W. Glenn Campbell, 77; UC Regent, Hoover Institution Chief

W. Glenn Campbell, a conservative economist in the national Republican brain trust who was director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford for 29 years, a UC regent for 32 years, and an advisor to presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, has died. He was 77.

Campbell died Saturday after suffering a heart attack at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

The picture of the scholarly professor, Campbell had impeccable academic and career credentials. But his combative manner and archly conservative political opinions kept him constantly in conflict with administrators and trustees of Stanford University and greatly hampered his effectiveness on the University of California Board of Regents.

Campbell was handpicked by former President Herbert Hoover in 1960 to build the small Hoover Institution into a nationally prominent center for conservative political research. He did just that, demonstrating strong skills as a fund-raiser and recruiter of Nobel Prize winners and other scholars.

The institution, established by Hoover in 1919 to house his extensive World War I library at his alma mater, always had an uneasy relationship with the university because Hoover insisted that his library be maintained separately from Stanford’s and that his institution remain free from what he called the “left-wing influence” of the Stanford faculty.

But the scrappy Campbell, who was outspoken in his criticism of Stanford faculty and administrators, was forced out at 65 though he wanted to stay on until he turned 70.

Typically, Campbell objected to the ouster, and strongly implied that he might sue for age discrimination. Eventually, he compromised and stepped aside after receiving a pay raise, the promise of an office and car, and the title counselor to the director for the five years in question. In 1994, he was named director emeritus.

During his tenure as Hoover director, Campbell eliminated the deficit he inherited and built the endowment to $130 million. When he left in 1989, gifts and endowment earnings were funding nearly three-fourths of the institution’s annual budget.

Campbell also strengthened the previously excellent library, which was known for its materials tracking the development of Soviet-style communism. It attracted such researchers as author and former Soviet Union exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Campbell added major materials on Africa, China, Japan and the Middle East.

He also upgraded the institution’s domestic studies program, recruiting such scholars as Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and physicist Edward Teller, who designed the hydrogen bomb.

Although many Hoover scholars resented the facility’s label as a “conservative think tank,” Campbell relished it, noting that at one point more than two dozen Hoover fellows were working in the Reagan administration.

Campbell proudly commented in the institution’s 1986 annual report: “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.”

His equal enthusiasm for placing the Reagan Presidential Library on the Stanford campus, many believe, helped shove the facility south to Ventura County.

Against his colleagues’ advice, Campbell wrote in the think tank’s 1986 annual report that “not only the Hoover Institution . . . can boast of a ‘Reagan connection’ but also the entire university.” The comment outraged the Stanford faculty. The university rejected the proposal, and the Reagan Foundation quickly settled on the Ventura County location.

Perhaps describing his view of his stewardship, Campbell told The Times in 1988 that his successor, whom he insisted on helping to choose, should be “someone with the toughness of Margaret Thatcher and the charm and charisma of Ronald Reagan, a person who is a true leader and knows how to leave all the . . . fellows alone but still make the whole mechanism work.”

He approved of the ultimate choice, economist John Raisian, who had served as his deputy director.

In 1997, the Hoover Institution honored Campbell’s long service by naming its National, Public Affairs and Peace Fellows Program for him and his economist wife, Rita Ricardo-Campbell.

The crusty Campbell’s long tenure on the UC Board of Regents was as controversial as his Hoover tenure. Then-Gov. Reagan appointed Campbell to his first 16-year term in 1968, and Gov. George Deukmejian named him to a second term in 1984. He chaired the board in 1982-83.

In 1969, Campbell backed Reagan’s crackdown on student protests over the Vietnam War and UC Berkeley’s People’s Park, and in 1995 he supported Gov. Pete Wilson’s successful effort to ban affirmative action throughout the UC system.

In between, Campbell angered most university constituencies and rarely fostered consensus on the contentious board as he proposed slashing budgets, eliminating student regents and controlling academic tenure for professors. He often condemned administrative appointments, including the 1992 naming of 67-year-old Jack Peltason as UC president, claiming, “He’s too old.”

Born on a farm near London, Ontario, Campbell graduated from the University of Western Ontario and served in the Canadian Royal Navy before winning a fellowship to further his study of economics at Harvard. After earning a master’s degree and a doctorate, he began teaching at Harvard when he was only 24.

But Campbell’s conservative thinking prompted Harvard colleagues, in his view, to force him out for political reasons.

Campbell served as research economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1951 to 1954, then as director of research for the American Enterprise Assn. in Washington, D.C., until Hoover tapped him to move to Stanford in 1960.

Nixon and later Ford appointed him to the President’s Commission on White House Fellows. From 1972 to 1978 and again from 1990 to 1994, he served on the National Science Board.

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, he named Campbell chairman of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board and a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, positions he held for a decade.

The economist wrote several articles for scholarly journals and co-wrote two books, “The American Competitive Enterprise Economy” and “The Economics of Mobilization and War,” both in 1952.

Campbell is survived by his wife of 55 years; three daughters, Barbara, Diane and Nancy; and four grandchildren.

Funeral services are scheduled at 1 p.m. Thursday at Spangler Mortuaries, 399 S. San Antonio Road, Los Altos, Calif.

The family has asked that, instead of flowers, memorial donations be sent to the MS Awareness Foundation or to a charity of the donor’s choice.