'Velvet-glove
forcefulness'
Six
years of provostial challenges and achievements
BY JAMES ROBINSON
Gathered last week to bid
farewell to Provost Condoleezza Rice, about 100 members
of Stanford's African American community were listening
to Brenda Sepolen give a rapturous rendition of two of
Rice's favorite gospels, "I Need Thee Every
Hour" and "His Eye Is on the Sparrow."
Rice, letting down her
guarded public persona for a moment, was moved to tears.
"This kind of music
has the capacity to make mountains tremble," said
associate provost for foundation relations Michael Britt,
who accompanied Sepolen on the piano. "Good gospel
music makes ice melt always remember that," he
said, adding quickly of Rice, "Not that she's as
cold as ice."
Rice is attending a lot of
farewell parties these days. In some ways, she is having
her own commencement, heading into a future that is both
promising and uncertain.
"Ambiguity has never
bothered me at all," the outgoing provost says
during a recent interview at her modest office in
Building 10. "I think that part of it is that I'm
pretty religious, and that probably helps to make one
less fearful and more optimistic about what's possible. I
rather like living with ambiguity."
But no one seems worried
about Rice's future, even if its course is uncharted. And
for all the goodbyes, Rice isn't really going anywhere.
Her campus condominium isn't for sale; nor are her
cherished season tickets to Cardinal basketball games.
She will leave her office to incoming provost John
Hennessy, dean of the engineering school, for space at
the Hoover Institution, where she will be a senior
fellow. She will be doing some work for J.P. Morgan on
international economic issues and is looking forward to a
lot of traveling. And yes, she says, "I'm doing some
work obviously for Governor Bush."
While it has been only six
years since her appointment as provost raised many
eyebrowsat 38, Rice had not even been a department
chair, let alone a dean it seems an eternity since
anyone questioned her ability to do the job. That's
distinguished, of course, from questioning her decisions.
"She has tremendous
ability and intelligence, and the maturity of someone far
beyond her age," the outgoing provost, Gerald
Lieberman, said at the time of Rice's appointment.
Born in Birmingham,
Alabama, Rice holds a bachelor's degree from the
University of Denver, a master's degree from Notre Dame
and a doctorate from the University of Denver's Graduate
School of International Studies.
Coit Blacker, now deputy
director of Stanford's Institute for International
Studies, remembers meeting Rice soon after she left
graduate school.
"She was like 12,
well, 25," when she came in 1981 to be a fellow at
the arms control and disarmament program to augment her
background in Soviet affairs with a grounding in security
issues, he recalls. "I think what struck people at
the time was a combination of all the personal stuff
charm and very gracious personality . . . a kind of
intellectual agility mixed with velvet-glove
forcefulness," he said.
He quickly learned she was
no shrinking violet. Blacker can still picture Rice and
another program fellow arguing one day over the relative
merits of Russian composers, perhaps Rachmaninoff versus
Prokofiev. "They were really going at hammer and
tongs. I thought, now this is real interesting,"
Blacker said.
"She's a steel
magnolia," he continued. "She has a wonderful
kind of Southern affect in the positive sense a kind
of graciousness. But mixed with this is a very steely
inner core. She always knows what she wants and is
extremely disciplined, both at personal and professional
levels."
Rice stayed at Stanford,
taking a tenure-track position in the Political Science
Department, publishing, picking up a raft of teaching
awards and becoming very active in the Stanford community
as a whole. Her work on various search committees caught
the attention of people outside her academic department,
such as Gerhard Casper, whom she and fellow members of a
presidential search committee visited in Chicago. She
kept up with her lifelong love of playing the piano,
occasionally giving concerts on campus, and became a
megafan of Cardinal sports, traveling often to other
cities to cheer for Stanford teams. (She celebrated her
most recent birthday by indulging in a weekend spectating
spree that included a women's basketball tournament,
football game and a men's basketball game, not to mention
the 49ers on television.)
In the early 1990s, Rice
left Stanford for two years to serve as assistant to the
president for national security affairs and senior
director for Soviet affairs at the National Security
Council under President George Bush. It was a great perch
from which to witness the fall of communism, but Rice
also relished her return to the academy, and two years
later, in 1993, President Casper tapped her for the
provost's job.
Six years ago Stanford was
still recovering from the effects of the indirect cost
dispute and was going through budget cuts. Rice had never
managed a big budget, let alone one in excess of $1
billion, but she boned up on budgeteering and boldly
began challenging some basic assumptions.
Balancing the budget,
Blacker believes, was Rice's most important
accomplishment as provost.
"There was a sort of
conventional wisdom that said it couldn't be done . . .
that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to
live with it," he recalls. "She said, 'No,
we're going to balance the budget in two years.' It
involved painful decisions but it worked, and
communicated to funders that Stanford could balance its
own books and had the effect of generating additional
sources of income for the university. . . . It was
courageous."
Wielding the budget knife
made her some enemies, she acknowledges. But even Rice's
detractors have credited her with, at least, candor and
directness, which contrasts favorably with the subterfuge
and back-stabbing that could attend such a difficult
process.
"I'm very proud we're
fiscally sound now," Rice said. "Even after we
had already been through $40 million-plus of budget
rejection under [former Provost] Jim Rosse, who had
started this process . . . we still had $20 million to go
and there wasn't much low-hanging fruit left," she
recalled. But she moved the university to
"revenue-constrained" budgeting meaning
you've got to live within your means and went through
with additional cuts. Such action "does mean that
people get laid off, and that's not easy," she says.
But Rice sees bigger
pictures. "I saw it as going through some of what
American business had had to go through in the `80s, and
we're seeing now in the United States a tremendous
benefit from having gone through that. Because that's why
the United States continues to experience growth rates as
it does," while the rest of the world has lagged,
she says. "As someone said, the world economy is
flying on one engine."
In recent years, a
healthier economy has made for much easier budgeting,
which Rice fears could make some people complacent.
"Universities tend in
times of relative flush to keep growing and add
functions, and to stop thinking of the necessity for
consolidation," she says. "And that's a little
bit of a danger with this period of time. Because I've
seen more requests in the last couple of years for a new
position here, a new position there, many of which were
cut out in earlier budget times. It seems almost as if
there's a pendulum, and you have to be very tough to not
have the pendulum swing."
Mariann Byerwalter, vice
president for business affairs, said that as a result of
changes in budgeting made under Rice, Stanford will face
new budgetary challenges such as making investments in
technology and facing salary pressures in the Silicon
Valley labor market from a strong position.
"We've had a great partnership in the day-to-day
work of the university. She's a quick study and gets to
the heart of an issue very quickly," says
Byerwalter, who will miss hearing the pounding on her
office door that signaled Rice's arrival. "She has a
keen understanding of business issues," says
Byerwalter, adding that Rice's membership on corporate
boards of directors she's currently on the boards of
Chevron and Transamerica, for example "lends an
important perspective in the university
environment."
Even as Rice helped
Stanford become more financially secure, she and
President Casper ushered in a set of new academic
initiatives centered on improving the experience of
undergraduates. Quick to point out that they have been a
group effort, she called the initiatives "just
stunning. I think the experience that an undergraduate
has here in the first two years is just 180 degrees from
where it was . . . much more in touch with faculty
members, much more small group oriented, much more
research oriented."
The changes have not come
without controversy, especially over what should
constitute undergraduates' core requirements in the
humanities. The debate over multiculturalism in
Stanford's curriculum was played out both on campus and
on the conservative editorial pages of the Wall Street
Journal.
"The argument that I
have never bought on the conservative side is that the
study of Western civilization devoid of the study of
all the other civilizations that helped to shape it
was the smart thing to do," Rice says. "Human
history has been the story of clashes of civilizations
and that is the interesting part about it. It is
absolutely true that our political structures, our civic
structures, come more from Western history than from
almost anything else. But I think it is important to
teach about clashes of civilizations and how they
infected and affected each other and how certain
civilizations have won out at certain times. I never
understood the critique that you should teach only
Western civilization.
"On the other hand,
I've never much liked the representational argument or
the identity argument for the teaching of more than
Western civilization the 'I need to know about my
culture' argument. Culture is something that many times
can be adopted. I'm probably as comfortable with Russian
culture as I am with almost any other culture. I think
that you need to be able to cross cultural lines. I think
that it is great that black history is being brought more
into American history because my view is that Africans
and Europeans landed here together and built this country
together, and the separation of African culture and
African history from American culture and American
history is just ahistorical. If you're going to read and
understand Frederick Douglass, then you'd better
understand Thomas Jefferson, because that is who he was
referencing."
Stanford's new
Introduction to the Humanities core, by introducing
students to humanistic inquiry through literature, the
arts, history and philosophy, allows students to see
"how the methods of those different disciplines
address important questions of human cultural identity
and development that students will be able to mix and
match for themselves," she said. At the same time,
Rice allowed herself to say "something that probably
wouldn't be very popular. I think that our students'
basic knowledge of history names, facts, places, what
came first is abysmal. Someplace it's got to be
either in high school or college someone has to teach
basic history. I've had too many students not be able to
get Bismarck in the right century."
Rice also has been in the
hot seat over the issue of faculty diversity, especially
the pace at which women have joined the Stanford faculty.
It is an area where she expresses some disappointment.
"I clearly would have
liked to have been able to do more about the
diversification of the faculty, but it's a slow process
and I think we've tried very hard and I think we've made
a lot of progress. But I think it's just a slow, tough
slog, and you just to have keep working at it, especially
if you're going to continue to maintain both your focus
on excellence and standards, which you have to do and
you're going to diversify and I think those two goals
have to work hand in hand," she says.
Asked how, as a woman and
as an African American, she felt about being criticized
on the subject, she says, "It comes with the
territory."
She says she can
understand the emotionalism that sometimes enters the
debate, "but in my job it is more helpful to try and
figure out what the problem is. I am somebody who is very
data-driven and analytic. When I see a problem, my first
question is, why do we have that problem it's not to
accuse others of trying to continue the problem."
Looking at the problem
analytically, she says, "you see 1 to 2 percent
turnover rates in the tenured faculty. So you simply know
that if you're not enlarging the size of the faculty,
percentages are going to move slowly. That's an
arithmetic fact. People may not like that arithmetic
fact, but it is an arithmetic fact."
The math is compounded by
the decentralized nature of university hiring, she adds.
"I have not hired ever in my life a single faculty
member as provost," she says. "Departments hire
faculty. There is no such thing as a university hiring
decision."
Some faculty believe there
has been gender discrimination against women, but Rice
disagrees. "I really don't believe anybody has
discriminated, wanted to discriminate, has been biased,
wanted to be biased. I just don't believe that has caused
the difficulty."
Nonetheless, Rice says
she's interested in research on "how subconscious
biases and preferences may come into decision making
and heaven knows we all have them so this is a very
human system and I would never say that under no
circumstances has anybody ever subconsciously looked at a
case differently . . . I'm respectful of those who are
doing research on this question."
When Rice presented her
annual report to the Faculty Senate this year on the
progress in hiring women faculty, observers said the
atmosphere was less tense than last year.
"I'm deeply
appreciative of her willingness to examine data, and that
is very important," says Laura Carstensen, a
professor of psychology and member of the women's faculty
caucus. "We see eye to eye on that. We might
interpret the data differently."
Carstensen worries about
the slow pace of change that the data suggest. "If,
50 years from now, Stanford as a university has
predominantly white males teaching classes and the
student body is incredibly ethnically and by gender
diverse, then I think we're going to be much more uneasy
about that 50 years from now," she says.
Housing has been another
flashpoint during Rice's tenure. A shortage of housing
for graduate students led some of them to demonstrate in
the Main Quad last year, while this year some faculty
leaseholders have opposed university plans to build
in-fill housing on campus lands.
The university provided
some immediate relief for graduate student housing by
offering leased rentals below market rate and there are
concrete plans for additional on-campus construction. But
faculty housing plans are still in the works, and
construction of any kind is receiving greater scrutiny
and skepticism by local jurisdictions.
Housing is another issue
that seems to frustrate Rice, even if she describes
frustrations as coolly and clearly as she does her
accomplishments.
"I see this
incredible ability to compartmentalize about
Stanford," she says. "On the one hand, people
tremendously enjoy our athletic events, our cultural
events, our land up on the Dish, take benefit of our
unbelievable health care system, and enjoy the benefits
of the Silicon Valley for which we bear considerable
responsibility and on the other hand don't believe
Stanford should use its land to Stanford's purposes. And
I just don't understand it.
"The notion that
Stanford is some sort of irresponsible developer that
will overrun the community if not checked is just
peculiar to me. If you look at the fact that we've
developed about one-third of this land and developed it
so beautifully, if you just drive along Foothill
Expressway or along Junipero Serra there is a lot of open
space out there and it's because Stanford has been very
responsible.
"And I think Stanford
can be counted on to continue to be responsible, but the
Stanford trust was not given as an open space trust, it
was given as a university trust and the university has
needs. And if it's going to continue to be a place that
people can look to and enjoy the benefits of in that
other compartment, then its needs are going to have to be
met in terms of the use of its land.
"I think we are good
neighbors with the community. No one wants to cram things
down the community's throat. But I think you would like
the community to recognize too what a tremendous place
this is, and that asking it to stand still would make no
sense to any of us. It would be as shortsighted in the
interests of Palo Alto and Santa Clara County as it would
be for Stanford."
But for now at least, Rice
will watch such issues play themselves out from the
sidelines. Byerwalter, for one, would rather be watching
a game with Rice than playing against her. "She
wants to play a lot of tennis this summer. I'm
nervous," Byerwalter says, recalling that an
invitation from Rice to play tennis one day turned into
participation in a full-day tennis camp.
Rice has decided against
pursuing leadership opportunities in higher education,
even though they beckoned. She wants to retool. "I
don't want to come back [to Stanford] and do research and
teaching on exactly what I was doing research and
teaching on six years ago," she says. Globalization
has produced winners and losers; what, she asks, is going
to happen to the losers?
Of course, leadership
opportunities may present themselves elsewhere. She's a
top foreign policy adviser for Texas Governor George W.
Bush's nascent 2000 presidential campaign. And she's only
44 years old.
"I would expect that
Condi's last tour in government will not be her only tour
in government," Blacker says. "At some point in
time, I expect she's going to be a person of consequence
in the American foreign policy establishment. The
handwriting's on the wall."
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