Letters to the Editor

The following letters did not appear in the print edition of STANFORD.

The Chautauqua Connection

As we read the fine article on Tara VanDerveer, we were surprised by the Chautauqua connection. My wife Cynthia (a Stanford Medical Center laboratory technologist in the late ’70s) grew up in the Chautauqua area. Her sister Lynn is currently the chief librarian at Smith Library on the grounds of Chautauqua. When we asked if she knew the VanDerveer House and Tara, her reply was “Yes, she’s quite a celebrity around here!”

We also go back there every summer for a visit with family—it’s a very rejuvenating experience. What a small world!

Cynthia and Rick Sapp, ’69
San Rafael, California

President Hennessy began his column in the January/February issue (“When Less Is More”) with a patently absurd statement: “Climate change is one of the greatest threats to our planet today. . . .” Climate change to most people means weather. But I am sure that in the rarefied air he breathes, it means man-made global warming.  We just know that industrialized man is bad, and Earth is being destroyed by him.

This theory has been debunked, discredited and relegated to the trash heap of false “science.” As to threats to the planet, most of us would rank earthquakes above weather at the moment. I would also include tyranny, which always begins with agenda-driven propaganda.

In the midst of man-made mismanagement of the economy of this country and of Stanford’s budget, I believe Hennessy was trying to say that he and the staff are being careful to save money on the energy needs of the school. Why not just come out and say it? No need to wrap it in the religion of “saving the earth.”

Bob Reid, MS ’71
Dunwoody, Georgia

Back to Basics

In the January/February issue, letter writer Robert Griffin (“What About the Golden Rule?”) is right to point out that the Bible teaches “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” and “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” But he is well beyond his depth when he tries to explain exactly where in the Bible these commands originate.

In Griffin’s telling, the Torah (aka Five Books of Moses) was given to “undisciplined former slaves” with “little or no knowledge” of God, and it was left to Jesus some 15 centuries later to condense the Torah’s commandments into the two that the Book of Matthew cites. Unfortunately, Griffin’s supersessionist excursus mainly reveals that he has not opened up his Bible to the part that Christians call the Old Testament [where] he could have [seen] Leviticus 19:18 (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) or Deuteronomy 6:5 (“You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”)

If Jesus repeated these statements, he was not condensing the Hebrew Bible,
but rather quoting from it.

Ron Fein, JD ’03
Arlington, Massachusetts

Lack of Respect

It distresses me to read Letters to the Editor, written by highly educated people, that lack civility and respect for other people’s points of view. It is possible to strongly disagree with other people civilly, respectfully, without stereotyping them and without rancor.

Phil Rogers, MS ’58
University Place, Washington

Undergraduate Research Cuts

How hugely disappointing to see that Stanford cut funding for summer undergraduate research disproportionately (“Careful Cuts,” November/December). In the sciences as well as other fields, a crucial component of education is participating in the research process. Reports from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation and other agencies consistently recommend a transformation of undergraduate education to include more research opportunities. Undoubtedly the economic times demand frugality, but the student experience should be prioritized and should not be curtailed more severely than other areas of the institution. Apparently Stanford’s strength in graduate-level research deceives people into thinking that undergraduate research is dispensable and suitable for “powerful cuts” as described by Vice Provost John Bravman. That attitude [betrays] the irony that the nation’s most highly regarded universities may not sufficiently prioritize the quality of undergraduate education.

Karen G. Hales, PhD ’97
Davidson, North Carolina

Galapagos and Logic

Upon reading “Galápagos and All That” (Farm Report, November/December), I realized such a well-written and interesting article glazed over logical alternatives critical to the main line of thought. People might not agree on certain premises, but logic, not language, is what we can agree upon. It is our cultural inheritance, because logic is not by choice or accident.

As a geologist, it became obvious to me that those unique species Darwin encountered on each island could simply be remnants of the same species (since extinct) on the continent. This logical alternative is not mentioned, but it is noted Darwin saw similarities with the nearest continental species

The nearest island is approximately 600 miles from the Ecuador coast. Could two iguanas hitch a ride? Instead, we know from Hawaii’s history that catamaran canoes took new species to vastly isolated volcanic islands long before Darwin’s time. Again, a logical possibility—human intervention!

Geologically, the Galápagos islands Darwin visited became inhabitable recently (being volcanic). It is unnecessary for anyone to postulate a creator “wanting” unique species there—as if creators were emotional like us. Why make the logic “either/or” (creator/nature), when there are various logical naturalistic options to consider?

John DeVilbiss, MS ’77, PhD ’80
Honolulu, Hawaii

The interview with Bill Durham on Darwinism was very interesting, with provocative questions and thoughtful answers. The last question, though, reflects (maybe deliberately) a popular misunderstanding that cultural Darwinism implies that people are engaged in cutthroat competition. Durham’s answer explains that it’s the ideas themselves, not necessarily their holders, who are in competition. But he muddles the point by talking about lofty ideas that humans consciously decide whether to discard or propagate, which is not the clearest example. Some purer examples of memes would be jokes, urban legends, and folk songs.

A joke’s survival traits include being memorable and funny; a joke that carries those traits will reproduce and ruthlessly outcompete a long complicated joke without a punch line. No conscious entity has to be involved in working out the best strategy for the joke’s spread. Good survival traits in an urban legend include admonitions that doing something commonplace will harm the listener, or better yet, his or her child, while accuracy has very little survival value.

Just as they undergo selection, such memes also undergo variation, just like genes. Jokes and songs undergo mutations in what’s called “the folk process,” particularly before the invention of writing and then the Internet. When a random mutation occurs because someone forgets the most boring part when retelling a joke, or misremembers a story and reports that the victim was a child or the outcome more tragic, that version gains survival value and spreads faster, outcompeting older versions.

I’ve long speculated that thousands of years ago, parents told children a story about a bear getting into a human family’s campsite and eating their food; it may even have been a true story. Then details got added about the bear being picky about which food it sampled, which survived because they were entertaining and added memorable structure. Then the bear became a bear cub, because that’s cuter and easier for the young audience to identify with. Finally, some parent a thousand years ago got tired of being asked for the same story night after night, and mischievously reversed the roles of bear and human. That version became so popular that it spread and is the one we know today, and it wiped out all traces of the original as surely as early creatures with our DNA encoding scheme ate up all traces of any of evolution’s false starts.

Bob Kanefsky, ’82
Mountain View, California

It has taken a while for me to respond to the welcome article on classmate Brooks Born (“Prophet and Loss,” March/April 2009), who received a Stanford alum of the year award deservedly. I am glad I waited to read the incisive letter by Judith Vollmar Torney-Purta, ’59 (“Profile in Courage,” May/June 2009). Together, there are at least three of us who can testify to overcoming what was an entrenched set of disincentives in our generation to the professionalization of Stanford female students.

Brooks Born was a legacy student; I was what was then called a “disadvantaged” student; and I do not know the circumstances of Judith Vollmar Torney-Purta. What is important is that almost 50 years after our graduations, we have discovered that each of us separately endured traumatic encounters with powerful personnel who discouraged us from applying the very talents that got us into Stanford.

Born’s story of overcoming surprised me, because she was singled out even as a freshman by faculty and fellow students as an uncommonly brilliant student. That she was also female seemed immaterial. I was, in fact, both envious and annoyed at the awe she engendered among us, because I came from a public school in a town that since has become notorious for its homicide rate and gangsta’ rap. How could a woman of her obvious ability be treated unequally right up to the 1990s, when she was discouraged from leadership status, because she foresaw an economic cataclysm that her male peers did not want to acknowledge?

Our class of ’61 entered as the “Sputnik” group, and we were subjected to even more difficult curricula because there was a panic over the United States falling behind the USSR in the race to control space. Nevertheless, like Judith Vollmar Torney-Purta a few years earlier, I was also told by a dean that I could not apply to medical school because I would only become pregnant and drop out, thus depriving a man of a career. He did console me somewhat by saying that my “son” could become a physician.

Last June, I attended the graduation of my daughter from ophthalmology residency at Doheny Eye Institute, where she is currently a fellow in a surgical subspecialty. And she is pregnant with her first child.

The three of us should try to find out how many other women in our class experienced the same discriminatory treatment. One way in which a major class of people is controlled by those in power is by treating each case separately, so that the group remains ignorant of the treatment of the whole. It remains important to document what happened, despite the obvious gains by women in society since then, because Brooks is not in public office, despite her superior qualifications to those who are. We need such women in charge, and we are still unable to establish a merit-based system that is gender blind.

Our “silent generation” produced a noisy feminist revolution that is not yet completed. I invite our sisters in our classes to get in touch and trade experiences.  Perhaps we can produce a collective memoir for our daughters and grandkids to consult whenever it seems to them that equality is something they can take for granted and the cream always rises to the top. I know a smart female desktop publisher from the Class of  ’61 who can put it together.

Jean E. Rosenfeld, ’61
Pacific Palisades, California