When choosing my home for the next four years, it was Stanford’s distinct — but largely under-advertised — residential program that tipped the scale for me. Like most international Indian applicants, my view of this school was marred by the myopia of its loudest, most declarative entities: CS, startups and a culture of big tech. Oblivious to its strengths in the humanities, I struggled to understand where I would fit in as a potential film and media studies and anthropology major.
The first-year Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program offered not just a place to belong but a sense of hope. Ironically, my discovery of it was rooted in the very model I was scared of succumbing to. (I asked ChatGPT if Stanford had a “Directed Studies equivalent.”)
SLE seemed like a perfect fit: an insulated bubble of the humanities that would “shield” me from the consumerist, productivist instincts I was wary of.
However, rather than serving as a refuge from Stanford’s technocracy, SLE emerged as a space on campus where technological inclinations slow down before they build. I arrived expecting an insulated cohort of pure humanities majors. Instead, the classroom became a site of deliberate encounter: a melting pot dominated not by English or philosophy but by computer science, electrical engineering and physics. As I got to know my cohort, I learned that this year especially, prospective STEM majors outnumbered humanities students by a wide margin. However, that revelation did not dilute SLE’s ethos: it clarified it. The program does not segregate the humanities from engineering. Instead, it forces them into dialogue — not as competing worldviews but as ones in continual synergy.
For one, SLE offers an avenue of imagination to those who see majoring in the humanities as a risk. A humanities degree is not just culturally devalued — it is economically precarious in a society that rewards technical output. Studying the humanities is a privilege — one that many first-generation, low-income students cannot afford. The injunction to “study what you love” presumes a safety net not everyone has. In that light, SLE is not simply a haven for curiosity — it is one of the few spaces where students can momentarily suspend the fear that thinking deeply will cost them a broader sense of stability in life.
What my time in the program has also clarified for me thus far is that most students are not indifferent to ethics, nor driven solely by material gain. Rather, they have rarely been invited to see ethical inquiry as inseparable from technological design. The distance from the humanities, then, is rarely ideological. It is infrastructural. SLE does not antagonize that instinct — it complicates it. It nudges technologists to think before they build and see reflection not as a detour from innovation but its precondition. In doing so, it becomes part of a small but vital ecosystem on campus — alongside ITALIC and ESF — that reminds students that power without philosophy is directionless velocity.
The questions at the heart of this tension spell themselves simply: what role does a canonical education play in shaping the way we experience and participate in technocracy? Why must one study Plato and Homer in the age of generative AI? It’s also a question that Michaela Hulstyn, associate director of the SLE program, dismantles — and subsequently reframes — at the very onset.
“The idea of a canon is always a fiction, and always changing,” Hulstyn said. “Oftentimes, we think we know what we mean when we say something is canonical, but when we try to explain it, the answers are almost always fuzzy. SLE is committed to exploring and interrogating what we commonly call the Western tradition, without any attempt to preserve it as such. When we read closely, we realize that it’s not a monolith; we recognize that we can be changed from our reading experiences and, in turn, can challenge this tradition in our engagement with it.”
It is such questioning that forms the central tenet of the inquiry SLE cultivates and nurtures, one that begs broader existential questions about morality and civilization — but also ones of decolonization and sociocultural resistance. One may argue that occasional insertions of Gandhi and Fanon don’t compensate for the supposed intellectual hegemony the Western tradition holds, and while those criticisms would be valid, they don’t take away from the fact that SLE is one of the only residential programs in the country that trains students in the humanities and the world’s inhumanities in equal measure. Moreover, contrary to popular perception, SLE doesn’t oppose Stanford’s big-tech ethos: it interrogates and reconfigures it. It isn’t as much a retreat from tech-culture as it is a reframing of what tech-culture could mean. In a culture obsessed with output — prototypes, start-ups, patents — SLE reclaims thinking as a site of value in itself. Critical thought is not viewed as a means to a more tangible end. It is a fulfilling, satiating act in itself. A pedagogy that refuses the capitalist conflation of productivity with worth allows students to build better because they think better. This trains STEM students to see ideation, reflection and ethics not as digressions but as integral stages of innovation.
SLE also offers an alternate way of organizing and nurturing community. Every student is both reader and writer of the collective narrative — a participant in meaning-making rather than a consumer. While inherently individual tasks like readings and assignments allow for the development of independent thought, that thought is grounded in discussion sections, allowing the program’s dialogic ethos to turn the classroom into a site of co-authored reflection where “I” dissolves into “we” without losing its clarity. There is also a slowness of pace — the natural aftermath of dense readings and long evenings — that counters the constant acceleration that defines much of campus life. It reframes community not as something that forms around productivity, but as something that deepens outside of it — a place where value is measured in attention, not output.
It is this depth that defines the SLE experience but also what so many students at Stanford quietly seek in an increasingly polarized world: a space where disciplines do not harden into identities, where STEM and the humanities can meet without suspicion. What matters most is not a major or an academic label but the appetite to think seriously and generously with others, your academic program notwithstanding. The “canon,” if we choose to call it that, is less a bookshelf than a shared vocabulary for asking how we want to live together, a reminder that engineering without ethics is brittle and ethics without application is toothless. At its best, Stanford shows that these questions are not the property of any one field: they belong to anyone willing to remain in dialogue rather than in camps.