Stanford Daily » Lily Zheng

Dear Stanford, So here I am thinking my last column was a week ago and I’ve wrapped it up nicely when the Daily offers me a chance to write a senior reflection piece. Great, I think. Sentimenta...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/21/a-letter-to-stanford/

I wonder why it is that we acclimate to change so quickly. The presidential election, suspension of the Stanford Band, CAPS drama and justice ad infinitum became facts of our social fabric as qui...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/01/gravitas/

That ethnography will likely never happen, and I know that as the months pass it becomes less and less relevant and less and less needed. But I can’t work up the courage to delete the file. T...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/a-love-letter-to-the-unfinished/

We’re nearing the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, and I’ve been thinking about Kardinal Kink again recently. Part of it is a selfish sort of nostalgia - I’ve been co-president for just ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/18/kardinal-kink-reprise/

In activist communities, resilience of this sort seems rare. Rather than hear stories of activists who failed and recovered, we’re far more likely to hear stories of others who failed while int...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/11/resilience-is-a-process-not-a-state/

I’ve been meaning for the past two years to write a column on Inside-Outside strategy, or more colloquially, the general philosophy or strategy of organizing that prioritizes both those activis...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/inside-outside-game/

Arguing that “Stanford shows only good things, and hides the bad things” seems at this point to be a drastic oversimplification of how this university works. The post The Stanford that prof...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/27/the-stanford-profros-dont-see/

Two years have passed since 2015, and activism has changed. Many frosh come pre-politicized, and a campus-wide movement is notably absent, swapped out for an endless number of smaller projects, i...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/social-justice-codeswitch/

The rapid creation of new student groups over the past few years has taken the core of activist mobilization, split it into a hundred pieces and scattered them across campus. The post Should ac...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/should-activist-student-groups-disband/

I believe that this trend is the result of a more complicated story, a story in which visibility and inclusion mirror violence and exclusion, involving two increasingly fractured transgender camp...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/06/what-we-lose-with-trans-visibility/

Fascism 2,800 miles away is a different beast from fascism right here on the farm, and having a persistent and open conflict on campus would necessarily galvanize a drawn-out activist movement. ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/sustainability-through-coalitions-or-not-at-all/

At Stanford, what’s rarer than a snow day, more political than a rally and more powerful than a speech? Answer: A professor acknowledging local, national or global crisis in the classroom. Th...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/02/sleeping-giants-and-sustainable-activism-where-are-our-professors/

A real problem was framed in terms that indicted students and not underlying structural problems. The post Pay no attention to the ex-Provost behind the curtain appeared first on The Stanford ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/pay-no-attention-to-the-ex-provost-behind-the-curtain/

The problem now is that the reputation given by activists to the collective “administration” has stuck, even though the “Stanford” that activists fought against in 2014 is in many ways no...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/what-it-takes-to-trust-stanford/

In hindsight, it doesn’t seem all too surprising that the concept of “self-care” caught on the way it did. The post No movement survives on self-care alone appeared first on The Stanford...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/09/no-movement-survives-on-self-care-alone/

We’ve got our movement; we know what we are resisting against; we know we’re in it for the long haul. But we don’t really yet have a way to act on our own terms - a way to win the slow burn...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/02/how-we-sabotage-our-own-community-education-work-and-how-that-ends/

In practice, anyone who has done social justice work is immediately confronted by the overwhelming variation in ideology, experience and intentions among those who want to make a difference. Th...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/26/why-our-rallying-cry-needs-to-be-resistance-not-intersectionality/

Now, as campus nervously awaits the inauguration of our president-elect and prepares to double down on social justice issues, it’s almost a given that CAPS is about to receive an influx in stud...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/19/taking-the-lid-off-caps/

As organizational theorists would argue, Stanford University, like many other modern universities, is less a cohesive institution and more an “organized anarchy.” An institution organized in ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/our-activist-frameworks-dont-always-work-here-and-thats-okay/

This is usually the trend: misinformed criticism of leftist activism or culture result in high-profile strawman arguments in popular media, which activists take great glee in tearing down. Real i...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/07/seeing-the-forest-missing-the-trees-an-honest-look-at-identity-politics/

On Tuesday night, a hundred people gathered at Pigott Hall to begin organizing a unified coalition against oppression, hate and intolerance in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election. In the a...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/01/toward-a-new-coalition/

2016 has been one of the worst years in recent memory for trans communities around the world. The 295 murders worldwide and 24 murders in the United States alone broke the previous record (271 an...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/16/concrete-action-in-support-of-trans-lives/

Right now, I’m scrolling past reblogged suicide hotlines and an endless stream of Facebook posts reacting to the news. I have to remind myself that the stages of grief include denial, anger, ba...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/what-we-do-now/

Over the last year, advocates for LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination legislation campaigned tirelessly in the wake of gay marriage victories in 2015. A broad coalition of organizations and advocacy groups ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/03/bathroom-battlegrounds-incrementalism-and-the-fracturing-lgbtq-coalition/

The world kinda sucks, and coming to terms with that has been a large focus of this column over the last three years. It’s afterwards, though, as we attempt to reconcile our knowledge of the wo...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/life-after-structural-oppression/

What I find myself fixated on concerning this piece, however, is one of Shulevitz’s proposed solutions to what she calls “the conflict between transgender rights and privacy interests” - �...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/20/gender-desegregation-and-transphobia-unlikely-bedfellows-in-the-new-york-times/

As frosh, so many of us see Stanford as the paradise we want it to be. We go into our classes ready to learn, make new friends in our residences and student groups and revel in the social and aca...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/13/me-mg-the-slow-demystification-of-stanford/

Content warning: sexual assault Today is the last day of Beyond Sex Ed: Consent and Sexuality at Stanford. This 90-minute program, repeated over three days for the entire class of frosh and trans...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/what-we-should-have-had-reflections-on-frosh-sex-ed/

It’s a little hard being at Stanford when the world is falling apart. This summer, we watched as thousands upon thousands of Indigenous people and communities gathered to oppose the Dakota Ac...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/once-more-the-double-life/

I still remember the way my middle school teachers always spent the last week of school warning of the perils of summer. “You’ll forget everything!” they threatened, and we students always ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/30/life-after-finals-nurturing-a-sustainable-activism/

I headed into the keynote address at the Graduate School of Education’s SWAYWO conference this past weekend fully expecting a non-controversial, vaguely inspirational talk on the importance of ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/23/embracing-the-contradictions-of-change-from-within/

I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard the term “safe space,” but it’s clear to me that it has fallen out of favor among educators and academics. I remember when I started...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/why-your-brave-space-sucks/

Awareness campaigns – efforts to inform an audience on the existence or complexity of an issue or demographic – are student activism’s bread and butter. For every issue, it seems, we studen...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/the-endless-vicious-cycles-of-awareness-campaigns/

April 23, 2015. It’s midnight and I am chalking the words “#BlackLivesMatter” in block letters in front of Florence Moore hall. There are many of us — a coalition of activists from every ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/01/activism-and-admit-weekend-reflections-on-the-future/

Content warning: suicide, self-harm I know I have the reputation of always seeing the glass as half-empty. In the three years I’ve written for the Stanford Daily, that’s been the hallmark of ...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/24/frankly-on-suicide-awareness/

I don’t even know why we’re still talking about free speech. There are so many things going on right now at Stanford: poor mental health resources, inadequately-paid PHEs, a lack of faculty d...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/21/me-ay-free-speech-is-not-a-free-pass/

Content warning: suicide If you were reading the Stanford Daily around this time last year, you might have thought our campus was in a state of emergency regarding students’ mental health. That...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/17/how-stanford-forgot-about-its-mental-health-crisis/

I was going to write this week’s column on diversity before I realized that I had unfortunately already written that piece back in January (I knew there had to be a reason why it was so easy t...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/10/me-ay-from-diversity-to-justice/

Okay, I’ll bite. On March 31, The Stanford Review published an article that mocked demands made by Who’s Teaching Us (WTU), a student coalition formed around issues of faculty diversity an...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/03/when-oppression-is-the-punchline-a-response-to-the-stanford-review/

I still remember what my high school principal told me in 11th grade when I asked to use the girls’ bathrooms. “We’re concerned,” he said, dropping his eyes, “that some girls worried ab...

https://stanforddaily.com/2016/03/28/me-ay-trans-bodies-cis-panic-more-than-just-bathrooms/