The Stanford Daily Magazine
VOLUME III
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Issue I
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September 20, 2018
Reframing a fraught mascot How Stanford led the country in shedding its Indian mascot — and how the first Native American Tree reclaims a historically controversial symbol p. 4
film Beginnings p. 12
athlete mental health p. 16
road trip p. 22 Issue 1 | 1
Dear reader, Our collective vision for the 2018-19 magazine is one that emphasizes the pushing of narrative boundaries, both in voice and in investigation. Put simply, it’s a platform for showcasing our most compelling content — a place to try out new forms and to shine new light on familiar ones. We’ll explore these forms over the course of the year through special themed issues, exclusive features and investigative collaborations across all five sections of the paper: News, Sports, Opinions, The Grind and Arts & Life. In light of the start of a new year, and with the influx of nearly 2,000 fresh faces on campus, we decided to theme this issue with the incoming class in mind. Inside, we explore the blistering underside of student-athlete mental health, unravel Stanford’s knotty history of the Indian mascot and take you on a cross-country road trip worthy of Jack Kerouac’s approval. Find out what to wear, what sports to watch and how many miles you’d rack up running the Dish every week for a year (hint: it’s over 100). At the end of the day, we’d like to emphasize that we aim for our magazine content to reflect what matters most to its readers. If you’ve got a vision in mind, we’d love to hear you out and have you on our team. To the Class of ’22, this one’s for you. Welcome to Stanford.
With Daily love, Claire Wang, Courtney Douglas and Josh Wagner
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STAFF editor-in-Chief Courtney Douglas Executive Editor Josh Wagner
LAYOUT Harry Cole Irene Han Annie Ng Josh Wagner
MAGAZINE EDITOR Claire Wang
Business manager Regan Pecjak
Managing Editors Amir Abou-Jaoude Gillian Brassil Brian Contreras Michael Espinosa Holden Foreman Julia Ingram Khuyen Le Anna-Sofia Lesiv Erin Perrine Olivia Popp Bobby Pragada Ashwin Ramaswami Emily Schmidt Andrew Solano Laura Sussman Nik Wesson
ad sales manager Evan Gonzales Director of alumni development Arianna Lombard
The Stanford Daily
Volume III, Issue I September 20, 2018
M AGAZ I N E
Contents
News 4 MASCOT Hannah Knowles tackles the complex history leading to the beloved Band mascot’s adoption. The GRIND 26 failed frosh resolutions What could have been freshman year 31 fashion bullseye Read for a breakdown of the Fall Quarter style devolution. SPORTS 16 athletes’ mental health Cardinal basketball player Mikaela Brewer investigates the grim state of Stanford sports psychology resources. 21 Must-see games this week From soccer to water polo and field hockey
Photo by David Hickey
shot on goal Our photographers capture moments from soccer, field hockey and tennis summer games, including this downfield run by Cardinal #20 Catarina Macario ’21. –– p. 28
ARTS & LIFE 12 GREAT FILM BEGINNINGS Envision the start of your Stanford career, as told through three cinematic masterpieces. OPINIONS 22 sehnsucht bulletins Chapman Caddell takes you on a road trip suffused with tales of whimsy and Kerouacian Americana.
Creative 28 LIGHTROOM Stanford Athletics highlights over the past month of games 30 cartoon Cartoonist Joe Dworetzky pokes fun at love in caricature. 32 CROSSWORD Test your knowledge of the classic Stanford activities and campus sites.
Want to submit to The Daily? Email us your poetry, short story, play or other creative work at eic@stanforddaily.com. On the cover: The new LSJUMB mascot, Dahkota Brown ’20, prepares for football season. Photo by Khuyen Le. Issue 1 | 3
Fraught mascot t
By Hannah Knowles
he pin was vulgar beyond words — a grinning UC Berkeley bear, bent over what is meant to be an Indian, a half-clothed, black-braided man whose blobby shape resembles a Dino nugget. This wasn’t vintage memorabilia, a token from those college days back in the ’60s when Stanford’s mascot was still the Indian. This shiny game-day pin was new.
Image courtesy of Stanford Libraries Photo: Before abolishing the Indian mascot entirely, Stanford replaced the old cartoon mascot with a more “dignified” chief.
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That’s what unsettled Dahkota Brown ’20 the most this February after he spied it on the vest of a Cal tuba player. Brown, a member of the Miwok tribe in California, was at Berkeley for a basketball game as part of the Stanford Band, trading with the Band’s Cal counterparts for the mementos they stick on floppy white hats. The Cal tuba player — face reddening as Brown asked about the Indian pin’s story — explained to Brown that a UC Berkeley alumni group makes and distributes the baubles as the Big Game approaches. Brown proposed a trade: his Aerosmith pin for the alumni handout. The Cal student quickly accepted. “Afterwards, he told me that he actually felt like a cleaner person without it,” Brown said. The pin was another addition to Brown’s collection of Native-depicting mascot items that he seeks to “take out of rotation”: pennants, T-shirts and other paraphernalia that he began accumulating back in high school, when he would face off on the football team against the Calaveras High Redskins. The Calaveras fans donned fake headdresses and war paint. Yelling “Kill the Redskins” and “Scalp ‘em,” the home crowd didn’t feel so supportive.
The same month that he encountered that Stanford Indian pin, Brown was named the Stanford Tree. For the next year, he would dance in a homemade leafy costume at games as the University’s unofficial but beloved mascot. As the first Native student to win the title of Tree, Brown is cognizant of how his new role resonates with school history. This history helped motivate his run. The slogan of his bid for Tree was a joking imperative: “Make the mascot Indian again.” Brown’s reclaiming of the Indian mascot is the latest in the old emblem’s evolution at Stanford — its rise, its removal in the early ’70s and its resilience on the fringe. Stanford is often cited as the first Indians sports team in the country, either school or pro, to completely disavow its name. As a movement stirred, some institutions followed
Courtesy of Dahkota Brown
A pin Brown reclaimed from a Cal tuba player at a recent Cal-Stanford game.
quickly: Dartmouth, for example, removed its Indian nickname and mascot only two years after Stanford, in 1974. Other teams held on to their branding for decades. The Cleveland Indians retired their controversial Chief Wahoo icon just this year amid pressure from protestors and Major League Baseball as well as a competing campaign to #KeepTheChief. The story of Stanford’s Indian mascot is in many ways one of swift, progressive shifts. It’s a story of student activism that made quick gains with quiet tactics in an era of bitter confrontations between protestors and school administrators. But Stanford’s mascot is also a story of resistance to change –– of love for tradition, of opposition both predictable and unexpected, of a racial caricature that keeps popping back up and a dispute about Native American representation playing out around the country. Franchises and student teams — Washington Redskins and Calaveras Highs alike — continue to divide, and one analysis from a few years ago estimated 2,000 Indian mascots remaining in the U.S. “We used to be the Indians, and now there’s a Native student who is the mascot,” Brown said. “Kind of ironic, kind of funny, but there’s still a very serious issue that lays underneath it all.”
Pop Warner. “FUTURE MEMBER OF INDIAN TEAM SIGNS UP EARLY,” a Daily headline from 1931 declared. A seven-year-old boy named John Williams had already pledged to play for “the Big Red Machine.” Stanford’s new moniker was an echo of Warner’s early coaching career. Before Stanford, he headed up the nationally competitive football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which became the model for a host of boarding schools built to assimilate Native Americans into white culture (“I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked,” Carlisle’s founder once said). The Carlisle team was called the Indians. The Stanford Indian may have taken root late, but it would become a ubiquitous — and crowd-pleasing — part of Stanford’s identity. The mascot gained star power thanks to the odd devotion of a man with no connection to the University: Timm Williams, known to fans as “Prince Lightfoot” or “Chief Lightfoot.” Starting in 1952, Williams spent 20 years as the live incarnation of Stanford’s mascot, chanting and dancing at halftime in a headdress and casting hexes on the Indians’ athletic foes. Williams was a polarizing figure. He was a Yurok Indian from northern California, a leader-spokesperson for his tribe, who pushed for Native American rights and served briefly as Governor Ronald Reagan’s advisor on Indian affairs (he was fired months after Stanford renounced its mascot). But The Stanford Daily Archives
The Stanford Indians The Stanford Indian was a belated addition to the University’s identity, officially adopted by student government in 1930 some 45 years after Stanford’s founding. The Indian name grew in prominence under star football coach
Yurok tribe leader Timm Williams performed for two decades as Prince Lightfoot, the incarnation of Stanford’s mascot who danced at halftime shows.
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Williams also eventually found himself pitted against fellow Native Americans who felt that his performances demeaned their cultures. He showed uncommon devotion to Stanford sports, so loath to miss a home game that he once showed up to dance while recovering from the flu. But he had no alumni or employee ties to the school. No one gave him money; Prince Lightfoot was largely his brainchild and his prerogative. He even paid for his feathered costume and, for a while, his travel to keep up with the teams. “I have a real feeling for Stanford — it is a great school with great students,” Williams told The Daily fifteen years into his mascot tenure. “I like to think, too, that the students appreciate my being at the games.” Prince Lightfoot wasn’t always controversial. For many, he was beloved. By the late ’50s, the mascot even had his own weekly TV show on which he danced, told legends and showed crafts, all in full costume while the Stanford Band played his theme song. Hal Mickelson ’71 was in the Band as a student, and the Band spent a lot of time with Williams. Mickelson would narrate over the PA system during halftime as Williams performed (“And now Prince Lightfoot will put his hex on the Trojans of USC…”). Mickelson, who visited Williams up in his Crescent City home after graduating, recalled a man whom Band members admired and learned from. Loyal to his friends and to the University,
Williams would come to feel abandoned by Stanford. ‘We were all horrified’ Elissa Patadal ’74, one of the Native students who successfully campaigned against Stanford’s mascot, had barely heard of Stanford when she applied; she thought it was in the Ivy League. So, Stanford’s mascot came as a surprise. About to leave for freshman year, Patadal was watching a Stanford football game in the living room with her family when Prince Lightfoot came out to entertain. “We were all horrified and terribly embarrassed,” Patadal said. The Prince’s dance was all wrong. Patadal and her family weren’t the only new Stanford community members who balked at the mascot. A recent push to recruit minority students had brought more Native students to Stanford than ever before in 1970 — that fall, over 20 of them entered a school that five years ago had enrolled a single Native student across all grades. Many of these new arrivals on the Farm saw Prince Lightfoot’s performances as a mockery, a stereotype-laden mishmash of traditions that weren’t all Williams’ to draw on. To them, the “hexes” turned tribal religion into play; the mouthslapping “woo-woo” sounds were offensive; Williams’ Sioux-style feather headdress was out of place on a Yurok. Feathers are earned through worthy acts, said Dean Chavers MA ’73 ’75 Ph.D. ’76, a Native graduate student who arrived the
The Stanford Daily Archives
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same year as Patadal. In all his life, Chavers has been bestowed two feathers — gifts from people who thought his activism was “badass.” Timm Williams was out on the football field sporting feathers in the hundreds. “Timm, let’s have some pride here,” Chavers recalls appealing to Williams in a meeting between the man behind Prince Lightfoot and the new Native students, who had just formed the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) and would gather every Sunday in a frame house near the Law School. According to Chavers, the students extracted a promise from Williams that he’d cut out certain aspects of his performance, like the hexes. But the next football game rolled around, Chavers said, and nothing had changed. “We went to every home game for all the years we were there, and it was just degrading to watch him out there doing his silly thing,” Chavers said. Williams and the founders of SAIO had opposite views on what Stanford’s mascot meant for Native Americans. Williams argued that serving as Stanford’s mascot was an honor, something that would elevate Native culture in the public eye. He stuck by this reasoning years after the Indian mascot’s removal, at a 1980 talk on campus that drew mostly yellow-arm-banded opponents — the latest of increasingly implausible attempts to resurrect an issue that University administration had declared closed. Stanford’s Indian was a symbol of courage, Williams insisted at that 1980 gathering. “We don’t need people shutting us out and forgetting about us,” he told the crowd, adding strangely, “An American Indian would rather be kicked than forgotten.” Williams found others to back him up in his positive view of the Indian mascot’s impact. A fellow leader in Yurok tribe, Dorothy Haberman, wrote scathingly of the SAIO students in 1972, saying that they are “evidently ashamed of their beautiful Indian blood” and that if they disliked the mascot so much, perhaps they should go find another school. The Native community both within and without Stanford was divided, particularly because of Williams’ role — 107 members of William’s Klamath River Yurok group signed a letter urging the Indian mascot’s preservation. “We feel, as Indians, we are being crucified by our very own,” Haberman wrote.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This year, the Cleveland Indians stopped using their controversial Chief Wahoo mascot.
A national dispute Today, supporters of Indian mascots in sports point to a Washington Post poll that found nine out of 10 Native Americans say they aren’t offended by the name of the Washington Redskins, whose owner Daniel Snyder has resisted calls for the nearly $3 billion franchise to rebrand (“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple,” he told USA Today. “NEVER. You can use caps”). That nine out of 10 statistic means that Native opinion hasn’t changed much since 2004, when the Annenberg Public Policy Center conducted a similar survey. “I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins,” a Chippewa teacher from South Dakota told The Post in 2016. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.” Still others echoed Timm Williams’ argument about raising Native Americans’ national profile, or told The Post they simply didn’t care. “The name is nothing to me,” one Native man said. When the NCAA pushed member schools to review potentially offensive mascots in 2005, ultimately banning the Indian, it gave exemptions to several teams
that secured the blessing of the Native tribes they were named after. The Utah Utes, Central Michigan Chippewas, Florida State Seminoles and Mississippi College Choctaws all argued that they could use the Indian mascot inoffensively. “That the NCAA would now label our close bond with the Seminole people as culturally ‘hostile and abusive’ is both outrageous and insulting,” Florida State president T.K. Wetherell said. He threatened legal action before his school was granted an exemption. These schools say they’ve worked with tribes to encourage more thoughtful use of their mascots and avoid denigrating or mischaracterizing Native communities. Citing the input of the Saginaw Chippewa Chief, Central Michigan University urges fans not to use imitative chants or face stripes (the Chippewas have roots as hunter-gatherers who wore war paint only in rare circumstances). Indian mascot critics, on the other hand, contend that something offensive to even a minority of Native Americans should be dropped. They also cite a growing base of research on racial representation and the psychological effects of Indians’ portrayals
in popular culture. The American Psychological Association issued a statement against Indian mascots in 2005, citing scientific studies. More findings have followed since asserting that such mascots reinforce racial stereotypes — not in a way that study participants admitted to, but implicitly, in a way that emerged through their mental associations. In a set of studies published in 2008, a team of researchers — two of them Stanfordbased, another a Stanford alumna — found that Native students’ self-esteem, esteem for their communities and ability to imagine achievement-oriented “possible selves” were all lower after exposure to Indian mascot images. When European Americans were shown Indian mascots in a different study, they reported higher self-esteem than participants shown a control image or an image of the “Fighting Irish.” “[Indian mascots are] actually making white students feel better about themselves, which to me is an even more dramatic problem,” said Adrienne Keene ’07, a Cherokee Nation citizen and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University.
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Keene, who’s written about mascots on her blog “Native Appropriations,” has become a prominent voice pushing back on misrepresentations of Native Americans. Her Twitter account @NativeApprops has over 65,000 followers.Despite the opinion polls touted by Redskins fans, Keen thinks the movement against Indian mascots has made headway recently, eroding the “myth” of the often cartoonish depictions as honoring a culture. And this movement gained an early victory at Stanford. ‘The right thing to do’ The early 1970s was no quiet time at Stanford. Opposition to the Vietnam War had galvanized students to bolder action and more open confrontation with their school administration than ever before. The same school year that Chavers and his fellow Native students arrived, a protest against ROTC’s presence on campus devolved into four hours of chaos as students hurled rocks and police unleashed tear gas. A sit-in the next year left dozens injured and $100,000 in damages. Unrest was the norm. As one Daily columnist reflected in 1975, you could almost miss the Indian mascot’s removal amid all the drama. But for Bill Stone ’67 MBA ’69 — then an assistant to University President Richard Lyman in a Quad Building 10 newly outfitted with shatter-resistant glass windows — the Native students pushing for a new mascot stood out all the more for their muted tactics. Stone has forgotten many details of that era now, but he can still recount how the students crowded politely into the administration’s lobby area for one of their visits, waiting to make their case to the president. He was used to getting calls from the police chief during lunchtime about activists bearing down on the office from White Plaza: “they’ll be there soon,” the chief would warn. “They didn’t come and pound on the doors like many student protests at the time,” Stone said of the SAIO students. “They made an appointment.” The students’ arguments were convincing and their goals straightforward, he said. “It was the right thing to do.” But Chavers said President Lyman was not immediately receptive to the students’ agenda, which focused on the mascot but
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sought more broadly to carve out a stronger place for Native cultures at Stanford. In their first meeting the fall of 1970, he recalled, Patadal asked Lyman about Indian Studies classes — to which Chavers remembers Lyman saying something like, “If an Indian student comes to Stanford, he has to come on the same terms and conditions as all other students.” The Native American Studies program at Stanford wasn’t founded until 1996, long after its peer UC Berkeley launched a program in 1969. Lyman writes about his change of heart on the mascot issues in a letter to alumni explaining the Indian’s removal. Initially, he thought the move extreme — why not just revise the mascot? And at first, that’s what Stanford did, ditching its traditional cartoon depiction of the Indian. The Bookstore stopped ordering items with a bulbous-nosed caricature, opting instead for what the University deemed a more “dignified” chief. However, to many Native students’ disappointment, the stocked up merchandise was still available by request. “I’m dumbfounded,” a rep for Governor Time Co. told The Daily after the paper declined an ad for its newly designed Stanford Indian wristwatch. They hadn’t gotten the memo about the mascot’s new look. “We thought that was the Stanford Indian,” the representative added. “This is new to us.” The student government was also instructed to redesign its paychecks, which featured 10 miniature Indians thumbing their noses. The next school year, in 1972, 55 Native
students signed a petition calling for the Indian mascot to be removed altogether. Even the revised image of the Stanford Indian did their race a disservice, they said. “People will fail to understand the human side of being Indian,” the petition asserted, “as long as they can choose instead to see only the entertaining aspects of Indian life.” The petition went to University Ombudsman Lois Amsterdam, who lent her support in a memo to the president. “Stanford’s continued use of the Indian symbol … brings up to visibility a painful lack of sensitivity and awareness on the part of the University,” she wrote, urging the mascot’s immediate disavowal. Local and state groups who heard about the motion wrote in with their endorsements. Within a few months, student government had voted 18-4 to drop the Indian, and in April of 1971, Lyman put his authority behind the mascot’s abolishment. ‘Draconian decision’ In her memo to Lyman, Ombudsman Amsterdam was optimistic about Stanford alumni members’ willingness to leave the Indian mascot behind. Alumni devotion to the school is much deeper than a symbol, she argued: “Surely we do not expect less from our alumni than we do from ourselves; and we should not disparage the alumni by assuming that they would cling obstinately to a symbol of the past whose present inappropriateness has become plainly apparent.”
The Stanford Daily Archives
Indian caricatures like these decorated Stanford merchandise until the early ’70s, when the University sought to make its mascot less cartoonish.
“This was a draconian decision rammed down the students’ throats.” Charlie Hoffman ’73 MBA ’76 Former Daily staffer Some alumni did accept the transition without protest. Others lauded the decision. But still others clung — fiercely. And opposition to a move questioned as “political correctness” came from more than just nostalgic graduates. For students like Charlie Hoffman ’73 MBA ’76, a former Daily staffer, Lyman’s edict on the mascot was an outrage — not for its shedding of tradition, but for the undemocratic way it changed the face of the school. These days, Hoffman believes the school was right to phase out the Indian. But back then, the mascot question quickly became tangled up in broader resentment toward University politics. “This was a draconian decision rammed down the students’ throats,” Hoffman said. “Boom, the Indian mascot was gone … In an era where students were trying to have their voice, it was another instance of the University [acting] really, at the end of the day, all-powerful.” Lyman anticipated the need for some sort of broader input on such a controversial decision, his ex-assistant Stone said, even though administrators and SAIO members argued that representing a race respectfully shouldn’t be a matter of majority-rule. The school formed a committee, which dutifully included representatives from the alumni crowd in an effort to “allow groups … to feel they have been consulted,” as The Daily paraphrased Stone back in 1972. But diehard Indian fans on the group would later complain that the decision had been made from the start. Despite the decisive vote in student government, nearly 60 percent of the student body as a whole voted to keep the Indian, and a majority of the mail that deluged Stone in the president’s office advocated the same. Foremost among the mail-senders: Alumni. The Buck Club, Stanford’s athletic booster group run by alumni, passed a resolution in favor of the Indian, and letters
to the administration threatened withheld donations. “It’s not going to close the school,” the fundraising office told Stone when he queried them. Certain alumni had already been watching with displeasure as Stanford’s student body became more activist, more liberal, more racially and culturally diverse. Stone laments that Stanford “had been taken over by Communists.” For this conservative set, the mascot’s removal was further proof of the University’s wayward bent — part of a bigger frustration with Stanford’s trajectory. The Indian issue pervaded the newsletters of one rightleaning alumni group called the New Founders League, even though restoration of the mascot was never one of the organization’s official goals (the League’s 800 members sought everything from ROTC’s reinstatement on campus to an end to affirmative action admissions). “In terms of alumni support [for the league], there is nothing that has brought out support anywhere near that for the Indian,” Lowell Berry ’24 told The Daily in 1977, five years after the mascot was nixed. “Some of our people would like to drop the Indian issue, but with the support as great as it is, we would be doing our supporters a disservice to ignore it.” Around that time, Stone became president of the Stanford Alumni Association, and he remembers a distinct weariness in his predecessor toward the challenge of reconciling Stanford’s past and present. Backlash over the mascot change was one symptom of something larger; Stanford, like the rest of the country, was changing rapidly, in ways that some people would never be comfortable with. The former Alumni Association president “was tired of spending all the time arguing,” Stone said. The Tree came about as Stanford
struggled to settle on an official replacement to the Indian and as a 1975 Daily poll of the student body failed to find consensus. The Band debuted a Tree mascot in jest at that year’s Big Game, having narrowly voted down competitors “Holy Order of Fries” and “Steaming Manhole Covers.” But the Tree stuck. Today it remains the emblem of the Band rather than the University, which reverted to its original moniker, the Cardinal. During all the mascot confusion and even after its resolution, the Stanford Indian persisted in unofficial ways: on T-shirts and Big Game paraphernalia, in defiant newspaper ads and opinion columns. Years after the Indian’s abolishment in 1972, the Friends of the Stanford Indian was registered as a new student group, while an outside-campus organization of the same name claimed over 2,000 members. The Stanford Band manager complained to The Daily that the Friends’ leader — a Palo Alto insurance executive who bore no formal ties to the University — had tried to offer him money to put the new Tree mascot aside. Meanwhile, the Indian’s most ardent supporters were vindicated when, in the late ’70s, Timm Williams snuck back onto the football field to cheers and the war chant drumbeat of the Band. The University did move to sideline Williams, telling campus police not to let him in the stadium. But that didn’t stop another man in traditional Native American regalia, a member of the Nez Perce tribe invited by alumni, from riding a horse onto the field using a fake pass that police traced back to the Friends of the Stanford Indian. It didn’t stop people from writing in to the school, hopeful that their mascot would return. “I am still answering letters from alumni asking when the Indian will come back,” Director of University Relations Ron
Courtesy of Adrienne Keene Alumni wear Stanford Indian gear at 2012 reunion homecoming.
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Carlson said in 1985. And it didn’t stop an alumnus in 1989 from marketing watches, buttons and more bearing a cross-eyed, cross-looking Indian man. He argued that the mascot didn’t have to be divisive. “Old alums should have a right to be nostalgic,” Robert Fuller ’60 said at the time. “[The Indians] existed at one point. My attitude is that there isn’t anything racial about it. If I thought there was, I’d stop doing it.” A ‘dead issue’? In 2012, 40 years after President Lyman’s administration declared the Stanford Indian a “dead issue,” Class of ’07 graduate Adrienne Keene spotted the Indian’s cartoon figure at her five-year homecoming reunion. She saw it stickered on a traffic cone. On the matching outfits of two different couples. On the white shirt of an undergraduate student who posed for her camera. She saw it right as she arrived on campus, on pins proudly worn by members of the Class of 1962 — fastened to an elderly man’s hat, to a woman’s name tag. “Class of ’62 Reunion — Skin the ‘Cats,” the pins read, a reference to a rival mascot. They showed a naked mountain lion shivering while a cross-eyed, hatchetwielding Indian in a loincloth holds up its Courtesy of Adrienne Keene
bloody skin. There was nothing honoring Native Americans in this mascot, Keene thought. She walked away, sickened from the pinwearing woman who cheerily obliged for a photo. She was too angry to say much, too angry to hear much. Like Brown, the new Tree, Keene was shocked above all by how intentional the artifacts were. They were modern creations, not found souvenirs.
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“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, my grandpa went to Stanford and I pulled this out of the basement,’” Keene says. As someone who helped to plan the reunion, Keene had been heartened to read the Stanford Alumni Association’s rules on the old mascot in her training packet, which emphasized that the Indian was hurtful even if “not meant to be offensive when adopted.” The Stanford Alumni Association does not “fund, use, distribute or condone officials mailings, memorabilia or activities that use the Indian mascot,” Victor Madrigal ’94, director of alumni and student class outreach, wrote in an email to The Daily. And yet, according to an email about the Indian pins sent to 2012 reunion organizers, someone had found the pins at a class check-in table. With the Class of ’62, at least, the Alumni Association’s guidance on mascots either hadn’t gotten through or hadn’t been heeded. Madrigal did not say specifically how the SAA handled the incident, only that it continues to make volunteers aware of the mascot policy. The Class of ’62 pins would never be made or given out with the Alumni Association’s consent, he added. (Class representatives did not respond to a request for comment, nor did they respond to Keene when she contacted them back in 2012). “On rare occasions we have had to address isolated situations,” Madrigal said. Stanford Indian gear is not common these days. Still, Mickelson, the former Band announcer, swears he can find an Indian sweater, scarf or necktie within 10 minutes amid the tailgate parties at any home game. He hypothesizes that for some alumni, wearing Indian paraphernalia is an act of defiance, “to kind of show that you can’t control ‘em.” But he also understands the devotion that many feel to a tradition. “There were Stanford fans who were prepared to have Stanford Indians license plates on their cars and markers on their gravestones because they identified so strongly with the team,” he said, recalling fans’ reactions to losing the mascot. The same month as her 2012 reunion homecoming — the one where she saw so many contemporary tributes to the Indian — Keene received an email from one of her friends on campus, forwarded from a student in the Class of 2014. It was an order form circulating on Stanford chat lists. Stanford Indian apparel was in high
demand. “To meet the overwhelming desire of, well … everyone, I am starting the process to make a new batch of those magnificent Stanford Indian Sweaters that people won’t shut up about,” began the email from Nick Hoversten ’14. Hoversten says he was a “naive 20-yearold who thought that throwback Stanford Indian sweaters would be cool.” He didn’t get “what the big deal was.” After an initial batch of just 10 or so sweaters piqued both student and alumni interest, Hoversten planned to scale up to 60 for his second order. He never completed it. Carly Kohler ’13, a student vocal against the Indian mascot, messaged Hoversten over Facebook. At first, Hoversten says, he went on the defensive, explaining why he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. But then Kohler explained that she just wanted to hear his side. “Looking back, I think my initial response of entrenching and becoming defensive is unfortunately typical of what we see happen in these scenarios,” Hoversten said. “What wasn’t exactly typical though, was Carly’s response to that initial response. She was understanding and compassionate, and that allowed us to have a conversation rather than a shouting match — and I ended up learning a lot from her.” Hoversten and Kohler’s Facebook conversation turned into a lunch. Hoversten went to a meeting of local Native American leaders. Alongside Kohler, he gave talks to Stanford’s Greek community about what they’d discussed — and about why he was wrong to send out the cavalier sweater form, even if he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. “If I had known how they would affect others,” Hoversten said, “I definitely wouldn’t have made the same decision.” Growing awareness Brown, the new Tree, had a tedious but time-honored task this summer: sewing the costume he’ll dance in for the rest of the year. Every Tree makes their own outfit, and while a friend welded the metal frame together, the rest is up to Brown. Each leaf of cloth-sheathed Styrofoam takes him over half an hour to make, he said; he’s hoping to have 70 by the end of the summer. His favorite leaf so far is cut from a
shirt mailed to him by Steven Paul Judd, a prominent Native American artist. Earlier this year, Brown posted an open call for fabrics and designs from the Native community that he could highlight in his creation. Judd responded with “his take on the Incredible Hulk,” Brown explained. The T-shirt he sent shows a Native person reading a newspaper article about a treaty being broken, prompting his transformation into the “Indigenous Hulk.” Brown has spoken out against Native mascots for a long time, starting in high school. His local advocacy led him to speak in Washington, D.C. on the issue and testify before the California State Assembly for the California Racial Mascots Act, which banned public schools from playing as the Redskins. Just as Stanford led the way in abolishing Indian mascots, California became the first state to enact such a law. The handful of schools affected have been slow to fully phase out their mascots, the Daily Cal reported last fall, and some school officials remain openly disdainful of the change and what they see as the overreaction of a uptight society. The legislation also does not attempt to regulate less commonly condemned team identities like “Indians” and “Braves.” But for the guy who used to listen to the home fans shout “Scalp ‘em,” it’s still a big victory. The Racial Mascots Act provides “an opportunity for Native youth to obtain an education free from mockery,” Brown said in 2015 after the law was signed into effect. Brown’s work on Indian mascots, college access and other issues has made him something of a “superstar” in the Native education sphere, said Keene. She sees Brown’s new role as a testament to how far Stanford has come since the days when Timm Williams’ hex-casting Indian was the University’s dominant representation of Native Americans. “I think it’s really powerful and kind of cool,” Keene says, “that we used to have Prince Lightfoot, quote-unquote ‘dancing’ around the football game — this Native guy in a fake Indian costume playing to the crowd and playing into those stereotypes — and now we have Dahkota, who is a proud contemporary Native person … embodying all of the subversive and irreverent things about being a Stanford Tree.” Brown hopes to leverage the Tree role to push back on continued use of the Stanford Indian. He’s thinking of making some
sort of announcement with the authority of the mascot behind it.“Like right at the beginning of football season, publishing something as the Tree saying I’m not going to pose for pictures or anything if you’re wearing Stanford Indians gear,” he explained. “Just so people are aware.” Already, the Band is part of an annual “Defend Our Honor” campaign organized by the Stanford American Indian Organization, the group that Chavers and his fellow Native students founded back in 1971. Every year around homecoming, as alumni flock to campus, SAIO distributes shirts meant to focus attention on why the Indian mascot is problematic. Keene noticed the Band’s show of unity in wearing Defend Our Honor shirts when she was back at Stanford for another Class of ``’07 reunion, this time in 2017. “It’s not something I think we’d have seen ten years ago, five years ago,” she said. Keene is glad the University takes a clear stance on the mascot but wishes that it wasn’t always Native students bringing use of the old mascot to people’s attention. It would be nice, she says, if “other folks could hop in and do that labor,” too. Still, she thinks she’s seen less of the Indian mascot in recent years. Something, she said, seems to be working.
Meanwhile, another issue has drawn the Stanford Native community’s attention as the University struggles with whether to rename campus buildings and the street of Stanford’s address, erasing references to Junipero Serra. Serra, a newly-sainted Catholic priest, was behind the California mission system that devastated Native tribes. After years of debate and protest among students, and a University committee so hung it had to be disbanded, a verdict on Serra is in sight as a new group looks to apply Stanford’s freshly formulated principles on renaming. If Stanford moves to drop Serra’s name, then — as with the Indian mascot — the change will largely be the result of Native student-led activism. The conversation around renaming strikes at many of the mascot debate’s core issues, with dueling charges of politically correct revisionism and disrespect to an entire people — one more way that, despite the University administration’s assertions back in 1972, the Stanford Indian controversy is diminished but never quite dead. Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles@ stanford.edu. Olivia Mitchel contributed to this report.
Dahkota Brown in his partially constructed Stanford Tree costume.
KHUYEN LE/The Stanford Daily
Issue 1 | 11
Let’s start at the beginning... Courtesy of MGM
By Amir Abou-Jaoude
I
first fell in love with the cinema at
three when I saw “The Sound of Music.” In the film, Julie Andrews plays Maria, a nun who becomes a governess, and subsequently teaches her seven charges the fundamentals of music — do-re-mi. She believes that it is best to “start at the very beginning,” since “it’s a very good place to start.” Maria’s advice is particularly apt during this time of year. After all, New Student Orientation (NSO) is the beginning of a Stanford education. As Stanford’s website states, NSO is an opportunity to “introduce undergraduate students … to the wide array of academic, intellectual, leadership, cultural and social experiences available at Stanford.” This is “a time to settle into your room, make friends, and prepare for classes.” Interestingly, this definition of NSO recalls screenwriter William Goldman’s description of the beginning of a film. Just as NSO allows freshmen to acclimate to college life and the Stanford campus, the opening of a film gives an artist “time to set up [his] situation ... [and his] particular world.” Just as NSO is “a time [to]… make friends,” the beginning of a film affords its creator “time to set up [his] people.” age
12 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
In George Cukor’s“The Philadelphia Story” (1940), socialite Tracy Lord cleanly snaps C.K. Dexter Haven’s pitching wedge in two as their first marriage dissolves into an air of mutual resent and violence.
The opening minutes of a movie may seem incidental in light of the subsequent drama that unfolds. Yet, Goldman, who won two Oscars for screenwriting, actually believed that the beginning was the single most important scene in the film. In his seminal book “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” he claims that “the first 15 minutes are the most important of any screenplay.” He explains that most studio executives have to read “a sludge pile of scripts.” Therefore, they do not have time to dwell on each page of the screenplay. When they finish perusing the first fifteen pages of a writer’s work, they “will either be hooked or bored.” If they are hooked, they will continue reading. If they are bored, “the ball game’s over.” While Goldman is focused on selling screenplays to studio executives, his reasoning also applies to the audience. While studio executives spend money to make movies, viewers invest their time in watching a film. After reading the first few pages of a screenplay, an executive determines whether a project is viable. Similarly, in the first few minutes of a film, viewers decide whether they want to hear the rest of an artist’s story. Furthermore, creating a compelling beginning is not the responsibility of the
screenwriter alone. Film is primarily a visual medium. Directors transform a stirring screenplay into stellar cinema. By choosing specific shots and cuts, they achieve the same effect as the screenwriter. Indeed, by starting at the very beginning, we can see what makes a film great. George Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story,” Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” are all superb films because they have strong starts. In their opening scenes, Cukor, Scorsese and Kubrick establish their stories, make us care about their characters and differentiate their styles from those of other filmmakers. If we accept Goldman’s criteria as a guide, Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story” has an exemplary opening. In two minutes, Cukor introduces his protagonists and his plot. His film focuses on a socialite, Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn). After her marriage to the charming C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) falls apart, she becomes engaged to an odious coal baron. Dexter, however, is still in love with his ex-wife. Therefore, he visits her on her wedding day. Accompanied by an intrepid reporter (James Stewart), he tries to stop her impending marriage. “The Philadelphia Story” was based on
Scorsese renders Travis’ situation in stark terms. He sees the city as a kind of hell and portrays Travis as a modern-day avenging angel. a Broadway play by Phillip Barry. The play opens abruptly, but when Cukor started to direct the film version, he realized that Barry’s opening was not suited to cinema. Audiences needed to understand the personalities of the two protagonists. They had to know that Tracy and Dexter were once married, and that Tracy was planning to remarry. To convey this information, Cukor simply added a two-minute scene to the start of Barry’s play. The opening credits of the film are superimposed over paintings of Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and a statue of Benjamin Franklin. The symbols of Philadelphia establish the setting. Next, Cukor inserts a shot of a stately two-story mansion. On the soundtrack, Franz Waxman’s lush, melodic theme plays. This story is not about average Philadelphians, but instead about the elite. They live in a world suffused with elegance, glamour and taste. Cukor shows Dexter walking across the portico of the home to his car. He is carrying two suitcases, and another stack of luggage sits beside the car. He looks nervously behind him as the door flings open and Tracy emerges, wearing a white gown. Her hair billows in the wind. She appears pure and free, but she is holding a basket and some golf clubs. Perhaps she is coming to say goodbye to her husband before he leaves on a trip. She takes a golf club out of the bag, however, and throws the rest of them at him. Tracy takes her golf club and splits it in two over her knee, as if to suggest the dissolution of their union. Thus, perhaps Dexter and Tracy are not the epitome Courtesy of Columbia
The view from Travis’s taxi in “Taxi Driver” (1976).
of a happy high society couple. Furthermore, even Cukor before inserts a title card reading “two years later,” we know that these events took place before the main action of the film, because they are done entirely in pantomime. Just as the silent era preceded the arrival of sound in Hollywood, this silent sequence comes before the scenes dependent on witty banter. Still, both this opening scene and the ones that follow are undeniably comic. After watching two minutes of the film, it becomes clear that this is not a hard-edged expose on the lives of the rich. Instead, it is a light, charming diversion. Furthermore, because Dexter and Tracy are acting like slapstick comedians, they do not seem above reproof. While they may be wealthy, they are essentially flawed, silly human beings. Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” could not be described as a light, charming diversion. Yet, like Cukor, Scorsese cultivates empathy for his protagonist. The people, situation and world of Taxi Driver is much less complicated than that of Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story.” The titular character in Scorsese’s film is the discontented Travis Bickle. He is afflicted with insomnia, so every night, he traverses the streets of a filthy New York City. A lesser director might have communicated this information in a quicker way. He could have simply shown Travis driving his taxi, passing various New York landmarks. Still, Scorsese is not particularly concerned with a specific location in New York, nor is he interested in documenting the actual work a taxi driver
does. No passengers climb into Travis’s cab during the duration of the opening. Instead, Scorsese encourages his audience to identify with Travis. In order for the film to be successful, viewers must see him as a conflicted individual as well as a cabbie. Therefore, Scorsese renders Travis’ situation in stark terms. He sees the city as a kind of hell and portrays Travis as a modern-day avenging angel. The film opens with a shot of smoke. Thick, white and opaque, it emerges from an unseen, but diabolical inferno. The smoke diffuses as Travis’s taxi passes through it. The taxi appears to be less of a car and more of a mechanical monster, because Scorsese captures it from a low angle. Its arrival is a momentous event. By introducing the taxi in this way, Scorsese enhances the stature of the man commanding it. Our first glimpses of Travis confirm that he is far from ordinary. His eyes reflect the artificial lights of the city, and they dart left and right, left and right. Scorsese has stated that the inspiration for this shot came from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Tales of Hoffmann.” This 1951 film features a devil, played by the dancer Robert Helpmann. Helpmann’s eyes are like Travis’s, moving back and forth like pendulums. By connecting Travis to Helpmann, Scorsese strengthens his contention that the city is a modern incarnation of Hades. Then, Scorsese shows us what Travis sees through the windshield of the taxi. It is raining outside. The windshield wipers are working, but they move languidly across the glass. Therefore, everything outside seems distorted. The crowded streets transform into a Fauvist landscape. The red neon lights blend into the yellow glare of the streetlights and the white haze of a movie theatre marquee. While Travis travels down various streets, they seem to blur together too. Only Travis can make sense of this indistinct metropolis. Thus, we are willing to accompany him on his journey. For some directors, introducing their idiosyncratic style can be more important
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
The first shot of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” (1975). Issue 1 | 13
Courtesy of London Films Robert Helpmann in Powell and Pressburger’s “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1951).
than introducing a single character. Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” is based on a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, and it chronicles the adventures of the titular Irish rogue. Barry travels throughout 18th-century Europe. He visits the court of King George III, fights in the Seven Years’ War, drinks in the taverns of the common man and plays cards with England’s upper crust. Kubrick, however, seems more concerned with the story’s historical setting than with Barry’s escapades. The film could be classified as a period piece, rather than a character study. Of course, the period piece has been a staple of the cinema since its early days. Like many directors of costume dramas, Kubrick strives for authenticity. While making the film, he took great pains to ensure that his actors were clothed in authentic attire. He wanted them to appear and speak like King George’s citizens. He also eschewed the use of electric lights during production. Only candles illuminated Kubrick’s set. They filled the set with smoke, and therefore, Kubrick was able to accurately capture the shadowy spaces of Georgian England. In composing his shots, he took inspiration from the great English artists of the era, including John Constable and William Hogarth.
Yet, for all his efforts to bring the past back to life, Kubrick would probably agree with the writer L.P. Hartley’s assertion that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” While other directors seek to immerse their audiences in an earlier time, Kubrick never allows his audience to truly feel as if they live in the 18th-century. He employs a narrator throughout the entire film. This unnamed personage speaks in voice-over, relating
characters. While we can observe Barry and his compatriots, we do not become intimately involved with them. Critic Pauline Kael called the film “a three-hour slideshow for art history majors,” and indeed, the experience of watching Barry Lyndon is similar to the effect you feel looking at a picture. You admire its beauty, but you are constantly aware that you are separated from it by the frame and the surface of the canvas. Kubrick’s perception of the past is apparent in the first few seconds of the film. After the credits, some text appears. As we listen to a Handel march on the soundtrack, we are informed that we are about to see “Part I: By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon.” Then, Kubrick presents a shot of the English countryside. A rustic, stone fence bisects the frame. Empty space lies on the right-side of the fence, but on the left, some figures appear in the distance. The composition of the frame is reminiscent of a John Constable painting. Constable often painted picturesque scenes of the English countryside. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, he emphasized the supremacy of nature over man. In paintings like “Fen Lane, East Bergholt” (1817), Constable rendered a pristine landscape
No matter how engrossed we become in Barry’s story, we cannot do anything to change it. We are simply viewers, watching history unfold.
14 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
key events in the past tense. Furthermore, Kubrick often chooses to shoot scenes in a wide shot. By placing his camera far away from the subjects in a frame, Kubrick puts physical distance between his viewers and his
in vivid, verdant hues. He populated the backgrounds of these paintings with tiny figures. Usually, these miniscule individuals were simply going about their mundane chores. While Kubrick’s frame resembles Constable’s paintings in its composition, Kubrick’s individuals are not carrying out a routine task. Instead, they are dueling. Distantly, we hear a man shouting “gentlemen, cock your pistols!” Then, the narrator intones that “Barry’s father had been bred, like many other sons of a genteel family, to the profession of the law, and there is no doubt he would have made an eminent figure in his profession, had he not been killed in a duel, which arose over the purchase of some horses.” The pistols are fired, and the narrator’s words are borne out. Barry’s father falls to the ground in a heap. His death is no doubt a dramatic event, but since Kubrick refuses to show us his face, it is difficult to empathize with Barry’s father as he expires. Still, Kubrick does not seek to evoke pathos from us, but instead call our attention to the
larger world he has created. By linking his style to John Constable’s and employing the narrator, he reminds us that we are looking at something that has already happened. No matter how engrossed we become in Barry’s story, we cannot do anything to change it. We are simply viewers, watching history unfold. Kubrick relays some information about his protagonist, expresses his style and tells us what our role in the story is, all within the first shot of the film. Indeed, in these first scenes, Kubrick, Scorsese and Cukor all demonstrate their skillful command of cinematic techniques. Yet, these openings are not just impressive in and of themselves. As Goldman writes, “a screenplay … is a series of surprises. We detonate these as we go along. But for a surprise to be valid, we must set the ground rules, indicate expectations.” In these beginnings, the directors establish the ground rules by introducing their characters, setting and style. Then, they build upon these foundations to forge great experiences at the movies. By exposing the foibles of his
characters at the beginning, Cukor encourages us to laugh at their staggering mistakes later in the picture. By making us feel sympathy with a taxi driver, Scorsese compels us to follow him as he roams the streets of the corrupt city. By immersing us in his gilded 18thcentury world, Kubrick is able to confront the complexities of a pivotal period in history. Students who are coming to Stanford have much more on their minds than the movies. Between moving in, meeting new friends and participating in introductory events, members of the class of 2022 have little time to entertain cinematic flights of fancy. Still, just as these masters of cinema are able to lay the foundations for masterpieces in their opening minutes, in this week, members of the class of 2022 are not just getting acclimated. As they start at the very beginning, they are setting out to create a stellar Stanford experience, suffused with surprises.
Contact Amir Abou-Jaoude at amir2 @stanford. edu.
“Fen Lane, East Bergholt,” John Constable, oil on canvas, 1817.
Courtesy of Tate Britian
Issue 1 | 15
When ‘Keep your head in Student-athletes, mental health and the drug of expectation
W
hen an athlete tears their ACL,
trainers and medics immediately rush to the scene. In the weeks that follow, a flood of coaches, trainers, physiotherapists, strength and conditioning staff and medical specialists are fully invested in getting that athlete physically healthy again. Injured athletes receive treatment and
16 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
physiotherapy every day until they’re once more able to compete. But competition-readiness encompasses much more than just basic physical ability: It includes both physical and mental well-being. And for all the resources that go into physical health, the latter half of that dichotomy — the mental side of things — often gets overlooked.
College athletes are at the top of the entertainment totem pole, raised on a pedestal where (seemingly) they “have it all.” The Cardinal-red backpacks slung nonchalantly over shoulders, the sponsored Nike gear filling lockers to the brim and the athlete-tailored high-protein meals served in dining halls all give the impression that student-athletes
By Mikaela Brewer
the game’ goes too far: should have no reason to feel anything other than elated. But they do. I did. I am proud to say that I am a Stanford women’s basketball player, and that my coaches and teammates are phenomenal. I am also not afraid to say that I am a suicide survivor. My freshman year of college, I almost cut out early. I know I am not the only one. One in every four college athletes suffers from depression, according to a recent study. There’s more to the picture than grinning headshots and game-day photos. The NCAA is so strict about the supplements that athletes are allowed to take that some have tested positive because of Advil for a cold — but what about the drug of expectation? The expectation to perform, and to exert consistent mental toughness at all times? This drug is legal and entirely undetectable by standard means. Consider: The second leading cause of death among U.S. collegiate athletes is suicide, just after sudden cardiac arrest. Why is it so hard to ask for help? No one individual is at fault, but beginning to turn the stigma around will take a collective consciousness of the issue. “The student body struggles with mental health, and athletes are going to be the same,” said Julia Axelrod ’20, peer counselor at The Bridge and mentor for Stanford’s studentrun Forest Support group. “Mental health is important and maybe not as mainstream as it should be. Stigma is a pretty big barrier.” Even as an experienced counselor at Stanford’s most well-established student-run peer counseling center, Axelrod admitted she doesn’t know whether this stigma is different for student-athletes compared to regular students. Her admission sheds light on an important point: although athletes make up a significant proportion of Stanford’s student population, their issues are often overlooked within the mainstream campus discussion around mental health. Across campus, there is a large knowledge deficit about the mental health challenges athletes face on a daily basis — and, therefore, a corresponding stigma and lack of available resources.
‘A balancing act’ The day-to-day demands faced by studentathletes are as overwhelming as they are exhilarating: practice, class, more practice, more class, repeat. Somewhere in that line-up, you also need to eat nutritious foods and sleep. To address these physical needs, Stanford provides student-athletes with an abundance
At the same time, the level of sport played at Stanford University is arguably the highest in the nation. No NCAA athletics program has ever swept the men’s and women’s Capital One Cup — that is, until just this past July, when Stanford did it. After a year of 17 top-10 finishes and four NCAA championships, the standard becomes self-evident: Stanford’s athletes are to achieve nothing less than that. But this doesn’t lower the academic standards to which they are simultaneously held. “It’s a balancing act for sure,” said water polo player and Cardinal RHED co-vice president Kat Klass ’19. Although she isn’t directly involved with Stanford Athletics, Axelrod attested to having witnessed the daily hustle of being a student-athlete through her peers. “I do have some friends who are athletes, and from what I’ve seen, it kind of seems like balancing a full-time job, on top of being a Stanford student,” Axelrod said. “I have a lot of respect for student-athletes … In terms of workload, it seems like a ridiculous amount.” According to Anderson, the pressure to uphold Stanford’s intense standards of athletic success, compounded by a lack of mental
The second-leading cause of death among U.S. collegiate athletes is suicide, just after sudden cardiac arrest. Why is it so hard to ask for help? of resources. These include the Stanford Sports Nutrition clinic, Oasis and Farmstand snack stations, physiotherapy, trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, high-performance dining hall meals, specialized academic advisors and the Athletic Academic Resource Center (AARC), to name just a few. “If you have a question about what to eat before a big meet, you don’t think twice about sending the email [to ask a sports nutritionist],” said swimmer Jack Walsh ’19. “But,” he continued, “if you have something that you’re struggling with — like you have to share something personal — it’s a lot harder.” When combined with academic stress, those issues only compound. Matt Anderson ’19, swimmer and co-vice president of mental health awareness committee Cardinal Resilience, Health, and Emotional Development (RHED), spoke about the unique amalgamation of academics and athletics at Stanford. “It boils down to a tremendous amount of pressure that we face, perhaps more so than [at] other institutions,” Anderson said. Stanford holds all its students, including student-athletes, to an extremely high academic standard. We attend class, meet with advisors about our majors and minors, attend tutoring, write daunting papers and complete day-long problem sets.
Courtesy of Isiphotos
Cardinal women’s basketball guard Mikaela Brewer ’20. Issue 1 | 17
“I think a lot of student-athletes may not have ever met with a psychologist or sport psychologist before, so they have no idea of what to expect.” Dr. Kelli Moran-Miller Director of Sports Psychology for Stanford Athletics health education, contributes to a system where athletes often internalize their mental health challenges rather than seek external help. “You combine [athletic pressure] with a lack of education that student-athletes have for their own mental struggles,” Anderson said. “You get a lot of people dealing with stuff that they don’t realize or characterize as something they could improve on or should/could be addressed.” The question is then: What is working and what can be fixed? According to Klass, the degree to which teams promote mental health advocacy varies widely across campus. While her own teammates and coaches do checkins about classes and life outside of athletics, others do not. In some ways, coaches can be helpful support systems for their players: “Coaches have been student-athletes themselves, so I think they kind of get it,” Walsh said. “I think they are pretty receptive in understanding our struggles because they have been
18 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
through it themselves.” But in other ways, they can fall short on the proactivity side of things: “There’s not a whole lot of coaches I’ve heard of that don’t listen to their kids when stuff ’s going on,” Anderson said. “But for any host of reasons, athletes aren’t always gonna start that conversation, and I think that it’s all too easy for coaches to see someone just a little bit off-kilter and not really think anything of it.” To Anderson, this brings to light an educational oversight: Mental health is not a priority among the entire student-athlete community, including coaches, support staff and athletes themselves. “Some of it may not even be clinical,” he continued. “Someone might just be dealing with an extraordinary amount of stress and it’s just killing them on the inside … and that’s something that needs to be addressed, whether clinically or not.” But that’s easier said than done — and in this case, also easier noticed than acted on. According to Director of Sport Psychology for Stanford Athletics and sport psychologist Dr. Kelli Moran-Miller, this general oversight stems from a variety of causes. “One is a lack of knowledge and awareness — I think a lot of student-athletes may not have ever met with a psychologist or sport psychologist before, so they have no idea of what to expect,” she said. She added that the demand to maintain a “game face” at all times compounds pressure on student-athletes. This mentality that Moran-Miller points to is often perpetuated by coaches. It is no secret that stress builds up, especially when coaches make it explicit that they don’t want to hear about students’ non-athletic stressors during
practice. Often, student-athletes are expected to simply “suck it up” in the name of focusing on their sport. To this point, many coaches offhandedly throw around the phrase, “Fake it ’til you make it” — a casual enough colloquialism, but with greater implications for studentathletes. Under this mentality, many athletes believe there will be large repercussions if they are unable to compete or perform. Put short: If you’re not able to hide everything you’re feeling internally, then you’re not tough enough. You’re not strong enough. You can’t be a Stanford student-athlete. For student-athletes, if a conversation occurs at all, it tends to happen in the proximity of teammates. Of course, peers are not always equipped with the resources or knowledge to help, and may not be trained to provide proper support in more serious circumstances. “From what I’ve heard, teams seem like a good family,” Axelrod asked. “But of course, when there’s team drama, where do you go?” Coaches aside, Klass added that there is generally a positive mental health community among student-athletes on campus, and that she leans on her teammates and family for a majority of support. In the past, “it’s been teammates noticing something [was] wrong and asking if there is anything you need to talk about,” Walsh said. “[But there’s still] this attitude to battle through it. It’s hard to make that first step on their own.” “And that’s still often too late, too,” Anderson added. The resource deficit On campus, Stanford offers professional resources including Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), Vaden Health Center, Sport Psychology Services, Sports Psychiatry as well as student-run peer counseling services including The Bridge and Forest Support. “[The Bridge] is a nice resource because it is student-to-student,” Axelrod said. “It feels a little less scary because they’re not some professional counselor, it’s just another kid.” But Axelrod added that despite this advantage, The Bridge is still no substitute for
extended care services. “The niche that it fills is pretty specific — it is really good for one-time issues, something you need to talk out,” she said. “[However,] it is not a long-term thing.” In the past, it has taken up to three months for students seeking counseling appointments at CAPS to even be considered for a one-onone counselling session, simply because they weren’t suicidal. But all students’ cases are important, even if they’re not immediately life-threatening. Stanford’s Sport Psychology program, meanwhile, is relatively new. Moran-Miller’s sport psychologist position was created in 2015. Before her position was created, Moran-Miller said, the general sentiment at Stanford was that its programs were behind. Other schools had already implemented sport psychology programs. She believes that in recent years, though, Stanford has made progress. “In terms of providing mental health resources, I think we are doing a really good job,” she said. “But of course there is always more we could be doing ... around the culture, reducing stigma, improving help, seeking and increasing awareness.” Anderson lauded the high quality of the University’s nutrition and strength and conditioning programs, but added that when athletes are injured, the first and only thing they are told to do is go to physiotherapy. Yet athletes also face mental challenges after an injury, such as separation from teammates, lack of motivation and withdrawal from their sport. “Going to Sport Psych isn’t even on their radar because of stigma and lack of education,” Anderson said. “That’s one of the things that’s really striking to me. We have all these programs ... [with] probably mental being by far the most important, [but] that gets the least attention from student-athletes
when they are injured or sick.” He added, “There [are] a lot of people out there that may be dealing with stuff, clinical or nonclinical, and they don’t even know if it’s a mental problem or not.” Speaking on behalf of Vaden Health Center, Moran-Miller and Director of Sports Medicine in Psychiatry Dr. Lisa Post, Athletics Communications Director Brian Risso wrote in an email to The Daily that the University’s Sports Psychiatry and Psychology program distinguishes itself from similar initiatives at other institutions in that “the team of sport psychologists available [at Stanford] are one prong of a larger group of psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in athlete mental health.” But despite the “team of sport psychologists” Risso referenced, up until the 2018-2019 school year, the University employed just one sport psychologist on campus — MoranMiller herself — to serve the approximately 900 students who participate in Stanford athletics. Beginning this fall, Moran-Miller will be joined by one full-time and one part-time sports psychologist, along with two part-time clinical psychology postdoctoral fellows. “We are constantly evaluating the needs of our student-athletes in an effort to provide the best possible resources and comprehensive care while collaborating closely with the University,” Risso wrote. There’s a long list of resources available at Stanford’s Sports Psychiatry Clinic, located a few miles off campus: Confidential personal counseling, performance psychology consulting, psychological rehabilitation from injury, career counseling, medication evaluation and management, specialized care
Up until the 2018-2019 school year, the University employed just one sport psychologist on campus to serve the approximately 900 students who participate in Stanford athletics.
referrals, team-centered workshops for varsity teams, crisis intervention and consultation with coaches and athletic department staff. But nobody knows about these resources, and nobody has any time to seek them out — especially when they’re tucked away offcampus. As an athlete with around four hours of class and four hours of practice each day on top of other responsibilities, it becomes easy to say, “I don’t have time.” Risso declined to provide The Daily with data on how widely campus mental health resources geared toward student-athletes are used, but stated that the University does track these figures internally. Most athletes have at least heard of MoranMiller and will seek her help. But up until this upcoming year, she was just one person on a campus with approximately 900 studentathletes of all different backgrounds and experiences. One person can’t help everyone. “Dr. Kelli is one person — no one person is ever gonna mesh with everyone,” Anderson said. “I know people who have gone to Kelli and not enjoyed their experience, for any host of reasons that are certainly not personal. Dr. Kelli just might not be the right person for everyone.” Although campus mental health resources outside of Moran-Miller exist, Klass added that it might be difficult for student-athletes to speak with someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the specific struggles they face, such as counselors from CAPS or The Bridge who serve as more general practitioners. “Someone who is able to relate to me in my
Issue 1 | 19
“Not every story has to be, ‘And then I won a national championship.’” Kat Klass ’19, women’s water polo Cardinal RHED co-vice president experience might be what people are looking for, rather than someone just to listen, who doesn’t have the same perspective necessarily,” she said. And according to Anderson, the University struggles with making more general resources accessible to student-athletes. In some instances, he said, the SARA Office may be the most appropriate resource for a studentathlete’s needs, but by default they’re almost always referred to Sport Psychology instead. “I think Sport Psychology does a good job, but they are grossly understaffed for the demand that we have,” Anderson said. “One thing I’d like to see more of is [a] push for students to seek other resources that are more specialized, even if they are supposedly for the general student population.” The push for campus mental health awareness — among both athletes and nonathletes — still seems to come primarily from students. “The cultural shift by students has to kickstart what the University does, forcing action,” Axelrod said. “I think the University does a lot of talk. I think a lot of the resources — at least the first line of defense — [are] students.” Established in 2016, Cardinal RHED is a student-run sub-committee of the StudentAthlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) on campus. SAAC consists of student-athletes who provide the student voice in NCAA, Pac12, University and Stanford Athletics decisions. It includes the subcommittees Cardinal RHED, Community Service, Special Projects and Social Events. According to Anderson, Klass and Walsh, Cardinal RHED’s mission within SAAC is pretty simple. “The main thing is planning and implementing and really trying to create conversations around mental health,” Klass said. “It’s something that is being talked about a little more now that we are establishing a bit of a presence on campus, but I [still] don’t think it’s talked about enough.”
20 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
Cardinal RHED aims to break this stigma through its annual GameFACES speaker event. Much like the FACES of Community program that occurs each year during New Student Orientation, GameFACES is a night that features student-athlete speakers who share their unique stories of triumph and adversity with the public. Klass believes that the University does a great job with GameFACES. However, Stanford’s simultaneous promotion of the opposing narrative — one of student-athletes who always bounce back from hardship — can be counterproductive. “It’s hard where they have to do the ‘Stanford Athletics thing,’ where they say, ‘These are how many Olympians we have, and here [are] incredible stories of people who have bounced back from some kind of adversity to do great things,’” Klass said. The thing Klass loves most about GameFACES, though, is how it pushes up against this public relations narrative with its human factor. “Not every story has to be, ‘And then I won a national championship,’” she said. Looking ahead Despite existing programs and resources provided by students and administrators alike, mental health resources at Stanford — and, in particular, those for student-athletes — continue to fall short. “We are full-time students and full-time athletes,” Anderson said. “There’s only so much one group can do.” Axelrod admitted to being guilty herself of not asking for help, even as a mental health advocate and peer counselor. Making the first step is the hardest — and maybe the most challenging — hurdle. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” she said. “Having more resources so that there are people available is really important. Having mandatory check-ins
would be really valuable. If we had the capacity for that, it would be really awesome.” Klass proposed a similar idea for team trips to away games. “When we’re traveling, it feels very us-versus-[the coaches]; we don’t usually travel with a team doctor [or psychologist],” Klass said. She added that establishing a pipeline between student-athletes and mental health providers at the start of the year would be beneficial in incentivizing students to use their resources. To this point, Moran-Miller proposed using initial team meetings to introduce sport psychology resources and increase the visibility of available mental health services, citing studies that show student-athletes feel most comfortable when talking to a provider they have already met. With more practitioners, it will be more possible to provide that face time. Walsh concurred. “If it was made more normal to seek help earlier, I think you’d find a lot less people digging themselves deeper and deeper [into a hole],” he said. Ultimately, it might boil down to an issue of size. Stanford offers 36 varsity sports teams, double the nationwide Division I average of 19. “We have more athletic teams than all but [a few] universities, and we have more student-athletes by default,” Anderson said. At the end of the day, despite Stanford Management Company CEO Robert Wallace’s statement that Stanford’s nearly $25 billion endowment — which ranks among the top 5 in the nation — “is not a tool for social activism,” the issues seem to speak for themselves. Stanford can and should do better. A ratio of two full-time sports psychologists to 900 student-athletes is not enough. “Fake it ’til you make it” only goes so far. “We are extraordinarily high achieving in academics at one of the top universities in the world — and, if anything, we should be the most staffed sport psych program out there,” said Anderson.
Contact Mikaela Brewer at mbrewer8@stanford.edu.
Week in Review: Must-See Matches By Laura Sussman
Sept. 23 12 p.m.
Women’s Volleyball vs. Arizona
Finish off your NSO week by going to a fun women’s volleyball match. Last year, the team saw a tournament run that ended in fourth place nationally.
Sept. 26 7 p.m.
Women’s Volleyball vs. UCLA
Whether or not you went to the last women’s volleyball game, you’ll want to go to this one. Last year, the team won 3-1 against the Bruins.
Sept. 27 5 p.m.
Men’s Soccer vs. San Diego State
If you want to see a team bound not to disappoint, go cheer on the men’s soccer team. They are the pride and joy of the Cardinal, having won the national championships three years in a row.
Sept. 27 8 p.m.
Women’s Soccer vs. UCLA
You’ll already be at the field, so why not stick around to watch another national championship team play?
Sept. 28 7 p.m.
Field Hockey vs. Pacific
If you like soccer, lacrosse, ice hockey or any fast-paced game, field hockey may become your new passion. The team will already be warmed up with 10 games under their belt for the season.
Sept. 28 8 p.m.
Women’s Volleyball vs. USC
If you go to Stanford, you hate Berkeley. But you also hate USC. So put on your Stanford gear and be prepared to shout “Go Card” on Friday.
Sept. 29 1 p.m.
Men’s Water Polo vs. San Jose State
Last year, we had a couple midseason losses that brought morale down. Then, we went and beat San Jose State 16-5 and started a streak that saw 12 wins in a row. Just saying.
Sept. 30 12 p.m.
Field Hockey vs. UC Davis
You know this is going to be a good game. The team will either be riding the momentum of a win against Pacific or trying to avenge a loss.
Sept. 30 1 p.m.
Women’s Soccer vs. USC
As someone who has covered women’s soccer since freshman year, I cannot emphasize enough how fun these matches are. The first time I went I couldn’t believe how good they were. See for yourself!
Sept. 30 5 p.m.
Men’s Soccer vs. UCLA
Last year, the 1-0 victory against UCLA was a close one. The game truly needed players in both teams to give it their all. If you want a regular season game played at the level of a tournament match, this is one of your best bets.
Issue 1 | 21
On a midnight voyage, Searching for my pleasure; Reaching with my mind for something I’ve dreamed.
Chapman Caddell’s
C
I hit the road going north and west toward the middle-end of July. Cam’s a victim of the systematic monosyllabification of America’s youth, but facile oversimplification, naturally, is a treasured American pastime. I occasionally have to go by Chap: your pain is my pain, America. We’re headed for Austin, the long way. As I write, Cam’s working cybersecurity and I’m working on a documentary with my good friend Rob — another victim! The only other campus personality who makes an appearance is Josh. He and Rob don’t start on the road. They first appear on other roads, at other times, and those “adventures,” in the social-media sense, are made for the screen. More accurately: you could, in theory, reconstruct them from the screen. We don’t appear. That is the nature of our documentary. So a couple of unregenerates drive out listening to rock ‘n’ roll, Britisher than your standard road-trip fare, on a playlist tellingly entitled, “In Which: Cam and Chapman Find am and
Their Elusive Souls in the Vast American Interior.” Cam, I absolve him, played no part in the entitling: he is a sturdy five-footsingle-digit, and his main distinguishing physical characteristic is a curly hair-beard combo that we, the smooth-faced, think worth celebrating. After a long pubic phase, it’s just starting to come into its own. He and I roomed and road-tripped together freshman year, and now it’s the summer after a once-interminable-but-not-altogetherunpleasant sophomore year. This trip bears, for us, some resemblance to the Concert in Central Park. Whether we like it or not (and we do) our fortunes are married together. But we’re looking less for America than Austin. It’s a serious, instrumental road trip. Not a pleasure trip. The stops are brief and the drives are long and the stories, if pedestrian, are real. Except for a few names of my own unique invention. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is intentional. Page-thoughts resemble actual thoughts in content if not in structure.
Cut to: windscreen shot, Cam in the passenger’s seat with a paperback copy of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” me at the wheel and a small ‘n’ dusty Nevada town (not pictured) in the rearview mirror. Lovelock? We’ll only pass Winnemucca around nightfall when the desert in the making is no longer beautiful. Here, at least, the emptiness feels less oppressive than it did in Reno. Even physics bows down to the golden hour — it’s an electromagnetic miracle. “You know,” Cam says, “I don’t think there was a better way to do Reno.” Reno, you may have gathered, didn’t sit well with your favorite singer-songwriter duo. Taste of India, not my name, stands on the outskirts of the city. Vegas without excess is
The road somewhere off in north-central Nevada, in a spot where there isn’t much of anything, except for a small town in the rearview mirror (not pictured). Photos by CHAPMAN CADDELL 22 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
fatuous Reno, and visions of that tame hell kept us in the way way out there, where we settled, naturally, for the extrarenal. “You ever had goat?” “No.” If I have, it wasn’t memorable. “Fuck it, I’ll get the goat.” Where the parking lot ends and Taste of India (ToI) begins is unclear. The only customers and cars are us and our own, respectively. Reno’s palette is modest, washed-out shades of grey, blue and beige, and ToI sets itself apart from the city, tastefully, in a shit-brown shadow all its own. But maybe Reno breeds a strange sort of optimism: the booths run deep at ToI, and if this night is at all like the others, they max out at half empty. The hostess took us down to the backmost. Cam eats his goat and I eat my chicken and we high-tail it out of greater Reno for Winnemucca’s shifting sands. Some facts about Nevada, as we experienced it: the land is ugly and dead when the sun’s above us, but it reanimates when the sun dips down toward the mountains behind us. I watch them in the rearview mirror as they and my California fade into the parched middle-distance. The road itself follows a so-slight-as-to-beimmeasurable arc that rises and falls and takes us westward in the flats. Along the road, we see cowboys, genuine cowboys, taking their herd into fields unknown. We can’t see fences, only the past, and the occasional sign that reminds us to call the police on hitchhikers. Nevada, after all, is the one true home of the American supermax. And the prairies unbroken that roll gentle toward the sun are the judiciary’s last guarantee. Cam and I first discuss this interior’s emptiness in the depth it deserves when we first experience absolute flat, which falls closer to the end of our fling with I-80 East. Still, it’s relevant well before we reach mid-Wyoming. It’ll be even more relevant come the Panhandle. But here it begins, and Cam’s theory goes that topographical simplicity deprives the young mind of much-needed (un)natural stimuli. Chronic visual deprivation shapes the flatlander’s allAmerican mind. For the better? Who’s to say?
Either way it’s compelling pseudoscience, as most pseudoscience is, and we ask: how to reach the mountainless mind? We go back and forth, but I like the flats. Though I don’t know whether I could say the same for my head. All I’ll know in the morning is that Battle Mountain, Nevada, looks much the same in the day as it does in the dark though it does have the topographical asset of … a mountain. It’s physically and metaphysically a cold, cold night, and we pull into a truck stop somewhere around the town — close enough to call it Battle Mountain — and off into a heat-baked dirt expanse that might be a quarter-aborted construction site
that’s hollerin’ I don’t look like much now, but golly I could have been somebody! There’s a short discussion of whether or not we’ll cave and get a cheap motel room. But here we are, committed, and there’s no leaving the truck turnaround until each of us feels the other has had sufficient time to sleep. We pretend to sleep early — it’s that or an empty night. That is: there’s fuck-all to do. So we feign sleep and, on a Nevada night (characteristically) devoid of stimuli, my silent thoughts return.
And it’s this that strikes me, or would have struck me: that Cam has it wrong, that the sacrifice required for a life in this world without terrain isn’t developmental. It’s mental. I look up and see myself instead of billboards as my thoughts project themselves out into that vast American interior I so tenderly mythologized. While it’s not inconceivable that I could fill that black starred space with happy memories, it’s an easy-access non-narcotic trip that begins where my mind ends, and this night these plains confront me with demons and my anxious want. They tend, politely, to keep a respectful distance — they’re skirmishers, not shock troops — and I return the favor. I tend to let them be. But they pass through Nevada now to have a chat I can’t take and I start looking to the crack between window and roof for a place to vomit. Dry heaves unconsummated prove counter-productive but I can still bring myself to piss, and I open and close the door with a quiet considerate affection for Cam whose eyes, it happens, are as white and wide as mine. Nightmares, for once, don’t come when I call. I sleep a total of two hours and find out in the morning that Cam scores a whopping four. We “wake” with the sunrise and push up to make Salt Lake City by noon. Bonneville lies somewhere between. So, we hope, does a redemptive greasy spoon. The loneliness of the plains and the desert isn’t hollow — it has substance. Dark, terrestrial angst reaches out from under the brush. And it burns.
We look for more life in Laramie and have some success. Joe’s Prairie Surf Rockers take the stage at 8, the stage being a carpeted floor, and they’re shockingly ready to rip. In the back is Little Dave, and as the little one — it’s in the name — he’s on the drums, and the two fat guys shred guitar and bass in the front. Steve Wonderbeard’s the guitarist. The bass (what else?) resides with Joe himself. The boys tear into a gutting classic rock ‘n’ roll that fills the mead bar with riffs so heavy they
Photo: The Bonneville Salt Flats, on their own. I hit 120 mph and drifted in a station wagon. The engine and Cam have never been the same. Issue 1 | 23
The saddest bowling alley I’ve ever seen, and I hate bowling alleys that aren’t abandoned. Struck me as true to Reno.
get Cam drunk on dehydration and a single glass. These riffs blister, so out-of-time-andstep with the Wyoming prairie that even the wind on Main Street doesn’t bother blowing in through the open door. And we sit still in an effort to get transfixed, out of-timeand-step ourselves in two wooden chairs we pulled over while the rest of our Laramie-ites just sit on the floor. Even Wonderbeard’s dad’s at home in the audience, we are told, and his mother, too — it’s a family affair — and the boys play two-minute banger after banger that warm the north summer night: all twenty-four-odd watchers over– and underage made ghoul-radiant by the cosmetic glow of skingrease nacre on three rockin’ foreheads. Don’t be caught off-guard: Joe and Wonderbeard have the filthy collective mind of a twenty-first century Chaucer, and Mom and Dad eat ‘em up, from the merely flatulent to the grossly cunnilingual. For all its charmlessness, what better to do when the road’s over there and you’re over here? The need for sleep steps in but it lands us in dives instead of beds. And even sleep takes a backseat to the need for some external stimuli other than “For What It’s Worth” on an infinite loop. But the time between drives is naturally empty and we overcompensate with landlock surf rock. Joe and the five girls on the floor try to make a night out of groovy anachronism — their heads bobbing in off-beat unison—but even the dirtiest surf rock can’t compete with narcotics, and what they’re digging comes with a better high than three mid-life crises in a mead bar.
24 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
The University of Wyoming, it turns out, supplies superlungs. Stoners aside, the band has pop, even “pizazz.” They’ve put a clean hole through the summer night with practice or passion and Cam leans in even as I lean out. He finds a home in the music. But I’m still outside, my teetotaling working hand in hand with conspicuous self-perception, and overstimulation itself creates a sense of stimulation more omni– than over– even if I bear some of the blame. I wear my Clark Kent glasses when I drive cross-country because fiddling with contacts is against code. I hope they make me into a scrawny little Superman, but they do more to call attention to the gulf between us. It’s this unfortunate structural-statural disparity that draws the imagined eye. Consciousness, unfortunately, makes us sidekicks take center stage, and distance from home has nothing to do with it. We leave when Wonderbeard says “it’s gonna get weird” because it’s exhausting, this chairborne performance: “It’s getting to be that part of the night, folks!” Laramie-ite laughter follows us on our way out. So we were being watched, at least on the backend — and paranoia, you Heller fans, doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But on a moonless night in the interstate’s shadow, no one can see.
Press “1” to get a hassle-free assessment. The comedown is brutal and Aspen helps, topography helps, but we’re near the corner
of New Mexico waiting for a spire or a drug bust that’ll never come — just something to break it up. And who knew Colorado was in the Confederacy? The owners and operators of this meth-den-turned-barbecue in Trinidad seem to know. Colorado’s Deep South is more punk-rock than America’s. Still, it shares a similar enthusiasm for political reaction and the so-called Lost Cause. While some of the mystery has been stripped out of the road trip by the smartphone, we console ourselves with the fact that our meth den scores a solid fourout-of-five on Yelp. How do the junkies at the barbeque joint fill the time? Anything distracts. We walk in through an entryway still under construction after all this time and find more dust inside than the desert has outside. Now Rob is with us, too, after a stop in Colorado, and the Three Musketeers are reunited for the final push south to our typically Stanford summers of self-justification. Long-lost Johnny Reb runs the BBQ joint and stocks it with as many guns as ribs, and he’s joined by this zeffish woman (Yolandi?) who’s just as addicted but full of surprises. She listens to Sublime, I assume, but maybe she just likes the cover art for Badfish — it doesn’t come up when she brings the ribs ‘n’ brisket back to the table. The ‘60s (18) collide head-on with the ‘90s (19) and leave us with good food and discomfort, mental and GI, that keep us wide-awake all the way to Rob’s home in the Panhandle: the jewel of the Canadian River. And I think back, as it’ll be another night
in Austin someday with the advertisements collapsing in on the highway after a crass commercial film I saw alone on a different kind of drive. I’ll sink into the lights and cars and music, my own music, and try to cry though I’ll find myself unable, but the car’s the place to give it a go where from time to time I will. Maybe heartbreak or betrayal will cut through that cross-country tug-of-war between noise and its absence and the existential’ll go on background, deep background. In this battle between my head’s dark dojo and the excess outside, the car plays an ambiguous (if vital) role, but it’s Sehnsucht — finally — that does most of the work, and Sehnsucht by nature works alone. It’ll take me down the highway with psychic speed as I drive by home (not home) for the summer and gun it south as long as I can. Little-known fact: demons can be physically located, placed on a map, and mine lie due south of wherever I am if they’re not passing through my head. But they’ll have to fight
for headspace with amelodic sight & sound, and now I fight with IHOP, Whataburger and 1-800-JESUS-SAVES, something like that, to hold on to what I hate — at least it’s mine. And Rob falls asleep as we cut across New Mexico uncharacteristically blasting The Pretty Reckless, God forbid, and Cam and I continue to grapple with false definitions of “mesa” and “butte” that this landscape foists upon us: Cam ‘n’ the Internet get it right and I get it wrong. But I’m so desperate to latch on to anything, anyone, any idea on the road — the real road, the Beat mythic road — where I’ll want something I know. But we’re not Beats because there’s nothing beatific about us, and the Lost Generation didn’t have GPS. Maybe the Looking Generation, postmodern Searchers, wanting something meaningful without knowing what that something is, late-night driving for authenticity’s sake when no one’s heard from God in decades and we already traded in our emotional literacy for techno-literacy.
We’re Google autodidacts from software to sex, and apparently we’re getting less wild as we get more lonely — less violence, more couchlock, less love affair, more one-night stand. But even as we medicate with our Marvel and our Molly, we morethan-anything want to feel what’s been lost. Until we do. And the tragedy from the driver’s seat is that it’s empty this side o’ the window and overfull the other, and meaning manufactured according to books we’ve read and films we’ve watched still feels empty as it is. And the salted engine mocks me: Hey kid: ya wannit from the inside-out or the outside-in? Turn the television set down, please. And turn the air conditioning off. Contact Chapman Caddell at jcaddell@ stanford.edu.
A lonely Bonneville gas station. I think it captures the flats better than the flats on their own. We drove out of there blasting “Paint It, Black” (shamelessly) into the salt. Not appreciated by the few families (not pictured) at the end of the road.
Issue 1 | 25
My failed resolutions from freshman year By Jackie O’Neil
As anyone who has studied for a PSYCH 70 final can tell you, we tend to regret the things we didn’t do more than we regret all of the embarrassing, guilt-inducing or downright idiotic things that we’ve actually done. Whatever the psychological explanation for this phenomenon, it certainly seems to ring true as I look back on my first year at Stanford. All of the times I stayed up too late before an important exam or presentation, decided I wouldn’t need an umbrella twenty minutes before a winter quarter downpour, wore a pair of heels altogether inappropriate for the amount of walking I knew I would
I mistakenly believed that only one sentence per day would be a reasonable journaling goal. As it turns out, the minimal “one sentence” requirement isn’t as important as the “per day” condition. One missed day inevitably turned into one missed week, and that was the end of my journaling resolution. If I had filled the pages of my One Sentence Daily journal with reflections, I would now have the benefit of a 262-entry chronicle of my freshman life.
have to do on a Friday night and forewent nutritious dining hall options for a dinner consisting primarily of sweet potato fries seem insignificant now, and when I consider my biggest regrets from the last year, most of them boil down into my failure to keep up the resolutions I made as an over-eager pre-frosh during NSO. I can’t blame my past self for not sticking to all of the goals I had in mind for my first year. After all, I was fully expecting the NSO whirlwind to die down during the first few weeks of fall quarter — instead, a chaotic juggling act left me with little time to do
When winter quarter hit hard, I got into the unfortunate habit of whisking my meals directly from Stern Dining to my room, where I worked, read and studied between bites of whatever lentil soup was on tap that day. Though my multitasking skills benefited, I missed out on the opportunity to share meals with friends and dormmates. If I had kept up the habit of eating dinner in the dining hall four or five nights each week for the second half of the year, I could have traded endless studying for so many valuable conversations with my peers.
My determination to enjoy as many sunrises and sunsets as possible was quickly dashed by the need for sleep in the mornings and a steady slew of homework and other obligations in the evenings. Had I reduced my expectations to only one Sunday morning sunrise per week, I still could have caught 32 of them during my first year instead of snoozing through brunch and missing out on the natural beauty that surrounds the Stanford campus. Photos by KHUYEN LE 26 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
anything more than sleep and try to stay on my feet while balancing schoolwork, extracurriculars, budding friendships and a determination to avoid FOMO at all costs. I had a better freshman year than I had ever dreamed or anticipated, and generally my reflections on the past ten months are overwhelmed by happiness and early-onset nostalgia. With that said, calculating the sacrificed outcomes of my failed promises to myself makes me all the more determined to stay on track with my resolutions in the coming year.
It’s safe to say that gym visits did not feature in my daily routine as prominently as I had hoped. If I take for granted the fitness world’s assertion that almost anyone can conquer a marathon after 24 weeks of training, sticking to this resolution would have given me 13 and a half weeks of wiggle room to work up to the 26.2-mile race. With a little more dedication I might have spent my spring break triumphantly crossing a finish line instead of lying poolside all day, every day.
In an effort to handle stress more effectively in college than I did in high school, I decided to meditate daily once I arrived on campus. This habit lasted all of three days, and I found myself frustrated, unable to practice for over 10 minutes at a time. If I had started small and committed, I may have been able to increase my daily sessions from five to ten to thirty minutes, accumulating over 3,000 minutes of zen by the year’s end — which would be well worth the increased clarity, focus and calm that accompany consistent meditation.
During NSO, when Provost Drell charged my class to connect with professors at office hours, I truly believed I would. In reality, a combination of scheduling problems and completely unfounded nerves kept me from visiting office hours more than a handful of times. If I had taken the time to approach a professor once a week to talk about a shared interest for half an hour or so, I could have spent more than sixteen hours of my first year forming important relationships with people who are experts in the fields about which I’m most passionate.
I promised myself I’d take advantage of the Dish even before I realized how close it was to my room in Stern. Despite the fact that I could get to the entrance in just a few minutes, I ended up hiking or running the trail only a few times. If I had maintained a weekly streak throughout the year, I could have walked or run the Dish trail 32 times, logging just over 115 miles.
When I crammed my suitcase full of way too many books on the way to NSO, I didn’t imagine all of them would end up collecting dust before being shoved back into a duffel bag for the trek home in June. Now that I’m home for the summer and finally making headway on my reading list, I wish I had taken time to read at Stanford. If I had read a book once every couple of weeks, I could have gotten a 19-book head start on the pile accumulating on my dresser.
After hiding indoors from Virginia’s 100% humidity index all summer, I spent the plane ride to Stanford daydreaming about lying out in the sun as much as possible. Had I committed myself to two dedicated hours of sunbathing per week while at school, I could have logged 65 hours under the sun and potentially returned to Virginia considerably less vampirishly pale.
Between working part-time jobs throughout the school year and doing my best to get the maximum possible value out of my mandatory meal plan, I had high hopes for developing some money-saving habits. Instead, most of my savings materialized as Trader Joe’s hauls and unnecessary retail therapy after exams. If I had saved $20 every week, I could have finished out the year with an extra $650, the equivalent of four flights from San Francisco to New York, 13 pairs of my favorite flip-flops or 63 Ike’s sandwiches.
The fast pace and quick turnover of the quarter system left me missing the year-long extended projects I completed during my high school years. I briefly considered filling this gap by slowly writing the first part of a novel. I never actually made it to the “create Word document” stage of this plan, but if I had written just 500 words four times a week from the first day of classes to the last, I could have created a respectable 75,000word dent in the first draft.
In the case of my resolution to commit at least one act of kindness each week, the foregone benefits don’t end with me. If I had performed one good deed for someone for each of the 32 weeks of the school year, who knows how many people’s days could have been made by a chain reaction of kindness?
After a flat tire paired with my stubbornness and laziness rendered my campus bike defunct for the months of November-June, I walked everywhere I went on campus and in the surrounding area. In all of that time alone with my headphones, I easily could have cycled through all of the podcasts I set out to listen to at the beginning of the year. Instead, I jumped around a truly embarrassing collection of Spotify albums heavily featuring One Direction and the pop country genre. Had I spent that time more wisely, I might have walked away an expert on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, early American history, Beatlemania or any of the other million podcast topics available on iTunes. Issue 1 | 27
#11 Amir Bashti breaks free toward the goal.
#12 Ryan Ludwick starts a drive to the goal. Matthew Radzihovsky rushes to celebrate Marc Joshua’s goal.
28 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
Logan Panchort stops one of the early drives to the goal.
#16 Beattie Goad takes a direct goal attempt, keeping up the pressure. #12 Sierra Enge fights to keep the ball as she pushes through defenders.
Nicole Gibbs serves at the Mubadala Silicon Valley Classic.
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Issue 1 | 29
Imagined Conversations By Joe Dworetzky 30 | The Stanford Daily Magazine
© Dworetzky 2018 / www.jayduret.com
Emily Schmidt’s
HONEST GUIDE to #StanfordStyle
F
rom urban to preppy to downright random, no two Stanford students’ styles are the same. But if you pay attention as the weeks of the quarter pass, you’ll realize that the style habits across campus are eerily similar. Here’s a week-byweek guide as to what you can expect your habits to look like.
Week 1. You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to make the best impression on your professors, your TAs and your classmates. You also realize quite quickly that campus is full of amateur paparazzi (or nosy tourists who take pictures of you living your *best* life). With practically the entire world looking at you, you feel it’s time to break out the cool kid clothes that make you invincible, the ones you’d wear if you decided to bump into that cutie from Coupa. Every morning this week you wake up before your alarm goes off and jump into the wrinkle-free clothes you laid out the night before. You take a moment in the mirror to appreciate the lack of bags under your eyes ... Week 3. The first major assignments and midterms happen this week, and you’re starting to panic (but only a little). Procrastination manages to paralyze any and all progress you should’ve made days ago, but an invite to Late Night is just too tempting to pass up. You haven’t done laundry yet this quarter, so the clothes left in the closet are a hodgepodge of pieces that either have holes, smell weird or could double as rally gear. You’ve already seen people show up to class in unicorn onesies and stripy knee socks, so you decide there’s no shame in being a spirited student during both lecture and section. Week 5.
When someone asks how you’re doing, the immediate answer always seems to be “Hanging in there” or “It’s Week 5” or “Eh.” It doesn’t matter whether you’re a STEM or humanities major. Everyone looks the same, acts the same and suffers from the same amount of work. You’ll share the thousand-yard stare and frown lines of the person sitting at the desk next to yours in Green. And you’ll both be wearing the Stanford sweatpants or flannels that you slept in the last three nights. What’s the use of changing if you’re comfortable, right? Plus, they’re technically clean because you haven’t worked out in them (or been to a gym in three weeks).
Week 7.
Daylight Savings give you an extra hour, but you’re not feeling any more awake come Monday morning classes. It’s cold when you wake up and gets dark by dinner, so motivation is at an all-time low. Rain is also in the forecast for the first time this quarter. You realize after getting soaked on the way back from class that you don’t have a rain jacket. Amazon Prime to the rescue! While you’re spending money, you might as well order what’s been in the shopping cart for two months: a few posters of Barack Obama, some patterned knee-high socks, a Mickey Mouse waffle iron and a Schrute Farms t-shirt. You’ll be sporting the t-shirt and knee-highs paired with whatever isn’t soaking wet for the rest of the week.
Week 10. Ah, Dead Week. The bittersweet end to what was a very, very long quarter. You’re burnt out, and your clothes are, too, thanks to the merciless industrial dryers. What’s left of your clean clothes is scattered around the room, mixed in with the several Stanford sweatshirts and sweatpants you’ve worn for the last few weeks. Instead of washing them, you load up on deodorant to freshen them up. You might even sleep in the same clothes you go to class in. With a final presentation at the end of the week, you make sure your lucky underwear is clean and ready to work its magic. Issue 1 | 31
Welcome to Stanford! A crossword crash course for frosh by Grant Coalmer
Need help? Solutions online at stanforddaily.com
Clues Across:
Down:
1. Home for caffeine and meals 2. The school’s time system, 25 percent 3. Library, Earth Sciences, Meyer 4. Midnight during the week before finals 5. Shakes and comfort food for dining dollars 6. Central dorm; has ice cream and SLE 7. The good thing about laundry 8. Mirth and merriment, performed in MemAud 9. Campus fountain activity 10. Week before finals; Week 10
1. Iconic fountain’s name 4. Famous drive; known for its trees 11. Church seen from the Oval 12. Tallest building on campus 13. Steam or sky, a sneaky student activity 14. Where chain restaurants on campus are 15. Stanford event based on the moon 16. What we do at Big Game (2) 17. “Let’s hike the ____”
32 | The Stanford Daily Magazine