New President of Stanford to Take Hot Seat : Education: Gerhard Casper must help the school recover from scandal. He also must adjust to a campus that likes football as much as academics.

In case anyone is worried, Gerhard Casper wants the world to know that he has no intention of abolishing football at Stanford University.

True, he has been provost and law dean at the University of Chicago, a school that dumped intercollegiate football in 1939, only to revive it in 1969 in a small-potatoes division sneered at by Stanford fans. And the German-born legal scholar knows little about American football rules.

Yet Casper, who is to become president of sports-mad Stanford on Sept. 1, promises to learn more about athletics in the next few months. “How can I possibly be opposed to athletics? But it is a different world for me, to be sure,” he said, adding that he is studying “a wonderful book on football with pictures.”

At the same time, he is girding himself for a grimmer task: helping Stanford to recover from the furor over federal research spending that drove President Donald Kennedy from office. Government investigators allege that Stanford may have overbilled taxpayers for research overhead by as much as $300 million during the 1980s. Stanford, which strongly contests the charges, will be in the fight of its life if the government seeks to recover funds.

“It obviously would be destroying Stanford and I cannot stand for it,” Casper said. “California cannot stand for it. Indeed, I do not think the United States can stand for it because Stanford has been one of the most effective contributors to the national welfare.”

Those two issues, sports and spending, illustrate how Casper must bridge different academic cultures. Any skepticism about his prospects as Stanford’s ninth president are wrapped up in stereotypes the two schools have of each other. Some Stanford professors and students perceive Chicago as a dour campus that cares little for undergraduate life and champions mainly conservative causes. At Chicago, there is some condescension toward Stanford as an alleged academic country club, not quite intellectual enough and overly interested in luxuries.

For example, the University of Chicago is celebrating its centennial this year with scholarly seminars, starring Oxford University’s chancellor. Stanford likewise had academic programs for its 100th birthday last fall but also held an enormous party in its stadium, with entertainers Whoopi Goldberg and Bobby McFerrin and a huge fireworks display.

To Chicagoans, the Stanford party symbolized the lavish spending habits that landed the California school in such serious trouble over research overhead billings. Mixing envy and humor, some Chicagoans ask, how serious can Stanford be if the weather and scenery are so wonderful and no one fears muggings en route to class?

On the flip side, the April Fools’ issue of Stanford’s student newspaper reflected suspicion of Chicago. The Stanford Daily jokingly proclaimed that Casper had appointed fellow University of Chicago scholar Allan Bloom as provost of the California campus. Bloom’s book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” excoriated the multicultural curriculum movement at places such as Stanford.

Such an appointment would be a nightmare for Palo Alto liberals who successfully fought in 1988 to add non-European material to required freshman humanities classes, angering Bloom and conservatives nationwide. In reality, Casper has no intention of appointing Bloom to any Stanford post and supported the change in freshman readings.

“The canon will always change. The canon is never stable,” Casper said. “Although I hope every student will be exposed to Aristotle, every student does not need to be exposed to some obscure writer of the 19th Century.”

On the other hand, he said, Stanford may want to examine Chicago’s undergraduate college, which requires many more “common core” courses than do Stanford’s more varied undergraduate schools. Casper agrees with Kennedy, who has called for more faculty attention to teaching.

“I do certainly think it is time for Stanford to take another look at the structure of its undergraduate curriculum because it will be necessary for us at Stanford to explain to the world why we have students there for four years at a rather substantial cost,” said Casper, a silver-haired 54-year-old with strong, angular features.

Outside his office window, an early spring snowfall whitened the neo-Gothic architecture of Chicago’s main quadrangle. The pink sandstone of Stanford’s sunny campus felt every bit of a half-continent away. But Casper said it would be wrong to stress differences too much.

In addition to their similar ages, Stanford and Chicago “have in common that they are Western (American) institutions. That is, they do not have an ancient lineage, they are not part of the concept of Ivy League. They are more robust. They enjoy, I think, not being viewed as quite as sophisticated. Those are qualities the two places share more than set them apart,” Casper said.

Still, he diplomatically conceded that Chicago seems to be older and “is much more self-consciously connected to European university traditions at its founding.”

Because of sheer numbers, undergraduate issues loom larger at Stanford than at Chicago. Only about one-third of Chicago’s 11,100 students are undergraduates, compared to about half of Stanford’s 13,500.

In addition, Stanford is a richer school and has lots more space.

Its endowment totaled $2.3 billion last summer, about double that of Chicago’s. Even as its image was tarnished with federal investigations into abuses of research spending, Stanford completed a $1.2-billion fund-raising drive last year for its centennial. Chicago’s goal is to garner $500 million in donations for its 100th anniversary. Nicknamed “The Farm,” Stanford has 8,180 acres in one of California’s priciest regions and most pleasant climates. Chicago sits on 175 acres, an intensely urban campus bordered by slums and middle-class neighborhoods in a climate that does not encourage winter bicycling.

The different settings are important for Casper to grasp, faculty and students say.

“Stanford is a much easier place to live, a much more laid-back environment. People at Stanford have a more balanced perspective. They balance family and work,” said Mark Lang, an assistant professor of accounting at Stanford who studied at Chicago. “Chicago is a pretty dreary place. It is very academically oriented and has very little else.”

Another view was offered by Gary Becker, an economics and sociology professor at Chicago, who also is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution think-tank. “I’ve always felt Chicago is the most intellectual university. . . . I’m not saying it’s the best institution, but it’s the most concerned with constantly arguing ideas. Of course it happens at Stanford, but it’s not as intense.”

Many Chicagoans regard Stanford as a bastion of “politically correct” liberalism, the kind that blocked a plan to have Ronald Reagan’s presidential library on campus and allows homosexual couples in married student housing. In reality, Stanford has many moderates and, especially at the Hoover Institution, conservatives.

Likewise, Chicago is viewed from the West as very conservative because of Bloom and economic theorists, led by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. But in a recent interview, Friedman, now affiliated with Hoover, stressed that “no ward in the city votes more predictably and overwhelmingly Democratic” than the Hyde Park neighborhood where most Chicago professors live.

Casper is a “moderate liberal,” according to Chicago friends, who bemoan his departure because he was viewed by many as destined to be the school’s next president. Resisting pigeonholing, Casper testified in 1987 before Congress in support of Robert H. Bork, the conservative federal jurist and Chicago Law School alumnus unsuccessfully nominated by Reagan to the Supreme Court.

The new Stanford president was influenced by a childhood spent living under the Nazi regime and hiding in basements during American bombings on Hamburg. He first came to the United States at age 16 as West Germany’s representative to an international student conference.

His wife, Regina, a prominent psychiatrist who is expected to receive a Stanford professorship, grew up in Germany during the same period. They have a daughter, a law student at the University of Virginia.

“My generation had to confront the Nazi past at all times and ask itself how could that have happened? Why did it happen? Why did it happen here? And for the generation growing up immediately after the war, being German wasn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world,” Casper said.

Casper earned law and doctorate degrees in Germany and a master’s degree in law at Yale University. He then taught at UC Berkeley for two years during the height of the student protest movement and then moved to Chicago, rising to second-in-command. Along the way, he developed a reputation as a respected scholar, able administrator, excellent fund-raiser and witty public speaker able to poke fun at his lingering German accent.

The Stanford trustees want him to boost morale at the beleaguered university and focus attention back “on the central purposes of the university, that is teaching and research, not being diverted by all these political controversies,” he said.

At Chicago, Casper has had to deal with similar problems, although on a much smaller scale. Federal investigators claim that the University of Chicago overbilled the government about $1 million, but the Midwest school is not badly harmed by the controversy and retains its more frugal image.

Stanford’s dispute with the federal government could drag on for years. Meanwhile, Casper plans a more austere style for the school, to deflect criticism about government funds paying in part for flowers and antiques in the president’s house. “I hope there will be some flowers,” Casper said, “but not at the taxpayers’ expense.”