And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures ā including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but arenāt) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from āmushroom mixā.
I was reading about Stanfordās accommodation culture when one detail stopped me cold. Some students, the article noted, claim to be devout Jains in order to escape the mandatory meal plan. Jainism, one of Indiaās oldest religions, forbids harm to living beings. That includes insects. In many traditions it excludes root vegetables, because uprooting a plant kills it. It is an ethic of extreme restraint, discipline, and care. The students claiming it, by the authorās own admission, are not Jain. They are optimisers. This is not a small lie. It is a revealing one.
Jainism is not a universalist or missionary religion. It is an ethnic faith, bound to specific mercantile communities in western India. Jains are few in number, highly endogamous, and disproportionately wealthy. Historically, they did not migrate en masse to the West, not because they were excluded, but because they did not need to. Capital, status, and security were already at home.
There are very few Jain Americans for precisely this reason. That matters, because it makes the Stanford claim implausible on its face. What is being invoked is not a living religious community with institutions, elders, and accountability. It is a hollowed-out abstraction, detached from its social reality and redeployed as a bureaucratic key.
Jainism here is not belief. It is paperwork.
The Stanford story is often framed as a policy failure: too much empathy, too little scrutiny. That is true, but it misses the deeper issue. These institutions no longer assume good faith because they no longer cultivate it. They assume rational actors responding to incentives. And that is exactly what they produce.
What is striking is not that students game the system. Young people have always done that. What is striking is the ease with which a religion centred on reverence for life can be reduced to a consumer upgrade.
Jainism is not performative. It is punishing. It demands limits on diet, movement, work, and even thought. Historically, it produced people who accepted moral cost as the price of ethical seriousness. To invoke it casually in order to eat better food is not merely cynical. It is symptomatic.
Elite Western institutions now operate in a language of claims without cost and identity without obligation. Disability becomes a credential. Trauma becomes currency. Religion becomes a checkbox. None of this requires belief. It requires fluency.
The system cannot challenge this without undermining itself. You cannot interrogate anxiety without seeming cruel. You cannot question a religious claim without risking litigation. So the institution retreats into procedure, and procedure becomes the only ethic left.
An honour deficit.
People with real disabilities are quietly crowded out. Serious faith is trivialised. Shared resources are treated as prizes to be captured. And no one involved feels shame, because shame requires a moral horizon beyond optimisation.
What this episode also reveals is the direction of cultural flow. For two centuries, the West assumed it exported civilisation and others absorbed it. That assumption no longer holds. IndiaāBharat in the civilisational senseāis now exporting not just people or capital, but ethos. Its religions and moral grammars are circulating globally, often stripped of context, sometimes abused, but no longer ignorable.
Jainism appearing in a California dining hall is not an accident. It is evidence of reach. We are entering a world shaped not by one civilisation, but by several large, irreducible ones. India, China, Islam, Africa, and Latin America operate as civilisational blocks too large and rooted to be flattened into Western categories. They do not need Western validation to exist.
Orthodox Christianity occupies an in-between position. It is no longer fully Western, but not yet fully post-Western eitherājunior in power, but quietly separating from liberal theology toward its own civilisational self-understanding.
The mistake Western institutions keep making is assuming these civilisations can be sampled without consequence. That you can borrow an ethic without its discipline, a religion without its cost, a moral language without its social obligations. That worked when the West set the terms. It no longer does.
Jainism does not dissolve when exported. It exposes the thinness of systems that treat belief as preference and morality as paperwork. When it collides with those systems, the problem is not Jainism.
It is the host civilisation discovering that it no longer defines the rules of meaning. That is the deeper discomfort behind the Stanford story. Not that students cheated. But that a non-Western civilisation showed up, uninvited, and revealed how unserious the moral architecture had become. A university that cannot distinguish between sacrifice and convenience, between belief and paperwork, is not educating leaders. It is training managers of decline.