winning!) football game, there were new activities: a pickleball tournament, a drag show, and the first Stanford Indigenous Alumni Summit.
Football flip-outs.
Alums of a, ahem, certain age watching the Reunion Homecoming football game may have been reminded of the card stunts students used to perform in the stands. What began as a hand-produced, analog affair ended when 1960s computer programmers began devising sophisticated sequences that sometimes required each fan to change their card 250 times. That’s speculated to have killed the fun.
Even if you didn’t know about card stunts, chances are you’ve at least heard of the Play—the 1982 Big Game that ended with crushed dreams and an airborne Stanford trombonist. Now college football lore, the biggest literal mash-up in Big Game history wasn’t televised live, and there was no instant replay. But 40 years on, author Tyler Bridges, ’82, has reconstructed the 21 seconds of action using more than 375 interviews with players, coaches, referees, band members, and stadium personnel who witnessed the drama. He’ll discuss Five Laterals and a Trombone: Cal, Stanford, and the Wildest Finish in College Football History at a November 15 event hosted by the Stanford Historical Society. And should you want a new perspective (insert hissing here) on the tragedy of 1982, you could read this story from Cal’s alumni magazine.
How many times did you hit snooze this morning?
In just a few days, most of the United States will fall back an hour during the annual and painful ritual known as reverting to standard time. But don’t let yourself also fall back to sleep! Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, says that whether you’re a night owl or one of the theoretical humans who easily wakes with the sun, anyone can change their sleep pattern. “Your tendencies are not your destiny,” he told Stanford magazine. He advises picking your ideal wake-up time, planning a fun activity to do each morning as motivation, and not stressing if you wake in the middle of the night. But you’ve got to be patient when changing your sleep pattern—it takes about six weeks for anything to become a new habit. Not to scare the daylight savings out of anyone, but six weeks from the time change is roughly the new year, so you’ve just found your 2023 resolution.
But wait, there’s more.
Los Angeles native Desiree Cormier Smith, ’07, is the new special representative for racial equity and justice at the State Department, where she’s working to address systemic racism both at home and abroad. Our fates are interconnected, she says: “I see the same problems in Inglewood and Ghana.”
Dante Dettamanti, Stanford men’s water polo coach from 1977 to 2001, died in a cycling accident on October 25. He led the Cardinal to eight NCAA championships and was the only collegiate water polo coach to win NCAA championships in four different decades.
LSJUMB student leadership has suspended Jordan Zietz, ’24, from his duties as the 44th Tree. The Daily reported that the Band felled the Tree “because of his use of the platform for personal benefit without going through or inquiring about appropriate processes, therefore violating the norms and expectations of the position.” The decision, Band leaders wrote in a statement to the Daily, “was completely unrelated to the content” of a banner Zietz unfurled at the October 22 football game that read “Stanford Hates Fun.” The 43rd Tree, Grayson Armour, ’22, will go back out on the limb until Zietz returns in January.
If you need an extra spring in your step, the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory has your back . . . or rather your foot. Their untethered exoskeleton (aka robotic boot) applies torque at the ankle, offering wearers increased walking speed and energy savings equivalent to “taking off a 30-pound backpack.”
The number of smokers in the U.S. is declining overall, but the rate of menthol cigarette use is increasing. Professor of otolaryngology Robert Jackler and the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising group have compiled nearly a century’s worth of advertising campaigns for menthol-flavored tobacco products, illustrating an orchestrated effort by the tobacco industry to make menthols the cigarette of choice among teens new to smoking, women, and Black Americans.
This fall, NASA successfully tested its ability to knock an asteroid off course. Not to be outdone, researchers at Stanford and MIT say they’ve found a better way to blow up such rocks. Improved analysis of the composition of asteroids would help scientists make a more accurate and effective hit.
The first Google server, which is decorated with Lego bricks, lives in the Huang Engineering Center. The most spherical manmade objects on Earth, as designated by Guinness World Records, are in the Physics and Astrophysics Building. And a giant clamshell, most likely from the Philippines, can be found on the second floor of Geocorner—although nobody seems to know how it got there. Take a look at these and other campus curiosities.
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