Because Some Students At Stanford Go To Startups, That Somehow Means Stanford Is No Longer A University?

from the huh? dept

First off, I should note that I like Nick Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker's website. I thought he was great back when he was at Wired, and later when he was an editor for The New Yorker magazine as well. So I'm a bit perplexed by his recent blog post bemoaning the fact that some students at Stanford drop out to do startups and that those startups often have strong ties to Stanford. I should note that I've got no personal connection to Stanford (though it appears Thompson is an alum). However, I'm really struggling to see what the problem is. Having real world skills and being able to do something with them seems like a good thing. Having a university right in the heart of Silicon Valley with close ties to Silicon Valley seems worthwhile.

The article even mentions how this has historically been the case as well, as many of Silicon Valley's most successful companies have close ties to Stanford, going back to Federal Telegraph and Hewlett Packard -- often considered the two "founding" tech companies of Silicon Valley. But where things get really confusing is that Thompson seems to leap from the idea that some rather small percentage of students have created startups, with a few of them having close connections to faculty and administrators, to the idea that this is some sort of "requirement" for students at Stanford:

But what’s the point of having a great university among the palm trees if students feel like they have to treat their professors as potential investors, found companies before they can legally drink, and drop out in an effort to get rich fast? Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? And Stanford has, in its day, produced a great variety of graduates: compost-flipping hippies, novelists, politicians, liberal firebrands, conservative firebrands, brilliant dropouts, and, of course, athletes.

All I can say is... huh? At what point are students forced to do all of that stuff? It certainly looks like a few (a very small number of total enrolled) students are choosing to go down that path, and that's fine for them. But there is no indication that many other students feel the need to do any of the things Thompson suggests.

Making this even more bizarre is the fact that Thompson himself is an entrepreneur. His own bio notes that he's a co-founder of Atavist, a digital publishing platform with investments from some of the top Silicon Valley investors: Eric Schmidt, Andreessen Horowitz, IAC and Founders' Fund. Should we question if it's bad for The New Yorker that one of its editors is also treating possible subjects as potential investors, and isn't living the carefree, ideologically pure life of a magazine editor? Of course not. But it seems odd that he'd then complain about students in a similar situation.