Locked-down students at prestigious Stanford Uni fear hearing loss from construction noise

Many locked-down students have complained to the University, expressing fears that the noise from works to build more subsidised campus housing on the EV site may leave them with permanent hearing damage.

In a report in the University's newspaper The Stanford Daily, residents and PhD students are quoted as having measured the noise using mobile phones and computers. The students complain of having to shout through Zoom classes and of being unable to concentrate. To make matters worse, the group handling the construction project, Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE), wrote recently to students in two residential buildings telling them to expect noise to increase.

Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda told the newspaper that the noise from the projects was monitored and mitigated by the University, but that the ongoing project would help “provide subsidised housing for our graduate students so that they can live on campus and facilitate our critical educational and research mission.”

All in all, this is one of the more curious lockdown stories from around the globe, firstly because of such high-level noise disturbance unexpectedly affecting the students of one of the USA's elite educational establishments— the inaugural 2017 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings picked Stanford as the No. 1 school in the United States—while it might be assumed that the complainants have a better chance than most noise-affected persons to have their grievances sorted out: the median family income of a student from Stanford is $167,500, and 66% come from the top 20 percent¹.

Source: The Stanford Daily ¹ New York Times