The University announced earlier this week that Columbae would lose its co-op status and "anti-war" theme. Following a petition which received over 1,000 signatures, Stanford offered Columbae student leaders a reprieve to collect more pre-assign applications.
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Residential Education (ResEd) reopened pre-assign applications for Columbae on Thursday, reversing the University’s’ announcement on Tuesday that the social justice themed co-op would lose its theme next year, following a lack of interest in pre-assignment.
A petition to save Columbae was circulated broadly, with a focus on outreach to current students and alumni. According to Jason Hu ’26, an incoming residential assistant (RA) at Columbae, the petition received around 1,800 signatures.
Stanford will accept pre-assignment applications to Columbae until midnight on Sunday.
Hu said ResEd would contact people who signed a form circulated to current students. Respondents expressed interest in living in Columbae next fall.
Vardaan Shah, an incoming RA at another co-op, Terra, wrote that other co-op residents and supporters will table at White Plaza to protest the University’s lack of support to Columbae and other co-ops. “We’re hoping the university will see that interest is clearly present for Columbae and reinstate its co-op status and theme,” Shah wrote.
But the group’s goals extend beyond Columbae. They hope the University will recognize that changes in housing policies and the pre-assignment process paint an incomplete picture of student interest in co-ops, Shah wrote.
“We’ve received no mass communication from admin acknowledging there is some kind of resistance to their choice,” Shah wrote. He criticized that the burden to save Columbae — and administrative effort to establish interest in the co-op — fell on students. “We’re still the ones handling all the administrative details of this. No communication is still the norm.”
According to Shah and some supporters who gathered at an emergency meeting to support Columbae, the University’s approach to housing is divorced from student’s desire for community. While ResEd hoped to emulate the residential college model at peer universities on the East Coast, this was incompatible with the Stanford campus, Shah wrote.
“What they miss is that Stanford is not situated in the same way as those places,” Shah wrote.
For instance, several East Coast universities are located near cities like Boston or New York, Shah wrote. “Those places have cities near them, where students can find community and places to enjoy themselves, and [they] can go back to the campus to sleep and engage in intellectual life.”
As an expensive suburb, Palo Alto is not accessible to students, and co-ops like Columbae provide an important space to seek smaller, unconventional communities — as a result, Shah and others hope that the University will acknowledge the importance of co-ops.
The Daily has reached out to the University for comment.
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EU leader Josep Borrell calls for collective global action in Gaza and UkraineThe EU’s top security advisor Josep Burrell visited the Hoover Institution on Monday — his first visit since his days as a student 50 years ago. He delved into the EU's responsibility in Gaza, Ukraine, China and the digital sphere.
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European Union (EU) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell M.S. ’75 visited the Hoover Institution on Monday for an event hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
In a keynote speech followed by a conversation with the institute’s director and former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, Borrell delved Europe’s crucial role and responsibilities in addressing ongoing war in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as geopolitical security and emerging technology more broadly.
Borrell emphasized the need for EU countries to collectively adapt to the changing geopolitical landscape and increase their strategic responsibility. He stressed the importance of European unity in the face of challenges posed by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and the ongoing Israel-Gaza war, noting that the security landscape has “dramatically changed.”
“Europe has to learn to speak the language of power,” Borrell said, emphasizing the need for Europe to increase its military capacities while utilizing all available tools to face global challenges.
Regarding the Israel-Gaza war, Borrell called for a political process that would empower the Palestinian Authority and reach a solution for peace, describing the current state as “a stain on human consciousness.” He urged the international community to push for a ceasefire, secure the release of hostages, and ensure better access to humanitarian aid in the region.
“It is not a natural catastrophe what is happening in Gaza. It is not an earthquake, it is not a flood when you come and help people suffering the consequences. [It] is a manmade disaster, is a manmade catastrophe,” Borrell said.
Among the other global challenges Borrell called for Europe to address was the continent’s dependence on China for critical materials and technologies. He emphasized the importance of coordinating with the US to counter China’s growing influence in the global economic and political sphere.
“More coordination in front of China should be one of the most important things that the Europeans and the Americans should do in order to balance the challenges of this world,” Borrell said.
More broadly, Borrell spoke to the importance of coordination between the US and EU to work globally to protect “political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion.”
Borrell acknowledged that the United States is a global leader in emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, and stressed the importance of cooperation on trade and technological innovation. He expressed concern that regulatory hurdles may be hindering the EU’s ability to catch up with the U.S. in the technology sector and emphasized the significance of transatlantic collaboration in shaping the future of technology.
“I am happy to know that we are partners in building a responsible and human-centric technological innovation,” Borrell said.
The importance of partnership across countries was a throughline in Borrell’s speech, as he concluded with a reminder of the interconnectedness of global security and social well-being. “You cannot be secure at home if your neighbor is not eating dinner.”
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Amy J. Blue award honors three ‘exceptional’ staff membersThe University announced the recipients of the Amy J. Blue Award, named after a long-time Stanford employee who died of brain cancer at 44. The award honors their exceptional contributions to Stanford, passion for their work and support for their colleagues.
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Victor Madrigal ’94, Penelope Van Tuyl and Madika Bryant M.A. ’04 received the 2024 Amy J. Blue Award, presented by President Richard Saller at a Thursday ceremony. The award, named for long-time Stanford employee Amy J. Blue who died of brain cancer in 1988, honors the recipients for their “exceptional contributions to [Stanford], passion for their work and support for their colleagues,” according to the Stanford report announcement.
Madrigal, who currently serves as director of alumni and student class outreach, found out he won the award when he logged onto a Zoom meeting that he expected to be with just one colleague, said Laura Jones Ph.D. ’91, University Archaeologist and Director of Heritage Services.
“Lo and behold, I dial in and see about 40 people on the screen. They DID NOT look like Laura,” he wrote. “I was stunned.”
Jones met Madrigal through their involvement in the Stanford Historical Society, when he helped organize a conference that invited local history nonprofits to campus.
She believes that his character and his passion for his work and values are why he won this award.
“I can’t even imagine Victor ever saying “that’s not my problem,” or “I don’t care,” or even “maybe I’ll get back to you about that later.” Victor is all-in on making Stanford an even better place every single day. And he makes it fun. Trust me, fun is not dead at Stanford if you’re Victor’s friend,” Jones wrote.
In 2020, Madrigal worked as a moderator for the University’s “Brave Spaces” program, a virtual forum for staff to have conversations on race, anti-Black racism, justice, equity, bias, and discrimination after the killing of George Floyd at the hand’s of Minneapolis police officers and the following wave of protests.
When asked what he’s particularly proud of over his 26-year career at Stanford so far, Madrigal pointed to the community he has helped cultivate.
“I felt I was able to create space for staff to feel heard, to grieve, to express their feelings and to build community,” he wrote.
Van Tuyl, human rights lawyer and associate director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, was also called into a fake meeting by her faculty directors who broke the news.
“They ambushed me here at our office and I was totally surprised,” she told the Stanford Report.
Van Tuyl grew up at Stanford, before attending Amherst College in Massachusetts for her undergraduate studies. She got her J.D. from UC Berkeley and returned to Stanford to kick off a now 10-year career marked by hard work and compassion, according to two anonymous nominators in the Stanford Report.
“Amy J. Blue’s friends saw and valued Amy for who she was and the passion she brought to her work for this university,” Van Tuyl told the Stanford Report. “To get that same recognition from my own friends and colleagues means more than I can say. Receiving this award makes me feel very seen and valued for the things I value most about my job.”
After graduating from Stanford with her master’s in East Asian Studies, Bryant began working with the Practice of Medicine course at Stanford’s School of Medicine, where she now serves as administrative director. According to the Stanford Report, the best part about her over two decades with the University has been the “people.”
“The passion, kindness and open-heartedness that everybody has towards this work is very inspiring,” she said.
Courtney Smith, a medical student, praised her as the “glue that holds all of [the Pracitice of Medicine course] together” in the Stanford Report. Another student, Saachi Datta, called Bryant her “superhero.”
Madrigal, when asked what he still hopes to accomplish here at Stanford, joked that fountain hopping was at the top of his list.
Aside from that, he’d like to amplify the collaborative work done in alumni relations across campus and would like to continue helping the Diversity and Access Office as they develop staff training programs.
“A connected and engaged workforce is a win for Stanford,” he wrote.
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Dear Diary: HomeAmanda Altarejos tackles homesickness in the newest installment of her column, 'Dear Diary.'
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Dear Diary combines the intimacy of a diary-like narrative with the writer’s own experiences, little and big, as well as politics and culture.
When you’re on the ground writhing like a child, teary-eyed with limbs cowardly conforming to the position in which you came into this world, there seems to be nothing left for you to do but call for home.
It’s a little bit like those times your parents took you to adult dinner parties or adult errands or adult cities.
Look up at them with big eyes. Squeeze the adult skin you see on their adult wrist.
Bored and whining, you say: Mommy, I want to go home!
Daddy, I want to go home!
I am an adult now, but I still say the same thing. It’s been years. My mouth has never lost familiarity with the shape of those five words– not when I turned eighteen and not when I turned nineteen and most definitely not when I turn twenty. The voice that sings it seems to be the same, too. Saccharine and sickening. An undesirable whimper. But yes– saccharine, sweet– because I think that may be what one needs during nauseating times. These sweet words of a child smother trouble; they keep things simple. They keep me afloat above vicious waters, and despite the subsequent screech-inducing embarrassment at my return to being Baby (a very vulnerable form: oh don’t I scream when boys try to say baby, baby!), I’m glad it does, since I’m pretty sure those waters would not hesitate to glug my wriggling body into the depths of damp, blue-grey desperation. But maybe boys don’t call you baby there. Do they? If they don’t, then that water might not be so bad after all. Would it?
I want to go home.
Whisper it, scream it, cry it. Say it with love. Say it with misery. Say it, say it– I say it on barely
vacuumed carpet, polyester duvet covers, and hardwood floors, which all feel the same because they aren’t water and they won’t let me sink. Not that the water would bring me home, but there’s this awful need when you’re feeling like a Baby: to hell with the carpet and covers and floors that are so rigid and unmoving. To hell with all that, because you so desperately need the earth to give up its rules, just for a minute, so that these rock bottoms turn into something that will just let you fall.
Of course, they will not do that. Of course not. I can only call for home and wish for water, then stop wishing for water and the frightening ease of falling that comes with it, then wish for water again. Over and over. Nausea crashes into fragility until memory arrives, like a parent, to settle the tantrum.
I want to go home. I want to go home.
Where is that? Please, pretend that it is family asking.
Please, answer.
On one of these days, in the midst of being a Baby on the floor, I was able to answer. A slight settling followed.
Here: sticky coconut rice, which had lingered on my hands even though I hadn’t eaten any since last summer. I must have held home for a brief moment sometime, somewhere. But that shiny sweetness was gone. I must have dropped home sometime, somewhere. Here: motorcycle exhaust, which is the only smoke I occasionally enjoy inhaling because I miss the tricycles made out of corrugated aluminum and Jobert’s motorbike rides to the coast and brown skin slick with sweat in the palegke. When I smell the same smoke on some street in London, I smile and think of starch and sugar– and that lets me pretend, for a little bit, that home is somewhere near.
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Description dances off the page at final Stegner Fellow readingThe Stegner Fellow in Fiction, Nevarez Encinias, ended this years's Stegner Fellow readings on a strong note with descriptive prose, themes of identity and artistic influences from his experience as a dancer, writes Cate Burtner.
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This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
On Wednesday night, Stegner Fellow in Fiction Nevarez Encinias delivered an evening of movement and description in literary form. A dancer by training, Encinias’s background came through in his writing through his elaborate physical descriptions and seemingly choreographed prose.
Throughout the year-long series of Stegner Fellow Readings, fellows are invited to give a public reading of their work. Even though the final Stegner Fellow Reading of the year was originally meant for two readers, Encinias made the trip to the Humanities Center worthwhile on his own. When Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Dashaun Washington, could not make it to the event, Encinias filled all the space and more with his descriptive prose.
Encinias read an excerpt from his short story “American Boys,” part of his unfinished book entitled “Bad Dance.” He described the book as “a novel in stories” that each follow the same narrator, but with a different tone. The prose he read on Wednesday was rich in visuals, physicality and use of similes.
The short story centered on identity, specifically that of American men. The excerpt was made up largely of the description of one such man, who was the object of the narrator’s observation, and followed the ins and outs of their relationship and interactions. The story and descriptive language twisted and turned, often subverting audience expectations. “Making [the man] laugh made me feel like a patriot,” Encinias writes. The audience laughed.
Reading between the lines, Encinias also navigated the separation between characters in a story and people in real life. “American Boys” was largely a story of observation and description. When does the way one describes another start to say more about the observer than the person being described? All of these questions were raised by Encinias’s prose.
Encinias’s descriptive writing style allowed him to capture the subtleties of human movement and behavior. It explored flirting as a form of “flattery” and “persuasion.” There was a close focus on hands, thighs, mouths and the way we unwittingly copy the mannerisms of the people we are close to. The reading oozed with a sense of choreography, and eventually the story reached its finishing pose.
In the Q&A portion, the audience asked Encinias about his experience with dancing and writing, his narrative voice and his writing process. The writer said that dancing calls him to write about “bodies and the way bodies move,” adding that he chose to write the five stories in “Bad Dance” with the same narrator and different tones because of the structure of a repertory dance concert. These concerts have different choreographies with the same company, and he was interested in “how this might be achieved in stories.”
With regard to his writing process, Encinias emphasized thinking about his own body, focusing each story around a different written text and the idea of having a “solid first draft” before often making minimal revisions. When asked if he people-watches in order to write such clear visuals of physicality, he responded, “certainly.” He explained his process as spending no more than 90 minutes at his desk, and then going out into the world. “I people watch, kind of… most of the day,” Encinias said as the audience erupted in laughter at this unexpected reality of his life as a writer. The revelation of his writing process also made the inspiration for his detailed observation and description quite clear.
Encinias ended the evening with a few pieces of advice for his audience. First of all, he urged them not to stay at their desks all day. He also encouraged audience members to think of their body as a “place” or “setting” in which “things change,” and to listen to their bodies and the movement inside of them.
In doing so, Encinias wrapped up a year of Stegner Fellow readings.
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‘Turtles All the Way Down’: Thin lines between self-care and self-absorptionThe film adaptation of John Green's "Turtles All the Way Down" hit streaming on May 2. The film portrays its protagonist's struggles with OCD, love and girlhood with great care, writes Blyss Cleveland.
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This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
“All you can be is in love,” Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced) explains toward the end of the film adaptation of John Green’s “Turtles All the Way Down.” She is saddened that one cannot be “in hope” or “in friendship” — love is the only emotional state that people inhabit in everyday conversation.
Aza is 16 years old and trying to figure out if she is capable of being the type of person that people can love and want to be around. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) complicates this message.
Green expressed the importance of selecting a production team that would accurately portray themes of mental health in his 2017 novel. Set in Indianapolis, Indiana, the story centers around Aza reconnecting with a childhood friend, Davis (Felix Mallard), and navigating her first romance while managing her mental health. Director Hannah Marks depicts Aza’s struggle with OCD with great care and shows how her condition affects her relationships with her friends and family.
Aza’s father died during her childhood. Without him, she and her mother Gina (Judy Reyes) orbit each other with slight uncertainty about how to coexist in the same universe. Aza’s best friend, Daisy Ramirez (Cree) is her rock. Daisy is as wild and carefree as Aza is cautious and reserved, but they are each other’s better halves — a fact punctuated by their each donning one half of a matching heart necklace.
Unlike stereotypical portrayals of OCD, Aza’s intrusive thoughts about being contaminated with germs and repetitive behaviors are depicted on a continuum from background annoyance to debilitating. Although voiceovers and cuts to microscopic photos of pathogens are used to bring the viewer into how she experiences her condition, other characters’ interactions add more insight.
Aza endures constant questions such as “Are you taking your medicine?” and “How are you feeling today?” from Daisy, her mother and her glamorous therapist, Dr. Singh (Poorna Jagannathan). Sometimes individuals are doing okay until they’re reminded of the many reasons they have to be worried.
The details that lead Aza and Davis to connect involve the disappearance of Davis’s wealthy father. Aza may not be good at new things, but she is instantly attracted to her “old-new” friend. It doesn’t hurt that the list of positive attributes Davis possesses is longer than the Indianapolis White River — handsome, thoughtful, kind to his younger brother, a good listener, supportive, rich, generous, et cetera.
Later in the film, when he expresses an emotional need, it throws a wrench into their burgeoning relationship. It’s also much-needed confirmation that he’s a real person.
The film presents situations that appear simple but add much-needed and enjoyable complexity. The central story appears to be about whether Aza can handle romantic relationships because of her mental health. As the narrative unfolds, however, it asks whether everyone’s focus on Aza has made her unable and unwilling to realize that other people have their own struggles. This comes into sharp relief when she and Daisy argue over the expectation that Daisy serves as a tireless cheerleader on Aza’s protagonistic journey.
Daisy is such a well-rounded and funny character, which makes Aza’s obliviousness even more egregious. Daisy writes Star Wars fanfic and has built up a cabal of 80,000 dedicated and overzealous followers. Her charm and people skills are shaped by navigating devotees and trolls. Cree’s comedic timing is perfect. She has a spot-on lightsaber routine and sells the slightly awkward nickname “Holmesy.”
To get to the good stuff, the viewer must endure a series of “Are you still watching?” attention checks — Aza calling her “mom” when addressing Gina even though we’ve already been introduced to her in a montage; characters that use each other’s names way more than anyone does in real life; and soundtrack cuts that are meant to underscore the takeaway of the scene we just watched.
It’s the equivalent of underlining points that have already been made in capitalized bold text. Maybe creators assume that viewers might be checked out if they’re watching a film via streaming and might check back in at any moment. But it’s also the type of filmmaking that may make viewers want to check out altogether.
There is also a fair amount of product placement in the film. From Dr. Pepper to Applebees to an absurd use of a Pop-Tarts box, I couldn’t help but wonder if these brands underwrote the costs of the film. These brands are mentioned throughout the book, and I’m familiar with the joys of Applebee’s 2 full-sized entrees and 1 full-sized appetizer for $20. Nevertheless, during a discussion on why people do the things they do, when a character asks, “Is it because advertising works?” I almost audibly booed.
Luckily, there is more to cheer for than jeer. Aza is the quintessential teenager who has stunning moments of insight followed by foolishness. When she sees her idol, Professor Abbott (J. Smith-Cameron) during a college visit, she panics and hides behind a tree. Also, her declaration that love is the only inhabited state? I instantly began making a mental list of alternatives — in shock, in denial and in flagrante delicto. Wisdom comes from experience!
The movie succeeds as a meditation on whether we’re really in control of our thoughts and actions. These are questions everyone struggles with but Aza’s worries are exacerbated by her anxiety and OCD. As far as the title “Turtles All the Way Down” goes, it’s a metaphor that simultaneously explains the futility of ever getting to the bottom of why things are the way they are. Maybe the point of existence is learning new ways of caring for ourselves and the people we love.
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Graduate Student Council addresses free speech billsCouncilors called for clarity on free speech policies. Several debated how to approach funding from fossil fuel companies towards scientific research.
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The Graduate Student Council (GSC) passed a bill that allows it to amend its own bylaws at its Tuesday meeting. It addressed resolutions on fossil fuels and confusion on free speech policies in White Plaza.
Many GSC councilors challenged the Fossil Fuel Bill which seeks to create transparency on research funded by companies tied to fossil fuel industries.
Councilor June Choi, a third-year Ph.D Student in earth system science, said “There has to be a line for the companies that the University chooses to engage with, especially when it comes to funded research partnerships.”
“The University should uphold core values of research, integrity, academic responsibility and calling for a commitment to having a binding process for establishing criteria,” Choi said.
Some councilors expressed concern about excessively harsh boundaries. Perry Nielsen Jr. M.A. ’24, Cabinet Director for Graduate Affairs, said, “I believe in rehabilitation and not pure punishment. So, I believe in having a way that these companies could demonstrate that they’re no longer going to be disenfranchising the University, that they’re going to make sure that any sort of industry affiliated programs will be clean.”
Councilor Chris West Jr. added that a nuanced review on the intentions behind donations was important. “Companies establish funded partnerships with academic institutions to enhance their credibility. If we want to accept these companies’ money and allow them to hire our students, we should make sure that they’re using those students to the best of their abilities and trying to actually do good in the world,” West said.
Councilors also delved into concerns around communication between Vaden Health Services and students. “Vaden should improve their communication with students and make sure they’re sending them to the right services,” Nielsen said. To mitigate concerns, GSC plans to host monthly seminars to provide “a brief overview of Vaden,” Nielsen said.
Councilors debated efforts to change the language around White Plaza’s portrayal as a free speech area. As the Stanford Free Expression website has not seen updates since 2017, some councilors said regulations and monitoring of policy is challenging.
“White Plaza is specifically an area for outside individuals to express their free speech on Stanford’s campus. As a student, you have different rights to express on this campus than someone who is not a student,” Nielsen said. Members proposed solutions to student concerns, especially for those involved in protesting and encampment in the White Plaza. One proposed surveys about student spaces not tied to a reservation fee.
According to Stanford’s freedom of expression policies, the University “firmly supports the rights of all members of the University community to express their views or to protest against actions and opinions with which they disagree.”
“Free expression is all good until you are disrupting. Your rights are somewhat restricted because you are disrupting the policy on campus disruptions,” Nielsen said.
Counselors passed a joint bill to overhaul the graduate student council bylaws, which would allow the “the GSC [to] amend its bylaws to clarify and update them to meet current needs.” According to the resolution, there are bylaws that represent definitions to inherit from the ASSU Constitution, some of which are no longer used.
Elizabeth Park, GSC co-chair and third-year Ph.D. student in chemistry said that the purpose of this joint bill was to “clarify the language, remove anything redundant with the Constitution and also make things gender level.” The bill was passed with 9 in favor and 1 opposed.
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Undergraduate Senators face antisemitism, harassment and election misconduct allegationsKang argued that improper ties existed between the candidates and the pro-Palestine encampment. “Activities by the encampment inherently doubled as campaign events for them,” Kang wrote in the complaint.
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As the mantle of power passed from the 25th to 26th Undergraduate Senate, accusations of bias and misconduct hovered over a tense closed session.
Outside the room, Daily reporters waited with two Stanford Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) officers.
At issue was a complaint, filed before the Constitutional Council by incumbent senator Carmen Kang ’26, against 10 other students — including six senators at the meeting. The council convenes on May 24 to decide whether to accept the case.
Concerned by contentious interactions prior to the meeting, two incumbent senators, Gordon Allen ’26 and Ivy Chen ’26, reached out to SUDPS. They believed Kang posed a threat to herself and other senators, Allen said in an interview.
Chen concurred. “I genuinely felt like I was going to get shot today, which is why I decided to go to the DPS because I feel like she is a person who can get armed,” she said. They did not elaborate on where the safety concerns stemmed from, and Kang raised similar concerns about her safety due to the complaint.
SUDPS remained outside the closed session, but interrupted at one point to check on Kang, following a request from her parents. When Kang stepped out, the officer said her father was concerned about her.
Kang said her parents have received several anonymous phone calls with threats to harm and “publicly lynch” her unless she discontinued her campaign.
These disputes over the election have created serious concerns for the senators involved. In text correspondence obtained by The Daily, Kang wrote to senators that “attempts to drag me down” caused medical emergencies with long term consequences, “for which I will hold you accountable.”
In her petition, she raised concerns about six Senate representatives, three members of the Associate Students of Stanford Union (ASSU) election commission and the student sponsor of the Statement on Divestment. Her complaint also criticized several Daily staffers as biased toward the named senators.
Three weeks ago, the Senate unanimously certified the recent election results, which are at the crux of this complaint filed to the ASSU Constitutional Council. Kang, who voted in favor, now calls on the University to investigate and reverse the results by disqualifying those named.
Among the senators implicated are incumbents Chen and Allen, as well as recently-elected Lizbeth Hernandez Rios ’25, David Sengthay ’26, Ethan Alfonso ’27 and Vivianna Chuquijajas ’26, who ran on a platform aligned with the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, tied to pro-Palestine activism. They campaigned as the “BDS slate.”
“I am proudly promoting the encampment,” Sengthay said. “Get that on the record.”
The complaint emphasizes that Kang’s criticisms were unrelated to the senators’ political affiliations and activism, and primarily concerned with election misconduct and violations of University policies to support a divestment initiative.
Kang alleged improper ties between the candidates and the pro-Palestine encampment. “Activities by the encampment inherently doubled as campaign events for them,” Kang wrote in the complaint.
The candidates’ relationship with the encampment was especially improper given ties between student groups like Students Against Apartheid in Palestine (SAAP) and the communist Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Kang wrote.
The pressure to disclose stances on a divestment initiative and antisemitic comments toward Jewish candidates constituted “coercion and discrimination,” Kang wrote.
According to Kang, the ASSU Election Commissioners, Amira Dehmani ’24, Leon de Souza ’24 and Viswajeeth Karthikeyan ’27, supported the BDS slate by manipulating results and poorly handling ballot distribution issues. The election results, where candidates with the BDS slate ranked among the top six of 28 candidates, deepened Kang’s suspicions.
The Election Commission previously investigated the six named senators after a violation complaint was filed by Kang on April 26, according to a letter from the named Commission members to the Constitutional Council. A financial audit by Stanford Student Enterprises CEO Jas Espinosa ’18 M.A. ’19 found “zero instances of any ASSU or University funds being used toward encampment activities since April 25,” and the Commission dismissed the complaint after additionally finding “no violations of ASSU governing documents or campaign regulations.”
The vast majority of the complaint, however, is focused not on the BDS slate, but on the two incumbent senators, Chen and Allen.
Kang criticized The Daily as biased toward Chen and Allen, raising concerns over the “impartiality and fairness” of elections coverage. The Daily’s opinions section, which operates independently from the news section, hosted a debate between Undergraduate Senate candidates on April 24. The moderator endorsed candidates who participated in the debate.
She criticized the short notice to participate in the debate and pointed to the endorsement as a violation of Daily policies, like fair reporting and conflict of interest. Editorials in The Daily’s opinions section represent the perspectives of the author, not the institution at large, and follow policies independent to those that guide news coverage.
Kang believes that Daily coverage on Chen’s constitutional case last election cycle was biased, since it was written by a friend. According to published policies, “The Daily strives, as much as possible, for fair and independent coverage untainted by a reporter’s personal motives.”
The alleged media connections persisted past The Daily to Fizz, where Kang argued the candidates spread malicious rumors about her. Kang further alleges that they “verbally attacked” her on April 30.
Chen and Allen characterized the April 30 interaction as a heated conversation. They said they saw the posts on Fizz, which included harsh comments about Kang’s body and ASSU initiatives, but stressed that they were uninvolved. Allen added that he reached out to Kang following the posts to offer support.
Disagreement bubbled to the surface prior to the meeting, as Kang and Allen emailed senators with conflicting information. Kang asked senators to postpone committee elections, while Allen told senators to disregard the previous emails.
In a separate email sent before the Tuesday meeting, Kang reiterated her request and circulated a petition to show support for her complaint.
The open and closed sessions proceeded as scheduled. In closed session, Chen and Allen were elected co-chairs and Sengthay appropriations chair.
Multiple senators, including Chen and Allen, confirmed to The Daily that while there were abstentions, no one voted to appoint Kang to a co-chair role.
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Inside the push to end legacy admissions preferences at StanfordAs a statewide bill that would fine universities for practicing legacy admissions practices is being considered, students at Stanford push for the University to end the practice.
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The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) and other student organizations are pushing the University to end legacy admissions preferences, while the California State Assembly considers a bill that would penalize universities for the practice.
The ongoing push to end legacy and donor preferences comes after last year’s Supreme Court decision to end race-conscious admissions in higher education. The ruling has amplified calls to end legacy admissions nationwide and has already led some institutions, such as Wesleyan University, to formally end the practice.
The bill, AB 1780, would prohibit private universities from giving applicants a legacy or donor preference during the admissions process. Universities that fail to comply would incur a fine equal to the funding they receive from the state-funded Cal Grant program, which provides aid to financially needy students.
Supporters of AB 1780 described legacy and donor preferences in admissions as an unfair advantage that perpetuates inequality.
“We know that legacy applicants are far more likely to be wealthy, and they’re more likely to be white than non-legacies,” said Ryan Cieslikowski ’23, lead organizer of Class Action. “On Stanford’s campus, students are mobilizing to end the practice because it is not reflective of their values.”
A national organization that opposes legacy admissions and corporate career funneling, Class Action has established a presence at Stanford. Student members have advanced their opposition to legacy admissions by launching a community-wide petition, tabling at White Plaza and calling for action in the ASSU. In April, students testified in support of AB 1780 at the State Capitol in Sacramento.
At the same time, opposition to legacy and donor admissions preferences has gained momentum in the ASSU. This month, the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) and Graduate Senate Council (GSC) jointly passed a resolution that expressed support for AB 1780 and encouraged the University to eliminate legacy preferences.
“Those preferences started with exclusionary intentions, and that is what they continue to do,” Diego Kagurabadza ’25, incumbent UGS Chair and ASSU Executive President-elect, told The Daily. “The students who benefit, the families that benefit, are those that really don’t need it.”
Kagurabadza authored and introduced the resolution, which he hopes will pressure the University and Faculty Senate to re-examine admissions policies.
“If the University wants to take its commitment to diversity seriously, then this is the policy it has to support,” he said.
State Assemblymember Phil Ting, who authored and introduced AB 1780 in February, echoed student organizers’ arguments. “This is really about making sure that many of these elite institutions are more equitable in their admissions process,” Ting told The Daily.
Ting introduced a bill similar to AB 1780 in the wake of the 2019 “Varsity Blues” scandal, which exposed a criminal conspiracy among wealthy parents to gain their children admission at top universities.
Although the 2019 bill did not pass the assembly, Ting said that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had changed the political landscape, making AB 1780 more likely to succeed. “It doesn’t make sense not to be able to look at race but to still include someone’s wealth in the admissions process,” he said.
An initial version of AB 1780 would have directly revoked universities’ Cal Grant funding, but an amendment to the bill replaced this mechanism with a fine. Ting said that if Stanford chooses to incur the fine, students’ financial aid would not be impacted. “We thought that this was fairer to the student,” he said.
AB 1780 has now passed the Assembly Higher Education committee. If the bill passes in the Assembly by the legislative deadline of May 24, it will move to the State Senate. Governor Gavin Newsom will ultimately decide whether to pass or veto the bill.
The bill would uniquely impact Stanford as one of seven higher education institutions that practice legacy admissions preferences in California. Public universities in the state disavow the practice, unlike Stanford, the University of Southern California (USC), Santa Clara University and four others.
According to the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, 13.8% of Stanford’s autumn 2022 admitted class had legacy or donor connections. It is unclear what portion of students would or would not have been denied admission without their legacy status.
University spokesperson Dee Mostofi wrote to The Daily that Stanford has not taken a position on the bill nor made any policy changes in response. She emphasized that legacy status is one factor in a holistic review process, and that diversity is “critical” to the University’s mission.
“Faculty representatives, admissions offices, and legal counsel are working to assess our admissions process and next steps since last year’s SCOTUS ruling,” Mostofi wrote.
The California assembly bill has motivated increased student advocacy for ending legacy admissions preferences. Numerous undergraduate students involved with Class Action have given testimony, written op-eds and publicly campaigned against the policy at Stanford.
“As a legacy student myself, I find legacy admissions completely abominable,” Sophie Callcott ’24 told The Daily. “It seems like such an obvious agent of inequality and supports an American aristocracy.”
In April, Callcott traveled to Sacramento with other students to testify in support of AB 1780. “Seeing such a mass of students go up to the microphone and say, ‘I’m a legacy student at Stanford, and I’m here to support AB 1780’ … It was really inspiring,” she said.
Students recently formed a branch of “Students for Educational Equity” to target Stanford’s policies. On May 3, the group set up a table in White Plaza and encouraged passersby to sign a petition urging Stanford administrators to abolish legacy preferences. An eye-catching sign on the table stated, “Calling Nepotism Legacy Does Not Make It Okay.”
One tabler, Alyssa Murray ’24, told The Daily that the organization wanted to hear community perspectives and “get the conversation going about ending legacy admissions.”
Murray said the Supreme Court ruling sparked her advocacy. “Whereas affirmative action is to bring people up, legacy admission is to hold people in power,” she said. “As a student of color, I want other students of color to be able to access Stanford. Legacy admissions predominantly favors not just white applicants, but wealthy applicants.”
The Students for Educational Equity petition asks signatories an optional question about their legacy status, offering a brief explanation: “Our campaign gains more significance with more legacies coming out against legacy admissions.”
Nazli Dakad ’24 echoed this perspective. “Being legacy does not preclude someone from supporting this cause,” she said. “It’s us looking forward to see what we want this university to stand for, regardless of if you’ve had a preference.”
Ava DeConcini ’25 noted that her own experience of being a legacy informed her decision to join Class Action. “If there was no legacy admit preference and I didn’t get into Stanford, I would have been fine,” she said. “I would have gone to some other very elite university, I would have gotten an incredible education. I would have had financial security from my family, and I would have gotten to reap all the privileges I have of being white, of being privileged.”
She added that abolishing the practice would alleviate “imposter syndrome” for legacy students who feel they “don’t have the integrity you wish you did at this school.”
Callcott made a similar point. “The numbers show that most legacy students were already competitive applicants,” she said. “Very selfishly, I don’t want people thinking that the only reason I got into a school like Stanford was because my parents went to law school here … I don’t think the accident of my birth should have dictated where I was going to spend the next four very formative years of my life.”
Isaac Nehring ’26, an undergraduate senator and a legacy student, defended legacy and donor preferences in admissions. “There’s a benefit in that the university gets more resources and those resources go to students that can benefit from them, who possibly otherwise might not be able to come,” he said.
Beyond financial support for the University, Nehring said that legacy admits could bring “generational memory and traditions to life, and try to keep those in play.” Nehring added that it was rare for applicants to gain admission based solely on their legacy status.
Organizers disputed arguments concerning institutional loyalty. “Embracing nepotism is not necessary for funding a modern university,” Cieslikowski said. “Look at the endowment. It’s hard to imagine that they don’t have enough money to fund financial aid, without legacy admissions, for a lot more people than they currently do.” He also pointed to MIT and Amherst as financially strong institutions that do not practice legacy admissions.
After the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023, Kagurabadza authored an ASSU resolution condemning the decision. The resolution also expressed opposition to legacy preferences. When it passed in October, Cieslikowski took notice and approached Kagurabadza about building a coalition to oppose legacy preferences at Stanford.
These efforts culminated in a second joint resolution passed last week, which targets legacy and donor preferences and AB 1780. While the fall ASSU resolution remains under review in the Faculty Senate, Kagurabadza hopes the follow-up resolution will emphasize “the urgency of this issue and will help to sway their decision on the particular policy.”
The resolution did not pass unanimously in the UGS — eight senators voted in favor, three against and one abstained. Nehring said he opposed it because he saw no urgent need to end legacy preferences.
“I haven’t been presented with any specifics on how legacy admission might be negatively impacting Stanford’s diversity goals,” he said. “There’s a lot of conjecture about how it would impact diversity, but nothing to necessarily back up any perceived malpractice.” He emphasized that he would have supported a resolution which only condemned the Supreme Court ruling.
Kagurabadza, however, saw the resolution as pressing. “We’re in a time where diversity seeking initiatives or diversity seeking policies are under scrutiny, if not being outright prohibited,” he said. “The University should be considering everything in its power to preserve diversity, if not to increase it on campus. One of the strongest ways it can do that is by eliminating legacy or donor preferences.”
A previous version of this article misrepresented the UGS vote count on the resolution. The Daily regrets this error.
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Christian Lim paves a path for Asian American baseball playersLim reflected on how role models like Shohei Ohtani inspired him to pursue a professional career, despite few peers on the pitch who looked like him.
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Christian Lim has taken on an impressive freshman campaign with Stanford baseball. Lim has been a steady arm for the Cardinal, winning Pac-12 pitcher of the week twice already in his first year. But beyond his pitching excellence, Lim’s journey carries a deeper significance, shedding light on the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in baseball and paving a path for future generations.
Lim reflected on his experiences of being “the Asian kid” on the baseball field and in school. Despite the scarcity of peers on the pitch who looked like him, Lim said he found strength and inspiration through the successes of Asian players on the professional stage, like Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani.
“Even seeing Korean players or Asian players in general was great,” Lim said. He raised Ichiro Suzuki, Shin-Soo Choo and Shohei Ohtani as examples. They made “such a big impact on baseball as Asians, even though they’re not Asian Americans,” Lim said.
“Just the fact that someone who looks like me was having so much success at the biggest stage really helped me find inspiration when I was growing up.”
Drawing from his own journey, Lim expressed the significance of Asian American representation in baseball. He emphasized its importance towards creating a more visible and inclusive playing field.
He noted the excitement surrounding the arrival of Rintaro Sasaki, a highly touted Japanese recruit slated to join the Stanford program next season. It would dramatically impact both the team and the broader Asian American community, Lim said.
“We all knew that this kid was the best recruit to ever come out of Japan and was supposed to be the number one overall pick in the Japanese professional league,” Lim said. “He joined us at the beginning of spring quarter and he’s been awesome. He’s been really eager to learn English, which he is getting better at every day, and improving his baseball skills.”
As the first Stanford pitcher since 2022 to be named Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week multiple times in a season, Lim’s talent and dedication have propelled him to the forefront of collegiate baseball. His teammates have taken notice of his exceptional abilities and mindset, including sophomore pitcher Toran O’Harran.
He “has been extremely impressive in his ability to slow the game down and make pitches when he needs to. His mentality that he pitches with is his big separator,” O’Harran said.
Similarly, sophomore pitcher Matt Scott, the leader of the pitching core, praised Lim’s demeanor when on the mound.
“The ability for Christian to stay extremely composed on the mound is something that is very impressive for a freshman,” Scott said.
Yet, amid the achievements and praise, Lim remains grounded: He attributed much of his success to the guidance of his pitching coach, Thomas Eager, whose mentorship has been instrumental in his growth both on and off the field.
“Thomas has helped me grow a tremendous amount since before the start of my freshman season. Even though it’s only been six months, I feel like I’ve grown so much as a pitcher and also as a person,” Lim said.
As he reflected on his freshman campaign, Lim also acknowledged the areas of his game that require refinement.
“There’s some things that have gone well for me that I don’t really feel like I need to address right at this moment,” Lim said. “But the biggest changes that I make are more game to game. For example, this past weekend, I kind of struggled with the location of my fastballs. That’s going to be something that I’m going to work on throughout this week.”
As Lim looks ahead to the future, both on and off the field, he remains committed to serving as a role model and advocate for Asian American athletes. With each pitch he throws and each accolade he earns, he carries with him the hopes and aspirations of a community often overlooked in the baseball world.
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Editorial Board | Give students seats on the Investment Responsibility CommitteeThe Editorial Board calls upon the Board of Trustees to introduce two student seats on the Investment Responsibility Committee. Student seats on the committee would provide formal student representation in discourse and decision-making about Stanford’s endowment.
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The Stanford Management Company manages the fourth largest university endowment in the nation at $36.5 billion. The Statement on Divestment, which calls for Stanford to divest from Chevron, Lockheed Martin and other companies tied to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, was recently passed in Stanford’s 2024 ASSU election. This bill, coupled with campaigns for Stanford to divest from the fossil fuel industry, highlight that the investment of our endowment is under more scrutiny than ever.
Questions over the ethics and responsibility of the University’s investments are handled by the Board of Trustees’ Special Committee on Investment Responsibility (SCIR), which steers Stanford’s investment decisions. This committee currently features no student members.
We believe that the inclusion of student representatives has long been needed, independent of current movements. The Board of Trustees has eleven committees that make recommendations to and advise the Board on various aspects of the University’s operations. Currently, two student representatives serve as “full, voting members” on four of these committees: namely, Development, Finance, Land & Buildings, and Student, Alumni, & External Affairs. Student members on the Finance Committee already oversee fiscal matters similar to those SCIR deals with.
We call upon The Board of Trustees to introduce two student seats on the SCIR to officially include students in discourse and decision-making concerning Stanford’s endowment.
The case for student representation on SCIR
Students offer a different perspective than current seated stakeholders on how institutional responsibility should motivate investment decisions. Having student members on the committee would foster more direct and effective representation of the diversity and conviction of student views, removing the kinds of bureaucratic red tape that isolates decisionmakers from our voices. Student members could serve as spokespeople who listen to, summarize and report on student concerns, rather than leaving it up to the Board of Trustees to speculate on campus sentiments.
Our argument for student input is separate from particular activist causes or advocacy. Rather, it is rooted in the need for an active and official student partnership with the Trustees over our University’s institutional holdings.
Stanford’s investment portfolio, or the “Merged Pool” controlled by the Stanford Management Company, is money that is invested in the name of our education. Many current students will become alumni who endow gifts that are managed as part of this portfolio. Representation on the Investment Committee would cultivate the financial partnership between Stanford and future alumni from an early stage. It will also foster greater trust and transparency between current students and administrators.
With these benefits in mind, why are students not already represented on the Special Committee on Investment Responsibility?
If top Stanford leaders believe students are not experienced or knowledgeable enough about finance and investing, this conflicts with the fact that students are already represented on the Finance Committee. Moreover, the student body at large has earned the confidence of the University to take on loans for their education.
If Stanford does not wish to disclose its investments to members of the student body, we do not think this is a sufficient reason to preclude student representatives. Stanford students already work as summer analysts at the Stanford Management Company.
If Stanford believes students are incapable of putting the good of the University before advancing their personal politics, then maybe they should have not trusted students to serve on the Presidential Search Committee in the first place – a committee with a similarly significant task.
A brief history of student-led investment decisions at Stanford
Stanford students have long demonstrated the desire to discuss and revise institutional holdings. In 1985, the student body voted 2,045 to 485 that Stanford should divest from Motorola due to Motorola’s sales to South African military and law enforcement. Stanford’s Trustees voted in agreement with students’ recommendation, committing to drop its nearly $4.7 million worth of Motorola stock if Motorola continued business operations with the regime. This culminated in Motorola selling all manufacturing operations in South Africa.
In 2005, the Stanford chapter of “Students Taking Action Now: Darfur” (STAND) pushed Stanford to divest from four companies whose business operations supported the Sudanese regime that perpetuated genocides in Darfur.
In 2014, the Board of Trustees announced that the Stanford endowment would no longer fund coal mining companies, making Stanford the first major university in the nation to take any such action. The Board Chair at the time described Fossil Free Stanford, the student coalition behind much of the advocacy at the time, as having “catalyzed important discussion” about investments made by the University.
In all of these cases, the Board ended up revising institutional holdings due to student perspectives. It’s time to institutionalize the partnership between students and the Board of Trustees. Formal seating of students on the Investment Responsibility Committee would provide stability to the tumult that exists on all sides of difficult investment discussions.
A seat at the table
Since the Board’s 2018 adoption of its Statement on Investment Responsibility and Ethical Investment, the school has witnessed intense student advocacy for divestment including ASSU ballot initiatives and petitions to faculty and the Board of Trustees.
To be clear: we are not arguing that students alone should drive Stanford’s portfolio. Rather, we are simply asking for students to be respected enough to have a seat at the table when discussing whether the endowment gets spent in line with the values Stanford claims to stand for. This includes “environmental, social and governance factors,” according to the Committee’s statement of values.
We propose that students should have two seats — one undergraduate, one graduate — on the Special Committee on Investment Responsibility. This selection process should be rigorous, credential-based and should start as soon as possible.
An ideal candidate for the committee would have an extensive background in finance and investing, the ability to communicate the diverse interests and needs of the student body and, most importantly, demonstrate the shared values our community embodies.
If the University commits to this increased transparency, the Board of Trustees will gain invaluable insights into student perspectives, while students will gain long-awaited involvement in critical decision-making related to Stanford institutional holdings. Aligned investing is difficult — more accountability can only help.
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Stanford in Style: Phone calls with MomRebecca Smith reminisces on phone calls and road trips with her mom, in this belated Mother's-Day installation of her column.
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Happy (belated) Mother’s Day! I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to write this column. I spoke to my mom on the phone this morning thinking I would interview her, but it quickly turned into chatter about my day. I thought for a moment I’d do a retrospective review of her style through the years, but the photos she sent leaned heavily into photos of us from my middle school years that should never again see the light of day.
When we spoke earlier today, I started off the interview-that-never-was by asking for her advice. She responded by asking if this was specifically an interview question or a “real” question, which made me laugh.
My mom, Nancy, is a lawyer, and thus is forced to love specifics, which she receives a lot of grief for from our family. I think we often fail to give her credit for her dedication to knowing the minutiae of each sentence and question. She is endlessly intentional and thoughtful with her words and actions, asking for clarity so she can be more understanding — which she is very much so.
My mom’s love of specifics translates into much more than the ability to use legal jargon in everyday life — she is careful, thoughtful and well-researched in everything she does. To offer my own specific example, one of her love languages is sending me supplements, but only after she researches them extensively and even vets the manufacturers. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to the package center to get a surprise package and opened it to see B12 or some new immunity boost supplement to try.
She offered me two pieces of advice: one was for the interview, and one was, according to her, “real.” Her advice to the readers of my column was to “always say yes to adventure!” She embodies this daily, from walking our dogs to see our neighbor’s horses or chickens, to moving to Colorado and taking up skiing again for the first time in over a decade.
We’ve taken lots of road trips together, driving over 8000 miles together since the pandemic, to northern Minnesota, the Adirondacks, the gulf coast of Florida and our new home in Denver with two large dogs in tow. One would think that spending this amount of time in the car with my mother would inevitably end in conflict, but I reminisce on our “Thelma and Louise” era with only fondness.
Keys to a good road trip with your mother involve the entire Harry Potter series on tape, but only the ones narrated by Jim Dale, and a massive bag of jolly ranchers — Nancy likes the green ones and I like the blue ones. Like most parents, my mom seizes the opportunity to grill me during these long car trips. However, I think I can honestly say my mom is much funnier than most parents — her rapid fire questions tend to start with the predictable — “anyone you want to tell me about?” — to the absurd — “how many times a week do you think about Joe Burrow? Just a rough estimate!”
Her love for the Cincinnati Bengals encapsulates her dedication, passion and support. I genuinely find it stressful to watch football with my mom because of how much she cares. She would never support anything less than wholeheartedly, least of all her kids. We talk every day, and I imagine she would have a supportive word to say even if I told her I tied my shoes incorrectly. I know it’s trite to say, but my mom is my #1 fan, and I hope she knows I’m hers.
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‘Anti-war’ co-op Columbae loses social justice themeStanford's social justice themed co-op Columbae will lose its theme next year, perhaps marking a close to a long legacy of activism, from the Vietnam War to contemporary campus discourse over the Israel-Gaza war. Resident assistants and students from several co-ops gathered on Tuesday to attempt to save the house's theme.
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Columbae Residential Assistants (RAs) received notice on Tuesday from University administrators that the social justice themed co-op would be discontinued during the 2024-25 school year. Several co-op residents, from Columbae and across the Row, gathered at the dorm to push back against the University decision.
According to an email from C. Matthew Snipp that was obtained by The Daily, only four pre-assignment applications were received for Columbae. “Many more fully committed residents would be needed to run this 53-person house as a co-op,” Snipp wrote. Co-ops, or cooperative houses, involve students in house governance and management, from cooking to cleaning.
Students criticized the choice and argued there was a lack of institutional support towards Columbae, as well as sufficient time to allow residents to seek new applications. But per the University, there’s not enough interest to support the theme house.
The theme “will be discontinued” and the house will become a self-op named for its street address of 549 Lasuen from Autumn 2024, Snipp wrote.
Columbae played a prominent role in campus protests against the Vietnam War in the 1970s and in anti-apartheid protests demanding divestment from South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Recently, the co-op was embroiled in campus tensions over the Israel-Gaza war. A former RA was quoted in a New York Times editorial about her experiences in the house and her frustration with how residents handled a banner following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and military response by Israel. The banner read “Zionism is genocide.”
While Stanford has since limited banners on Row houses, several Palestinian flags hang from Columbae windows and some residents chanted at tour groups who passed the house, calling on the University to divest from ventures tied to Israel.
But the emergency meeting on Tuesday drew residents from several co-ops — who argued that the decision to strip the theme is tied to a broader pattern, where the Stanford bureaucracy suppresses student culture.
“Since the pandemic, Stanford has unhoused a lot of themes,” said Mandla Msipa ’26, an undergraduate senator, who raised examples like the Toussaint Louverture or French House and Haus Mitteleuropa as other houses where the University removed themes. “This is a continuation of stripping Stanford of its culture and vibrancy.”
They collaborated on a petition to preserve Columbae’s theme, which had received over 574 signatures at the time of publication.
The petition made committments to draw more residents to Columbae. “The residential staff will make changes to current house characteristics, such as vegetarianism, in order to accommodate students potentially interested in living in the house and engaging with our social justice, anti-war theme,” student leaders in Columbae wrote.
Residents also stressed that communal living arrangements were not required and students lived in a myriad of rooms, some with only one roommate and others with several.
Columbae RAs also expressed concern that the University did not inform student leaders about the decision before Tuesday, with pre-assignment decisions scheduled to be released the next day on May 15.
The Daily has reached out to the University for comment.
“Pre-assign applications closed on April 10, and we only received a notice yesterday about this decision,” said Jason Hu ’26, an incoming Columbae RA. “They had a month to tell us that we had too few applications, but they waited until the last day before the pre-assignment decision came out.”
Moreover, changes to the pre-assignment process disadvantaged Columbae, according to residents.
Last year, Residential Education changed its policy so that applicants could only pre-assign to one house. “The amount of applications has gone down because we can no longer rank multiple pre-assign options,” Hu said.
According to some RAs, changes in the neighborhood application process confuse students, even though less restrictions on neighborhoods were welcomed by many undergraduates.
“Stanford has not had a consistent application process for two years ever since the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Caro De Sa ’24, a current RA in Columbae. “We don’t know whether Stanford is going to allow us to rank co-ops or whether they’re going to have us choose a single one. That makes it really, really difficult to plan.”
Hu added that the tight pre-assign application schedule affected the amount of pre-assignees interested in Columbae. RAs were asked to prepare the application last minute amid finals.
“They announced the new RAs at the end of winter quarter. Then, during finals week, they told us we had to prepare the [pre-assign] application,” Hu said. “They didn’t even tell us who our fellow RAs were. We ended up using the application from last year, because nobody had time to edit the application.”
Others expressed concerns that the Stanford administration was averse to the concept of co-ops. Eliana Fuchs ’23 said that the University hopes to phase out co-ops due to liability concerns in “a space that is somewhat removed from Stanford oversight compared to conventional norms.”
“This is Stanford seizing the opportunity to do that,” Fuchs said.
Columbae’s status shifting from a co-op to a self-op has implications beyond its pending status as a hub for activism.
Orlando White asked incoming Columbae RAs, now RAs at 549 Lasuen, to make a decision by Friday on whether they will continue as an RA, or resign and be placed into non-RA preassigned residency or participate in the regular housing draw, in a follow-up email obtained by The Daily.
This involved an increase in housing costs. Housing costs in a self-op will increase by around $3,000 compared to co-ops next year, White wrote. For some incoming RAs, this creates financial challenges.
“I applied to be a residential assistant due to financial need,” said Zofia Trexler ’25, another incoming RA at Columbae. “I really needed that stipend to pay for housing. I am peeved that the University has been so flippant with my financial situation.”
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‘We’re still here’: Indigenous women lead ‘record-breaking’ Stanford PowwowStudent organizers held the 53rd Annual Stanford Powwow at Eucalyptus Grove last weekend, drawing over 30,000 attendees. This year’s celebration, themed “Empowering Indigenous Women,” featured dances and art vendors from tribes across North America.
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Zola Ortiz ’27 has been attending powwows for as long as she can remember. Last weekend, as she stepped into Eucalyptus Grove wearing regalia gifted to her by her mother, Ortiz continued a tradition she has carried on since elementary school, as a dancer at Stanford’s 53rd Annual Powwow.
“It’s so powerful to enter into an arena and see a bunch of Native people all around you,” Ortiz said.
Stanford hosts the largest student-run powwow in the U.S., attracting 20,000 to 30,000 attendees every year, said Powwow Committee co-chair Julia Perez-Pacheco ’26. The event, which occurred last weekend, featured competitive tribal dances, food stalls selling treats like strawberries on frybread, booths run by Indigenous art vendors and a 5k fun run/walk.
“Our goal was to bring a great event to the community and make sure that the Indigenous community has a space on campus, because oftentimes we don’t have that representation,” Perez-Pacheco said.
The powwow began on Friday at 5 p.m. with the opening of the “Indian Art Market,” as Indigenous vendors set up stalls to sell handcrafted jewelry, clothing, shawls and other wares around the edges of Eucalyptus Grove. Each day of the event was marked by a “grand entry,” when flag-bearers and dancers wearing feathered traditional regalia streamed into an arena in the center of the Grove.
The sounds of drum beats, joyous singing and ringing bells could be heard throughout the day as dancers representing different tribes competed in a three-day contest. Dancers competed based on age categories and the type of dance they participated in, with Ortiz dancing in a traditional Southern style.
“Even though there’s usually different styles, any form of dance is rooted in healing,” Ortiz said.
Perez-Pacheco said that this year saw “record-breaking numbers” of attendees, including thousands coming from out of state, traveling from as far away as the East Coast and Canada. Some camped on campus for the weekend.
An all-women team of co-chairs — Perez-Pacheco, Sophia Allan ’26 and Nena Naat’aanii Dorame ’25 — led the event. They chose this year’s theme, “Empowering Indigenous Women.”
Perez-Pacheco said that their theme selection was partly inspired by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and the need to “honor the women who are no longer here with us.”
“There’s a lot of sadness in our community, and so we wanted to shed light on the positivity of being Indigenous … and to show the strength within Indigenous women,” Perez-Pacheco said.
Ortiz said this year’s theme resonated with her experiences as an Indigenous woman.
“I’ve been so grateful to be surrounded by such strong Native women who are so capable of leading, of loving, of leadership,” Ortiz said. “I think that it’s important to honor those women.”
In addition to the dances and contests held throughout the powwow, the event featured an honor song for Native graduating seniors at Stanford. Amid the sound of resounding drums, the students joined hands as they walked through the arena.
Ryan Duncan ’24 M.A. ’24 is one of the graduating seniors who was honored. Duncan served as a Powwow co-chair in 2022, the first year the event returned in-person after two years online during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was excited to see that attendance for the event is rebounding after emerging from virtual powwows.
“I think everybody is realizing that Stanford Powwow is back on,” Duncan said.
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the original inhabitants of the land Stanford sits on, was also honored at Powwow this year with a performance by the Muwekma Ohlone Dance Group.
“Today was the third time we have been asked to dance on our own homelands,” said Muwekma Ohlone Tribal member and ambassador Julie Dominguez. She said that the Tribe’s consistent presence at Powwow is important for the “revitalization of our dance, our songs, our language and our culture and spirituality.”
Dominguez, alongside Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh, staffed a “Justice for Muwekma” booth at Powwow that shared information about the Tribe’s efforts to gain federal recognition.
According to Dominguez, the Muwekma Ohlone plan to demand federal recognition from government leaders by embarking on a “Trail of Truth” starting on Aug. 1. Advocates from the Tribe will travel on horseback from the Bay Area to Washington D.C., with other federally unrecognized tribes joining them along the way.
“We want to bring that call to action that we’re still here, and we all deserve that justice to be recognized,” Dominguez said.
Attending Powwow was a “beautiful” experience for Stanford alumni Keoni Rodriguez ’22 M.A. ’23, who returned to the event after serving as an organizer during their time as a student.
Rodriguez said their favorite aspect of Powwow was the leadership of the event’s student organizers, who worked since fall quarter to make the event happen despite the stresses of midterms and schoolwork. Rodriguez was also impressed to see large crowds of volunteers and attendees still at Powwow late into the night.
“There’s so many booths and vendors and people who are maybe not even part of the Native community, but are still here, volunteering and attending,” Rodriguez said. “That’s really special.”
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Fountain hopping makes a splash at StanfordFountain hopping has been a favorite Stanford tradition since around the 1970s. The 25 fountains are maintained to swimming pool quality and take 50,000 gallons of water to fill.
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There are 25 fountains on campus, prime for the quintessential Stanford pastime of fountain hopping. Donning swimsuits or just rolling up their pant legs, students head to the fountains to splash around, climb the structures or create whirlpools.
Some of the fountains have had a long history, and are more popular among fountain hoppers.
An older fountain is the birdbath-esque Centennial Fountain in front of Green Library’s Bing Wing, which was built in 1928. The spiky green fountain known as the Claw, which is adjacent to White Plaza, was built in 1964. The grand Tanner Fountain, which sits between Memorial Auditorium and Hoover Tower, was built in 1977. Obert Tanner M.A. ’37 and his wife Grace Tanner donated funds to create Tanner Fountain in honor of their son, who died of polio in 1943. Shumway Fountain, or the red hoop fountain in front of Green Library on the Coupa Café side, was built in the 1980s.
In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote that Terman Fountain, constructed in 2012, is the largest fountain on campus by total area. This fountain was named after Frederick Terman, a professor of engineering at Stanford. Rapport wrote that the fountains across campus serve as memorials, commemorations of University milestones and public art.
Although the exact date of fountain hopping’s origin is unclear, potentially circa the 1970s and 80s, the fountains have been well-loved by generations of students over the years.
Many students, like Stephanie Unur ’24 M.S. ’25, find fountain hopping to be a cooling reprieve from busy campus life.
“Campus is already such a beautiful place, so having that backdrop while I blast some music and go for a dip with friends is the perfect way to spend a hot spring day,” said Unur, whose favorite fountain is the Tanner Fountain because of the large rim where students may lounge.
Incoming University president Jonathan Levin ’94 also partook in the activity when he was a student. “I most definitely participated in fountain hopping — though not recently,” he wrote. Levin’s favorite fountain is “a close call between the Claw and the red hoop in front of Green.”
In May 2023, Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) even proposed fountain hopping as a way for students to beat the broiling summer heat, since all undergraduate and most graduate student residences do not have air conditioning.
The water used to keep the fountains flowing makes up less than 0.5% of Stanford’s yearly domestic water consumption. This volume translates to around 50,000 gallons to fill the fountains and “several thousand gallons a day to replenish water lost through evaporation, splashing and other factors,” according to the Stanford Report.
Rapport wrote that “fountain maintenance is performed on an ongoing basis with a focus on water quality and conservation, through water treatment, water filtration and mechanical / hardscape repairs.”
According to Rapport, all fountains are maintained to the same quality of a swimming pool. Fountains only require refilling if they have been drained for maintenance or repairs.
The fountains are also key to Big Game traditions. During the week of Big Game, all fountains are dyed a bright red, symbolizing the bloodshed from slaying the University of California, Berkeley’s mascot Oski the Bear. Oski is also impaled atop the Claw.
According to Rapport, “the University works with the Axe Committee to select a dye that can be filtered out without damaging the fountains or wasting water.”
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Love all: Women’s tennis commemorates Taube Tennis StadiumStanford women's tennis's win against N.C. State on Friday didn't just launch the Cardinal into the NCAA tournament quarterfinals — it also marked the last match the team would ever play in Taube Tennis Stadium.
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Amid the tension of Taube Tennis Center, graduate student Angelica Blake found herself locked into a prolonged rally. Blake had N.C. State’s No. 2 ranked Ameila Rajecki on the ropes and needed just one more point to secure an NCAA tournament victory for Stanford.
But Rajecki wouldn’t go out easily — she unleashed a mixture of impressive forehand and backhand shots, compelling Blake to hit her own aggressive shots in response. The 15 stroke rally reached its conclusion when Rajecki’s shot went beyond the baseline, giving Blake a win and propelling Stanford to the NCAA tournament quarterfinals.
When the match finished, Blake threw her racket into the air, emotion evident across her face. But Cardinal fans witnessed something more momentous than just an NCAA tournament victory: The team played its final match at Taube Family Tennis Stadium, closing the curtain on the venerable facility with a rousing 4-0 victory over No. 14 North Carolina State.
Taube Stadium, which was dedicated in 1997 to Stanford alumn and entrepreneur Tad Taube ‘54 M.A. ‘57, sits on a site that has been the venue for Stanford varsity tennis since 1926. The stadium, which has hosted Stanford women tennis’s 113 wins in the last 120 matches, will cease to exist in its current form after it undergoes substantial reconstruction and reconfiguration to become part of the newly named Arrillaga Tennis Center.
“It’s nice to go out on a win,” said Stanford women’s tennis head coach Lele Forood. “I wish we weren’t leaving [Taube] but we are.” Forood, who played tennis at Stanford in the 1970s, has coached here since the 1980s.
“I have very fond memories and I will miss this structure because there are very few stadiums left for tennis in the United States,” said Forood. “I will miss the grandeur of this place and all that went on here, not just college matches, but pro tournaments and even Fed Cup and Davis Cup.”
During Forood’s head-coaching tenure, her teams have won 10 NCAA titles and compiled a 560-62 overall record. She has also coached 69 all Americans, including junior Connie Ma, Blake and junior Alexandra Yepifanova — all while playing their home matches at Taube.
Friday’s contest was a rematch of last year’s semifinal, won by N.C. State. This year, motivated by both the significance of the match and the chance to get a final win at Taube, the team achieved a different result.
The Cardinal won the closely contested doubles point behind wins on the No. 2 and 3 courts. Blake and sophomore Alexis Blokhina triumphed over No. 29 senior Sophie Abrams and sophomore Anna Zyryanova 6-3. In the deciding match, freshman Katherine Hui and junior Valencia Xu broke serve at 3-3 and held on to win 6-4, clinching the doubles point.
In the singles, No. 29 Yepifanova won in straight sets, 6-1, 7-5 over No. 62 Zyryanova. Next, No. 7 Ma used her shot variety and superb tactical skills to beat No. 71 Abigail Rencheli 6-1, 6-4. In the deciding match, No. 25 Blake employed her aggressiveness and consistency to triumph over big-hitting No. 2 Amelia Rajecki, 6-3, 6-3.
“It’s a special moment, winning with the team and it being the last match at Taube,” Blake said after winning the final point. “I tend to be pretty level headed after matches, but this one, I felt the emotions after match point.”
Taube has hosted four NCAA women’s tennis championships and the first combined men’s and women’s NCAA championships in 2006 and again in 2011. Many of the all-time great players have graced Taube’s courts, including John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Venus and Serena Williams, Jimmy Connors, Mats Wilander, Lindsay Davenport, Martina Hingis and Kim Clijsters.
“We’re definitely sad to see it go,” Ma said. “Tennis has been here for almost 100 years and we’re glad we were able to do it justice, to honor the people who came before us. We’ve had a great home record, so to send it out on a win is what we wanted and everyone is just ecstatic about it.”
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Food for thought: SLE Sushi Salons bring the humanities to a wider audienceSLE Sushi Salons invite students with interest in the humanities to FloMo, for talks with guest lecturers and sushi to feed all.
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During a Thursday afternoon, students trickle into the lounge at East Florence Moore Hall, home to the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program — a three-quarter residential program for freshmen to delve into the Western canon. Amid the comfortable sofas in the lounge is a table with a stack of identical books up for grabs and lots of sushi.
Referencing the Parisian salons of the Enlightenment era, which used to house intellectuals to discuss the arts, literature and philosophy, SLE Sushi Salons similarly explore innovative ideas in the humanities. The events host guest speakers from various humanities disciplines to speak to students about their work.
On this particular Thursday, ITALIC lecturer Sam Sax presided over the salon. Sax answered questions about the poetic process and read aloud poems from their collection “PIG,” often inciting laughter and “hi-yas” (a reference to the Muppet character Miss Piggy’s catchphrase). As the audience chuckled together over Sax’s poetics, the salon reflected a relaxed, communal environment.
SLE has a long-standing tradition of hosting guest speakers in the dorm, but the events became formalized as “Sushi Salons” when SLE became a theme house as part of the neighborhood system in 2021.
“It’s kind of just taken on the name of ‘Sushi Salon’, but it’s something that has been happening for a long time,” said SLE Resident Fellow, Lecturer and Assistant Director Michaela Hulstyn, who organizes the salons. “It’s part of this longer tradition, but it’s a new way of bringing cool intellectual or artistic guest speakers into the dorm space and having students be able to meet them.”
The sheer breadth of arts exposure that SLE offers, thanks to the various guests hosted in the house, provides opportunities that student Sydney Prier ’27 hadn’t had before.
“I’m from a small town in Texas. There’s not a ballet, people don’t go to the opera, we didn’t have incredible access to books. The most poetry I had was Dr. Seuss or maybe some Langston Hughes,” Prier said. According to Prier, the Sushi Salons are a way for students to soak in the frontiers of the human intellectual experience.
“Even if you already thought that what you were reading [in SLE] is on the edge of forward thinking, Sushi Salons go beyond the forward thinking,” they said.
Speakers are drawn from faculty on and off campus; memorable speakers in the past include Haleh Liza Gafori, a translator and reciter of Rumi’s poetry, and Elias Rodriques ‘13, a novelist and professor of African American Literature at Sarah Lawrence College, who is also a SLE alumnus.
Hulstyn believes that the talks help students discover a part of the humanities they might have not heard about or realized they were interested in.
For example, Welsh medievalist and Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of English Elaine Treharne spoke about the study of medieval manuscripts with a phenomenological approach. Hulstyn said that, for students who didn’t know the specifics of either field, the salons gave them a starting point to learn more by engaging with the professor’s work and considering what future classes they should take.
Prier agrees that the salons help students explore intersectionality amongst unexpected ideas.
“It gives you a really great picture about the world that’s not just Western ideology. It just allows you to have a feel of other cultures,” they said.
Sushi Salons aren’t always connected to the SLE curriculum. While SLE’s syllabus includes different readings every week and invites around 80 guest lecturers per year, the salons serve as a way to diversify the ideas brought into SLE.
Audrey Jung ‘27 said that the salons help broaden the definition of the humanities.
“We hear about people who are being really innovative; you get a filmmaker or somebody who prefers poetry, so it’s maybe not necessarily what you think of first when you think about the humanities, like history or philosophy, which is what SLE focuses more on,” she said.
The salons are mostly funded by ARC, the Academic-Residential Co-Curriculum under VPUE, “to maximize the potential intellectual energy of our residential campus.” The Stanford Introductory Studies business team, notably Residential Programs Administrator Noel Dahl, also lends administrative support to the events. With the administrative work it takes to bring speakers on campus, Hulstyn said that the grants make the salons a sustainable endeavor.
Hulstyn sees the salons as instrumental in community-building within the SLE cohort, but hopes to see non-SLE students venturing in as well. The salons are published on the Stanford Event calendar, and Hulstyn hopes that dorm resident fellows can pass along news of the events.
“We really envision the offerings of the theme house as being something done in the service of the entire campus,” she said.
Echoing this sentiment, Prier believes the salons also help advocate for SLE as a whole in “establishing a community of forward thinkers who genuinely want the best for the world.”
For students considering attending the salons, Hulstyn emphasizes that events are low-stakes and aimed at an undergraduate audience.
“All you have to do is just be interested and maybe hungry,” she said. Sushi is always the main staple, but according to Hulstyn, “the ideas are as nourishing as the food.”
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Police Blotter: Hate violence, motor vehicle theft and vandalismThis article contains incidents that were reported on campus from May 6 to May 12, as recorded by the Stanford University Department of Public Safety bulletin.
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This report covers a selection of incidents from May 6 to May 12, as recorded in the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) bulletin. Learn more about the Clery Act and how The Daily approaches reporting on crime and safety here.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for comment on the report of non-criminal hate violence.
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Mary Ashley Stevenson commits to StanfordStanford women's basketball landed its third undergraduate transfer in program history with Mary Ashley Stevenson, the 2024 Big Ten Freshman of the Year at Purdue.
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On Tuesday, women’s basketball head coach Kate Paye announced that Mary Ashley Stevenson, the 2024 Big Ten Freshman of the Year at Purdue, has transferred to Stanford.
“Mary Ashley is another fantastic addition to our program, someone who is fiercely competitive and works incredibly hard to improve each day,” Paye said in a press release. “She embraces everything that Stanford has to offer, is diligent in the classroom and a dedicated student of the game. We are thrilled that she decided Stanford is the place for her and are excited to welcome her into the fold.”
The six-foot-two forward started 33 games for Purdue last season and averaged nearly 10 points and 5 rebounds per game, including a career-high of 25 points against Illinois. Coming out of high school, Stevenson was ranked No. 97 in the nation by ESPN HoopGurlz.
“What I admire about the Stanford community is its commitment to excellence in everything it does,” Stevenson said. “That same commitment to excellence is what I seek to embody as a Stanford student-athlete.”
As the third undergraduate transfer in Stanford women’s basketball history, Stevenson’s signing indicates that Stanford may be more open to accepting transfers in the future. Tess Heal announced her transfer from Santa Clara to Stanford yesterday.
Stevenson, who has three years of eligibility remaining, brings more experience and scoring to the Cardinal’s young roster, especially following the losses of Cameron Brink, Kiki Iriafen and Hannah Jump.
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From Doak Walker to venture capital: Bryce Love ’19 embarks on a new chapterBryce Love was known for carving up defenses during his time on the Farm. Now, Love is taking his talents off the football field into the finance world.
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Coming into the 2017 football season, expectations for the Stanford football team were high. The Cardinal were ranked No. 14 to start the year and brought back most of the defense that ranked top 20 in the nation. But questions still remained on offense. Perhaps the most important was who would replace the production of running back Christian McCaffrey, a top-ten pick in the 2017 NFL Draft and one of the best college football players of all-time.
In their first game of the season, Stanford played the Rice Owls in Sydney, Australia. But instead of No. 5 in the backfield, Stanford fans witnessed the emergence of No. 20: Bryce Love.
In his first play from scrimmage, Love carried the ball and quickly found a hole to exploit. After going untouched for eight yards, the 5-foot-9 running back used a quick stutter-step and broke two tackles before getting to the outside. No. 20 utilized his track speed to blaze down the sideline, only to be slowed down by an arm tackle before finally being brought down by a safety.
The run was a preview to come for Love, who had one of the most decorated seasons ever by a Stanford player. During his junior season, Love rushed for 2,118 rushing yards, 19 rushing touchdowns and had 13 consecutive games with a 30-yard rush (an FBS record). For his efforts, Love won the prestigious Doak Walker Award, given annually to the best running back in the nation. That same season, he was named a unanimous All-American and a Heisman Trophy finalist.
But after an injury-riddled senior season, Love’s football career slowed down and he spent just two seasons in the NFL with the Washington Commanders.
“After I took some time off, I started thinking about different avenues, and was trying out different cohorts to see what I was passionate about,” Love said. “I wanted to figure out ways that I could make a difference, so I started taking different classes, investing in startups and learning about different technologies.”
Today, Love is still based in the Washington, D.C. area and works as an angel investor. He is passionate about identifying new opportunities for growth and innovation in tech.
“I often refer back to conversations I had [on campus], college is about touching into different passions,” Love said. “I went out there from North Carolina, which was a big adjustment, and learning to navigate that, being pushed academically, so many of those lessons ended up bleeding into other parts of my life.”
The 2017 Doak Walker Award winner didn’t stumble upon venture capital (VC) by himself.
Jeff Jordan M.B.A. ’87, a current partner at Andreesen Horowitz, has helped professional athletes like Andre Iguodala and Lebron James get into the VC space during their careers. Jordan and Love first crossed paths during Love’s college years, where Jordan introduced the star running back to the profession.
“Bryce is the embodiment of the Stanford ideal of the student-athlete. He has unlimited potential in life, and we’re proud to have the opportunity to help him along in any way we can on his journey,” Jordan said, who is also the former CEO of OpenTable.
The two met through Harrison Phillips ’17, who currently plays nose tackle for the Minnesota Vikings and was Love’s teammate for two years. Jordan had hosted Phillips for a summer dinner, and thereafter began periodically hosting dinner parties for a handful of student athletes.
Jordan and his wife Karen were immediately impressed with Love.
“He had a magnetic personality and could light up the room,” Jordan said. “He was thoughtful and intelligent, and he was off-the-charts skilled on the football field, but that was combined with a deep humility that we found very compelling.”
Having studied human biology at Stanford, Love shared that his dream had always been to work in pediatrics. However, he remembers attending a talk as a student athlete, where students were asked, “Are you passionate about a specific thing, or are you a passionate person?” Love considers himself to be the latter.
“As long as I’m learning and growing and taking it day by day, I’m happy,” he said. His long term goals include one day running his own VC fund, or attending medical school and becoming a pediatrician.
While Love’s historic season occurred just seven years ago, the college football attention cycle moves swiftly and historical memories quickly fade.
But current students on campus still remember Love as a key part of the Stanford football teams that won the 2016 Rose Bowl and two Sun Bowls in 2017 and 2018. “I remember as a kid how much he flashed on the field,” said Mason Osborn ’26. “He was definitely a special talent.”
Love said that over the years he has remained close with many of his former coaches and teammates, including former head coach David Shaw and running backs coach Ron Gould. Even as many of his teammates have moved around the country and are now getting married, Love notes that when they do find opportunities to see each other in person, “it’s like no time has passed.”
When asked of any advice he had for current Stanford students, Love emphasized meeting new people as a crucial part of the college experience.
“One of my older teammates used to say, ‘the days go by slow, but years go by fast’,” Love said. So, meet as many people as you can, lean into it, take advantage of it, and keep pushing yourself everyday. It’s all gonna work out.”
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Women’s basketball lands Santa Clara transfer Tess HealWomen's basketball landed its first transfer of the offseason, bringing in former Santa Clara guard Tess Heal.
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Tess Heal, a sophomore at Santa Clara University, announced her move to Stanford for the 2024-25 women’s basketball season. The 2023 West Coast Conference Newcomer of the Year is a promising transfer for the women’s basketball program, with two more years of eligibility for Stanford.
As a freshman at Santa Clara, Heal splashed into the college basketball scene. She tallied 562 total points in her first season, the fourth-most in a single season in school history, and along the way she was named West Coast Conference Freshman of the Week a record-breaking 12 times. Heal started in all 32 regular season games, averaging 17.6 points, 4.3 rebounds and 4.0 assists per game.
Heal’s sophomore year was another historic season. Heal set program records for points (663) and free throws (191) made. Heal’s stellar season once again earned her conference recognition as she was named West Coast Conference Player of the Week six times throughout the season. Her best game of the season came against Pacific University when she torched their defense en route to a 40 point performance, matching a program record.
Heal is only the second undergraduate transfer in Stanford’s program history, with the other being Brooke Smith in 2003. While still reeling from the loss of Kiki Iriafen, the women’s basketball program can now shift focus to welcoming Heal ahead of the 2024-25 season.
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‘Don Quixote’ is en pointe and en garde"Don Quixote" spotlighted CBC dancers' talent, poise and grace as its characters fought windmills and fell in love.
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This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Beautiful poses, immense talent and a flair for drama — Cardinal Ballet Company’s (CBC) production of “Don Quixote” on Saturday at Dinkelspiel Auditorium was riveting and intriguing, showcasing its dancers at their best.
The plot was simple: Don Quixote, played by Tai Groenveld ’23 M.A. ’24, dreams of chivalry and windmills, while Kitri played by Ellie Wong ’23 M.A. ’24 and Basilio played by Jared Klegar ’24, a Daily staffer, fall in love despite the disapproval of Kitri’s father Lorenzo, played by ballet lecturer Anton Pankevich, who curiously wore white sneakers instead of ballet shoes. At the same time, Lorenzo tries to set Kitri up with a wealthy nobleman, Gamache, played by Sam Prausnitz-Weinbaum ’27.
The main duo, Wong and Klegar, demonstrated incredible talent. The chemistry between the characters was palpable — when the characters first interacted, Kitri cheekily avoided Basilio’s advances, putting a fan to his face when he came too close. The music swelled as the two finally began dancing in tandem, smiling blissfully.
The humor weaved into the performance elevated the show, transforming it into something that could be universally understood, regardless of knowledge of ballet or the story of Don Quixote. In a performance with no words, these minor moments of comedy clarified the plot.
No performer embraced the humor more than Prausnitz-Weinbaum as Gamache, the bumbling nobleman Kitri’s father hopes will marry her. When his white, Georgian-era wig repeatedly slipped off his head, he took advantage of the opportunity to fix it campily. His comic intuition was a grounding presence to the otherwise stricter mode of ballet dance.
Before intermission, the story returns to Don Quixote, who fights a windmill and loses. Presumably comatose from battle, a dream sequence commences.
Ballerinas, wearing outfits of teals, blues, pinks and lilacs, frame the stage in perfectly still formation. Amisha Iyer ’23 M.A. ’24 delicately dances in the center as Cupid.
This dream act was exquisite. The colorful tutus created the image of a bouquet of flowers twirling around each other, with Iyer gracefully tiptoeing in the middle, fragile yet strong. It was the perfect ending to the first half of the show.
After intermission came my favorite scene, set in a tavern, which was curiously decorated with red Solo cups in a cheeky reference to college life. Kitri and Basilio danced together with both precision and passion.
Klegar showed no sign of strain as he carried, threw and caught Wong, seemingly defying gravity. Wong’s face remained enchanted as she posed and jumped effortlessly. I wanted to keep on watching just to see what happened to their characters and how their romance manifested itself through dance.
Basilio left the tavern and re-appeared with a cape and sword. He laid on the floor theatrically and stabbed himself in the chest, ostensibly because he could not win the approval of Kitri’s father. The crowd erupted in gasps and “oohs.”
Yet, once Kitri bends to kiss Basilio, he springs back alive with restored life force by her love. I was glad to see Basilio alive — I was really rooting for him and Kitri by now.
The crowd alternated between pure silence and uproarious applause throughout the show. One moment that the crowd loved was the “Cupid’s Trio” dance, which transitions from the tavern to the wedding act. Dancers Amanda Cheng ’27, Alice Finkelstein ’27 and Juliet Sostena ’27 demanded full attention as one dances in the foreground, one in the background and one in the center simultaneously, creating this beautiful depth of motions.
I highly anticipated the final dance between Kitri and Basilio. As Wong’s leg extended a perfect 180 degrees, Klegar turned her slowly, romantically. At the end of the scene, he lifted her above his head, walked with her to the front of the stage and dramatically lowered her as if she was flying.
The show ended with a wedding, and the entire ensemble came out for a final number and a bow.
“Don Quixote” was romantic and talent-filled, a real delight.
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Is happiness an illusion? Veritas Forum asks the big questionsAn event hosted by the Veritas Forum last Thursday talked about the importance of self-perception in achieving contentment. Attendees expressed appreciation for the inclusive and thought-provoking dialogue, which encouraged them to seek joy and meaning in their everyday lives.
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Students and community members gathered on blankets at Meyer Green on a warm Thursday evening last week, hoping to find an answer to one of life’s most important questions: What is happiness? Most importantly, is happiness an illusion and, if not, where can we find it?
The event, organized by the Veritas Forum, a Christian student organization whose goal is to “invite university communities to dialogue with respect and curiosity about ideas that shape our lives,” featured David Spiegel and David Carreon, both psychiatrists. Spiegel is a current and Carreon is a former professor at the School of Medicine. The discussion, moderated by George Muirhead J.D. ’24, focused on happiness, mental health and the search for a sense of contentment and satisfaction in one’s own life.
“Veritas is a Christian club; however, we want to engage in dialogue with a variety of worldviews and encourage anyone to attend these large forums,” said Zara Thomas ’26, one of the organizers of the event.
When asked about the definition of happiness, Carreon described preferring to break the abstract concept into three dimensions. “Happiness” as the fleeting state of feeling good, “flourishing” as well-being due to meaningful and ethical work and relationships and “blessedness” as happiness beyond simply circumstantial influences.
Carreon said “blessedness” was a feeling of happiness that could be achieved even in dire circumstances. He emphasized that happiness should not be limited to only a reflection of good circumstances, but more deeply seeded.
Emphasizing Carreon’s focus on how individuals reflect on their circumstances, Spiegel said that happiness depends largely on one’s perception of the world and, more importantly, oneself. He invoked the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s research — “slipping into thinghood,” often resulted in a loss of happiness due to treating ourselves and others as objects rather than as dynamic beings, Carreon said.
“We are not an ‘it,’” Spiegel said, emphasizing that individuals should not let the “presumptions of who we are impair our capacity to enrich the experiences we have.”
Spiegel illustrated this with an example of how he coached the Stanford women’s swimming team to swim faster in their meets by shifting their focus from beating the competitors in the next lane to helping their bodies perform their best. The process of fully engaging with and experiencing activities is crucial to finding happiness, he said.
Turning to the popular topic of the potential for hypnosis to treat depression and other behavioral or performance issues, Spiegel clarified that hypnosis often involves gaining control of one’s senses rather than losing them. Renowned for his research into therapeutic hypnosis and featured on multiple YouTube videos and the Huberman Lab podcast, Spiegel discussed the differences between hypnosis and meditation, emphasizing the critical role of focused attention in both practices.
Veritas Forum member and discussion moderator, Xander Russell ’26 said he thought this event was a valuable contribution to a campus-wide discussion about mental health. “I think mental health is a very important facet of campus life, and I think students benefit from listening to different perspectives on happiness,” he said.
Henry Wang ’25, initially attended the event for the free boba but also found it to be a valuable experience. “It was a good opportunity to engage in dialogue with people I wouldn’t normally run into,” he remarked.
Attendee Audrey Jones ’27 appreciated the forum’s inclusive approach. “They seem like they try to showcase different viewpoints as opposed to one perspective, and I really appreciate that,” she said.
Jones also mentioned how the event encouraged her to focus on activities that bring her joy: “Especially being at Stanford with so many opportunities, it’s important to approach these opportunities in a way that brings the most meaning into my life.”
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National anthem rendition at fraternity party receives national attentionA video gained traction on X, with retweets and likes from politicians and businessmen. Kappa Sigma, who hosted the event, used the momentum to launch a fundraising campaign to repair damaged speakers and sound system equipment.
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“Dunch,” one of Stanford’s most well-known and anticipated parties of the year, made a splash on social media after a video went viral that featured party attendees singing along to the national anthem, loudly enough it drowned out hosting Stanford fraternity Kappa Sigma’s (KSig) loudspeakers.
Andrew Gao ’26 recorded and posted the video to X, formerly known as Twitter, with the caption “Stanford students singing the national anthem at a frat party today” and the American flag emoticon. The video since received over 3.5 million views and 6,000 likes, including one from Elon Musk.
Vivek Ramaswamy, an Ohio politician who recently ran for the Republican presidential nomination, reposted the video, with an additional comment: “It’s good to see young people starting to rebel again.” His repost, with 28,000 likes, is currently pinned to the top of his Twitter account.
Some attendees and KSig members said the narrative that fueled the video’s virality was unintentional.
“In many ways, [the video has] kind of been used by the right-wing as a narrative on how college campuses and how the youth are approaching the current political climate,” said KSig pledge Vincent Zhou ’27, who was DJing the party and started his set with the anthem. “For us, it wasn’t really a narrative on that at all.”
“It’s more so a thing of unity,” Zhou said. “There’s so many different people from diverse backgrounds who came to Dunch, people from all sides of the political spectrum, but in that moment it felt like we were united and stood – at least a little bit – on common ground.”
Kappa Sigma (KSig), the fraternity that hosts Dunch every year, has taken this moment of virality, launching a GoFundMe campaign that aims to raise $10,000. According to the campaign, half of the money raised goes towards the local branch of Veterans Affairs, while the other half will support repairs to KSig’s sound system and DJ equipment that was damaged during the event.
The fundraiser follows similar efforts at other universities, as concerns grow over “anti-American” rhetoric on college campuses amid pro-Palestine protests.
Fraternities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill recently made national headlines when non-affiliated individuals raised over $515,000 in a GoFundMe campaign in their name, after a photo of the University’s fraternity members protecting American flag amid pro-Palestine protests went viral. The organizers issued an update saying that they will create a “transparent independent entity” that oversees the funds, with some donated to charities chosen by the UNC fraternities and the remainder to a party for the students.
Members of KSig were “definitely aware” of the UNC fundraiser, said Akea Pavel ’25, who organized the fraternity’s GoFundMe campaign. “We saw the success it had,” he said, “but we didn’t directly try to emulate what they were doing, we kind of wanted to make it our own.”
Beyond X discourse, the video sparked discussion in spaces like Stanford’s anonymous platform Fizz, as students shared screenshots of Ramaswamy’s repost and Musk’s like. Many pointed out similarities between the KSig and UNC fundraisers.
Students debated what the video captured, with a mixture of jokes and serious commentary.
“End of the day — I’m not in a place to make a definitive statement on the ongoing conflicts,” Zhou wrote. “I played a song, and it was electric. And yet, I acknowledge the greater context in which this story exists and the nuance that comes with it.”
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‘Good’ girlhood: ‘How to Have Sex’ is about the before and after“How to Have Sex,” explores how everything that comes before and after sex is more important than the event itself, writes Blyss Cleveland.
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Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.
This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
There are communication dynamics that are infuriating once you notice them. One rhetorical tactic that annoys me is when people hear me say “no” to a request and understand this as the start of a negotiation.
Writer and director Molly Manning Walker’s provocatively-titled feature film debut, “How to Have Sex,” explores this dynamic in great detail. It is a film about obtaining sexual experience, but more importantly, about how non-romantic relationship dynamics shape how girls conduct themselves with romantic partners. The story centers on three 16-year-old British girls, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), and their vacation to a budget resort in Malia, Greece. They are awaiting the results of their university entrance exams, GSCEs, and adhere to a strict regimen of clubbing, libations, french fries (aka “chips”) and debauchery. Em suggests that whoever gets laid the most earns the main bedroom. Skye teases Tara about still being a virgin, which gives Tara an extra incentive to score.
An encounter with a group of slightly older British tourists one balcony over, Badger (Shaun Thomas), Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Paige (Laura Ambler), turns their trio into a sextet and adds stakes to the competition. The girls use the superlative to declare themselves best friends on the best vacation ever, in a room with the best view. The power of positive thinking, perhaps, but Tara is pretending she is having a good time when she is not.
Walker’s script establishes the dynamic among the girls from the outset. Em is the smart friend, but Tara has the people skills. When Em tries to obtain a room with a pool view, the receptionist tells her that none are available. Tara skips to the counter and uses her charm and a series of outlandish lies to secure their desired room. Hearing “no” as the start of a negotiation during a business transaction foreshadows the later theme of ignoring consent. Skye witnesses this interaction, but provides no help.
Although the trip appears to be the trio’s first outing sans parents, it is also a last holiday. During drunken revelries they vacillate between childish horseplay, teasing and revealing anxieties about needing to cross the threshold over into adulthood. During a conversation about what to study in college, Tara declares: “I think maybe I’ll just do business ‘cause everything is business now. Every day, just like all the time.”
McKenna-Bruce gives a tour de force performance. There are flashes of consternation on her face and she uses closed body language to indicate discomfort. She often looks at the ground as if there is a reminder at her feet to act like she’s having fun. Feeling one way and acting another is fine in most circumstances, but it has devastating consequences in the arena of sexual intimacy.
Once the girls link up with the men, there are the requisite machinations to match everyone with a suitable partner. There are courtship rituals that take place while pregaming on resort balconies littered with alcohol bottles and in nightclubs saturated with blue light and propulsive, bass-heavy dance music. In a pivotal beach scene, one guy negotiates his way into sexual activity with Tara. She doesn’t want to go to the beach, but he insists they go together, alone. She doesn’t want to go into the water, but he throws her into the waves. While she calls him out on his attempted negging, she is unable to resist his physically aggressive overtures.
Although the film is called “How to Have Sex,” everything that comes before and after sex is more important than the event itself. It sensitively depicts the sexual-violence spectrum and shows how an encounter can go from half-hearted consent to unwanted sex to rape. Walker is an experienced cinematographer, and her sharp direction underscores the narrative action. From the shaky camera work in the club scenes to the slow, still, close-ups of the girls waking up after a night out, she induces the ominous feeling that something bad has happened, but we’re not quite sure how to label it.
The wardrobe choices in the film are similarly instructive. Early in the film, Tara gives Skye the shirt off her back when Skye is indecisive about what to wear. Skye dresses Tara during subsequent scenes, but the garments she gives to Tara are uncomfortable (and green, the color that represents envy). Tara wears the outfits when Em confirms how great she looks, a further habituation into enduring discomfort.
There is an interesting commentary on men’s behavior when one male character who suspects his friend has harmed Tara admits that his friend is a “nightmare of a guy.” He goes on to explain why they remain friends — reputation laundering under the guise of vulnerability. Nightmare guys are made by those willing to enable them.
Beyond the lesson about the sexual violence continuum, there are two additional takeaways from this film. If friends are making jokes at your expense, they’re likely not your friends. “Yes means yes” and “No means no” are simple phrases to consent to or decline sexual activity, but communication and relationship dynamics are complicated. Learning how to have to sex means learning to recognize when “no’s” are going unheard, and friendship may be the place to practice these skills.
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Stanfood bounces onto campusBranded yoga balls that appeared in dining halls this morning launched Stanfood onto campus. A web-app that provides dining hall information in a more accessible and user-friendly way, Stanfood was developed at TreeHacks.
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While a typical Monday morning may find students begrudgingly making their way to class, this morning, some noticed a new fixture in their dorm’s lounge: a branded gray yoga ball. The few who managed to get breakfast also may have spotted a yoga ball or two in their dining hall.
The branded yoga balls marked the official launch of Stanfood, a web-app that provides dining hall information in a more accessible and user-friendly way.
Users of Stanfood can sort through dining halls menus by allergen, student reviews, pictures, crowd size and more.
Founder and creator of Stanfood, Alexander Yue ’27, shared that the website initially draws menu information from the R&DE website, and students can further enhance its accuracy by providing live updates on menu information or rating the food items themselves.
According to Yue, Stanfood allows students to get better nutrition and have a more enjoyable experience. He also plans to add a social component to the web app, where students can make connections with others in dining halls or find someone to share a meal with.
A close friend of Yue, Adam Young ’27, brainstormed the idea for Stanfood with Yue at this year’s TreeHacks competition.
At the time, their initial pitch was nowhere near ready, according to Young, and today’s version is a result of Yue’s hard work. “This is [Yue’s] brainchild. He’s always been one of the most hardworking people I’ve ever seen, to a degree that I find unbelievable,” Young said.
Yue’s funding for the 100-yoga ball launch came from the Stanford Startup Society and a TikTok challenge, in which he promptly deleted his TikTok after winning. He estimated each yoga ball’s cost as approximately $4.80, shipping and all.
“I really hope some people have an extra smile in their day, something to laugh about. Hopefully people actually use them, they’re kind of ergonomic,” Yue said.
The inflation of the yoga balls began at approximately 10 p.m. Sunday night, in Yue’s dorm. Each yoga ball was painstakingly hand pumped by Yue and friends. The first round of yoga balls was distributed in each Wilbur dorm as well as Wilbur dining hall.
Stern dining hall followed with one yoga per dorm. Arrillaga Family Dining had a few balls hand delivered before Crothers did.
Branner was the last of the first batch of yoga balls before the second round of balls were inflated in Casper dining hall and subsequently distributed to surrounding dorms.
A trip to Florence Moore dining hall followed, where Yue was let in by a friend, Chuer Yang ’27. She was studying for her midterm before she joined Yue in pumping up yoga balls.
After hand pumping her first yoga ball, Yang said, “I feel like it’s going to bring a lot of joy to people’s lives; I feel like this very random act of spontaneity will cause a lot of confusion. This is so… funny.”
Yang also stressed the passivity she thinks many students have toward their food consumption, citing the value of convenience over health most students hold; a problem Stanfood solves.
Lakeside Dining was the next stop, where the third batch of yoga balls were inflated. The surrounding dorms were gifted with the gray branded yoga balls.
A venture to Ricker Dining followed the same vein, balls pumped and delivered.
The final batch of balls were delivered to dorms in GovCo at approximately 3 a.m., bringing a total of exactly 69 balls distributed, with plans for further distribution in the morning.
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‘Io Capitano’ evokes shared humanity at Stanford in Florence screening"The indignation that we experience after watching films like 'Io Capitano' should not be a momentary feeling that quickly fades with our next distraction," Madary writes.
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After a morning class about Florentine squares and architecture, the Stanford in Florence cohort convened in a movie theater to watch the Oscar nominated film “Io Capitano” (2023), directed by Matteo Garrone. We had spent the previous six weeks enjoying rich cultural experiences, attending courses in silk-paneled rooms overlooking the Arno river and savoring Italy’s gastronomic delights. “Io Capitano” brought quite the contrast to our leisurely study-abroad lifestyle. It showed us just how out of touch we were with the lived experiences of people on the move around the world.
Stanford hosted this film screening as part of Black History Month in Florence. The film follows the migration route of two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, who journey from West Africa to Italy in search of a better life. While the film includes some fictional elements, it is based on true accounts of migrant experiences and spares no details of the appalling conditions people brave along Mediterranean routes.
Garrone primarily filmed “Io Capitano” using point of view shots, a technique that enables viewers to enter a character’s perspective. It offers access to details that a documentary film might omit and helps the audience feel like they are journeying alongside the boys. The decision to use a hand-held camera enhances this effect, creating shakier scenes that give viewers a sense of immediacy, almost as if they are moving and breathing with the characters. I had previously watched several documentaries about migration routes, but “Io Capitano” captured moments that I had never before seen on screen. The brutality of Libyan torture chambers and intrusive body searches for valuables particularly gripped me.
These realistic scenes had a powerful emotional effect on me. As I watched the film, some thoughts kept running through my mind: “Someone is living this reality right now. While I sit comfortably in a movie theater, someone my age is sitting in prison and fearing for their life, is thirsty in the desert, is being robbed or enduring torture and forced labor.”
Between these painful moments, comforting fantasies filmed in vibrant colors relieve viewers from the harrowing scenes that they witness on screen — for example, a woman who otherwise would have died of thirst flies through the Sahara desert while holding the protagonist’s hand. Scenes like these underscore the power of human imagination to render life’s harsh realities more bearable and to rise beyond the physical and mental constraints that bring about suffering in our world.
After the screening, we spoke with Abdou Salam and Abega, two men who had taken a similar migration route from West Africa to Italy, where they arrived in 2017. They, alongside Suzie Alexander, are founders and members of the Cetona-based cultural association Loop-La-Loop that welcomes migrant people to Italy through recreational activities aimed at restoring dignity, supporting aspirations and encouraging freedom of expression. A member of the audience asked whether the film’s depiction of migration routes was accurate. They both confirmed that the scenes were authentic but explained that their personal experiences with migration had been much worse. Traveling as adults, they suffered more brutal treatment in Libyan prisons and attempted to cross the Mediterranean multiple times before succeeding.
Viewers might be puzzled about why people continue to attempt such migration routes despite knowing the dangers that they entail. Often, unbearable life circumstances such as war and persecution at home drive these decisions. The case of “Io Capitano” illustrates another motivation — the power of someone’s desire for a better life. During the Q&A session, one man shared that he still would have traveled to Italy, even after the difficulties of his migration experience, while the other said he would not have attempted the journey if he knew then what he knows now.
The film does not simply elicit feelings of pity. Rather, it is a hopeful modern odyssey about two young boys taking life into their own hands. They not only embark on a geographic quest but also complete the universal journey from childhood to adulthood and experience the moral awakening that all humans must face. They are innovative, determined and assume large responsibilities. In the midst of their heart-breaking encounters with human evil, Seydou and Moussa display a genuine concern for the well-being of those around them. Their instinctive efforts to care for one another and for strangers contrast the moral attitudes of many adult characters who instead treat human lives as means for profit or as worthless, disposable goods.
Constant exposure to headlines about migration have removed the shock of what is happening at borders around the world for many news outlet audiences. We most often hear about thousands of people entering the country and overwhelming its borders. Rarely do we reflect on who these people are — on the fact that they have made difficult choices and sacrifices and that they too desire a safe, happy life. Instead, the topic of immigration has become a tool for politicians to craft identities and build platforms.
Our immigration system is broken because we do not think about people on the move as human beings. Art steps in to remind us of our own humanity at times like this, when politicians, institutions, law enforcement and media are failing to respect human dignity. More than anything, art invites us to empathize, reframe our preconceptions and take another’s perspective.
Migration is not a crisis. On the contrary, it is a very normal part of human history. The true crisis is our society’s numbness to human rights violations. So often, we shy away from discomfort. We seek remedies and distractions to make any unsightly pains around us disappear. We shut our eyes and delude ourselves about reality.
Let us actively seek moments of discomfort, so that we might harness the shock and horror that we feel at the state of the world and reconsider our individual responsibilities. The indignation that we experience after watching films like “Io Capitano” should not be a momentary feeling that quickly fades with our next distraction. Instead, this story should remind viewers of their duty to treat other human beings as human beings, beginning in their own communities.
Perhaps the prestige of this Oscar nomination will finally force elites to confront the shameful sufferings of this world rather than ease deeper into the leisurely comforts at their disposal and blind themselves from reality.
My academic exposure and personal engagement with the topic of immigration have given me strong opinions about our human responsibility to protect and defend the rights of migrants and refugees, but I am keenly aware that many people do not share my views. Throughout the weeks after the screening, I have reflected on how art rises above the political and bridges human hearts in ways that empirical measurements, academic papers and discussions cannot. When experiencing a work of art, the focus does not lie in being right, making the most convincing argument or proving another person wrong. Instead, masterful works, such as “Io Capitano,” allow us to process contentious issues and challenging emotions that might otherwise succumb to defensive, unproductive conversations. At a time when levels of political disagreement have surpassed reasonable friction, re-centering our attention to art might inch us closer to the common human understanding our democracy so desperately needs.
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‘Man of God’ captures female rage and resistanceAATP’s MainStage production explored gender roles, sexualization and the female experience through powerful acting and staging.
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Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.
This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
At 7:55 p.m. on Saturday night, the Nitery stage lay dormant, an ominously still tableau of a hotel room waiting to be filled with humor, betrayal and epiphany. Projections of camera feeds, paired with prophetically sinister audio, inhabited the space for the next five minutes as the theater’s audience filled the room.
Five minutes later, the lights dimmed as a girl walked on stage and discovered a hidden camera in her hotel room. For the next hour and a half, the Asian American Theater Project’s (AATP) MainStage production, “Man of God,” explored ideas of feminine rage, togetherness, archetype and the male gaze.
“Man of God” began by introducing its four main characters, all members of a Korean Christian youth group on a mission trip to Bangkok: Samantha (Emma Hong ’26), Kyung-Hwa (Junah Jang ’25), Mimi (Serena Tran ’25) and Jen (Chloe Chow ’23 M.A. ’24).
While the group is clearly well-acquainted, their colliding personalities seemed to put them at odds with one another. Through numerous bouts of banter, each member of the quartet established themselves as a specific archetype of woman. Samantha was almost infantilized by her naivete, Kyung-Hwa’s devotion to her religious beliefs led her into multiple arguments with other characters, Mimi’s irreverence sprouted as a reaction to being unseen and Jen’s dedication to her education became her defining characteristic.
The juxtaposition of these four character archetypes, made all the more apparent by their aptly designed costumes (created by Dana Chiueh ’23 M.A. ’24), brought to life an ensemble that struck a perfect balance between comedic disputes and serious conversations.
After finding a hidden camera in their bathroom, the group panics and attempts to contact their pastor (Henry Tian ’27), only to later discover that the camera had a label marking it as the property of their church.
At this point, the reality that friends are faced with deepens as they realize that their pastor, someone they had trusted for years, was watching them. The incongruous cast dealt with this information in their own unique ways, with Samantha struggling the most to accept that their pastor could have done something so invasive.
As Samantha faints, the show continues with a series of fantasy revenge sequence. In the first one, Samantha imagines herself fighting the pastor in a taekwondo adjacent action sequence (choreographed by Matthew Canlas ’24 and Eli Shi ’24). The rest of the sequences punctuated the show as intermissions from the main plot, portraying dramatic vignettes of Jen shooting the pastor and the group harvesting his kidneys. The audience watched the pastor ‘die’ three times as three of the actresses process their relationships to him — and the patriarchal concepts he represents — in their own ways.
Each fantasy scene was dramatically lit in a pseudo-cinematic way, with harsh reds and blues illuminating the actors’ serious faces. Tran’s performance as Mimi was particularly striking during the final revenge sequence, with a startlingly relatable display of manic aggression reminiscent of Stephanie Hsu’s Jobu Tupaki in “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.”
Although the show’s events took place entirely within a hotel room, it was not limited by its singular location. Instead, the finite staging contributed to a feeling of claustrophobia — the emotional “trappedness” felt by characters paralyzed by the sexism and sexualization that surrounded them at every corner.
Beyond the technical, the show’s true strength lied in its ability to portray the female experience — both the good and the bad. Throughout the performance, I kept finding myself thinking this is so ‘girl.’
I was struck by how fluidly the group moved between small tiffs over makeup or follower counts to moments of solidarity borne of common experience. The show made a point to connect each of these aspects of girlhood and stitch them together as a patchwork of the female experience under the patriarchy.
One of the most powerful moments of the show, and a major turning point for the group, occurred when Kyung-Hwa revealed that she had been sexually abused by two of her family members as a child. In a show filled with cast members arguing and speaking over each other, this was one of the first moments where the group felt united by a common understanding. For once, the stage was quiet. The cast finished one another’s sentences; even though not all of them had the same experiences as Kyung-Hwa, they all related to the experience of being objectified and violated by the male-driven society that surrounds them.
The show’s message expanded outwards, and clearly resonated with its audience — the end of one revenge fantasy was marked by an audience member yelling “drag his ass!” in support of the group disposing of the pastor’s body after he was ‘killed’ by Jen.
It was made clear by the cheers during revenge sequences that, while not all audience members may have shared the exact experiences of the characters of “Man of God,” they could empathize with their emotions. There was a particular depth added to the show because of its performance on a college campus, to an audience filled in part by college-aged women.
The end of the show was marked by silence. The pastor gives a long build-up to an apology, before frustrating the group and the audience alike by only apologizing instead for mis-scheduling the trip’s return flights. Jen and Kyung-Hwa tried to stand up to him before their courage sputtered into silence, and the four girls each individually gave up and began to pack their things.
This scene was the slowest in the show. The set called its realism to attention as the girls silently packed their bags in resignation and the audience was suddenly reminded of the disheveled luggage that scattered the stage.
The show’s exploration of the female experience came to a poetic conclusion when Kyung-Hwa stopped the pastor when he tried to drink a laced juice that the group had once planned on using to kill him. Despite their prior imaginings of the pastor’s demise, the characters, much like the audience, return home to their ordinary lives. But the audience members, if they were anything like me, went home feeling recognized, having found four new faces with whom they could relate their own experiences.
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Your Father: A guide to genealogical insultsSam Lustgarten gives tips on more progressive genealogical insults.
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Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
We at The Stanford Daily announce our disappointment in the prevalence of “Yo Momma” jokes on Stanford’s campus. In a spirit of abolishing the patriarchy, as well as improving the comedic ability of our campus, we are proud to announce our latest invention, the “Yo Daddy Joke.” In the future, when presented with “Yo Momma Jokes,” we recommend following this course of conversation to lay the maximum amount of comedic truth bombs.
Do you know who I was with last night? Yo Daddy! You might as well start calling me Grandsire, ‘cause I am Yo Daddy’s Daddy.
Yo Momma may have a pearl necklace, but I have Yo Daddy’s family jewels.
Do you know why Yo Daddy loves Elton John so much? Because I was his Tiny Dancer.
Yo Daddy may be too hard on you, but I was never soft with him.
Yo Daddy’s so round Miley Cyrus calls him “her wrecking ball.”
Yo Daddy’s so old, most women in the retirement home are “too young for him.”
Mothers call me Houdini, ‘cause one night with Yo Daddy, I make your marriage disappear.
Yo Daddy’s so scared of intimacy, he can’t even commit to the bit.
Do you know who loves to sleep in on Sundays? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who has eyes that dazzle in the moonlight and sparkle in the Sun? Yo Daddy.
Do you know who makes an amazing Chocolate Souffle with Raspberry Drizzle? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who is well-read, well-dressed, and always ready to mingle with the well-to-do? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who taught me how to have a relationship, to be willing to be open, and welcoming, and kind? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who promised to always be there for me, to reach out and catch me with his big, burly arms if I ever needed his love and support? Yo Daddy?
Do you know who always smelled like sandalwood and felt like home? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who told me how he was dissatisfied with his boring, suburban life with a wife he never loved and a job he always hated, and who lit up in passionate glee when I told him of my depression at my future prospects in this deadbeat town? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who told me of his plan to leave this place once and for all, to pack it all up and head off to the desert of Arizona to finally start that small little independent bookshop he always dreamed about? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who told me that, if I wanted, I could be by his side, and could create a new life, away from it all, with him in Arizona? Yo Daddy!
But do you know who, after promising to leave you and your mom and start anew by each other’s side, left me all alone at the Amtrak station, only sending me a message on WhatsApp 5 hours later that he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t leave his life, that he wasn’t brave, that he didn’t have the courage to start anew, and that we can’t do this anymore? Yo Daddy!
Do you know who’s a real love em’ and leave em’ type? Yo Daddy!
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Pro-Israel protesters rally against pro-Palestine encampmentHundreds of pro-Israel students and community members gathered to protest “terrorist support” on campus Sunday afternoon, as pro-Palestine demonstrators congregated to “defend” the student encampment at White Plaza. Though protestors chanted and carried flags on both sides, both groups dispersed without incident after several hours.
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Hundreds of pro-Israel students and community members marched from the Oval to White Plaza on Sunday afternoon to protest “terrorist support” on campus.
The pro-Israel protest was an Interfaith Rally organized by the L’Chayim Club to oppose “calls for death on our campus” and demand the University “enforce school policy and ensure student safety.”
Separated by a row of security and a strip of road, pro-Israel protestors chanted in the direction of pro-Palestine protesters, who congregrated around the student encampment, beat drums and lobbied chants in response.
Over 100 pro-Palestine students protested to “defend” the encampment, at the other side of White Plaza. Stanford Against Apartheid in Palestine (SAAP), the organizers of the pro-Palestine encampment, wrote that they would not “stand idly as these inter-fascist forces … threaten the safety of our students and the encampment.”
The encampment was reestablished on April 25 during Admit Weekend, following the February removal of the 120-day Sit-in to Stop Genocide, amid a national wave of pro-Palestine protests on university campuses.
Pro-Israel protestors gathered before the White Plaza main stage across from the pro-Palestine encampment, before they were asked to leave by security and the Stanford University Department of Public Safety. SUDPS did not respond to requests for comment.
“They didn’t say anything to the other side, even though we were being peaceful, and we did get permits, and we did get approval,” said Amalia Abecassis ’27.
Several protestors at the pro-Israel demonstration carried flags, primarily Israeli, American and Indian with some from other countries. Abecassis, a pro-Israel student organizer, told The Daily they hoped to bring together different communities to stand against antisemitism, such as an indivdual photographed in a Hamas headband on April 30. Stanford forwarded the image to federal authorities.
Edith Cohen Ph.D. ’91 said she was shocked at the disinformation spread on U.S. campuses and by the media. She expressed hope that the encampment would call “for the dismantling of Hamas.”
The demonstrations occurred on Mother’s Day, a synchronicity that resonated with Sameena Usman, a pro-Palestine protester.
“I’m here on this Mother’s Day to stand in solidarity with all the mothers who have lost their children or all the children who have lost their mother in this war,” Usman said.
Cohen said that as a mother, she too felt “very, very sad … to see babies and see other mothers crying for their babies,” but that Israel was left with no choice but war after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Pro-Israel student organizers like Noah Maltzman ’25, who is also a Daily sports staff writer, also expressed concerns about hateful rhetoric. He said as a Jewish person, he wanted to stand up to hate, especially from those who echo historical persecution and “want Jews dead.”
“I’m tired of being the scared Jew I am. I wear a kippah, always, but I wear a hat on top because I’m scared,” Maltzman said.
As he ran for Undergraduate Senate, people called Maltzman “a Zionist Nazi, a pig,” and threatened to dox him.
Maltzman said he believed students were misled by external organizations who took over the encampment with hateful rhetoric, affecting people from several backgrounds including “Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim” students, he said.
Bay Area local Jack F., who was granted partial anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said he wanted to support the pro-Palestine encampment. He was cautioned not to participate by his family because he’s Jewish, Jack said.
“From what I hear from my family, people here want to kill me, and that’s not true,” Jack said.
Similarly, Michael Batchelder, a member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) said “it’s hard to be a part of the mainstream Jewish community when I see the … ugly politics.”
Attendees from other communities articulated similar disagreements with others despite shared cultural identities. Dozens of pro-Israel protesters carried Indian flags. At the pro-Palestine encampment, other protestors carried banners reading “Hindus for Human Rights” and “#VoteOut HitlerModi.”
Satish Chandra, a Santa Clara resident who serves on the Chief Advisory Committee for the Santa Clara Police Department, spoke on behalf of pro-Israel Hindu allies, some of whom were affiliated with the Hindu American Foundation, at the demonstration.
Chandra called on Indian Americans to support Israel. “I am here standing with humanity … standing with the people who have been facing terrorist attacks and are constantly getting attacked and bullied every day,” Chandra told The Daily.
To Chandra, a historical arc exists between terror attacks in India and Israel.
Stanford student Aatika, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, drew a different historical arc: She said as a Dalit student, she acutely understood how violence and discrimination across different countries was connected.
“I’m holding a poster that says that we need to vote out Hitler and Modi because there’s uncanny similarities between how both have operated, one in the past and one currently,” Aatika said.
Similarly, Anuradha Bhagwati, a member of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, said the pro-Israel protest brought together several issues: “ I’ve seen the rise of Hindutva in India, and the growing oppression against Muslims in India and in the United States. I feel like it’s my obligation to connect the dots.”
Ajinkya Ashok and Prasanna Gaibhive, members of the Ambedkar-King Study Circle, agreed.
“The Ambedkarite position is that injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere,” Ashok said. “We see that the Palestinian struggles are the struggles of the oppressed.”
Nancy Wagner, a pro-Israel demonstrator, wore a Biden-Harris shirt and carried an American flag with a peace symbol in one corner. “My personal interests are for peace … and a two-state solution.”
While Wagner supported free expression on each side, she discouraged vitriolic language and hate speech. “I’d like to see a little more empathy on both sides,” Wagner said.
The pro-Israel demonstration ended at the Oval without incident. Pro-Palestine supporters also dispersed, and the pro-Palestine encampment remains in White Plaza.
A previous version of this article misrepresented the date the encampment was established as April 26. — the encampment was established April 25. The Daily regrets this error.
Caroline Chen and Jessica Zhu contributed reporting.
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Fizz bug temporarily censors some terms related to Israel-Gaza warFizz users reported that terms related to the Israel-Gaza war were no longer searchable in the anonymous social media app. According to Fizz leadership, the bug was corrected.
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On Sunday, students on Fizz, an anonymous social media app developed at Stanford, noticed that the search terms “Israel,” “Palestine” and “protest” led to no results, sparking rumors about whether Fizz moderators were censoring posts related to the Israel-Gaza war.
Fizz cofounder Ashton Cofer told The Daily that Fizz does not have any banned keywords, aside from common slurs linked to hate speech, and that the terms “Israel” and “Palestine” have not been banned on the site.
“Our engineers investigated and found that a bug in our moderation system was causing some posts to not be indexed into our searching service,” Cofer said. “This means that some posts weren’t showing in search even though they were still showing in the New / Fizzin’ / Top feeds.”
Mandla Msipa ’26, a Fizz moderator, acknowledged that earlier in the day, users were having difficulty searching words related to the Israel-Hamas conflict, but that the specific Fizz posts talking about the problem were removed, either by the original posters or by other moderators.
Fizz moderators are randomly chosen from a pool of active users who have a history of good behavior on the platform, according to the company’s website. They are then trained to remove content which objectively violates Fizz’s Community Guidelines.
According to Msipa, when a user reports a post, the post is hidden and randomly assigned to a moderator, who then has twenty seconds to make a moderation decision. If the moderator is unable to make a decision within that time, the post will be sent to two other moderators, who similarly have twenty seconds to make a moderation decision. For a post to be taken down or returned into the feed, two moderators must make the same moderation decision.
Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas conflict, many students have accused Fizz moderators of censorship for removing multiple series of posts related to the conflict. Msipa explained that throughout the conflict, Fizz moderators have been unsure of how to approach misinformation and spam moderation because of the political nature of most reported posts. Msipa shared that in training, moderators are taught rules on how to handle posts with content about college, such as misinformation about professors or classes, rather than political situations, because of Fizz’s intentions to be a platform about college. Furthermore, moderators don’t have a forum to communicate with one another, adding to the confusion about moderating political posts.
“As a moderator community, we’re really struggling right now to be consistent about what content people are allowed to post,” Msipa said.
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Stanford softball slides into regionals, earns No. 8 seedStanford softball learned yesterday that they earned the No. 8 overall seed in the NCAA Softball tournament.
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On Sunday, the Stanford Cardinal softball team (43-13, 17-7 Pac-12) earned the No. 8 seed in the NCAA Division I Softball Championship, paving way for a potential title run for the second-straight year. The Cardinal will face off against the unseeded Saint Mary’s (30-22) in their first Regionals matchup at the Boyd & Jill Smith Family Stadium on May 17.
Star sophomore pitcher NiJaree Canady, the Pac-12 Pitcher of the Year, will likely pitch in the Cardinal’s first game of the regional.
Last season, the Cardinal came close to bringing home the first NCAA championship in program history, losing to the eventual champions Oklahoma in the Women’s College World Series bracket play finals.
With the addition of freshmen Ava Gall and Jade Berry, along with transfer infielder Taryn Kern, the Cardinal have posted a successful 42-12 season while securing 17 wins in conference play, tied for the program record.
The Cardinal look to bounce back from their Pac-12 tournament semi-finals loss to Utah this past week, as they make preparations for their NCAA tournament opener this Friday.
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Third FLiCKS screening hits the right noteA cappella performances, audience laughter and cups all featured during "Pitch Perfect" FLiCKS screening, writes Anthony Martinez Rosales.
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Last Sunday, May 5, CEMEX Auditorium hosted a viewing of “Pitch Perfect” (2012) in the third FLiCKS screening of the year.
The film features a comedic inside look at the world of collegiate a cappella. It’s not the first time that FLiCKS has shown “Pitch Perfect”; the organization hosted an advanced screening before its theatrical release in 2012.
When protagonist Beca (Anna Kendrick) auditions with the original song “Cups,” the crowd erupted with cheers. During the scene, in the only in-film shenanigan of the night, a group of students got on stage and performed the song. Some audience members joined in from their seats using cups of their own.
The audience reacted loudly throughout the film. They cheered, booed, sang along and, most of all, laughed. Some screamed “make-out” and commented that Beca “wasn’t like other girls.” Fittingly, the screening also featured surprise performances from several Stanford a cappella groups.
Stanford Talisman opened with a performance before the show as early-comers rushed to claim a free drink.
Talisman Co-Director, and Alto, Sofia Pesantez ’24 said the team was excited to receive an invitation from FLiCKS’s Annie Reller ’24 to perform.
“We watched ‘Pitch Perfect’ as a bonding activity, and it is cool to talk about the college a cappella scene,” Pesantez said.
Amongst the singing, FLiCKS staff distributed paper for paper plane making and neon-green punch cards, which debuted during the last screening.
FLiCKS’ Hanna Carlsson ’27 said that “back in the day, FLiCKS used these punch cards as a season ticket. You’d buy a punch card for the entire year, and this was your way to get into the movie.”
Carlsson said that, this time around, the punch card is “a kind of participation rewards system.”
“If people come to enough FLiCKS, hopefully they can get some free merch,” Carlsson said. “We are hoping to bring back these bits of tradition — the punch cards and the shenanigans — to bring back the FLiCKS experience.”
The next performance began immediately after the doors opened. As eager crowd members flowed into CEMEX, they were met with voices of Mixed Company.
Many audience members commented that they couldn’t hear the group’s voices, an issue present throughout the night’s performances, but they clapped nonetheless.
Mixed Company Baritone Nick Buckovich ’26 introduced the film and commented that Mixed Company has previously competed at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), the competition featured in the film.
The night’s student short film selection included the ending of the fantasy-action “Heartrender Bane of The Elf Queen” (2023), which had been split up over the past two screenings.
Eventually, the screen faded to black. Audiences clapped, thinking that the film would start, but then a group of men sporting red blazers flooded the stage.
In the third performance of the night, The Stanford Mendicants gave a surprise appearance including a rendition of The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.”
Following the film’s conclusion, a final surprise awaited outside: a performance by Fleet Street.
Audience member and senior Yesenia Garcia ’24 said the live performances were “the cherry on top” of the night.
“It is really cool to see events like this put together,” Garcia said. “But it definitely makes it so that I wish they had been present earlier.”
FLiCKS will return on May 26.
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Pressure to play through the pain: Athletes promote mental health awareness at GameFACESAt Stanford's annual GameFACES event, student-athletes opened up about their mental health journeys in order to promote mental health awareness.
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Stanford’s student-athletes are no strangers to pressure: They face the academic stressors tied to education at an elite institution and the immense pressures involved with competing at the highest levels in collegiate athletics. The pressure underscores why it’s important to support athlete’s mental health and wellbeing — a task taken up on on Tuesday evening by the seventh annual GameFACES event.
Organized by Stanford Athletics to recognize Mental Health Awareness Month, GameFACES brought student-athletes to Meyer Green to celebrate the community’s strength and foster conversation around unique challenges faced by student-athletes. Organizers created spaces to delve into shared experiences and
GameFACES hosted a panel with seven students from different sports who shared personal stories that described resilience and experiences overcoming adversities associated with mental health issues. The stories were received by supportive teammates and friends and representatives from Stanford Sport Psychology, who shared additional information and resources with interested student-athletes.
Senior and lightweight rower Mikayla Chen opened the evening by speaking about her first years on the Farm, where she worked to convince the University to reinstate the rowing team, while simultaneously confronting her parents’ divorce.
“I had to be the student-athlete I was recruited to be and try to reinstate the team, while also basically being the mom of the family from 3,000 miles away,” Chen said.
Others told stories about deep personal losses and how it affected performance both on and off the field. Redshirt sophomore forward Andrea Kitahata on the women’s soccer team shared how she was affected by the passing of Katie Meyer, her friend and teammate.
“Working through the grief of losing someone who was built into my daily routine and suddenly disappeared took everything out of me,” Kitahata said.
She initially wanted to supress her emotions: “Feeling the pressure of playing time, starting spots, and my career, I wanted nothing more than to push my emotions down and be on the field.”
But it was only several months later that she realized how deeply she was affected. “As an athlete you’re taught to muscle through pain. It took me six months to realize that this pain was actually an indicator that I was not on the right track,” Kitahata said.
Student-athletes also shared stories of perseverance and overcoming immense obstacles.
For Chen and senior thrower Brandy Atuatasi, the healing journey was centered around their faith, especially as he navigated losing multiple family members.
“God has given them eternal life, and they’ll always be a part of me,” Atuatasi said. “They’re a source of my strength, and I’ll forever carry on their legacies.”
Some also described the critical role mental health resources played in personal battles. Stanford sports counseling helped senior diver Hunter Hollenbeck find a new sense of purpose.
“After spending 6 months in a life I did not want to live, my task was to figure out what life I did want after all of this,” Hollenbeck said. “In those sessions [with Stanford Sport Psychology], I redefined who Hunter Hollenbeck was, is, and wants to be.”
For student-athletes, Stanford Sports Psychology is one of the primary resources offering mental health services and resources. The team of psychologists provide free individualized counseling for varsity athletes on any issue regarding academics, athletics or the athlete’s personal lives.
Junior driver Sophia Sanders on the women’s water polo team also credited mental health resources in helping her understand and work through depression.
“Origins are difficult to untangle, but I know the work I did untying all those mental knots in therapy is the number one reason why I am the person I am today,” Sanders said.
Others illustrated how coming out the other side has impacted their lives for the better. Describing a triumphant return to her sport after lengthy treatment for a nerve condition and the passing of her father, fifth-year rower Regan McDonnell said, “If I can do this, if I can come back from getting 2 ribs removed and not rowing for 16 months to race in an NCAA boat, I can do anything.”
Senior rower Nick Woehrle described how he also hoped to help others, especially following his experiences with anorexia. “I feel now that sharing my story has become part of my story, that part of my healing process is coupled with the possibility of helping others with their own,” Woehrle said.
For several student-athletes, events like GameFACES were integral to sparking conversations and creating a supportive community to navigate mental health issues.
“It’s great that, apart from the resources that we have as athletes to help ourselves improve mental health, we can also share in a wider community setting,” said former swimmer Neel Roy in an interview with The Daily.
Events like GameFACES are integral to allow student-athletes to feel less isolated and ensure that “everyone understands that they’re not the only ones going through what they’re going through, and everyone’s struggling in their own way,” Roy said.
While participants stressed this was only a first to step work to support the mental well-being of all student-athletes, GameFACES provided a positive opportunity to the Stanford athletics community to seek resources, share stories and provide support to others.
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Battle of the Band winners ‘The Move’ to open at Frost Fest 2024The namesake student band gains traction on campus in spreading their jazz-pop style of performance.
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From its very fresh beginnings, The Move has always been on the move. With their seasoned instrumentalists and experimental “20-minute jazz standard sessions,” the student band is rising to the spotlight within the Stanford music scene, winning this quarter’s Battle of the Bands and the candidacy to open for guest performers at Frost Fest 2024 on May 18.
The seven-man-band has quickly made a name for itself with its mash-up of jazz and pop, featuring bassist Archish Arun ’26, drummer Jonathan Martinez ’27, saxophonists Quinn Simmons ’27 and Ethan Htun ’27, pianist Haohan Wu ’27, guitarist Ryota Sato ’27 and frontman vocalist Jackson McCormick ’27.
The band’s path to formation was equally as expeditious, forming in weeks one and two of last autumn quarter, though the members’ roots in music-making stem deeper than college.
“I played a lot of jazz and knew a lot of jazz players growing up.” Sato said. “And then Archish said he’s transferring to Stanford and [we] really wanted to start a band. From there, it was really fast paced — we just figured out there were a lot of really good jazz players, specifically at Stanford, who really want to play pop music.”
The group said their early head start enabled them to take their time in developing their groove and image as a band, with each quarter serving as a “phase” in their cumulative trajectory.
“Autumn quarter was getting to know each other, just musically working with Jackson and each other as a lot of us haven’t played in groups with a singer,” Arun said. “Phase two and winter was trying to build a brand and an identity as a band, as we did our first gigs in winter as well. Spring, so far, is visibility, like how do we get as much traction on campus?”
The Move recently performed during Admit Weekend during “The Move on the Move,” where band members paraded around campus with the prospective students. The event also featured two other student bands, Six of Spades and Peach Fuzz, coming together to offer a memorable live music experience.
Arun said that The Move’s performance was inspired by the energy that Htun and Sato experienced at their own Admit Weekends, which they hoped to emulate for this year’s prospective students.
Even as the ensemble seeks to emulate the performing spirit of preceding student bands, they place emphasis on the music itself. This “music first” mindset has formulated and maximized the band’s unique sound as influenced by each student’s personal music background.
“There’s a lot of spontaneity and improv and we play through it,” Arun said. “There are aspects of jazz but there are also elements of funk and Jackson’s got a lot of gospel and soul in his voice as well. Considering how short our tenure as a band has been, I like to think we have such a clear identity of what we do.”
The ensemble also takes inspiration from distinctive, spontaneous bands like Vulfpeck and their unique approach within the funk realm in building an individually in-tune and solid identity.
“[Vulfpeck] doesn’t rehearse. They’ve played with each other for so long, just on recording sessions and those kinds of things, but they just show up to a gig and there’s a guy who has a Mission Control mic, and he’s just telling them onstage what to do,” Arun said.
The band’s infusion of funk, jazz and pop music also represents something bigger — a reconciliation between the group’s classical taste for jazz and their goal to relate to and have fun with the audience through better-known pop tunes.
“Jazz is regrettably a bit obscure, so it’s fun just sharing these experiences of playing songs that your friends know, that your mom knows and that your siblings know,” Htun said.
The Move hopes to foster appreciation of new, innovative music with the motto of “bringing soul back to Stanford.” To do so, band members aim to highlight their personal value of the technical complexities behind making music rather than just how loud or stimulating their performance is.
“I’d rather [have] somebody be reacting to how I sound than to the intensity of how I’m playing,” McCormick said. “I’d rather have somebody be like ‘how did they just do that?’”
Reflecting on their music journey, The Move hopes to expand their gigs while commemorating their old ones.
“One of our best shows was at the Brick and Mortar in San Francisco,” Arun said.
“Get yourself a Filipino burrito [there],” McCormick added. He said that the band’s obscure yet delicious food-find helped the group further bond, connect and celebrate with each other post-show.
Looking ahead, the band is excited and grateful to take the stage at Frost, hoping that people continue coming to music events to keep Stanford’s music scene alive.
“For us to be achieving this gig after only a few months of being a band feels surreal, but it’s a testament to how the band scene and support system here is thriving,” Arun said.
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Men’s basketball lands transfer from UC IrvineUC Irvine transfer Derin Saran announced his commitment to Stanford on Friday.
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Former University of California at Irvine guard Derin Saran announced his commitment to Stanford Friday morning, the third player that Kyle Smith has obtained from the transfer portal this year.
In his lone season with the Anteaters, Saran averaged 10.1 points and 1.6 assists per game.
The 6-foot-4 guard has displayed his proficiency to score in transition and spot-up situations, while also being a prolific passer. He will have the opportunity to compete for a starting role for the Cardinal next season.
“Derin possesses good size and skill in the backcourt,” Smith said. “His ability to score and make plays with a high usage rate should translate well as he levels up to Stanford.”
Saran helped the Anteaters achieve a 24-10 overall record and a 17-3 record in the Big West conference. UC Irvine received a bid to the NIT, where they lost to Utah in the first round. While the ACC will certainly be a step up in play, Saran’s early career achievements reveal that he has the potential to be an impact player at the highest levels of college hoops in the coming years.
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GSC unanimously calls for end to legacy admissionsThe GSC unanimously passed a joint resolution to express support for California Assembly Bill No. 1780, which would prohibit the use of legacy and philanthropy status in admissions decisions.
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The Graduate Student Council (GSC) unanimously passed a resolution urging the Faculty Senate to prohibit the use of legacy and philanthropy admissions at its meeting on Tuesday.
The joint resolution with the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) expresses support for California Assembly Bill No. 1780, which would prohibit preferences for legacy and donor applicants, and asks the University to “opt to eliminate legacy and philanthropy preferences in its admissions processes before the state legislature may impose the restriction itself.”
The UGS also passed the bill with one abstention and three in opposition at its meeting Tuesday, where senators said they were concerned that the abolition of legacy and philanthropy preferences would negatively impact donor relations with the University.
The joint resolution, drafted by current UGS co-chair Diego Kagurabadza ’25, states that “legacy and philanthropy preferences provide an advantage to those who need it least,” and pointed to actions taken by Wesleyan University and other institutions in the wake of the SFFA v. Harvard case. The Supreme Court decision ruled last June that most existing race-based admissions policies were unconstitutional.
Kagurabadza said that the resolution was meant to pressure the Faculty Senate to more publicly speed up the elimination of legacy and philanthropy preferences so that the University is not forced to comply with California Assembly Bill 1780.
Representatives from Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) also spoke to councilors about housing assignments and water-filling stations at EVGR.
Justin Akers, the senior director of student housing assignments, said that only six or seven students had ranked the pilot program for triple-occupany housing as their first choice in graduate housing applications. R&DE was thus only planning to set aside three rooms as triples next year, he said.
“That way, we won’t be forcing anyone into this that doesn’t really want it,” he said.
Senior Associate Director of R&DE Rebecca Benaderet said that R&DE was planning to place two water filling stations with card access at EVGR, but that the endeavor would have to wait until the fall because of a backlog in University IT work.
The GSC also unanimously certified the results of the recent ASSU elections, including the passing of the Statement on Divestment and the election of Diego Kagurabadza ’25 and Divya Ganesan ’25 as ASSU Executives, as well as a slate of 15 members to serve on the GSC for the 2024-2025 academic year.
The divestment statement, which was supported by 74.64% of graduate student voters, calls on the University to “divest from companies supporting Israel’s apartheid, genocide, and other internationally recognized war crimes against the Palestinian people.” 72.86% of undergraduate students who voted on the April ballot initiative also expressed support for the statement, which was spearheaded by Students Against Apartheid in Palestine (SAAP).
The certified slate of new councilors will join incumbents Chris West, Leslie Luqueño, Emmit Pert and Áron Ricardo Perez-Lopez, who is an editor at The Daily, on the GSC next year.
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Familiar words in novel contexts: Arthur Sze translates the human conditionSze's collection references the concept that every life event is not lined in a particular hierarchy, but rather that everything exists as a piece of hanging glass from an immense chandelier of life.
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Mohr Visiting Poet Arthur Sze shared his work alluding to nature, translation and the human condition at a public reading on Wednesday. The reading, co-sponsored by the creative writing program and the Stanford Humanities Center, was packed with visitors, faculty and students.
“Often the worlds are familiar. But it seems that he’s writing about a dimension within them that we’re discovering for the first time,” said English professor A. Van Jordan in his introduction.
Stanford invites a Mohr Visiting poet to campus each year. In addition to holding a reading, the poet teaches a small undergraduate writing course and hosts a colloquium. This quarter, Sze has students experiment with different forms of poetry in ENGLISH 192V: The Occasions of Poetry, drawing on his own career in composing original and translating foreign poetry. His colloquium will be held May 22.
After Jordan’s introduction, Sze read a number of his poems, particularly those from his 2021 collection, “The Glass Constellation.” Sze has authored ten other books of poetry, including National Book Award winner “Sight Lines” and Pulitzer Prize finalist “Compass Rose.”
“When a black butterfly flits past,/ when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees,/ when you smell the spring of sunrise and walk up to the ditch,” Sze opened, reading from his poem “Anvil.” The natural undertones of the poem take a slight turn when Sze introduces a human pair. “When in our bodies we sway and flood,/ when you bloody your hands,/ when the mind like this Earth is struck and tilts its axis,” Sze read.
Sze said that his poem “The Glass Constellation,” which shares the same name as the collection, is inspired by Indra’s Net, an image and metaphor in Hinduism. It references the concept that every life event is not lined in a particular hierarchy, but rather that everything exists as a piece of hanging glass from an immense chandelier of life.
When a light is shined on to this chandelier, each hanging piece of glass reflects the light of the other, creating a network of interconnected experiences. Sze said that this collection also rests on notions of the weighing of a heart against a feather, an ancient Egyptian tradition that determined the dead’s place in the afterlife.
Sze mentioned the impact of translated poetry, particularly the poems of Pablo Neruda, on his work. In addition to his original poetry, Sze has also published a book of Chinese poetry translations, “The Silk Dragon.” During the reading, he recited his English translation of “Bamboo Grove” from the book.
“I sit alone in the secluded bamboo grove/ and play the zither and whistle along./ In the deep forest no one knows,/ the bright moon comes to shine on me,” Sze read. Snaps and “oohs” rippled through the audience.
Sze – who has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the past 50 years – explained how his experience there, coupled with his Chinese immigrant background, has shaped a large part of his poetic career.
“You want to be true to yourself and to your cultural heritage and to your experience of living in America, but you have to find a way to sort of deepen your experience of that place, not just through landscape, but through people, through nature,” Sze said.
Sze said that his community in Santa Fe had allowed him to gain a conversational understanding of Spanish. To better comprehend the rhythms and flows of Spanish poetry in its original language, Sze took Spanish classes at his city outreach center.
Out of all poetry works, however, Sze says his favorites are the untranslatable ones. “One of my favorite texts that many people don’t know is [one that explores] questions about heaven, questioning heaven and the questions of heaven. They’re all cosmological in ‘what is composed of the brightest bright and darkest dark,’” he said.
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‘The program of no’: Creative writing program faces lecturer shortagesAfter the implementation of a four-year cap on lectureships last year, the creative writing program has faced teaching staff shortages that some say are discouraging students from the department.
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Two creative writing lecturers requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation. Pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns were used to protect sources’ identities and improve readability.
Rose Whitmore, a former Jones lecturer, was one of Kathaleen Mallard’s ’25 favorite teachers and mentors. She received the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize — the same year she was let go. When another student asked her to be their advisor that year, Whitmore had to decline.
“I advised her for the rest of that year and then she had to go find somebody, and I think that was a bummer for her,” Whitmore said.
Whitmore’s dismissal was necessitated by a four-year cap on lectureships, implemented by the creative writing program last year, which meant that those hired after the cap would be terminated at the end of their four years. But despite the policy, Stanford’s creative writing program — which claims to be “one of the best-known in the country” — continues to struggle to meet student demand, with high-volume waitlists for capped workshop classes.
For some students and lecturers, this tension between the program’s hiring limits and student demand means that creative writing students are not receiving the resources they need.
“Students are having a harder time getting into the classes,” said Charlie, a lecturer who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. “That’s why we’re disappointed at the faculty’s decision to reduce the number of lectureships — we feel like it’s wrong and it’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, considering the demand.”
This academic year is the first that current Stegner fellows, from whom Jones lectureships are usually hired, are not being offered the opportunity to apply for the lectureship. In an email obtained by The Daily, Nicholas Jenkins, the co-director of the creative writing program, and Elizabeth Tallent, the former co-director of the program, wrote that the program lacked the funds to support new positions. Following advocacy to increase compensation to allow lecturers to afford Bay Area rent, the program recently increased salaries for Jones lectures.
Some students who face limited resources and teaching staff say they are being discouraged from the program.
Natalie Rodriguez ’25, who said she applied to Stanford because of its creative writing program, said that despite being a declared English major, there has not been a quarter where she has not been stressed about enrollment.
During her frosh winter, Rodriguez said she struggled to get into ENGLISH 90: “Fiction Writing” and eventually got off the waitlist after classes had already started. She considered herself lucky — if she had not gotten into the class, she said she likely would have been turned off by the program and probably would not have become an English major with a concentration in creative writing.
“That is the whole reason that I wanted to come here and it probably would have been incredibly stressful to have to figure out a whole plan and to feel like I had been lied to,” she said.
Even students who brave the enrollment process say the challenges are making them hesitant about pursuing a creative writing career.
Mallard said she can feel a sense of discouragement in the classroom from seeing lecturers get let go and experiencing the difficulty of getting into classes, which both make it seem like Stanford does not think creative writing is a “valid pathway.”
According to Mallard, Whitmore is “one of the best short story writers [in the] nation.”
“If she was let go, what hope do the rest of us have for finding a job in creative writing?” Mallard asked.
Sam, a lecturer who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation, wrote that they found it strange that Stanford does not have the funds for additional creative writing classes when other departments and classes, like engineering, require more expensive resources. If there was a lack of instructors in the computer science department, they wrote, Stanford would immediately address the issue.
Hiring caps mean that creative writing instructors also often have to turn down students looking for advisors.
Natalie Rodriguez ’25, who applied for an honors in the arts, said she reached out to several lecturers to advise her creative writing project. But none had the capacity to help her, because they were at capacity for the number of other students who had asked to do independent work. Eventually, Rodriguez found someone in a different department to advise her.
Sam wrote that since the passing of the last program director, Eavan Boland, the new co-directors have implemented a policy of two independent studies students per year, per lecturer. Though many lecturers, like Charlie, say they take this maximum amount of two independent studies students per year, they are unable to fully meet student demand.
Capped workshops, which Rodriguez said are some of the program’s most popular and demanded classes, are also affected by teaching staff shortages. The most popular introductory creative writing classes, ENGLISH 9CE: “Creative Expression in Writing,” ENGLISH 90: “Fiction Writing” and ENGLISH 91: “Creative Nonfiction” are all workshops.
“It’s important that workshops are kept to a class of 15 students, so that each student’s work gets the attention it deserves,” Sam wrote. “Most introductory courses have waitlists of 10 students or more.”
Whitmore said she used to receive many emails from students, especially from seniors who really needed to take a specific class to fulfill their minor. She would occasionally take more students than the cap, but such a decision is up to the discretion of each particular lecturer.
“If there’s too many students in the class, people just don’t get the same experience,” Whitmore said. “Creative writing classes should be small because it’s an intimate excavator process and it’s meant to be.”
Workshops typically begin with a few weeks dedicated to studying the works of other authors, before students take turns sharing their personal work. Class sessions are then spent providing feedback to individual students — Rodriguez said these are her favorite classes to be in because she enjoys reading her classmates’ work and getting feedback from them and lecturers.
Since the introduction of enrollment groups, though, Sam wrote the composition of their introductory creative writing classes has been affected, with more seniors and juniors than before. “Of course we want seniors and juniors in our classes, but we’d especially like for freshmen and sophomores to have access to these introductory classes,” they wrote.
“This is a failure of vision and attention at all levels of upper administration at Stanford. If I was a parent of a Stanford student who could not take a Creative Writing class, I would be astonished and angry,” Sam wrote.
Mallard said this was a huge problem for creative writing students, because it is hard to get into the classes they need. She said that it feels like there are more creative writing minors and English majors with a creative writing concentration now, “but they’re not hiring any new lecturers and a lot of really, really famous lecturers, like famous writers, are let go.”
Sam wrote that when the creative writing program was under former director Eavan Boland, the culture and priority of the program was centered around the students. However, since her passing in 2020, the leadership and direction of the program has changed. Sam wrote that critical needs are not addressed, even when expressed by lecturers and students.
“Every email from our directors detail all the things that can’t be done. It’s become the Program of No. The culture and morale that was built by Eavan in partnership with the Jones lecturers and generations of undergraduates is falling apart in front of our eyes,” Sam wrote.
In an email to The Daily, Gabriella Safran, senior associate dean of humanities and arts, wrote that she and the faculty in the program were aware of the high demand for creative writing classes, and that she could not speak to personnel and hiring issues.
“We hope to provide more opportunities for students in the future once the restructuring of the program is complete,” she wrote.
According to Charlie, under the co-directorship of Jenkins and Tallent, a process to restructure the creative writing program began with the formation of a working group comprised of creative writing faculty members. There was no Jones lecturer representation in the group.
“I think if Stanford wants to claim that they have a great creative writing program, they need to offer the same funding and the same support that they offer to other programs,” said Rodriguez.
Mallard said she recently attended a poetry reading held by a Stegner Fellow. It was a packed event, which surprised her.
“So I think the problem isn’t with engagement or the lack of people who are passionate about creative writing … I think there are lots of students who want to make creative writing their livelihood after college,” she said. “It’s like, truthfully, Stanford is just, ignoring the students and what they want.”
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Stanford renames Maples Pavilion court after Tara VanDerveerStanford Athletics announced on Thursday that Maples Pavilion court would be renamed after Tara VanDerveer.
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Tara VanDerveer has a laundry list of accolades. She’s a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, has been named a five-time national coach of the year and has won three national championships. Now, the 46-year college head coach will be memorialized forever by the school she has built her career with.
Stanford Athletics announced on Thursday that the court at Maples Pavilion will now be named Tara VanDerveer court. The athletics department also told the press that a public celebration and an official unveiling of the court will occur at a Stanford women’s basketball game in November.
“Coach VanDerveer has served as an excellent global ambassador for Stanford throughout nearly 40 years of service,” said University President Richard Saller. “Her dedication to ensuring high academic and athletic standards drove our women’s basketball program to new heights. We will be pleased to name the court in her honor and hope that it serves as a constant reminder for Cardinal student-athletes of her passion, care and grace.”
The University also announced that a women’s basketball assistant coaching position will be endowed in VanDerveer’s name. The gift was made by John Morgridge MBA ‘57, the former CEO of Cisco Systems, and his wife Tashia. In addition to his work at Cisco, John was a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has been a University trustee.
“We have long been admirers of Tara and are proud to support the program this way,” the Morgridges said. “Her ability to teach, educate and mentor the women on her teams, developing true scholar-athletes and lifelong leaders, has been inspiring.”
“I would like to sincerely thank Tashia and John for their support of Stanford Athletics and this tremendous contribution,” VanDerveer said. “I have many wonderful memories of leading the women’s basketball program at Maples Pavilion. It’s an honor, and a little surreal, to know that my name will be linked to both in these ways, and I look forward to celebrating with all our fans this fall.”
The inaugural Tara VanDerveer Assistant Women’s Basketball coach will be Heather Oesterle, who was hired by Kate Paye at the end of April.
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