In "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" there is a story about a society that shipped out all its useless members (hairdressers and telephone sanitizers) off planet.
Stanford is doing that with their new Redwood City "campus", an office park five miles from the main campus. No professors. No students. No researchers. No labs. All administrators. "Stanford units that will have at least some employees at Stanford Redwood City include Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; School of Medicine administration; Office of Development; University Human Resources; University Libraries; Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning; and Residential & Dining Enterprises."
"The first phase of construction at Stanford Redwood City will include four office buildings, indoor and outdoor dining areas and plazas, a child care center, a glass-atrium fitness center, a parking garage, a landscaped greenway, a 2.4-acre park and a sustainable central energy facility."
It's Stanford's version of a luxury center for influencers.
(As a Stanford alum, I consider this embarrassing.)
It's the sheer number of administrators. Stanford has only 1,761 instructional employees, of which 834 are tenured faculty. The Redwood City facility will have 2,700 administrative employees in the first phase alone.
Maybe I'm not surprised by this because I work in higher ed, but that ratio of administrative staff vs faculty is not really anything to write home about. I work at a top 10 business school, and our staff/teaching ratio is about 5/1, and at schools like HBS or INSEAD in France, the ratio skews quite a bit higher.
Stanford is doing that with their new Redwood City "campus", an office park five miles from the main campus. No professors. No students. No researchers. No labs. All administrators. "Stanford units that will have at least some employees at Stanford Redwood City include Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; School of Medicine administration; Office of Development; University Human Resources; University Libraries; Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning; and Residential & Dining Enterprises."
"The first phase of construction at Stanford Redwood City will include four office buildings, indoor and outdoor dining areas and plazas, a child care center, a glass-atrium fitness center, a parking garage, a landscaped greenway, a 2.4-acre park and a sustainable central energy facility."
It's Stanford's version of a luxury center for influencers.
(As a Stanford alum, I consider this embarrassing.)
[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/