Key Arms Control Educator Quits Stanford Post

In a move that could weaken the nation’s ability to groom the experts needed for international arms control, physicist Sidney Drell abruptly resigned Monday as a co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Drell, one of the nation’s top arms control experts and an internationally known scientist, quit his post because the university has balked at allowing the center to make appointments with the rank of professor.

Stanford University allows only specific schools, not interdisciplinary centers, to appoint professors, and many educators are reluctant to see that authority spread to research and policy training centers. Thus, the center has been staffed largely with professors from other departments, and Drell has complained bitterly to friends about the loss of a number of key staff people who accepted appointments at other universities because he was not able to offer similar opportunities at Stanford.

Drell told colleagues that he reached his decision with “deep regret” and “great sadness” but that he believes his efforts to build a multidisciplinary faculty were “stymied.”

“The problem is that to do first-rate work in policy studies at a university, you need to have a crew of first-rate people and give them the credentials commensurate with a university position,” said David Bernstein, Drell’s assistant.

Bernstein said the problem was called to the attention of the university’s president several years ago, “but there has been no progress on it.”

In a formal statement released in response to Drell’s resignation, Stanford president Donald Kennedy conceded that the problem is unresolved.

“Sid’s decision saddens me, for he has long been one of the most creative and influential voices for policy studies,” Kennedy said. “His evident disappointment with the administration’s response to his request points up a difficult problem for us, and the provost and I will continue to wrestle with it in consultation with the faculty.”

Drell will return to his position as deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and will continue as one of about 70 members of the Arms Control Center.

His resignation, which is to become effective Aug. 31, is expected to have ramifications far beyond the Northern California campus.

Drell, a MacArthur Foundation fellow and a close friend of Soviet physicist Andrei Sakarov, has been a government adviser on arms control more than 20 years.

He has been a consultant to several U.S. presidents, as well as the Congress, and that experience helped him guide a center that trained many of the people at the forefront of international arms control programs. Because of his background as a scientist, the Stanford program included heavy dosages of science considered essential to the understanding of international arms control policies.

With Drell gone, the science side of the Stanford program could suffer, according to Stanford sources.

Several people crucial to the center’s technical and scientific programs are expected to follow Drell out the door.

“With my departure, several of my outstanding younger colleagues, who have helped me build a strong research and training program in technical issues of security and arms control, are now planning to leave,” Drell said in a statement distributed by the university’s public affairs office. “I hope that this loss is only temporary and that before too long new means can be designed within the university structure to rebuild this part of the program,” he said.

The center was founded in 1970 by Drell; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Wolfgang Panofsky; Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, now president of Rockefeller University, and Stanford law professor John Barton. Drell’s co-director is John Lewis.