A recent article in the Stanford Daily argues that Stanford students have become politically apathetic, attributing the trend to two forces: a STEM culture that prizes efficiency over moral reasoning and a Silicon Valley ethos that venerates the founder over the lawmaker. It’s a neat theory. But it mistakes the symptom for the cause and misses where political formation actually happens.
I was fortunate to be an undergraduate at Stanford two decades ago and was certainly politically active while I was on the Farm. Notably, one of the places that shaped my political engagement most wasn’t a political science seminar or in a student government meeting. It was a laboratory in the old Mudd Chemistry Building.
As a student, I had the opportunity to work in the lab of chemist Richard Zare. Zare was not only one of the most distinguished scientists on campus; he was also deeply engaged in public life. He served on the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation from 1990 to 1996 and chaired the board from 1994 to 1996. His career embodied something important: Science and civic responsibility are not in tension; they are deeply connected.
But what mattered just as much were the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the lab. These scientists and engineers were extraordinarily generous with their time and intellectual energy. As an undergraduate wandering into a world of lasers, spectrometers, and complex experiments, I was constantly asking questions. They didn’t dismiss them. Instead, they taught me something far more valuable than chemistry itself.
They taught me how to think.
Scientific training insists on certain intellectual disciplines: evaluating evidence, questioning assumptions, studying data carefully, and separating claims from proof. Arguments are tested. Conclusions are provisional. Theories survive only if they withstand scrutiny. Scientists learn to interrogate every claim with the same questions: What evidence supports this? What assumptions are being smuggled into the argument? What does the data actually show?
Those are scientific questions. But they are also the foundation of serious civic reasoning.
The Stanford Daily article rests on a familiar assumption: that political engagement lives primarily in the humanities while STEM students inhabit a technocratic bubble. The piece also argues that Stanford’s startup culture—its reverence for the disrupter over the statesman—pulls students away from democratic participation. Both observations contain a grain of truth. But they confuse the form of engagement with the fact of engagement.
One of Stanford’s genuine strengths, when I was a student and still evident today, is the openness of its intellectual culture. Students move easily across schools and disciplines. Conversations spill across departmental boundaries. Ideas circulate freely between engineers, historians, economists, biologists, and political scientists. The world simply isn’t as siloed there as the article assumes.
What the article reads as apathy is often something else: a student body that engages with politics through analysis, institution-building, and design rather than rallies on White Plaza.
The article also relies on a narrow definition of political engagement, implicitly equating it with visible campus activism. But protests are only one form of civic participation. Many of the most consequential political debates today revolve directly around science and engineering: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, climate systems, and digital infrastructure. The students working closest to those developments are not disengaged from politics. They are operating unobtrusively at its frontier.
The article’s voting data is worth taking seriously: Stanford has at times lagged peer institutions in electoral participation, and that deserves attention. But low turnout at a rally is not the same as civic indifference. Political formation often happens quietly: in a lab where claims must withstand skeptical questioning, in a problem set session where classmates try to make sense of the world, in a classroom where an engineer learns that every design decision carries social consequences.
My own experience in the Zare lab illustrates what the article misses. The scientists and engineers around me did not make politics feel distant. Learning to think like a scientist – to hold conclusions provisionally, to demand evidence, and to resist motivated reasoning—made me a far better critical thinker about public policy. Good policy analysis, like good science, requires humility before evidence. Those lessons were reinforced day after day in that lab.
I remain deeply grateful to Richard Zare and to the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the Zare lab who patiently taught an undergraduate how to think more carefully about evidence, argument, and truth.
Sometimes political awareness begins in a seminar room. Sometimes in a student organization. Sometimes over problem sets with classmates trying to make sense of a complicated world.
And sometimes it begins in a chemistry lab, where scientists and engineers patiently teach an undergraduate how to evaluate evidence and in doing so prepare him for the harder work of thinking about public life.