Stanford in Top 10 : ‘The Farm’s’ Quest for Excellence

At the end of its first 95 years, Stanford University has an endowment valued at $1.5 billion. On its faculty are nine Nobel Prize winners, five winners of the Pulitzer Prize and 77 members of the National Academy of Sciences. It has a highly intelligent student body, if grades and test scores are accurate measures. It can even boast of having produced one of this year’s Super Bowl quarterbacks, John Elway.

Not all is perfection, however, on “the Farm,” the nickname the university acquired because its 8,200-acre campus occupies the former Palo Alto farm of Leland Stanford, president of Central Pacific Railroad and U.S. senator from California in the late 1880s.

Tuition is sky-high and rising. Research accomplishments in science and engineering tend to overshadow the arts and humanities and threaten Stanford’s commitment to undergraduate education. Close ties with nearby Silicon Valley industries and the Hoover Institution, the conservative on-campus think tank, raise concerns among some faculty members that the university’s independence is being compromised.

Fund-Raising Campaign

But as Stanford launches a five-year, $1.1-billion centennial fund-raising campaign, few would argue that it does not stand in the top rank of American universities.

In the most recent national evaluations of graduate faculty quality--which is the way academics judge one another--Stanford finished in the top 10 in 25 different fields and was first in four: biochemistry, computer science, psychology and statistics-biostatistics.

Tuition costs of more than $11,000 a year notwithstanding, demand for admission remains heavy. About 16,700 applicants are competing for 1,550 places in next fall’s freshman class. (At the Stanford-UC Berkeley football game last fall, some Stanford students wore “We Got In” buttons to taunt their rivals from across San Francisco Bay.)

Graduate-Level Competition

The competition can be even stiffer at the graduate level. For instance, 700 students applied for 30 places in the computer science Ph.D program.

Much of this academic reputation has been gained in the last 35 years or so, since J. E. Wallace Sterling became president in 1949 and especially since 1955, when Sterling named Frederick E. Terman, dean of the School of Engineering, as the university’s provost.

“This is the only university I know that has made such a leap in category in such a short time,” said James Sheehan, chairman of the history department who moved from Northwestern University to Stanford eight years ago. “In 1945 or 1950, it was a good but rather limited and provincial university, but now it is a world-class institution.”

Faculty veterans give much of the credit to Sterling and Terman.

“They provided incredible leadership,” said Sanford M. Dornbusch, who has taught sociology at Stanford since 1959. “They were ‘Mr. Outside’ and ‘Mr. Inside.’ Sterling had great charm and a broad vision and he was a marvelous speaker, but he completely delegated internal development to Terman.”

Working with the money that Sterling and others raised and with the federal funds that began to flow in the 1950s, Terman built one or two academic departments at a time.

He attracted national publicity by luring Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Arthur Kornberg and his entire department from Washington University at St. Louis to Stanford in the late 1950s.

Other, quieter acquisitions were no less important.

For instance, three excellent historians--Gordon Craig of Princeton, David Potter of Yale and Gordon Wright of the University of Oregon--all moved to Stanford in the 1960s, providing the core of what became an outstanding history department.

Stanford’s march to the academic top stalled in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when, like many other universities, its campus was disrupted by anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and other protests.

Sterling’s office was burned in 1968, just before he left the presidency. The Naval ROTC building was burned to the ground in the same year. The residence of the university’s personnel director was bombed, and other bombs were found inside the president’s office and above the English department offices.

‘Almost Came Apart’

“The place almost came apart,” said Bob Beyers, Stanford’s longtime news bureau director.

The turbulence swept Kenneth Pitzer, Sterling’s successor as president, out of office in 1970 after two short years and battered the early years of the presidency of Richard W. Lyman.

But the war finally ended, the campus calmed down and, under Lyman’s gentle prodding, the work of building academic excellence resumed.

Stanford’s top administrators today--President Donald Kennedy and Provost James N. Rosse--face a different kind of task. They must maintain the quality that has been achieved and improve upon it where possible.

“My strategy,” Rosse said, “is to make sure that the places where we are strong continue to grow stronger and then look for opportunities to connect some of these peaks of excellence. We have several high alpine meadows that we’d like to turn into peaks.”

To make this possible, the special Centennial Campaign hopes to raise $180 million to build a 41-acre campus for science and engineering and $141 million for additional endowed professorships.

There is no secret about attaining academic excellence--it is done by hiring or promoting excellent faculty members and then keeping them happy.

And by excellence, Stanford means research accomplishment. Much lip service is paid to the importance of teaching--and Stanford probably does more than most research universities to go beyond lip service--but increasingly, according to reports from all parts of the campus, promotion to a tenured position requires high-quality publication.

Salaries Second to Harvard

When Stanford finds professors it likes, it treats them well. Stanford’s average faculty salaries ranked second only to Harvard in the nation last year, according to the annual report of the American Assn. of University Professors.

For professors with 25 years’ experience, the average pay is between $65,000 and $70,000, depending on the field. These are nine-month salaries, and professors in many subjects, especially engineering and science, earn substantial amounts as consultants and at summer jobs.

Research opportunities for faculty members in most engineering and science fields, and in some other isolated subjects such as linguistics, are almost unlimited. So are chances to consult for Silicon Valley companies or even to start companies of their own.

Probably the best-known professor-entrepreneur is Carl Djerassi, developer of the first contraceptive pill and founder of several private companies. But at least a dozen other professors of engineering and computer science have started their own companies, according to James F. Gibbons, dean of the School of Engineering.

“Stanford used to be a school for rich kids, but now it’s a school for rich professors,” said an envious UC Berkeley faculty member who asked not to be identified.

There is a long history of cooperation between Stanford and nearby industry, dating at least from the 1930s, when Terman, then an engineering professor, put up $500 to help two young Stanford graduates, William Hewlett and David Packard, start an enterprise that has become the hugely successful electronics giant Hewlett-Packard Co.

Gibbons believes close cooperation between the university and private industry is good for both.

“Research and teaching is the business we’re in,” he said, “but in this kind of society the ability to transfer that knowledge to commercial use is very important.”

Center for Integrated Systems

Stanford’s most ambitious attempt at cooperative sponsorship of university research is the 2-year-old Center for Integrated Systems, a joint venture of the university, private industry and the U.S. government devoted to research and development in fields related to the computer industry.

Twenty companies contributed $750,000 each to put up the center’s building, and each company continues to pay $120,000 a year for operating expenses. The university provides the faculty--about 80 of them--assisted by postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The federal government contributes $32.5 million of the annual $40-million research budget, most of the money coming from the Department of Defense.

One of the few requirements Stanford imposes on the Center for Integrated Systems is that its research, like all research at Stanford, must be “open,” meaning that it must be published in journals available to scholars generally and not confined to secret military publications.

John Linvill, director of the center, hailed it as “the most recent progression in a series of steps that have been taken for 40 years, during which the university has moved from not much connection with the outside to a very close connection with industry.”

Others at Stanford are less pleased about these connections.

“The ever-closer ties with corporate America . . . compromise the university’s integrity,” said John F. Manley, professor of political science. “They make it impossible, for example, for the university to take a more principled stand on South African divestment because their corporate friends and large donors might not like it.”

(The Stanford Board of Trustees has adopted a policy of selective divestiture of stock in companies doing business in South Africa, but so far little stock has been sold.)

‘Influenced by Your Support’

Said Ronald Rebholz, professor of English: “Inevitably, the kind of research you do at a place like CIS is going to be influenced by your support”--that is, by large donors like Hewlett and Packard.

Bernard Roth, professor of mechanical engineering, said Stanford has become a “huge conglomerate” in which it is all but impossible to be sure that secret military research is not being conducted on campus or that the policy limiting outside consulting to one day a week is being enforced.

University President Kennedy denied, however, that the research agenda at the Center for Integrated Systems, or elsewhere in the university, is set to please outside financial supporters.

“I don’t think we’re giving anything away, and I think we have begun an experiment that may lead to exciting results,” Kennedy said. If a Center for Integrated Systems backer insisted on a particular kind of research that the faculty did not want to do, “we’d part company,” he said.

In any case, the stakes are high enough that it will take more than complaints from professors of English or political science to threaten the links among the university, government and industry. In the current year, Stanford expects to receive more than $286 million in federal research contracts and grants and $24 million more from private sources.

But such issues are the concern of but a portion of the Stanford community. More than half of the students are undergraduates who have little contact with the big-bucks world of government-sponsored research or university-industrial partnerships.

What are the undergraduates like, these survivors of the intense admissions competition?

Freshmen’s High Scores

For starters, they are very bright. This year’s freshman class of 1,575 included 630 students who compiled perfect 4.0 grade-point averages in high school (2,720 such people applied), 876 who scored higher than 700 (out of a possible 800) on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and 785 who scored at least 600 (out of 800) on the SAT verbal test.

Even the athletes have to be good students. The average high school grade-point average for this year’s crop of football and basketball recruits was 3.31, and their combined SAT scores averaged 1,050--200 points higher than Stanford’s closest competitor in the PAC 10 conference.

The entering class was 42% female, a decline of 4% from the year before, and 30% of the freshmen were members of racial minorities.

In recent years the percentage of Californians in the first-year class has dropped from 44% to 38%, a development that Kennedy attributed to a decline in the quality of high school education in the state.

“California ought to take that as a serious message to improve its schools,” he said.

Ninety-seven percent of this year’s freshmen said they plan to go on to graduate or professional school, and nearly a third expect to seek a doctorate.

Those who advise and counsel Stanford students say many of them are obsessed with jobs, money and success.

“Students are taking fewer risks,” said Audrey Bernfield, director of undergraduate advising. “They feel they need to get a job. It’s so hard to get in here that a lot of them feel they’re wasting their parents’ money if they don’t study something ‘practical.’ ”

But not all Stanford students fret over grades and job prospects.

“Some students think getting in here is the hardest thing they’ll ever do at Stanford, so they goof off once they arrive,” said Mark Lawrence, who was editor of the Stanford Daily last fall.

Some spend their time drinking, carousing and generally behaving like characters in the movie “Animal House.”

“If there is a problem at Stanford with substance abuse, it is with alcohol, not drugs,” especially among members of the 11 residential fraternities, said Sally Cole, campus judicial officer.

Attention to Undergraduates

Scholars who come from other research-oriented universities are sometimes surprised by the attention that Stanford pays to undergraduate education.

Efforts are made to provide as many small classes as possible for freshmen and sophomores as well as for upper-division students, and awards are given for outstanding undergraduate teaching.

“There is obviously a tremendous risk for undergraduate education in this university’s commitment to excellent research,” said Carolyn Lougee, associate professor of history and dean of undergraduate studies. “There’s always the danger that researchers will separate themselves from undergraduates.”

Lougee hopes that the Centennial Campaign will produce enough money to improve academic advising for undergraduates, to provide more research opportunities and honors programs for talented undergraduates and to make possible more educational experiences in campus residence halls.

“We have tremendous capacities in the classrooms,” she said. “What makes us different, an excellent place for students, is the out-of-classroom stuff, but we must do much more.”

If the faculty is largely productive and the student body is generally intelligent and hard-working, what could be wrong?

High costs, for one thing.

A year at Stanford costs about $17,500 for tuition, room and board, books and supplies and a modest $1,000 for personal expenses, not including transportation.

These costs will continue to rise, even though Stanford has one of the largest university endowments in the nation and was raising about $100 million a year in private gifts even before the Centennial Campaign began.

Tuition, which accounts for about half of the university’s annual revenue, will continue to rise, said budget director Raymond F. Bacchetti, “because the salaries we pay to make the university work are going to continue to rise. . . .”

‘Must Pay Them Well’

“Today’s professors are no longer willing to live in shabby gentility,” he said. “They are an important part of a high-tech society and the competition for them is keen, so we must pay them well.”

A shortage of minority faculty members troubles some Stanford administrators.

In a recent report to the Faculty Senate, Provost Rosse noted that the 1,315-member faculty included only 24 blacks, 24 Latinos, 46 Asian-Americans and two American Indians.

Recruitment of minority faculty “has somewhat stalled, here and elsewhere,” said Clayborne Carson, associate professor of history and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers project. “I think the commitment is still there, but there seems to be a lack of candidates in the pipeline.”

Deborah Rhode, professor of law and director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, said hiring and promotion of women faculty members have also slowed down, although there is no shortage of candidates. About 10% of the 1,315 faculty members and 4% to 5% of the tenured professors are women.

Rhode, who is a trustee of Yale University, said Yale “has committed itself to doubling the number of women on the faculty, and I would hope Stanford would undertake a similar commitment.”

But Rosse said the shortage of women on the faculty “is more likely to be corrected by our regular procedures, as more women enter the candidate pool,” while recruitment of minority faculty will take special efforts.

The shortage of minority faculty is one of the problems Kennedy is working on during a winter-quarter sabbatical from the presidency.

Faculty Heavily Tenured

Another is what to do about a faculty that is growing quite old and heavily tenured in some fields. About 80% of the 480-member faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences is tenured. In the law school, 88% of the professors are tenured, in the School of Engineering, 79%. This does not leave much room for young professors to move up.

“We worry about this,” said Norman K. Wessells, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. “There just aren’t enough young faces (teaching) in the classrooms.”

Because financial constraints prevent significant expansion of the total faculty, and relatively few have chosen to retire early, there is not much the university can do about this problem. And some have advised the administration not to worry.

“It may be lamentable, but it took us 20 years to get to this stage, and it’s going to take us 20 years to get out,” said Sheehan, the history department chairman. “I think we just have to be a little patient. All this talk about being ‘over-tenured’ has created a certain amount of anxiety among the younger assistant professors,” who usually are not tenured.

A problem that the president has not been addressing during his sabbatical but that is never far from his consciousness is the troublesome state of relations between the university and the semi-autonomous Hoover Institution, which provides Stanford with its most visible landmark--the 285-foot Hoover Tower--and also with a continuing source of political tension.

The institution was established in 1919 by President Herbert Hoover, a Stanford graduate. In 1959 Stanford trustees defined Hoover as “an independent institution within the frame of Stanford University.”

That puzzling description has led to much of the trouble, because it is not clear whether the president of the university or the director of the institution runs Hoover. It is even less clear when the two dislike each other as much as Kennedy and Hoover Director W. Glenn Campbell do.

Some Stanford faculty members, pointing to the conservative publications that flow from some of the Hoover senior fellows--most of whom do not have regular university appointments--and the large number of Hoover fellows who have served in the Reagan Administration, argue that ties between Stanford and Hoover should be severed.

Criticism of Hoover Institution

“Hoover is one of the leading think tanks of the right wing,” said political science professor Manley. “What is a politically motivated think tank doing in the center of a university?”

Campbell and others argue that the senior fellows are more balanced politically and ideologically than are some Stanford academic departments and that the research they do and the public service they perform are no different from that done by faculty at the Kennedy School at Harvard and other research institutes.

A controversy has boiled up in recent years because of a proposal to build the Ronald Reagan Library, as well as a public policy research center, at Stanford.

The Stanford trustees accepted the library and a small museum but said the policy center would only be acceptable if run by Stanford and not by Hoover. This was unacceptable to Hoover, so the center will be built elsewhere.

Despite the continuing rancor, there appears to be no disposition on the part of either the Stanford trustees or the Hoover Board of Overseers to disengage, so the problem is likely to continue.

A final problem is the impression spreading through non-technical areas of the campus that Stanford is growing, as one professor of English put it, “too ‘techy’--sort of like the MIT of the West.”

Professors of English or history or philosophy watch as their colleagues in the sciences and in engineering rush off to lucrative consulting jobs with local industries or start companies of their own. They contrast their pleasant but sometimes cramped quarters with the grand plans for the “Near West” science and engineering campus.

“Humanists don’t see themselves as sharing in this new move toward excellence,” undergraduate Dean Lougee said. “There is some feeling of being second-class citizens.”

Assistant professors in arts and humanities typically start at salaries of $27,000 to $28,000, while the School of Engineering and the computer science department pay up to $45,000 to lure young talent away from private industry.

Low Interest in Humanities

Only about 8% of entering freshmen say they want to major in a humanities subject (although about 20% end up actually doing so), a far lower number than at some of the universities with which Stanford likes to compare itself--Princeton and Yale, for example.

“We’re not bringing in very many students who have a passion in that area and therefore could set a tone,” Lougee said. “I think it’s not a wholly comfortable place for humanities undergraduates to be.”

Sometimes top administrators are irked by the complaints from humanists.

“Maybe some of the people who think we’re becoming too ‘techy’ should look at engineering and see the way they are delivering undergraduate education,” Kennedy said. “They might learn some things.”

In a less testy mood, Kennedy noted that a Humanities Center has been established to support scholarship by young professors in the humanities and to sponsor conferences. (Skeptics contrast the center’s $700,000 annual budget with the $40-million budget of the Center for Integrated Systems.)

Several academic “stars” have been appointed to humanities departments in recent years, including Joseph Frank, a professor of Slavic languages from Princeton; Stuart Hampshire, a philosopher from Oxford University, and Stephen Orgel, a professor of English from Johns Hopkins.

In allocating money from the Centennial Campaign, “greater incremental increases are going to the humanities and social sciences than to physical science and engineering,” Rosse said. Forty of the 100 new endowed professorships will go to the School of Humanities and Sciences, 20 to the humanities.

But Rosse conceded that the proposed new science and engineering campus is “an unfortunate symbol” of the ascendancy of technology at Stanford. “I have groped for an equivalent symbol for the humanities without any luck,” he said.

Gordon Craig, professor emeritus of history and one of Stanford’s most respected teachers and writers, said it would be a mistake for the university to turn away from the humanities.

“Our big job here is to give the best undergraduate education in the world, the kind that will provide young people with the education they need to run this country,” Craig said.

He continued: “We need undergraduates who understand politics, who understand that decisions must be made, even if all of the choices are bad, who realize that some problems have no solutions,” not students who take “practical” courses of study that will lead to advanced technical degrees.

“I sometimes feel this university doesn’t have an educational philosophy,” Craig said. “We’re too lax, too loose about what students learn. . . . Little is said about the relationship between teaching and research. Little is said about what Stanford considers to be important. I think the administration had better start figuring out what we’re all trying to do and help us do it better.”