Liberals Exact a Pound of Flesh at Stanford

On Aug. 31, one chapter of Stanford University’s attack on the academic freedom of its famous Hoover Institution will be completed.

On that day W. Glenn Campbell, who built the Hoover Library into a well-endowed major international research organization, will be forced to retire as director. It is testimony to the petty-mindedness of Stanford’s president, Donald Kennedy, and the Board of Trustees that Campbell is being required to step down four months short of serving a full 30 years. Under Campbell’s direction, the Hoover Institution has been a phenomenal success. Its human, archival, financial and physical resources have multiplied many times. The best-endowed think tank in the world, Hoover has a world-famous research staff boasting several Nobel laureates.

Normally, universities cannot attract administrators with talents Campbell’s caliber and therefore go out of their way to retain them. Stanford, however, is handicapped by a faculty that is seriously unbalanced to the left, and these ideologues demanded that the university find some way to punish Campbell and the Hoover Institution for helping to devise the outlines of the Reagan Revolution.

When Campbell, a Harvard Ph.D., became director in 1960, he was warned by former President Herbert Hoover, the institution’s founder, that Stanford’s left wing would conduct “sneak attacks” against him. However, Campbell survived these attacks and led Hoover to unparalleled prominence. When I arrived at Hoover in the early 1970s, I discovered that the institution’s scholars were regarded as “war criminals” by Stanford’s “progressive” faculty. There was no place for moderates or reason; either you hated America or you were a “war criminal.” The windows of the beautiful Lou Henry Hoover building were broken out and boarded up, and the doors were chained on the inside to protect the scholars from physical attack from “students” directed by left-wing faculty members.

But the attack on the Hoover Institution began in earnest in the early 1980s. A number of the institution’s staff had connections to the Reagan Administration and its new policies. As Peter Duignan writes in his 1989 history of the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s “liberal faculty hated Reagan not only for cutting taxes and domestic spending but also for raising defense spending, projecting U.S. power overseas and reinvigorating America’s policy of containing communism after a period of ‘disarmed diplomacy’ under President Carter. Liberal faculty especially resented Reagan’s efforts to reduce the size of government and the bureaucratic control of citizen’s lives. And Hoover scholars by virtue of their association with the Reagan Administration received a full measure of this resentment.”

A big effort was made to take over the Hoover Institution and to subject its appointments and research to the approval of Stanford faculty committees. Most of the motivation was ideological, but some was purely opportunism on the part of Stanford administrators with an eye on Hoover’s large endowment. For the last six years a large part of the energies of the Stanford president and trustees were devoted to an attempt to subvert the independence of the Hoover Institution. Campbell, however, is a brave and tough man, and with the help of Hoover’s faculty and overseers, he defeated the effort to squelch intellectual diversity on the Stanford campus. During this time of misdirected efforts, Stanford lost the immensely valuable Reagan Presidential Library, the character of the university’s once distinguished course on Western civilization and the confidence of some of its alumni. Beginning last fall, deficits appeared in the university’s budget and, as of June, Stanford’s fund-raising efforts were running behind the weak performance of last year.

Unable to retaliate in any other way, Stanford insisted that Campbell retire from his position as director at age 65. Realizing that Stanford’s left wing would pay any price for a symbolic victory, Campbell negotiated his resignation in exchange for Hoover’s control of its endowment and budget, re-acknowledgement by the university of Hoover’s independence and a six-year contract as counselor to the institution with substantial salary boosts.

Campbell’s success in protecting the academic freedom of Hoover scholars owes much to his character and much to his standing. Now Stanford’s ideologues are biding their time, hoping that the succession will result in a less fearless, less distinguished and less well-connected successor. Through Campbell’s victory, the Hoover scholars have gained a respite, but Stanford’s continued leftward drift will force them to fight again for their academic freedom.