Professor With High-Tech Ties to Head Stanford

Electrical engineering professor John L. Hennessy, who recently reeled in the largest gift in Stanford’s history, was named the university’s next president on Monday.

The appointment is expected to perfectly position the campus to harvest big donations from alumni and professors who have joined the fairy-tale rich in the surrounding Silicon Valley.

Hennessy, 47, who is currently the university’s No. 2 administrator, was a natural choice as an inside candidate, given the enormous pressures on campus presidents to raise large donations.

He is on a first-name basis with many high-tech titans, including Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, whose recent $150-million gift is the current Stanford record holder. The two men had side-by-side offices when Clark was a junior faculty member in Stanford’s electrical engineering department.

When Clark donated the money, he said he wanted to help his old friend deliver the message to other entrepreneurs who got their start at Stanford: “It’s time to give something back.”

Hennessy said fund-raising will remain a priority for the university, which is one of the nation’s wealthiest, with more than $4.5 billion in its endowment.

“I’ve been here for 22 years and I have some friends in the Silicon Valley,” he said. “Stanford has a lot of friends, too.”

Among the items Hennessy would like to use more money for is building additional university-owned housing for faculty and graduate students, who have been squeezed out of the market by astronomical prices in the booming Silicon Valley.

Although the university near Palo Alto provides dorms or apartments for nearly all undergraduates, the options on campus are slim for graduate students and junior faculty.

“It’s a crisis for grad students,” Hennessy said. “Recruiting faculty is tougher, too.”

Moreover, the engineering professor said he wants to strengthen the university’s arts and humanities programs and steer the campus toward more interdisciplinary study programs that tear down the traditional walls separating departments.

He noted that Stanford is using the $150 million from Clark to launch a biomedical engineering center, pulling together the departments of engineering, biology, medicine and computer science.

“It is often at the boundaries of these fields where the revolution and understanding of new knowledge occurs,” Hennessy said. “We need to think about building other interdisciplinary programs.”

Hennessy is scheduled to take office Sept. 1, replacing President Gerhard Casper, a constitutional law scholar who wants to return to teaching after a sabbatical.

During his eight years as president, Casper helped restore stability to Stanford after a research funding scandal. More recently, he got snared in a controversial merger of the Stanford and UC San Francisco hospitals. The merger was supposed to save money, but instead has hemorrhaged red ink.

Casper said he is determined to unravel the mess before he hands the reins to Hennessy, whom he calls “the logical choice to be Stanford’s next president.”

Hennessy joined the Stanford faculty in 1977, after earning a bachelor’s degree at Villanova University and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He rose through the ranks, becoming chairman of the computer science department and dean of the school of engineering. He was elevated to provost, the No. 2 job, last year when Condoleezza Rice, a foreign affairs advisor to presidential candidate George W. Bush, left the university.

Internationally respected for his work in computer hardware engineering, Hennessy co-founded a company that produced microprocessors. That company, called MIPS Computer Systems, eventually was bought by Silicon Graphics, making Hennessy, as he put it, “finally comfortable.”

“I’m not taking this job for the salary,” he quipped. Stanford officials declined to release his future salary. Casper earned $379,622 in 1998, according to the most recent reports.

Stanford’s Board of Trustees appointed Hennessy on Monday. His was the only name forwarded to the trustees from a presidential search committee that took five months to review 400 prospects.

“He is a great teacher and a brilliant researcher, with a touch of entrepreneur thrown into the mix,” said John Etchemendy, a philosophy professor on the search committee. “He is the embodiment of everything that has made Stanford one of the world’s great universities.”

Hennessy and his wife, Andrea, live with their two teenage sons in Atherton.