Stanford Students Upset About Early Classes For Worst Reasons Possible

Rex Reagan12 years ago

Sometimes I wonder how college rating organizations decide that schools like Duke and Northwestern are so much better than your typical large state/football factory school. Sure, I understand Ivy League schools loaded with Noble prize-winning professors are probably better off than some publicly-funded state school where a basically-literate graduate student tries to teach a room of 3,000 students Calc I. Hell, according to the UN, Harvard’s endowment alone would make it the 86th-richest country in the world. But is a school like Stanford, with a Division I athletics program and recent Rose Bowl championship, really that much smarter than the rest of us?

Then I read shit like this about their students, and I realize A) yes it is, and B) not that I had the option to, but boy am I glad I didn’t go there.

The Mercury News ran a story recently about Stanford’s plans to incorporate more morning classes. Not shockingly, the students aren’t happy. Then I read why.

“Late at night — that’s when the cool stuff happens,” said 19-year-old Viraj Bindra, a symbolic systems major from Singapore. “I stayed up until 7 a.m. this morning on computer science problem sets.”

Not “Stanford is so hard I stay up all night doing homework and I can’t make a morning class.” Not “I’m just figuring out what bed I’m in at 8 a.m.” Or even “Fuck that I’m still drunk.” Poor Viraj here doesn’t want to cut short the thrilling fun that comes with solving computer science problem sets all night.

And it’s not just virgin foreign students that are upset. Poli-Sci major Lauren Bindra doesn’t want to miss out on all the awesome nocturnal options at Stanford.

Night is when you hammer away at code or design, dance, practice your instrument, or stay up conversing with amazing people about humanism, or the classics, or religious principals.

Your go-to nocturnal activity is to “hammer away at code?” You’re a fucking Political Science Major! No politician has ever written any code, ever. Nobody affiliated with politics has ever written any code. That’s why they hire people like Viraj.

And when you’re not busy writing lines for some shitty web site no one will ever see, you’re staying up late to talk about Beowulf? That’s what your freshman English class was for. You can talk about that all you want during class during the day. People like you don’t deserve the night.

At least she mentioned dancing, something most of us have stayed up late doing, but I’m 100% sure this type of dancing involves intricate dance steps and 18th-century ball gowns — not sloppily grinding on someone who’s drunker than you. And “practice your instrument?” Really?

“You want to hit up the bars tonight?”

“Sorry Bro, I’m going to be up till sunrise blowing into a Sousaphone.”

I’m glad I’ve gone through college without ever a missing a night out to practice an instrument…or known anyone who has. The only instrument anybody should ever even think of playing in college is a guitar. And you only really need to know just one song anyway to make everyone think you can play it.

The story goes onto say:

But the masses prefer classes in the middle of the day, like the immensely popular human biology or organic chem.

When the story mentions “immensely popular,” it could use that term to describe a class that either A) is “popular” because pretty much everyone is forced to take it, or B) Cardinal students actually enjoy what, for most schools, are their hardest classes. This story makes it pretty clear which view they have.

Stanford students, if you like to load your semesters with obscene amounts of credit hours, code all night and debate Nietzsche till the sun comes up, go ahead — it’s your life. But don’t complain when you’re given earlier classes. You can do all these things you love at any time. Most people actually prefer it when 19-year-old aspiring musicians don’t play the xylophone until 4 a.m.

Because of liquor laws, society’s expectations and people like you that make us stay in class and work during the day, most can only do what they most enjoy doing late at night. We’re the ones who don’t deserve morning classes. Don’t piss off the rest of us.

[via Mercury News]

Image via Venture Beat