Reagan Library Strains Link Between Stanford and Hoover Institution

The dispute over locating the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at Stanford University has further strained an already tense relationship between Stanford and the Hoover Institution, the semi-independent on-campus library and think tank.

Established in 1919 by former President Herbert Hoover, who graduated from Stanford in 1895 and later served for 50 years on the university’s Board of Trustees, the institution is housed in a cluster of buildings in the center of the Stanford campus. It provides Stanford with its most familiar landmark--the 285-foot Hoover Tower--and for the last quarter of a century, it also has provided a continual source of political wrangling.

Faculty critics say the Reagan Library, when added to the Hoover Institution, will compromise Stanford’s independence by tying the university to right-wing Republicanism.

“A university has to defend itself from the charge of being partisan,” David B. Abernethy, professor of political science, said in a recent interview. “If we are seen to be not only part of a political party but part of a particular wing of that party, then we have a problem on top of a problem and our integrity may well be questioned.”

But W. Glenn Campbell, an outspoken conservative who has been Hoover’s director since 1960, contended in a recent interview that “ideologically” the Hoover scholars are “much better balanced than some Stanford departments.”

Campbell also charged that much of the criticism of Hoover scholarship, and of the efforts of key Hoover people to bring the Reagan Library to Stanford, amounts to an attack on free inquiry.

The roots of this dispute can be traced to 1959, when the Stanford Board of Trustees defined Hoover--its full name is the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace--as “an independent institution within the frame” of the university.

This ambiguous language has meant, in practice, that Hoover is largely free to go its own way without much interference from the Stanford administration, faculty or trustees. Its scholars, who hold the title of either Senior Fellow or Senior Research Fellow, write books and articles and participate in public debates ranging from arms control to welfare policy. Hoover has no students and offers no degrees.

Stanford provided 27% of Hoover’s $12.7-million budget last year.

Many of those appointed as Fellows have been conservative on domestic issues and fervently anti-communist in international affairs. Some hold joint appointments to Stanford academic departments, but most do not and have tended to be isolated from the rest of the university’s faculty.

Before the 1959 agreement, Hoover was a quiet library and archive known largely for its excellent collection of Slavic books and related holdings and for good research materials about Africa, China, Japan, the Middle East and Germany.

Among the most important materials are Russian secret police files from 1895 to 1917, known as the Okhrana archives, and the diaries of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial papers are also there, as are tapes of eight seldom-seen episodes of Reagan’s old TV show, “Death Valley Days.”

Although the Hoover collections provided the research base for hundreds of books and thousands of articles, by the 1950s the institution was not fulfilling Herbert Hoover’s hopes. It was also losing money.

In 1960, Campbell, a 35-year-old Harvard-trained economist and President Hoover’s personal choice, took over as director. He quickly erased the deficit and began to build toward the institution’s present $100-million-plus endowment.

Fund-Raising Methods

Because some of the money might otherwise have been given to Stanford, university administrators over the years have been less than enthusiastic about Campbell’s fund-raising methods.

“He raises money by warning people not to give their money to those ‘radicals’ at Stanford,” one high-ranking university official complained recently.

But Campbell denied this.

“There is almost no overlap between Hoover Institution fund raising and the rest of the university,” he said. “Only a few of our big donors have Stanford connections.”

In the 1970s, with the deficit eliminated and the endowment growing, Campbell decided to place more emphasis on Hoover’s domestic studies program.

He also reached for greater academic respectability by hiring prominent scholars not necessarily known for their conservative views, including political scientist John Ferejohn, economist Robert E. Hall, sociologists Alex Inkeles and Seymour Martin Lipset, and management expert James G. March.

Moderating Influence

Many of these new Fellows held joint appointments in Stanford departments, bringing Hoover and the university closer together. Sources at the institution say they also acted as a moderating influence on Campbell, who tempered his acerbic attacks on the Stanford faculty and administration for a time.

But then, as one of the Hoover Fellows put it, “disaster struck” in the form of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. “Glenn realized there was another route to fame and fortune”--by tying the institution to the Reagan presidency.

Photographs of the President, who was named an Honorary Fellow in 1975, began to appear profusely in the institution’s annual reports, and Campbell wrote in these same reports of the close ties between Hoover and the Reagan Administration.

“It is a source of immense pride to know that the ideas developed by scholars at the Hoover Institution have greatly influenced the new policy agenda,” he wrote in the 1986 annual report.

‘Reaganomics’ Birthplace

Campbell said “Reaganomics” was born in a memo written in 1979 by Senior Fellow Martin Anderson. He said the work of Senior Research Fellow Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics when he was on the University of Chicago faculty, and Senior Fellows Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka provided the theoretical basis for last year’s tax code revision.

Studies by Senior Research Fellows William R. Van Cleave and Henry S. Rowen “have had great influence on rebuilding our nation’s defenses,” Campbell wrote, while the work of Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell has “provided the theoretical and empirical underpinnings for the Reagan Administration’s reform of the ineffective and costly poverty and social welfare programs.”

Many Hoover scholars have served in the Reagan Administration. Among them:

- Senior Fellow Thomas G. Moore, whose writings contributed significantly to the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, now is a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

- Senior Fellow John H. Moore is deputy director of the National Science Foundation.

- Senior Fellow John F. Cogan was assistant secretary of labor and later associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.

- Senior Research Fellow Annelise Anderson is a member of the National Science Board and an adviser on immigration policy.

- Until a few months ago, Senior Research Fellow John H. Bunzel was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

The Reagan ties help Campbell raise money among conservatives but cause him problems on the Stanford campus.

“Until Reagan was elected and all this started, most of the campus regarded Hoover as a minor irritant, a bunch of crazies,” a Hoover staff member said. “Now a lot of people on campus are concerned about the politics of the institution.”

Some Stanford faculty members were particularly irked by Campbell’s remarks in the Hoover 1986 annual report, in which he went beyond boasting just of Hoover’s ties to Reagan. The Stanford trustees’ decision to accept the Reagan Library, Campbell wrote, meant that the “entire university” could “boast of a ‘Reagan connection.’ ”

Stanford President Donald Kennedy, long at odds with Campbell, replied: “The suggestion that having the Reagan papers somehow changes the university’s political orientation, if that is what he means, is not true at all.”

‘Right-Wing’ Think Tank

Other faculty critics of Hoover also stepped up their attack after publication of Campbell’s remarks.

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

Hoover, added history professor Barton J. Bernstein, is “a cancer that is handed from generation to generation.”

Senior Fellow Martin Anderson, an adviser to both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, disagreed.

“The notion that we’re all radical Republicans, sitting around writing right-wing tracts, is just not so,” he said. “There is no pervasive bias in Hoover research.”

According to Anderson, the views of the Hoover scholars “more closely reflect a cross-section of the (American) population” than do the “predominantly left-wing” opinions of professors at Stanford and many other major universities.

In defense of Hoover’s presence at Stanford, Campbell contends that there is little difference between Hoover and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University or the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Degrees Offered Elsewhere

In fact, there are several significant differences. Unlike Hoover, the Kennedy and Wilson schools both offer degrees. Kennedy and Wilson faculty members, moreover, pass through regular university appointment and promotion procedures, while most Hoover Fellows did not until recently.

Hoover seems actually to have more in common with such research organizations as the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and the liberal Brookings Institution, all in Washington. Of these, Hoover is the only one on a university campus.

While the mutual suspicion between Hoover and Stanford is not new, the plan to build the Reagan Presidential Library in the campus foothills has raised the level of rancor.

Campbell is chairman, Atty. Gen. Edwin M. Meese III is vice chairman and Martin Anderson is secretary of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, which first proposed a complex made up of a library, a museum and a public policy center, to be administered by Hoover.

After lengthy negotiations, Stanford trustees agreed in June, 1985, to accept the library, regarded as a valuable scholarly resource, and a small museum, but refused the Hoover-run policy center.

Campbell on Leave

Campbell has taken a leave of absence as Hoover director to raise about $100 million for the library, museum and the policy center, which now probably will be located in nearby Menlo Park.

Administrators and trustees have said repeatedly that Stanford accepted the library because of its value to future historians and other scholars, not to honor President Reagan. But many faculty members remain concerned.

“The library presents a very unfortunate set of problems,” said Gordon Craig, professor emeritus of history. “It does appear to put a conservative stamp on the university that could, in the long run, be damaging to our reputation.”

Two weeks ago the Stanford Faculty Senate criticized Campbell for his “Reagan connection” comments and also insisted on being involved in future planning for the library and museum.

Faculty opponents of the library say they will continue their attacks in hopes that Campbell, Meese and other Reagan Library officials will become so angry that they will move the project to another location.

But Campbell said this is unlikely.

“I have been around so-called distinguished faculties most of my adult life and I’ve learned one thing they’re good at is talking,” he said. “The decision has been made. Unless the Board of Trustees allows the (issue) to be reopened, nothing will happen.”

Better Relationship Seen

Despite these recent exchanges, some people believe that Stanford and the Hoover Institution are getting along better than they have for some time.

“I think the relationship is better than it has been for several years,” said Los Angeles attorney Warren Christopher, chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees. “On the extremes there is some rhetoric that stretches the limits of tolerance, but many people realize that both Stanford and Hoover will be strengthened by a better relationship.”

Christopher attends the semiannual meetings of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers and is personally friendly with John C. Shepherd, the St. Louis attorney who is chairman of the Board of Overseers.

On campus, Provost James N. Rosse, Stanford’s top academic officer, meets regularly with John F. Cogan, Hoover’s principal associate director, to resolve problems.

Senior Fellow appointments, as a result of a recent policy change, now are reviewed by ad hoc committees of Stanford faculty members. And Hoover librarians have taken steps to make the 1.6-million-volume collection more readily accessible to Stanford scholars.

Some believe that one development that would lower tensions would be Campbell’s departure.

“Glenn Campbell has a visceral need to render himself even more intolerable than he normally is,” historian Barton J. Bernstein said. “Things will get better when he leaves.”

Campbell, now 62, said he has no intention of leaving, but a search committee has been appointed to seek a new director in case he changes his mind.