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One outcome of a long-range plan is
a focus not just on outstanding future research we can do
or the spectacular students we'll educate,
but it's a focus on the Stanford community
and what we need to do to support the Stanford
community to be successful.
We have a task force for affordability, really examining
the cost issues of what it means to live, work, and undertake
your studies at Stanford.
Another example would be something
that we're at least for now calling community engagement,
and that is about how do we connect people better
to the Stanford vision and mission?
But especially, how do we connect people to each other,
create a sense of belonging?
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This institution doesn't exist without fabulous staff,
fabulous students, fabulous faculty,
and if they can't afford to live in the area, we have a problem.
So first, I think we have to acknowledge affordability
is a huge issue, and it's a huge issue for the entire Bay
Area not just for Stanford.
So the affordability task force is really chartered
to look at four main aspects of affordability.
Those four are housing, childcare, transportation,
and benefits.
In the affordability task force structure,
there are separate stakeholder groups
for postdocs, for graduate students,
for faculty, for the academic staff of which I am a member,
and then for staff more generally.
For some of the constituents that I
think are feeling the most pain, we've taken some early actions.
One thing we did, last year when the LRP was announced,
was to announce that we were raising
the minimum postdoc salary.
We've also provided some need-based emergency
support for postdocs.
Similarly, we've provided some need-based emergency
support for grad families.
Another thing that we've done for our graduate students
is we're building the new Escondido Village Highrises,
so that more of them will be able to live
in subsidized campus housing.
It is a complicated, complex set of things
that we're looking at.
It became evident early on that we
would need to gather really broad-based information,
and so we designed with the help of an outside consultant
an affordability assessment.
We had a 49% response rate.
Over almost 14,000 people responded.
We did learn that, while there are
unique needs in these populations,
there's also needs that cut across.
We see that household income level, size of family,
age, where the person is currently living,
and maybe how long they've been in the area
are key factors in the types of solutions that might be needed.
I know there are no real magic bullets for this,
but I am glad that Stanford is making the effort to reach out.
It's given me some additional perspective
into the challenges that other units are facing.
The next step in our process will
be to review some of our initial findings and share
with our executive cabinet potential recommendations.
But our initial best recommendations
will be brought forward at the end
of the year for consideration again by the executive cabinet,
our board of trustees, and overall senior leadership
of the university.
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So when we're talking about community engagement
at Stanford, we're really talking
about creating connections among the members of our community
to each other and to the mission of the university.
The Town Center project is about reimagining the White Plaza
area of Stanford's campus as the real heartbeat
of the institution, and it's about creating
social engagement and community building
and the exchange of ideas.
When people live on campus, students easily
form an apartment to departmental path.
They don't vary that course very much.
Students are amazing.
They have such diversity of experiences and talents.
I think having a place where they can gather and share
those perspectives will help everybody
to have a better sense of the meaning behind what
they do here.
This project is really about understanding the importance
of those informal social interactions
as part of the academic mission of the university.
I think we do need to be mindful of the probably over 1,000
non-student partners that are living
with their students and also the 400 or so children here
as well with graduate students.
I think having an overall center that
accommodates the wide population and life diversity will
be pretty important.
We're in a yearlong planning phase.
So we're a couple of months in.
We are deep into the process of speaking with the community,
talking to students, faculty, postdocs,
staff members, alumni.
We're getting all sorts of really great ideas and really
great input about what this could be,
about what would be compelling to people,
about what would bring people together in this space.
We had a town hall meeting for the entire members
of the Stanford community, on April 24th.
We are planning future ones, but we also
would love for people to reach out to us to contribute ideas.
We have a website.
I encourage people to go there to submit ideas.
You can also volunteer to be part of a focus group session
and to contribute your ideas in person.
We expect at the end of this first year, so in early 2020,
to have a set of options that we can
present about different possibilities for how
this might unfold.