A number of us on the editorial board are non-engineering majors, more fondly known as “fuzzies.” So imagine our surprise when we returned this fall and noticed that a glittering white quadrangle had sprung up near Y2E2. Our techie friends explained that this was the new Science and Engineering Quad.
Our response: holy shit.
The “anchor” of the quad is the new Huang Center, named in honor of Jen-Hsun Huang M.S. ‘92, co-founder of NVIDIA. If you haven’t seen it yet, drop what you’re doing and go right now. Walk through the courtyard under the blue California sky and peer into the glass offices of Nobel laureates. Curl up in a comfy red sofa and munch on a sandwich from Ike’s. (You’ll never think of sandwiches the same way again.) Ask yourself: would you rather work on your thermodynamics problem set in Terman or in this stunning engineer’s paradise?
The answer should be obvious. As long as Stanford remains a residential university, the physical spaces we occupy will affect our productivity in material ways. After all, why do students flock to the Bender Room during finals week? Why not head over to one of the frats instead and crack out a book while your friends play rounds of beer pong? We all know the answer: because we are more productive if the space meets our needs. Working on CS 107 with your friends is that much more difficult when there aren’t enough outlets. And as any student will tell you, ready access to sources of caffeine after midnight is critical to surviving the quarter system.
But magnificent buildings like the engineering quad go one step farther and add a sense of wonder to this campus. Wonder, one might claim, has no practical value and is a waste of tuition money. But Stanford and other top schools in the country attract the best talent from around the country in part because they inspire dreaming. If you are an accomplished high school cellist, would you practice late into the night so that one day in the future, you could to Stanford and play on the Dinkelspiel stage? No. Would you dream about performing in the forthcoming Bing Concert Hall, with its first-class acoustics that “determined the shape of the hall’s exterior, which echoes the vineyard configuration with a distinctive, fez-shaped design,” as the University describes it? Yes, please.
Yet disbelievers, including some on the editorial board, do have a point. These spaces are an enormous investment. The University cannot in good faith devote all its resources to designing architectural masterpieces on a whim. There are financial aid, professor salaries and research funding to worry about–which is why, for the first time in our Stanford career, a few members of this board wandered into the engineering quad and stood for some time in front of the list of donors. It seems even we ungrateful youth can be moved. So thank you.