Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta#ixzz1sumsGpmF

The reaction to this article on my facebook newsfeed was really interesting - half my friends were reposting with comments like “Stanford pride!” “d.school pride” etc but the other half didn’t like many of the assumptions, criticisms, and depictions this article made. The title of the article is “Get Rich U” for crying out loud.

Despite that, it’s hard to pick a side, especially because when people say “this article makes Stanford out to be some sort of factory, manufacturing entrepreneurs and not caring that much about the liberal arts” well it’s kind of true, isn’t it? :\