Update
October 29, 1998

Casper reviews the year, announces grants for junior faculty

This is the text of the State of the University address delivered by President Gerhard Casper on Oct. 29, 1998.

The French historian Jules Michelet was delivering a lecture at the École Normale Supérieure when the July Revolution of 1830 broke out. As the sound of cannon fire became audible, the students grew agitated until Michelet stilled them. “Messieurs,” he said, “they are making history. We shall write it.”

At Stanford, as at the École Normale, men and women are writing history at all times. They make history as well—scientific, scholarly, educational. Stanford also makes a little history as an institution, though most writers and readers give it scant attention. Nonetheless, the past year has included several items of our institutional history that were “historic,” that is, important enough to note for the long-term record. While they will not constitute my main points today, I mention them at the beginning for the simple reason that all those who contributed to them should take pleasure and pride in our collective efforts.

In the past year, we have witnessed:

• The fruition of Stanford Introductory Studies. The first year of Freshman Seminars exceeded our greatest expectations, with 75 seminars created in a model display of partnership, enthusiasm, and alacrity. This year, that number will rise to approximately 100, offering space to every member of the freshman class who wishes to participate. For freshmen and sophomores combined, there will be more than 220 offerings, with a maximum class size of 16 in each Freshman Seminar and 12 in each Sophomore Seminar. Sophomore College enrolled 50 students just four years ago and 324 students this fall. I do not know of any other research-intensive university that has, in a similarly short period of time, undertaken such an allocation of resources to undergraduate teaching.

• The highest number of undergraduate applications ever—18,888, as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the official vote-counter of the Academy Awards!

• The first class of Stanford Graduate Fellows. Last year, more than 120 graduate students began fellowships in 32 fields, from economics to neuroscience to chemical engineering. The fellowships provide critical support, says Professor Jim Plummer of Electrical Engineering. “With flexibility, students can take more time to explore options,” he has said. “This offers a tremendous matchmaking possibility to get the right students together with the right researchers.” Those ideal matches help student and researcher together pursue innovative ideas, without the uncertainty and delay of outside funding considerations. And they help Stanford recruit the best of both graduate students and faculty members.

• The first openings—of the Teaching Center and Sequoia Hall—in the new Science and Engineering Quad. The building of the SEQ can be described as having both historic and historical aspects, for it fulfills the original intent to have the campus expand laterally by quadrangles. The area west of the Main Quad was explicitly marked on maps as “Future Science Quad” as early as 1928. When the remaining components of the SEQ—including the arcades, courtyards, and landscaping—are completed this spring, Stanford will be both more handsome and more functional, with a new Quad that fosters academic affinities and working relationships. This summer, we also completed, nine years after Loma Prieta, the last restoration and seismic strengthening work in the Inner Quad. We also finished restoring the 1893 Leland Stanford Junior Museum building, which is now part of an expanded beautiful complex, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. It will officially open in January of 1999.

• The charter year of UCSF Stanford Health Care. The unprecedented partnership of private and public university medical centers created by Stanford and UCSF began operating on November 1, 1997. It has earned praise for providing the best in advanced health care to the Bay Area and beyond, while meeting the challenges of the marketplace. In awarding high bond ratings, Standard and Poor's cited “the combined strength and reputation” of the two medical centers, and Moody's Investor Services said that UCSF Stanford “is better positioned to deal with the challenges of a difficult market and fulfill the teaching and research missions of the respective universities' medical schools.” Moody's also noted, “Despite the potential risks due to the magnitude and complexity of the merger, we believe that to date, the process has been well managed.”

• Integration of the Stanford Alumni Association into Stanford University. In another joining of two entities with shared goals, SAA formally became a division of the university on September 1^st. This came after the alumni association and university boards each voted unanimously to take this step, and the members of SAA overwhelmingly approved—92 percent to 8 percent. More than 25,000 of the association's 67,000 members cast their vote. Said Bill Stone, SAA president: “I cannot recall a single mailing, in the summertime no less, that has prompted anything like this level of response.” We believe this support on all fronts reflects recognition of the quiet efforts we have made over the last six years to increase the involvement and support of Stanford alumni.

The past year also marked:

• The first time in almost a century that Stanford went to the ballot. Voters in Palo Alto gave a 55 percent approval to the Sand Hill Road Projects, including at long last connecting Sand Hill Road to El Camino Real and constructing 628 rental apartments for which Stanford faculty and staff will have priority. I remind us all that use of Stanford lands is part of our endowment, and all the projects provide support for the academic mission.

In another vital form of support, 1997-98 saw:

• Another record level of gifts to the university. To be precise, $319,410,838.18. The willingness of Stanford's alumni and friends to maintain giving above the annual levels of the then-record Centennial Campaign is, if not historic, at the least truly remarkable. While the economy has clearly helped us, I should like to stress that these results reflect much hard work by many people, ranging from members of the Board of Trustees to the staff of the Development Office. Three hundred million dollars do not just walk in the door.

Once raised, however, they can make a difference in many ways. Today, I wish to announce one more of those.

As you know, it is my strong belief that the synthesis of research and teaching is what makes universities such as Stanford so attractive. I therefore have decided to fund a five-year pilot program of Presidential Research Grants for Junior Faculty. I shall allocate unrestricted funds that the university has raised by means of the President's Fund, or that are otherwise available to me.

This program will give unrestricted research grants to junior faculty in the three schools that offer undergraduate degrees: Earth Sciences, Engineering, and Humanities and Sciences. Undergraduates come to Stanford to pursue a degree in a research-intensive university; it is to their benefit, as well as to the benefit of the faculty, that the university strengthen research support to junior faculty.

The program is very simple. Each assistant professor will receive from the university a $5,000 unrestricted research grant at the time of initial appointment, followed by another $5,000 at the time of reappointment. If a candidate is awarded tenure, he or she will be given an additional $10,000 research grant in a single lump sum.

The Presidential Research Grants for Junior Faculty will begin this academic year. All existing junior faculty in the three schools will receive $5,000, as though they were newly appointed. The fact that I can undertake such an effort reflects the relative success we have had in recent years in raising unrestricted funds on an annual basis, and I thank all who have made that possible.

Returning to our review of notable events of the past year, finally, we sent:

• A men's basketball team to the Final Four. Since its founding, Stanford has been committed to equality of the sexes, and I am pleased to see our male athletes making clear gains in catching up to our women.

I wish to make clear a careful use of language: I said, “finally, we sent,” not “we finally sent.” I have no wish to join in raising expectations and pressures on Coach Montgomery or any of our athletic programs.

It remains amusing and bemusing to me that making the Final Four, a wholly pleasant and remarkable event, subjects me to many more comments off campus than last year's achievements in the Nobel Prizes, when two of our faculty colleagues won Nobels, one of them the third Stanford physicist in three years so honored. This month, of course, that streak extended to a record four in a row with Professor Laughlin's prize. Members of the class of 1999 will have seen five Nobel prizes come to Stanford faculty members, and, to return to athletics, will have seen Stanford win the Sears Cup for the best collegiate athletics program in the nation every single year they have been here. To this last accomplishment, the senior class—as well as, of course, other classes—will have made their own contributions.

• • •

Alas, not all the historic events of the last year were so positive. Among the troubling trends has been an increase in litigiousness and grievances. From 1990 to 1995, two to three faculty grievances per year reached the provost's office. In the past academic year, with little increase in faculty numbers, 10 such grievances did so. While some might view this as a small number, it nevertheless provides reason to worry. I wish to devote my main remarks to a few observations concerning issues of faculty cohesion, faculty grievances, and faculty discipline. I shall conclude with a call for changes in our disciplinary and grievance processes.

There are those who believe that universities have devolved from communities with a shared sense of purpose into merely loose aggregates of subcultures and individuals, each marching to a different drummer. I confess that, with respect to almost any social development, I have never been much of a believer in “the good old days.” As some wit once said: “Soon these will be the good old days.” As to universities in particular, the difficulty always has been that as a “community,” the university, in essential ways, is noncommunitarian. That is, it is much concerned with the individual scholar and the individual student, of whom Edward Levi noted wryly, “These individuals of necessity are concerned with themselves.”

Perhaps we should be more surprised, indeed gratified, that so many universities possess a community spirit. Clark Kerr wrote in 1994: “Some universities have never lost their sense of an integrated intellectual community of scholars.” His illustrations—Princeton, Chicago, and Cal Tech—were taken from the smaller institutions. Then he went on to say: “Among the larger institutions, I have always marveled at the cohesion of Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, MIT . . . Berkeley, and Michigan, and I have wondered what the secrets of social alchemy are that give them each their special character.”

Another time, another day it might be worthwhile to tease out those “secrets of social alchemy.” Certainly Clark Kerr is right with respect to Stanford. When I first came to the university, I stressed that the work of a university is work that cannot be done unless it is continuously reconsidered and supported afresh and jointly by faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends. In almost all areas of Stanford, that has been and is the case. The endeavor is both a test and an expression of cohesion and community.

Of course, we do not escape the tensions that come from the heterogeneity of the institution, generational differences, and evolving community standards. The university as an institution is organized for the pursuit of goals that are stipulated to be coherent and compatible. That pursuit is subject to norms that determine the interactions among scholars, between faculty and students, among students themselves, and between individual community members and the institution as such. These goals and norms, as well as institutional cohesion, can be tested by disputes about them and their interpretation. Indeed, it is one of the obligations of university leaders—presidents, provosts, deans, chairs, Advisory Board members, Senate—to watch over those rules, articulate them, and help adapt them where adaptation is needed. But it is not just their obligation.

Edward Shils, the great sociologist and critic of higher education, said in a famous essay of 1982: “University teachers owe obligations to the particular institution in which they are holding appointments. This obligation is not a composite of obligations to their students and their colleagues. There is an obligation to sustain the particular university because it is a source of intellectual sustenance to its members.”

He went on: “The university is an intellectual collectivity, and not just a collection of stimulating individuals and necessary services provided by the university; it is not just a legal construct and it is not an epiphenomenon. It is a general pattern of attitudes and activities that molds the activities of the individual members of the university. If this pattern is dissipated, it has a debilitating effect on the relation of teachers and students and of colleagues and colleagues.”

The pattern of attitudes and activities shows fragility throughout. For instance, the present legalism in American universities—characterized by “the structuring of all possible human relations into the form of claims and counter- claims under established rules” (Judith Shklar) and the adjudication of the various claims in some multi-level process, including the courts—does little to improve outcomes, while sapping very significant strength and resources from the institutions. A recent study indicates that legal defense costs for private colleges and universities nationwide have risen 250% in only five years, from an average of $70,000 per claim in 1992 to an average of $175,000 per claim last year. In our state, this amount increases another 30-to-40%—what is generally called the “California” factor in legal costs. These are national and statewide averages, and our costs in a specific case may be higher or lower, but they give you a sense of the numbers involved.

Beyond the diversion of significant amounts of money from core academic purposes, excessive legalism depletes valuable time. If depositions in a single case can consume 10% of a university president's official working hours during an entire quarter, and if dedicated university deans, faculty, and staff must accept being personally attacked by a plaintiff's lawyer for days on end, the effect on the individuals and the institution is debilitating, indeed.

These days, and for the first time in my life, I myself am mostly a client (and a victim) of lawyers. A sobering experience! My daughter who is a lawyer, when asked what her father does, answers: “My father? Oh, he is a defendant.”

Alas, it seems there is little we can do about an excessive and overreaching legal system. But we can do something about our own internal procedures. Under the present circumstances, our procedures strike me as adding to our woes by being too cumbersome, leaving grievants, respondents, and the university alike in limbo for too long. My point does not pertain to rights, or asserting rights, but to the manner in which we adjudicate them within the university. I have heard from members of the Faculty Senate and the Advisory Board, and other colleagues who express similar concerns.

A typical departmental grievance involves an initial review by the dean. If the facts are complex, a faculty or senior staff member often is asked to undertake an independent fact-finding review. That review takes time. The preparation of a written report takes still more time—as much as 6 months or more under past rules, up to 60 days under current ones. This is especially true where the faculty member doing the review has many other competing time commitments. The report then goes to the dean, who considers it, sometimes consults with others, and ultimately either accepts or denies the grievance. If a problem is found to exist, corrective action is taken, and that usually is the end of the matter.

If the grievance is denied, however, there currently are additional levels of appeal, including to the provost and, in many instances, to the president. At each of these stages, an independent reviewer again might be appointed, and often might start an investigation all over again. At the level of the president, matters involving appointments, re-appointments, and promotions are referred to the Advisory Board, where additional proceedings are required, and where some or all of the process may be repeated.

Our estimate is that the handling of a grievance that is complex and appealed through the various levels will take from 350 to more than 500 hours of faculty and staff time. Further, a lawsuit often is brought in such cases, adding from 50 to several hundred hours of attorney time per side and, in one or two of the more extreme cases, actually as much as 9,000 hours. Attorneys are not free, and I would remind you that every dollar spent defending the university against lawsuits is taken away from much more productive academic uses.

Even with attorneys carrying the brunt of court challenges, a great deal of faculty and staff time still must be devoted to responding to the complaint and written interrogatories, the production of documents, and depositions and pre-trial meetings. If the case comes up for trial, it typically will take from 3 to 15 additional days in front of a judge or jury, with double to triple that amount of time in preparation of the faculty members and other witnesses who will appear at the trial.

In some of the cases that have been handled in recent years, we estimate from 50 to 500 hours of faculty and staff time may be devoted to the court case, including mediation and any settlement discussions. This is on top of what was invested during the university administrative process.

So long as our society is so quick to resort to the courts, there is not much we can do about legal costs. Focusing on what is within our power to improve, however, one has to think that a greatly simplified university process would continue to assure the full protection of academic freedom and due process, but without the current substantial costs to the faculty members who are at the center of the decision-making process. This is in all of our interests—grievant and respondent, individual and institutional.

Faculty discipline poses similar problems. At the end of the summer, I rendered my decision on the recommendation of the Advisory Board to suspend and fine Dr. Pfefferbaum. The issues dated back to spring of 1996. After I charged Dr. Pfefferbaum with neglect of duty, the proceedings within the university, including an outside fact-finder, took more than a year. In my six years at Stanford, this was the first case to reach the Advisory Board. However, there were other discipline cases that occupied much time of deans, faculty, lawyers, and president.

Under the university's Statement on Faculty Discipline, it is the president of the university who charges a faculty member. But, of course, cases first arise in the schools and it is, in effect, usually a dean who brings to the president allegations of wrongdoing after a decanal or faculty committee investigation. The Statement on Faculty Discipline provides faculty members and the president with the opportunity to settle the matter by agreement—clearing the allegations or engaging in a kind of university plea-bargaining process under the control of the president. If an agreement is reached, the Advisory Board will not be seized with the matter; indeed, it will never hear about it. If no agreement is reached, the case goes to the Advisory Board and then back to the president.

I cannot even begin to suggest to you how time-consuming all of this is, especially in cases where facts are often difficult to establish, such as with sexual harassment. Starting, properly, with a presumption of innocence, the president is in a difficult position: He or she—I am using this form of reference to make clear that I am not concerned about my personal lot but about the institution—must develop an independent sense of what happened at the school level and is, of course, given conflicting versions. If the president were a judge, this kind of adjudication would be his or her job. The president's job, however, is to lead a rather complex educational institution with, this year, an annual budget of $2.25 billion (including hospitals and clinics). If the president carves out the time needed to perform the judicial assignment conscientiously, it is at great expense to nearly every other duty to the university, and its faculty, students, and staff. Conversely, if the president does not set almost everything else aside, charges of foot-dragging can come from accuser and accused alike.

Because the “plea bargaining” takes place behind closed doors, as it must, and usually includes an agreement not to discuss the matter, the president cannot even make appropriate contributions to the articulation of university rules. Instead, interested parties spread their versions of what the president did, while the president is condemned to silence. This is not a trivial matter, because rumors can destroy the trust that is vital to a community, especially in light of the fact that the issues tend to be highly charged and the rumor mills in academia work worldwide at electronic speed.

I strongly believe that it is in the best interest of the institution to reduce complexity in the faculty discipline and faculty grievance procedures. Consultation with faculty members and faculty bodies has raised a number of ideas about reducing layers, time, and the burden on such already heavily laden groups as the Advisory Board. For instance, we should ask ourselves if the power to charge faculty under the disciplinary rules would not be most appropriately vested in the deans of the various schools. Or whether we should not consider different approaches to fact-finding than we have in the past.

I, therefore, am appointing a task force to make specific recommendations. This task force will comprise the current chair of the Advisory Board, Professor Robert Simoni of Biological Science; the three most recent Advisory Board chairs, Professors James Sheehan of History, Bradley Efron of Statistics and Frances Conley of Neurosurgery; Professor Michael Bratman of Philosophy as a faculty member at large; the provost; and me. Any resulting proposed amendments to the present rules will be offered to the Senate of the Academic Council for its consideration, and, if adopted, sent to the Board of Trustees for approval.

Grievances and discipline sometimes may be indications that we—at the departmental, school, or central level—could be more effective in communicating and enforcing norms, standards, expectations. The complexity of the modern university at times makes breakdowns almost inevitable. Furthermore, we are committed to uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate, to the wind of freedom. Nevertheless, it is also the case that plaintiffs and their lawyers will exaggerate internal disputes and use these exaggerations to disparage the good name of the university and its members for personal gain. If all of us were more mindful of the consequences that imprecise words and actions may have for the university as an institution, we might avoid some of what we are currently facing.

In a recent column for the Stanford magazine about what I called “the overreach of law enforcement,” I wrote that ever-increasing concerns about investigations, depositions, lawsuits, and publicity may intimidate citizens and private and public decision-makers. I obviously abhor the very idea of such intimidation. However, there can be no doubt that the university can be debilitatingly distracted from its core missions by the excessive intrusions of a legal system that seems bent on turning all human disagreements into legal conflicts.

Our obligation to sustain Stanford includes being cognizant of this aspect of our life as an institution. And it includes each of us doing all we can—as individuals and as university citizens—to prevent such damaging distractions from our core missions of teaching, learning, and research.