[michael_j_x]

If an IT department of a major organization has both the time and motivation to construct and publicize such a document, that speaks volumes of the incentive structure and cooperate priorities of their organization. The fact that they released such document in the public domain without first running it from the PR department speaks volumes to their incompetence. This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.

[ehvatum]

If you saw a chart of Stanford administrative overhead growth, you would be aghast.

All these useless busybody administrators sucking down $100k+/yr compete for visibility in order to grow their compensation and hire yet even more of their dipshit buddies.

They are a cancer.

Learning, teaching, and researching are entirely beside the point. Demonstrate moral superiority and hire your friends if you want to stick around.

This insular, spiraling, incenstuous dynamic produces artifacts that are tremendously embarrassing and discrediting when exposed to the outside world.

[ModernMech]

> This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.

You're just projecting that you don't really understand how universities are organized. Universities are towns more than corporations, and we share a lot of things in public because we are very open. Unlike corporations which use a veil of secrecy to hide their operations, universities operate more freely. This is a good thing.

That is of course until the public and provocateurs come in and start misrepresenting things, as was the case here. It was a policy proposed by a subcommittee of a department, and the document described itself as aspirational and a guideline. Was it a good idea? No. But it was misrepresented by outsiders as "official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy." This is a flat mischaracterization of what that document was. It's a mischaracterization of the literal words on the document explaining what it was.

You may say that its nature on the Internet made it a defacto public PR strategy, but again that shows ignorance of how University PR works (lol, what's a "PR department"? That's corporate speak), but the subsequent hiding of the document behind the Stanford network should make clear it was never for you in the first place. The fact that you're still mischaracterizing the document today tells me you are intentionally pushing misinformation. I'm not sure why, but don't you think you should stop?

> speaks volumes to their incompetence.

Okay, and what was the fallout really? A bunch of conservatives and right wingers had a field day complaining about wokeness gone wild. And? Stanford continues to be a world-class institution producing cutting-edge research. The world continues turning. Stanford enrollment continues to grow.