Swarms of Spontaniety-Smotherers
On the Ginerva Davis Stanford Essay, Or, "First They Came for the Frat-Boys, and the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band, and I Said Nothing"
My father was part of the Cal-Berkley band in the early 60s, and I remember some of the stories he used to tell of their prank-wars with their rivals the Stanford band. The one I remember best was the time the Stanford band marched into their big “S” on the Cal field, and took a knee, secretly planting seeds that later sprung up into an “S” bed of flowers. My dad had to admit: they got us that time!
Here’s a history of that band, which if you read closely and are conservative, you’ll see that the seeds of pranky freedom sown in those days had arguably gotten out-of-hand and tiresome by the 80s and 90s. If you wish to search for it, there is an image out there of the band marching itself into a d&#k formation. Better this, a picture of “The Tree,” the band’s official mascot from the late 70s on.
Then there’s this, from the same history:
…in 1990…the Band’s infamous University of Oregon halftime show, which spoofed the spotted owl timber battle between the logging industry and environmentalists. Formations included a giant chainsaw and band members re-forming the word “OWL” to “AWOL” on the field. Following the inevitable backlash, the governor of Oregon attempted to ban the Band from the state of Oregon (he failed).
Compare and contrast this report, by recent Stanford alum Ginerva Davis, from our blessed times:
…today, the Band designs all their pranks based on pre-approved themes from the university and clears the final plans with a panel of administrators.
“Mommy, what do you do at work?” “Honey, I approve of pranks, to make sure they offend no-one.”
My good friend Paul Seaton recently published one of his annual Declaration-analysis essays, and the topic he chose this time naturally led to him to look at that line that says, “He [The King] has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to Harass our people, and eat out their substance.”[emph. added]
Hence the title of this piece.
Here’s Seaton on his essay:
Last year I wrote about the instruction and example the Declaration provides to those who wish to band together against the designs of a misguided administration bent on manifold mischief. This year, I wish to turn to the logically prior topic, the criteria of judgment the Declaration puts forth to discern advancing injustice.
Vital stuff. Numbskull populists who talk irresponsibly of America already being at civil war or in a state of revolution ought to read and reflect upon it. “Populist” is no insult-term in my book, though I prefer the compound term “populist-conservative.” Last year I wrote a piece called “Rules for Democracy-Rescuers” as a way to guide populist-conservatives, not to anathematize them. Reading Seaton, and thus also reading the Declaration more carefully, would help the confused or careless among them better understand their “moral obligation to be intelligent,” and to be Lincoln-like precise about every word they utter about the possibility of a 21st-century populist-conservative revolution in America. It would help them abide by one of the rules I laid down: “Thou shall be bound by strict conditions for entering into revolution, such as those articulated in the third and fourth sentences of the Declaration of Independence.” Not that I don’t also see that, in some cases, spontaneous pranksters might shape the political scene, so that the serious collective deliberations about whether to enter into revolution will wind up influenced by them.
Discerning the requirements for legitimate and prudent revolution is a weighty task—let’s return to the lighter fare, apparently, of college pranks. I’m doing so inspired by two writers less-academic than Seaton, the recent Stanford-alum—or is she a senior or junior?— Ginerva Davis, who writes for the fine Palladium site, and Chris Bray, one of the best substackers who reflects on today’s descent into semi-totalitarianism. Bray’s substack is titled Tell Me How This Ends, and while every other post of his is gold, his most fascinating ones have been on Jim Jones, thinking about him in light of the Covid-cult or the “mass formation psychosis” of the last two years.
Anyhow, his post “Instrumental Tedium” is mainly a framing of, and a teasing out of the more fundamental implications of, the essay Ginerva Davis wrote, “Stanford’s War on Social Life.” I’m going to do the same thing here, but in my own way and at greater length. My apologies to Mr. Bray for the imitation!
Davis begins with the delightful early-90s story of how one fraternity created an “island” in a college-area lake out of the sand they had obtained for a Cabo-themed party, an act of prank-like building of social space. This sets up her main paragraphs:
Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student 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.
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.
Whenever Stanford empties out a fraternity or theme house, the administration renames the organization’s former house after its street number. Now, Stanford’s iconic campus Row, once home to dozens of vibrant student organizations, is lined with generic, unmarked houses with names like “550,” “680,” and “675” in arbitrary groupings with names like “S” and “D”.
Number-names. Ugly stuff. Reminds me of public-school names in NYC, or of the character-names in this dystopian novel:
“Mommy, what do you do at work?” “Honey, I erase names, and replace them with numbers.”
Apparently, the trend began with college admins trying to get some control over some lawsuit-inviting—and in my social conservative opinion—lame, Stanford antics/traditions of outright license, such as certain nudity-encouraging co-ops, anarchist houses with repulsive murals, and certain fraternities which from time to time set their houses on fire, but it soon focused upon target number one, the band:
…the year after that, in 2015, the administration put the notoriously anti-establishment Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band on “super-probation,” the culmination of years of increasing restrictions on their antics.
Super-probation? Like the “Double-Secret Probation” in Animal House?
Apparently one Iron Law about college admins is that they will have no sense of humor, and no awareness of pop-culture precedents.
Stanford’s decision to sanction the Band was a sign of things to come. In response to their sanctions, which included a travel and alcohol ban, the Band leadership penned a forceful rebuttal …But over the ensuing years, the Band mostly lost its raucous, fraternity-esque culture, and stopped doing anything particularly controversial.
I agree that that band had to be reigned in a bit, but the pendulum obviously swung too far—it reminds me of these recent Van Morrison lyrics, about the lockdown bureaucrats:
That was 2020-21, of course, so we’re getting slightly ahead of Davis’s story, as she arrived at Stanford in 2018. And that’s when the consequences of the previous years of admin-destruction were beginning to become apparent:
One night, I was biking home late…I realized that something was missing. Music. It was a Friday night, but the campus was completely silent.
…Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. …
Over time, it became clear that their decisions only ever went one way—fewer gatherings, fewer social groups.
They even went after the Hiking Club house! Only reinstated it after it pledged allegiance to Woke slogans! The French house, and the Italian house? Eliminated during Covid, when the students were forcibly excluded from campus.
Now, one way in which I differ from Davis is that, regardless of whatever nostalgia and second-thoughts about Greek Life she’s making me feel, I have about close to zero natural nostalgia for fraternities. For one, I am a social conservative. I am so, and in a certain odd-way was so even back in the day when I was an undergrad in the 1980s, though my politics then were democratic-socialist. My main social groups were IVCF, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, KCR college radio and the alternative music scene generally, and the DSA chapter. Yes, I was something of an oddball, trying to combine things others said could not go together, but my views against the Sexual Revolution were front-and-center: to quote the Modern Lovers, I was a guy who said I don’t want a girl just to fool around with, I don’t want just a girl, to ball, what I want is a girl that I, care about, or I want, nothing, at all!
For two, that time was perhaps the very nadir of frat-culture, and my campus, San Diego State University, voted the number-three top party school in the U.S. by Playboy, was the site of a rather notorious gang-rape case at a frat-house. “She drank the punch” and “brothers don’t snitch on brothers” are the two lines that suffice to tell the story. The organized silence of most Greeks, sorority or fraternity, regarding that case and its implications, was disgusting, more repellent than a full whiff of drying frat-row vomit on a hot Saturday morning. I’d even say a feminist term, “rape culture,” which I detest as illuminating next-to-nothing, would not have been that off-target in describing the tone of some of the SDSU houses, and I would have been perfectly fine with half the houses being shut-down at that time; even the adult me, aware that some of my impressions formed at the time were too judgmental, remains open to the idea that it would have been better for all concerned had a fourth of them been.
And BTW, Animal House (1978), while “classic” and “iconic,” is not a good movie, even though the writer Harold Ramis—of Caddyshack and Ghostbusters middle-brow glory—was involved. It relies heavily on Belushi’s magnetism to make it even passable. It’s funniest moment, in fact, is in the opening shot, where we see that the college’s slogan is: “Knowledge Is Good.” The film’s celebration of Delta house’s barbarism seems a debased imitation of American Graffiti’s nostalgic, yet reflective, treatment of the early 60s cruising/high-school scene. I’m sure the writers said they were criticizing that barbarism even while using it to poke fun at the hypocrites in the other frat and the dean’s office, but they essentially built, amid the usual National Lampoon tit-shots, a comic archetype of Frat Animal-ism that all future college guys could aspire to. And excuse themselves with.
You had to be at a place like SDSU in the 1980s to see how dismal that could turn out in reality.
Things change, however, and Greek life can be (and usually is) more prudently self-governed, so a better comedy for making sense of what Davis is describing about Stanford today, is Whit Stillman’s 2011 Damsels in Distress, which contains a subplot about a self-righteous campaign at a liberal arts college to kick out the frats. In a comic-presentation of what, alas, really has happened year-in-and-year out at contemporary Stanford, we see dejected frat-boys ejected from their digs—the excuse being a riot-like melee at a Roman-themed party—and the key voice-of-Stillman character Violet, mordantly observing that “Even after Civilization ends, people will still need a place to stay!”
But what’s funny in a surreal satire is tough in real life.
…with every unhousing, another 150 students who had a home and a culture are pulled apart from each other.
Davis then describes Stanford dorm-life as anonymous and dispiriting, and mentions precisely the statistics you’d expect her to about Gen-Z loneliness and mental health issues. Near the conclusion, she says this:
We have so many words to describe the ways an institution can be problematic. It is easy to find faults, scrape crests off walls, and feel like you have done a good deed. But there are far fewer stock phrases to articulate what is lost when an organization is destroyed. There are no parties anymore. I want to live with my friends. It’s hard to name the pain of absence.
An empty house is safe. A blank slate is fair. In the name of safety and fairness, Stanford destroyed everything that makes people enjoy college and life.
It is indeed hard to find the words for our situation today. I began by insulting and in a sense warning the members of our administrative class, and especially at the universities, by using the Revolutionary-Era term swarm.
I thought also of doing the T.S. Eliot and Pete Townsend thing of speaking of what they have created as a Stanford Wasteland. But that seems a rather 1971 move, or even a 2012 move, the year I wrote a complex Stillman/Austen-inspired essay related to various “hook-up scene” and “frat-house” issues, titled Swingin’ Tips for Youth-Group Leaders.
Among the essay’s parts is a sketch of a theory I laid out most fully in “Social Dance in the Films of Whit Stillman” a chapter for the recently-published collection Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation. Perhaps its most important line was at the end: “College Administrators , fire your lawyers, and hire dance instructors instead!” I took Stillman’s and “Violet’s” championship of social dance in Damsels quite seriously, as you should too—dance-less living is something to fight heart and soul, and little fights the every-lurking barbaric potential of the post-Sexual-Revolution era better than dancin’ combined with romancin’, and also, with what Stillman calls “group social life.”
I was not entirely or mostly joking in addressing college administrators when I said that—I guess those were times when I felt such folk were still in some sense my colleagues, people perhaps, just perhaps, capable of hearing me.
Things feel different in 2022.
The Biden WH just restored and amplified the worst Obama-distortions of already-problematic Title IX rules. The same damn errors (of most-questionable constitutionality), doubled down-upon—sigh. I can no longer believe the multiple accounts this linked Revolver story shares about how those directives were despotically deployed against various young men are the kind of thing that can matter anymore to an administrative class as heart-hardened as ours has become.
For of course, this wee lil’ thing I alternately call the Covid/Vax Disaster, or the Great Betrayal, just happened. Here’s what that meant on college campuses, as reported in this September of ‘21 piece in Reason:
Far from returning to normal…many colleges are implementing some of the most authoritarian mitigation efforts.... Harvard has encouraged students to keep "close contacts to a minimum" and wear masks at all times…the University of Southern California prohibited all indoor eating and drinking and asserted that if students need to hydrate during class they should first leave the building.
"The exception to this rule is limited to instructors, who may briefly hydrate while teaching but must re-mask immediately," said the dean of USC's law school...
“Mommy, what do you do at work?” “Honey, I say absurd things with a straight face, and punish anyone who dares to question them.”
In an effort to completely disrupt illicit socializing, Columbia reprogrammed key cards so that they would only grant access to students' individual residence halls. The campus is currently in the midst of a "temporary" two-week ban on hanging out with other people.
Guidance from campus administrators is often authoritarian in tone. Boston University's recent missives to students emphasize the need for obedience to random testing requirements and warn that serious punishment will occur "should you fail to become compliant."
Journalist Michael Tracey has been tracking COVID-19 restrictions on campuses and notes that many administrators are creating vast surveillance networks to keep students in line. "University of Michigan requires all students/staff and visitors to acquire the 'ResponsiBLUE' app which reveals their vaccination status and 'health screening' results," he writes. "This must be presented on command when entering facilities. There's every indication it will be made permanent."
“Mommy, what do you do at work?” “Honey, I lock people into their rooms for months at a time—for their own good.”
Am I insane for thinking that the college-admin class is becoming a basic threat to liberal democracy? The evil habits it has gotten itself into have now spread everywhere…
I feel the blood boiling, and the need to perhaps start listing the names of college students killed or maimed so far by the “vaxxes,” many of them who only took them because admins mandated them.
So let me calm myself down, and begin to wind down this essay, by taking it to a more philosophic level. I think the best term to describe what has happened, at least in the 1970s-2010s lead-up to 2020’s admins becoming complicit in patent, in-your-face, power-corruption, is one coined by Philippe Bénéton: soulless institutions. That’s chapter four of his 2004 book Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement.
What is happening in universities illustrates a more general phenomenon: institutions are losing their soul. Appearances are maintained, but social roles are emptied of substance.
Riffing off of Tocqueville’s discussion of social “forms,” Bénéton goes on:
Authority comes with a certain responsibility, which is associated with certain forms. Now, a responsibility is no more a function than a form is a procedure. In both cases, the difference is the same: a responsibility or a form has to do with ways of being; it has a vital significance, it is a matter of substance. The person who exercises a function hires himself—or, rather, a part of himself—out; he has no other responsibility than that of an agent in a system. The person who takes on a responsibility invests himself, he assumes a burden that obliges him as a human being. To fulfill a responsibility is to belong to an institution (not an organization), to put oneself in the service of a moral (or religious) idea, to embody a mission. The schoolteachers of whom Péguy speaks with such moving gratitude fulfilled a responsibility because they put themselves in the service of something greater than themselves. They owed their authority to what they embodied, what they strove to embody: the school and its educative mission.
That is why I think Davis goes off-track when she says this:
Without the nudist co-ops and wild parties, Stanford is not a campus more focused on its core mission. Those things were the fruits of an environment built around student agency and attempting to create your own, better social norms. Fostering that creative environment was Stanford’s core mission, and what made it distinctive from other elite schools.
Stanford’s “core purpose” cannot be “student agency” and “attempts to create your own, better social norms.” Unguided by any larger educative mission, that kind of dogmatic elevation of “agency” and spontaneity did result in ugly listless things like a band no longer that tight in its marching, but apt to produce a penis formation on a stadium field in front of tens of thousands. And the ruin wrought by that anarchic Freedom, that confusion of License for Liberty, was the path upon which today’s Administrative Despots marched in.
Not that Stanford can be rescued at this point. I think it, like 95% of America’s higher-ed institutions, are now corrupted beyond reform-ability.
Whether I am right to be that pessimistic about our present institutions or not, what I can say to Davis is that the likes of her, and of myself, should become united in a cause of rooting out the soulless managerialism that increasingly smothers all—here’s Bénéton again:
In politics and just about everywhere else, responsibilities are giving way to functions. What is a head of state? A man like any other who performs the functions of a head of state. A judge? A man like any other who performs the functions of a judge. A priest? A man like any other who performs the functions of a priest. A mother? A woman like any other who performs the functions of a mother. …established inequalities change in nature because their object is shrinking, because this object is increasingly confined to the realm of technical competence… Hierarchies of competence remain, but there are no more authorities.
And the smart functionary knows that to keep his/hers/its job, the only safe path in this time of ever-shifting dictates, is to stick to rules, to the scripts, to the steps the ap lays out, to what the lists of “best practices” our admins all send to one another require.
The Stanford groundskeeper Davis describes at the beginning of her piece, the one who allowed the frat boys to go ahead with their late-night island-building inspiration-of-the-moment—he was a man who belonged to an institution that still had some soul. He was free enough in his job to make a judgment call about a complex—albeit low-stakes—situation, and to know that he had earned enough respect in his work from his colleagues that he would not be punished for making that call.
How unlike he was to the four or five admins, and three dept. chairs I ran up against back at Utah Valley University around 2018, when thier “sticking to the rules” prevented me from advertising a Great Books Club on campus!
Here’s one of the homemade flyers I’ve made for a set of Provo Great Books Club sessions. I am this groups’ chief facilitator, have been for five years, and we’re still trucking along—doing Middlemarch together this summer.
This was back when I worked at Utah Valley University, as the Assistant Director at UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies, in a hybrid teaching/admin position. I had initially formed this book club group with students there, but had from the beginning invited students members from the cross-town institution, BYU, and community members. So we weren’t, technically, a student group. Nor one of UVU students only. So we couldn’t have been approved as one even if we had wanted to be. And that meant, according to a strict reading of the rules, that we couldn’t post our flyers in the UVU halls and common spaces. To do that, you see, you had to have an Approved-to-Post Sticker or, the “Campus Connection” staff would remove your flyer.
“Mommy, what do you do at work?” “Honey, I order my Connection minions to tear-down the flyers of anything un-authorized or spontaneous.”
I thought, “Well, they will surely make an exception for us, if we just find the right person to ask. Here we are trying to foster student connection, generate enthusiasm about higher education, and link with community-members.” Besides, I knew a few tricks—my position required me to learn these—for dealing politely and strategically with UVU bureaucracy. But try what I might, email after email, visit after visit, I could not get anyone to issue an exception, an elaboration of the bare rules. No-one was willing to stick their neck out the way that Stanford groundskeeper was.
What students might have joined our group and benefitted from it had they seen our aborted publicity efforts?
We’ll never know.
And with such folks in charge of permitted “connection,” what chance do future oddball proposals or spontanenous ideas for socializing from UVU students have?
You see why I call them smotherers. Back at the SDSU of the 1980s, the student flyer-boards were near-total free-for-alls. A purely non-student group likely would not win approval to use an SDSU room for a meeting unless it paid handsomely, and for no amount could it set up a recruitment table, but it certainly could advertise with flyers. A lot of the rules-issues there go back to the Berkeley Free-Speech Movement of 1964—and I admit that the best balance in setting the rules is hard to hit. But now I bet it’s the same at SDSU as it is here in Utah and at Stanford, with everything sliding to one side, into soulless authority’s hands.
It’s 2022, and I sense that a strange alliance is bubbling up, born of necessity, between frat-boys, their intellectual half-admirers like Ginerva Davis, the old rocker who wrote the pleasure-centric “Gloria,” Great Books professors, pranksters, dancers, Whit Stillman fans, pastors, worshippers, smokers, cheaters, metal-heads presently holding “generator parties,” grand-daughters who just want to visit their grandmothers, 80s-nostalgia-buffs, 80s-haters, vax-hold-outs, libertarians, populist conservatives, social conservatives, socialists, and those just concerned about social connection.
And the enemy of all is in plain sight.
My mentor in undergrad had gone to Berkley back in the 80s; he said there were so many weird people in the town it was unbelievable. In particular, one that struck him was a guy called "Polka Dot Man," who was a mono-maniac for drawing polka dots
https://acidheroes.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/5099/