Stanford Report, May 12, 2004

THE WORLDWIDE OUTRAGE concerning the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq simultaneously highlighted a social experiment conducted at Stanford 33 years ago. PHILLIP ZIMBARDO, psychology professor emeritus, was bombarded by print and broadcast reporters in connection with his 1971 Prison Experiment that divided 24 students into guards or inmates in a "prison" in the basement of the psychology building. The two-week study was stopped after only six days because it quickly reeled out of control -- guards turned sadistic and prisoners suffered mental breakdowns. "The terrible things my guards did to their prisoners were comparable to the horrors inflicted on the Iraqi detainees," Zimbardo wrote in the Boston Globe on May 9. "Human behavior is much more under the control of situational forces than most of us recognize or want to acknowledge. In a situation that implicitly gives permission for suspending moral values, many of us can be morphed into creatures alien to our usual natures." Zimbardo appeared on ABC's Nightline, National Public Radio, CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown, MSNBC, CBS News, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Australian Broadcasting Company Radio and the BBC. The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today have interviewed Zimbardo, and journalists from Austria, Poland, Japan, Denmark and Germany have placed requests. "People are amazed at how similar the circumstances are between the experiment and Iraq," the professor told Stanford Report.

FROM THE LAW SCHOOL, ALLEN WEINER, the Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, on May 5 questioned the U.S. military's decision to choose an administrative punishment rather than file criminal charges against Janis Karpinski, the commander responsible for all military prisons in Iraq. "That means they are saying that this is basically a failure of management -- it's not the same as criminal behavior, except among those who were actually humiliating and photographing those prisoners," Weiner told the Los Angeles Times. "The question then becomes, is that appropriate? It's hard to imagine anything more damaging to U.S. objectives in Iraq than this set of images," he said, referring to photographs of abused and humiliated Iraqis. "I would assume that you would want to pursue criminal prosecution at the highest level to try to counter that."

POR ESTUDIANTES LATINOS, Stanford is the best, according to Hispanic Magazine's 2004 list of top colleges for Latino students. The ranking only considers colleges with Latino enrollments of at least 8 percent. Stanford beat MIT, Harvard, UCLA and Cal for the top five slots, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported April 30.