The oft mentioned but never properly cited cost of $30,000 per palm tree is not nearly as damning as a whining undergraduate would have us believe. The cost of these trees may be great, but so is the result. We attend not just a school, but an institution. Tour buses migrate up palm drive daily not to see our smiling faces but to appreciate the avenues and buildings we travel with hangover induced ingratitude. It is no less than shocking that so many students spending four years (seven for the truly artistic) finding themselves and their voices would deny Frederick Law Olmsted, our campus's architect, his self-expression. Stanford must be both a campus and a canvas. Besides, the palms' true purpose, best revealed at admit weekend, is one near and dear to my own heart: attracting high school students.

No one denies the palm trees are beautiful, only that the native Eucalypti would be as striking and definitely cheaper. Once they have repeated Mr. Olmsted's feats of designing Central Park and staying for a generation as the preeminent American landscape designer, I will agree with them. What they are truly arguing for is not effectiveness but cost-effectiveness. Judging the balance between cost and reward is so delicate a seesaw that I cannot condemn anyone for misjudging by a few degrees once I remember the Ram's Head Winter One Acts I spent 9 dollars viewing.

We should save our criticism for expenditures that because of their worthlessness could never be deemed acceptable. This is like the difference between every date I have ever taken a girl on (how was I to know beforehand that such expense would lead to such failure) and a Gaieties ticket (overpriced even at free). One such waste is the sign proclaiming "No Food or Drinks" hanging in every classroom I have been compelled to visit. Also in every classroom, I have seen flagrant violations of this rule, committed by teacher and student alike, ranging from a cup of tea to a potluck dinner. Contrary to popular belief, these signs are not free, nor even pardonably cheap. Considering the exorbitant charge for rekeying my dorm room incurred after my keys were lost by an ex-girlfriend of uncommon absent-mindedness but less-than-usual maliciousness, I reckon the cost of each sign at approximately $223.45.

Only the high schoolers who, every summer, spend thousands on summer school for the chance to spend thousands more on college school would still be scared enough of authority to ignore their keenly-evolved hungers. It would be cheaper to tattoo the rule on each of their foreheads so any glance around the classroom would remind them of the edict, without costing the university too much. We could even add a Stanford logo. Once the block S is recognized as a prestigious brand (ed note: pun), we could rent out these "billheads" to easily recoup the cost of body art and any incidental carpet cleaning costs.

The final and most damnable expenses are those that trade monetary resources for an opportunity and obligate to waste other kinds. We pay the College Board to administer the SAT's that figuratively kick us in the balls. Some pay dominatrices to literally do so. Upon reflection, the aforementioned Gaieties tickets perhaps belong more rightly to this sort. Included in this critique are buildings I-550 and I-560.

These hidden buildings are underground men's rooms. There are two schools of thought as to the proportion of bathrooms, and this scheme falls into neither. The first is that people should be judged not on the size of their bladders but on the shape of their genitals; men's and women's restrooms should always exist in a one-to-one pairwise correspondence. The second is that both physiological plumbing and societal pressures make fewer women occupy more bathrooms; we need a sort of three-fifths compromise for ladies' powder rooms. Without any empirical study, my subliminal feeling is that our architects favor the latter; whenever nature calls it is first answered by several wrong numbers in the guise of women's rooms. But when I do find a men's room, it is invariable vacant.

Not only has no person seriously suggested having more male toilets than female ones since days when society forced females to hide the shameful existence of their bladders by keeping a chamber pot in the jungle of their skirts and petticoats, these bathrooms were a bad idea at their inception and are doubly so now. If the olfactory environment created by sunken stalls does not frighten you, perhaps your logical skills would be better met by a publication like The Stanford Review (the smell is as pungent and damp today as it was in 1891). Today, however, that valuable square footage adds to the space shortage that both limits brilliance, as when departments exhaust their office capacity, and contains ineptitude, as when Cowell was torn down to make room for Darth Vaden. The legacy of devoting such precious land to an unusable bathroom is an embarrassment of former riches.

So what would I do, were I given the reins? I would keep Palm Drive as is; the Eucalyptus Drive contemporary sensibilities favor is not worth the less-than-visitor-or-biker-friendly Cactus Drive Post-Post-Modernism will eventually dictate. I would not spend another cent on signs, programs, clubs, or departments that offer nothing. I would remodel Buildings I-550 and -560 as residences for beleaguered grad students who, until now, had only metaphorically been living in the shitter. I will leave it as a thought exercise for each reader as to what action should be taken regarding AxeComm: do we cut funding and let them die a death of dearth of funds? Or should we rightly spend money and effort ensuring they and their kind are wiped from the face of this campus?

Sociologists are philosophers who have yet to die or grow a beard.
--Fostotle

Adolescence. Coming of Age. The Wonder Years. Self-Discovery. Puberty. Call it what you will. Its been done before, many times over, and by better hands than mine. Somewhere between jacking-off and getting your driver’s license you find yourself, or a suitable facsimile.

You go to the mall and you get yourself a couple of uniforms. You go to Sam Goody and you buy off the rack they put right out front for your convenience. You take your IQ and you divide that by your relative attractiveness on a scale of one to ten (please be honest). Then you add to that the total number of surnames employed by yourself, your siblings and your parents. Award bonus points if you were a bed-wetter and/or like to hurt small animals, and now you’re getting somewhere. If your number is between zero and ten, throw your hat into the Homecoming race. If it’s between ten and twenty, do your homework and try not to draw any attention to yourself, you’ll be issued a Taurus and a three-bedroom ranch on a quarter acre lot. If your number is between twenty and thirty, consult Karl Marx and/or your favorite angst-ridden musician. If your number is above thirty, write a novel.

You take the shiniest parts of yourself and, if you haven’t found your authorial voice yet, you pick a writer and you basically mad-lib in the names and dates. Since I have by now realized there are no authorial voices left, I've decided on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Something about the way he writes his prose like poetry. I can’t explain it. Read the end of Gatsby. I don’t care if you don’t read a single word in chapters one through seven, read the last five fucking paragraphs in Chapter 8. The beauty. The trance-inducing, pins-and-needles, capricious and consciously ignorant beauty of the thing. Fuck. There is a foreboding hope, a nihilistic belief in those words that I don’t think any of Gen-X’s bittersweet overtures can match. It isn't beautiful because it's true, it's TRUE because it's BEAUTIFUL. Literary masturbation at its comeliest.


If you can just write it well enough it is. If you can only convince people of it it, its real. Step right up and get your identity. It’s the objectification of subjectivity.

Now I know, of course, that the preceding is bullshit. And in two years I’ll know that the following is bullshit too. But at ____teen you want to believe it, you NEED to believe it. You need to make your name in someone else’s brand, because the prospect of doing it naked and cold and all alone is stupefying. If you thought it’d make people understand you, you’d kill yourself. But then you’d be dead and they might not get it at all anyway. No, the problem with suicide is you can only do it once.

So instead you pick your scabs and you go on. Instead you wear a clever t-shirt. Instead you listen to the leading unpopular band. Instead you spend. Instead you booze. Instead you toke. Instead you fuck. Instead you live.

The point is I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. Beyond that I don’t fucking know.

--Daniel "Vitamin" Foster

Apologies to Ogden Nash,

College breeds knowledge
but booze yields truths

From time to time, I hear the pseudo-socialists that populate fashionable campuses clamor about separating colleges from the economic pressures they feel and create. Such an idea is a product of idealism so sentimental it makes babies and puppy dogs alike vomit. Whether we measure wealth by dollars, shares of stock, shotgun shells, or virgins reserved for us in paradise, substantial universities will be economic institutions until societies no longer face any scarcities. Trying to reform colleges without changing society at large would be like filling your gas tank with hydrogen in the fervent hope that your Honda's four-cylinder internal combustion engine will turn into a fuel cell once it realizes the advantages of the new.
Part of the problem in discussing this issue has been that universities operate with an almost incomprehensible amount of money. Any sort of tower requires a great deal of funding to operate, and those made of ivory require more polishing than most. To put it in familiar terms: If my current alma mater, Stanford University, shut down tomorrow, it could give a dollar to every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. Or it could give me 6 billion dollars, preferably in small un-marked bills. This godlike wealth deserves not only our respect and consideration but also a healthy dose of human sacrifice and graven image worship. I am not so vain in my abilities as a writer to think that this essay could form a holy text for the nascent religion of Educationism.
In a fortuitous and purely random coincidence, this topic is precisely large enough to require a series of mediocre and mildly repetitive essays on the subject. I accept this charge. I will discuss all the interesting aspects of educational economics, like tuition and financial aid, legacy admission, $30,000 palm trees, student group funding, and the like. Only in instances of uncommon desperation will I revert to the boring aspects like student theater, class distinctions, and textbook prices. For the sake of my readers, I promise to skewer celebrities like James Clark and Jane Fonda who fabricate excuses to renege on their pledges after the stock market has an off-week and they panic to find their hundreds of millions whittled down to the mere pittance of tens of millions. Throughout this series, I will highlight the stupidity of administrators and bureaucracies wherever they may exist (mainly because these stupidities exist anywhere either administrators or bureaucracies do). After tearing down, examining, and satirizing everything that is wrong with our system, I will put it back together in a new shape, a better shape: An educational system that every capable person may attend without incurring crushing debt. A system where money is spent only for the absolutely necessary or incredibly shiny. Where teachers are paid enough to attract, if not the best and brightest, at least the better and brighter. For this invaluable service, I require nothing more than your attention and consideration. And, during our half-price sale, 3 billion dollars in small, unmarked bills.

Yes, we are the Enfranchised. Its like "the Enlightened" but with a bittersweet bite of self-conscious irony. White, middle-class and pissed off that nobody seems to think we've got anything to be pissed off about. As a people we are minorities of nothing; as individuals we are the ultimate minority.We are slow-mo Hobos in a PoMoWo. Our idea of multi-cultural is the food court at the mall. We are those subjects left out of subjectivity. We are the jagged center of the fragmented world. We know no movements, no trends, no wisdom. The pendulum continues its swing and we hold on for dear life. Is there room on the bookshelves and gallery walls for us? Or are doomed to a life lonely in endless WASP opportunity? We hereby seek to answer that and other questions. And we apologize in advance. We're sorry. We are truly and profoundly sorry.

-Fosterius

We are The Enfranchised. We are the stereotypical. Our troubles are inconsequential. Since our writing is "bereft of substance", in the words of some, we turn to style. We promise you the best dog and pony show that studying dead white men can give. We will steal blatantly from sources you would not otherwise have heard of. Sources so obscure and magnificent that you will be wowed even as you turn to google to find the original. You won't find it there.
The Enfranchised: Plagiarism at its most original.