> Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad."

Yes, if you haven't noticed, other people on this thread are saying dehumanizing things like "administrators are a cancer" and "PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce" and "American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies".

I mean, talk about projection. But if people were saying this about you and yours, I think you'd be a little mad too. Do you casually describe people as cancer? When you think of an "administrator", does that person have a blurry face, or does that person have the face of someone you know and love?

I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here, but this kind of vitriol feels qualitatively different, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but you're also not the target of these kinds of attacks. We can all express our opinions here without calling the other side cancer or a child. What's said here is kind of mild (unless you browse with show dead), but go read the comments about "Stanford" and other Universities on different outlets, and people are calling for the death of college administrators and professors. Even students.

Like... that's the level of discourse in this thread, and that's not my doing. I didn't cause those people to say those things. That's just the level of discourse that the word "Stanford" attracts on HN. I wonder why? You think I'm the one pushing an agenda? Look around, the agenda is being pushed by a lot of people, and I'm not one of them. But insofar as you think I am, what agenda is that? That Universities are good things and are helpful in society? That we shouldn't use the actions of a few to cast blame on the many? What exactly am I saying here that's objectionable?

> I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.

I think I've responded to you directly to your points in this thread. If I've mistaken a point someone else made for one you made, please point that out and I'll reformulate my response with apologies.

> So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.

Yes, a far cry from where we started, which was that subcommittees should have their work approved by linguistics experts before publication, which is unreasonable. The much more reasonable stance is that subcommittees could leverage expertise available on campus from time to time, but we shouldn't have the expectation that linguistics experts should be on call to vet these kinds of things, and that they don't should rise to the level of incompetence. Because literally no one is held to that standard.

> That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.

No, it's thinking from the experience that 100% of the day is filled with other work. So it's not that one must be totally close to outside requests, it's that one does not have the bandwidth to open up for even trivial things outside of one's job description. Any work beyond that is in the "favor" realm of collegiality. It's not within the expected duties of tenured English professors to vet university comms, just like it's not within the expected duties of the business college to help with university accounting, just like it's not my job as a CS professor to even handle the IT in my own department, let alone the college or university.

Although the amusing thing to me here if we are to take your proposal seriously, then the correct course of action would be to create a department tasked with specifically being experts through which communications would be filtered. This department would require administrators, and I'm sure you know what the people here would say about this department.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If your comms are unprofessional, then you're an incompetent university. If you have a process for vetting comms so that they're professional, then you're bloated with administrators, therefore you're an incompetent university.