After months of behind-the-scenes work, President Hennessy’s task force on freshman expansion is finally starting to move outside the meeting room.

By planning to release its recommendation at the same time as its specific findings, however, the task force would deny students the opportunity to voice their opinions on expansion in light of the important new information the report will contain. Details about the most likely form this expansion would take, including crucial areas like housing, study abroad programs and availability of campus resources, won’t be available for the public until the report is released, which is expected to be some time this fall.

According to University Trustee and task force co-chairman Jim Canales, the committee will solicit student, faculty and alumni opinion this quarter. The University plans to launch a public Web site to collect feedback on the expansion proposal, and the first town hall forum was held last Saturday to gain the input of a group of prominent alumni volunteers.

“We hope to have solicited opinions and suggestions from these groups by the end of spring,” said task force Co-Chairman and English Prof. Ramon Saldivar.

The Web site will include the written “charge” issued by President Hennessy to the task force, which has not been made public yet. The task force hopes to release its preliminary findings next fall, although “preliminary” may be a misleading word, because the report will also include a recommendation on whether or not to proceed with expansion.

“The charge is fairly clear: that [President Hennessy] would like us to come back with a recommendation,” said Canales ‘88, M.A. ‘89.

According to Canales and Saldivar, the reason that the University has not released more details about the possible expansion, such as how large it would be, how much it would cost and whether it would require new construction, is that no one has answers to those questions yet.

“I don’t think the intention is, ‘This is the design, let’s hear how people react to it,’” Canales said. “We’re hoping to have a community-wide discussion.”

The University’s public stance is that nothing has been pre-determined. According to people who attended his talk on Parents’ Weekend, however, President Hennessy said that the most likely number for a possible expansion would be around 10 percent to 12 percent.

During the outreach process, Canales says that leaving such questions open-ended will make it easier to solicit people’s unbiased reactions. He recalled having dinner with a group of students who expressed their reservations about everything from overstuffed dorms, the shortage of community spaces and the potential loss of the campus’s intimate look and feel.

Without any more details from the task force, students who support expansion will essentially be writing a blank check to the administration to carry out expansion however it pleases, while students who don’t support expansion may be doing so for the wrong reasons, such as out of fear that Stanford will lose its “prestige.”

Let me be clear: I don’t think there’s a conspiracy to withhold information. However, the task force should try to structure the discussion by releasing some of their findings before issuing a recommendation on whether or not to expand.

To give only one example, I think it’s unwise to make any decisions before saying, publicly, where the added students might live. It would be all-too-easy for the University to simply slap down another low-cost, high-occupancy eyesore like the Manzanita dorms.

What’s more, it makes the University look bad to leave the housing question “open” at a time when some students have been living in windowless study rooms in the basement of Crothers. For many, the campus is starting to feel like a permanent construction zone and we want to know that the outcome will reflect a harmonious vision, of the sort that is clearly lacking when the current housing system was planned.

As of now, Canales and Saldivar insist that the primary motive for expansion has to do with the University’s core mission.

“There are probably a number of practical reasons that Stanford might consider expanding the undergraduate college,” Saldivar said. “However, the moral argument, that it is our responsibility to educate more students, should be taken very seriously.”

Both Canales and Saldivar were gracious enough to let me interview them face-to-face, and both seemed particularly sincere on this point. But instead of tools for social benevolence, I think of universities like Stanford as large, complex bureaucracies that encompass a variety of different goals — some of them self-interested, some not. It’s not that the moral argument isn’t valid, it just doesn’t really move the discussion anywhere.

In many ways, expansion has been the theme of President Hennessy’s tenure, which is now nearing its eighth year. Under his leadership, the University has constructed many new buildings, with plans for more, and pumped up the endowment. He has promoted Stanford as a global university, with ties to students and campuses all over the world.

I would like to see President Hennessy articulate his vision for the University’s future, and how, exactly, undergraduate expansion fits into it.

Kudos to the University for starting its outreach process and for trying to get more students involved through on-line forums. Now, it would be great if at some point the task force would give us more specifics before issuing its verdict, preliminary or otherwise.

Brendan Selby is neither for nor against Hennessy’s proposal, but he thinks students should be able to comment on more than just an abstract idea of expansion. Email him your thoughts at bselb "at" stanford.edu.