Jeeze, I hope my son doesn't ever tell me he's going to graduate school at Stanford.

[NNadir]

He hasn't expressed any interest in going there, thankfully, even though one of the most cited Materials Scientists in the world, Yi Cui is a professor there.

Dr. Cui is a very impressive fellow, by the way, having established the conditions under which N95 masks can be sterilized and reused. (He's also a protege of Obama's first Energy Secretary, Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.)

Nevertheless, no reflection on Dr. Cui, Stanford seems to be losing scientific credibility.

Of course, this is the university where the right wing Hoover Institution resides, and of course, people associated with Hoover with no training in epidemiology have been very Trump like in their predictions of how bad the virus would be.

Apparently, for financial incentives, funded by the CEO of Jet Blue, they've been pushing the idea that Covid-19 isn't all that risky:

How Stanford Lost Its Soul

Subtitle: A distinguished university known for its embrace of corporate funding has come down with a bad case of Covid-19 contrarianism.

Stanford is also the home of Mark Z. Jacobson, whose approach to science includes filing a lawsuit against prominent scientific journal for um, publishing science he didn't like.

My son hasn't expressed any interest in Stanford and in any case is up for a scholar award covering his graduate program at his current institution, but if he did...

...under the right circumstances his father can go ballistic.

[DonaldsRump]

1. I would take UC-Berkeley over Stanford any day!

Thank you for posting.

Any institution relating to and named after a massive failure of a President like Herbert Hoover is a bit suspect in my view, but your point about Stanford's ridiculous views on the Trump Virus (aka covid-19) are spot on.

I'll take Cal any day over Stanford. Putting everything else aside, it's got a much cooler campus!

[NNadir]

2. I'm hoping he'll go to one of the East Coast Ivy's if he doesn't stay where he is.

There are clear cases of a lack of integrity in the Stanford faculty. That should be obvious from the mere existence of the Hoover Institution.

My son will probably stay where he's due to graduate in December because he's in love with a underclasswoman who has a few years left to graduate. He is very likely to win a graduate scholarship there, so he can go for free.

I've never thought that highly of Stanford, to be honest, and I would agree that Berkeley is a better institution, and is, in fact, more highly rated, at least by US News - whatever they know - this year for Mat Sci, at #3; they rate Stanford #5, probably because of Dr. Yi. It turns out that a few years back the #1 university for Materials Science was actually UC Santa Barbara. One of my son's professors got his Ph.D there under Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura. They do not have an undergraduate Mat Sci program at UC Santa Barbara, but their graduate program is considered one of the best in the United States.

I'd like him to consider MIT because this year they're rated #1, and in any case I'm trying very hard to get my son interested in refractory materials for energy applications. MIT would be the place for that. If he's at MIT, I can see him once in a while too.

My son, however, is disinterested in what I think about his education in any case. He just humors me. As long as he rules out Stanford, I'm OK.

[EarnestPutz]

3. I wondered what Jacobson had posited in his paper and what PNAS had...

....published that contradicted his assertions. Mr. NNadir, I've read lots of your commentary here on DU and feel I understand your position that renewable energy sources are not capable of replacing fossil fuels by themselves and nuclear power must be part of our salvation in reducing global warming. I will tell you that you've turned me around on this issue and made me a proponent of smart nuclear power. I can see why Stanford's Mr. Jacobson publishing something of a scientific fantasy, asserting that an all-renewable future was possible, got your attention.

[NNadir]

6. Thank you Earnest. Nothing makes me feel better than to hear...

...that I've opened a mind to the reality. In general, it's a hard sell, but since climate change is the greatest risk to future humanity, and of course, to the environment at large, I feel ethically compelled to make the case. It is, I think, relatively rare that I change a mind, because basically, I'm not really a nice polite person.

Thanks again for your kind words, and thank you for having an open mind.

As for Professor Jacobson, I've been aware of him for quite some time. When I was writing over in the E&E forum, there was a guy who used to cut and paste huge sections of Jacobson's idiocy and then remark that Jacobson had to be right, because he was at Stanford.

Science doesn't work that way. It's based on observation of reality, and not oracles from people working at "prestigious" universities.

From my perspective, Jacobson's papers, which I take to be bad and uninteresting science fiction, would be amusing were he not taken so seriously by some people.

My favorite paper of his was the one where he claimed we could stop hurricanes with wind turbines. Of course, if wind turbines could stop hurricanes, they could also stop the wind, which would be rather self defeating wouldn't it.

[link:Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages195–200(2014)|Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines] (Jacobson, et al Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages 195–200 (2014))

My favorite response to one of his papers was that of his Stanford colleague, Nobel Laureate Burton Richter, during which Dr. Richter informed Dr. Jacobson, quite correctly, that even including Fukushima, Japan would have lost far more lives from air pollution than any who might die from radiation, had Japan not embraced nuclear power.

Opinion on ‘‘Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident’’ by J. E. Ten Hoeve and M. Z. Jacobson, Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, 5, DOI: 10.1039/c2ee22019a

Dr. Richter was very gentle, which is perhaps why Jacobson didn't sue him. The scientists he did sue basically, in academic language, told him he was out of his mind. I'm inclined to agree, at the risk of a lawsuit.

Jacobson's ignorance, like Trump's, kills people.

[EarnestPutz]

13. Thank you for your reply and the additional information. Please keep up with your efforts....

....to educate the masses, not just this one tree hugger.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I have long heard that Stanford tilted right -- a lot of entrepeneurial IT types are from there.

The creators of Ethernet were all associated with Stanford; there is an "Ethernet Lobby" in one of the new buildings there commemorating their role(s). Apparently there is a feedback loop between Stanford and IT corps (which are, first and foremost, corps after all).

OTOH, Rachel Maddow got her BS in public policy there, so somebody did something right ...

[NNadir]

9. Well it is true that back in the 1950's that some scientists left Berkeley for Stanford...

...to avoid Ernest Lawrence's approval of the McCarthy era "loyalty oath." So there was a time that Berkeley was right wing and Stanford wasn't.

Panofsky, the original SLAC director, was one of the scientists who left Berkeley because it was too right wing.

But yes, Stanford is very clearly a right wing institution now. I didn't know that Maddow went there, but I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

My son's best high school friend - who is now at Princeton - has a sister who graduated from Stanford. She seems OK, and got a nice job, but the place is a turn off to me.

[hatrack]

12. I'm not sure how much miileage Elizabeth Holmes got out of her year at Stanford by itself . . .

But it seems strange that she was able to bring along so many illustrious alumni and affiliates of Stanford and Hoover (James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, David Boies) in her billion-dollar fraud-romp.

The only satisfaction - the realization that Rupert Murdoch lost a shitload of money in the Theranos fiasco.

[Hortensis]

5. Stanford's actually famous for various past incidences of

financial corruption, much of it Pompeo-type, taking by top administrators for themselves just because they could.

When I was appraising there, the adjoining, mostly working class county and city of Ventura had strikingly better public schools than those of wealthy Santa Barbara. Good enough for the children of service workers. That was some time ago, but somehow I doubt attitudes have improved as the corruption and extremism of the Republican Party just continued to grow beyond anything we once thought possible.

As for the Hoover Institution, I presume from what I've heard that, like the Heritage Foundation and most other conservative organizations of its type, it reflects the corruption that's taken over the right. If so, of course its people aren't respected by honest and honorable colleagues.

[NNadir]

7. Well, Proposition 13 did exactly what its detractors said it would.

It damaged basic education in California. Before Prop 13, California's K-12 education was considered to be excellent.

I'm so glad that my wife and I escaped from California before we had kids. My sons got excellent educations in public schools in New Jersey.

My experience with wealthy people in California is that they could afford to send their kids to private schools and thus didn't give a rat's ass about public schools, so what you say about Santa Barbara doesn't surprise me.

The Universities however, seem intact.

California to my mind, from what I know of it since leaving, is a model of what the United States as a whole will be, a culture severely damaged by years of Republican misrule. They had Reagan, Wilson, Deukmejian, Schwarzenegger, a pretty rough history if I must say so. I was there for the tenure of some of these fools.

The recovery from Trump alone, never mind the two Bushes, will take a very long time. Obama was on the right track, and Ms. Clinton would have done a great job. She has something Trump lacks, high intelligence.

The sad thing is that in a democracy, you sometimes get what you deserve. California's solidly blue now, but it certainly wasn't always so.

[Hortensis]

10. CA may not remain solidly blue. Whenever one party

dominates government, especially the top position, it gets all the blame for dissatisfaction.

Plus, and it's not a little thing: when the only game in town is blue, locked-out conservatives run for electoral and appointed power as Democrats. At all levels but especially lower and local where there's a lot less scrutiny. Once in power, too many find ways to pursue the anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-education, white power, misogynistic, pro-wealth, pro-corruption agendas of today's Republican Party -- while being seen as Democrats.

We get the LA Times still. Whenever I see a report of some town angry and in trouble because of policies conservatives pursue when in control and liberals oppose I have the basic outline of what's been happening.

[Alex4Martinez]

8. I took a course from Dr. Cui in energy storage.

Stanford Center for Professional Development, I enjoyed the course.

I didn't know about this development, maybe I shouldn't be so regretful that I didn't take up an opportunity years ago to enter a Masters Program there.

[NNadir]

11. I listened to an ACS lecture on line from Dr. Cui Yi recently. It was impressive.

He's clearly an outstanding scientist. But I still wouldn't want my son to go to Stanford.