Outgoing Board of Trustees chair reflects on a decade of service
Proud of leadership during 'challenging times' and protection of university land from 'political grandstanding,' he says
Isaac Stein served 10 years as a member of the Board of Trustees. His tenure came to end June 30 due to term limits.
BY RAY DELGADO
After 10 years on the Stanford Board of Trustees, the last four of which he spent as chair, Isaac Stein's tenure on the board came to an end on June 30 due to term limits.
Stein, who earned his business and law degrees from Stanford in 1972, is the president and founder of Waverley Associates Inc. in Palo Alto, a private investment firm. He is succeeded as board chair by Burton J. McMurtry, a private investor who co-founded several venture capital partnerships, including Institutional Venture Associates and Technology Venture Investors. Stein recently sat down with Stanford Report writer Ray Delgado to discuss his plans for the future and reflect on his decade of board service.
Q. You've spent a full decade on the Board of Trustees, four of those years as board chair. You've led the university through a complicated merger of two major university hospitals, shepherded sometimes controversial growth proposals through uncertain public approval processes, inaugurated a new university president and dealt with the dot-com boom and bust. How hard is it to walk away from it all?
A. Nobody ever walks away from Stanford, especially as a trustee, and I don't expect to walk away either. I think we are in permanent service. We just take breaks from time to time. For me, this is one of those times.
Q. What will you do now that you have to leave the board due to term limits?
A. Our plan is to actually take most of the year off to do some traveling and really think about the next projects in our lives. Plus we're building a house and that takes a lot of time.
Q. What's at the top of your summer reading list? Are there any hobbies that you will now be free to pursue?
A. We've been planning a trip to Burma, so the book I just read is called Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, who writes about the development of Burma and India. It's a novel and quite a good one. The hobbies I always threatened to do  there are two of them. One is to try and play the piano. I have some friends who have gone out and bought portable keyboards that they can travel around with [while wearing] headphones so you don't inflict your early attempts on other people. And the other one is exactly what [Stanford News Service photographer Linda Cicero] is doing over there, and that is playing around with my digital cameras. I have always wanted to learn how to use [Adobe] Photoshop so I can finally organize all of the years of family photos that have accumulated. That could take a lot of time.
Q. President Hennessy joked that he wanted to change the board rules to allow a chair to serve longer than four years so you could stay. Even if that were to happen, would you consider it?
A. No. I think that the beauty of our system is that Stanford gets to keep me and yet get somebody else to get involved in the institution. And they get somebody else's eyes to see things in a perhaps different way.
Q. What will you miss most about leading the board?
A. That's a good question. I think what I will miss most is the opportunity to have an excuse on a regular basis to see so many good friends and work with them on complex issues. They'll still be my friends, so I can still see them as friends, but there is no substitute for having the consistent ability to be engaged in discussing some of those challenges.
Q. And what will you miss the least?
A. There really are very few things that have ever troubled me. I suppose there was the frustration of sometimes working on our political issues. Those were never my favorite tasks.
Q. What does a board chair really do and how much time would you say you spent on board duties any given day or week?
A. First of all, we start with the Board of Trustees. My view is we represent future generations on behalf of the past generations. So I think of us as judiciaries who continue the mission of the founding grant and make sure that we make appropriate trade-offs between the current generation and those future generations. That means that we cover the gamut of everything at the university.
Q. People who have worked with you have almost universally characterized you as one of the most thoughtful, deliberate, grounded, conscientious and friendly managers to work with. What is the key to your management style, and is there any flaw that you'd like to change?
A. Probably the lobotomy I had five years ago. [laughs] I think I have always tried to keep in mind why we are doing what we're doing. It goes back to, I believe, that the test of our success as trustees is not what happens next week but what the place is like in 25 years. So I will sometimes be asked by people, irately, "What is the board doing about cars for freshmen?" And I always assure them that we're doing absolutely nothing and we have no interest in the subject. On the other hand, whether or not there are parking facilities 25 years from now at Stanford is very much something that we should think about. So we have a longer time in which to focus, and, if you think about it in those terms, it makes the management task much easier.
The second thing is I generally respect the people I work with. We have a fabulous board, we have wonderful faculty, we have wonderful students. When you work with people who you know are trying to do the right thing, and you know they're very high-quality minds, then you will be able to trust that they know what they are doing.
Q. Is there a flaw that you would like to change with your management style?
A. I think at times, like most people, I am too impatient with the pace of change at the university. [Former Provost Condoleezza Rice] once said to me that the university is a place where if you ask someone the time, they look at their watch and say, "It's a quarter till spring." It is a place where change is slow. There are some benefits to that. But the negative to that is that we're slow to respond to things that we need to respond to in order to evolve in a better way.
Q. The trustees had a retreat during the spring to look at the long-term issues the university will face and to brainstorm some different approaches and paths the university might take. Can you shed some light on what was discussed?
A. Yes. The advantage of a strategic retreat is that it gave us a chance to have a discussion free of the constraints of day-to-day business and to talk about longer-term issues. One of the things we did was to look at what are some of the mechanisms that will drive the institution over the next 25 years and get a sense of how those affect the way in which we will make decisions. So what were some of the factors? One thing we talked about was that the last 20 years had been a perfect storm or perfect sunshine, depending on how you want to look at it, for Stanford in terms of external factors. We had a booming economy, a significant increase in government-funded research in the sciences; we had tremendous growth in the technology industry. It was a good time to be a major research university with a strong science capability in Silicon Valley.
What we concluded was that it would be very dangerous to assume that those trends will continue in the next 20 years. It doesn't mean that we see the sky falling. It simply meant that we needed to look at different ways in which benefits would come. We concluded that we need to make tougher decisions in the years ahead than perhaps we made in the past. What that means is that there are constraints to growth, both external and internal, and we need to think about how you make appropriate decisions about growth.
Q. The board's Task Force on Minority Alumni Relations recently released findings of a report that showed that although the university has made great strides in increasing the number of minority undergraduate students enrolled, minorities are still woefully underrepresented among faculty and top administrators at the university. What can be done to improve those numbers and to improve the experience of minorities at Stanford?
A. I think the minority alumni task force did a great job of surveying minority alumni and talking to people to get a sense of the environment for minorities at the university. I personally feel that diversity is not a strategy. Diversity is a reality of what is happening around us, in our country and particularly in California. There will be an increasingly diverse population. The question for us is how do we respond to that and incorporate it into our activities. The place where we've made great progress is undergraduate admissions, in part because we can. It's a rapidly turning-over pool and, given the population of the state and the national reach we have for recruitment, we are able to attract a far larger portion of minorities than any of our peer institutions.
The challenge on the faculty side is twofold. First, we need to increase the number of qualified applicants. And that means we need to work on graduate education. We simply do not have a large enough pool of minority graduates with Ph.D.s who are moving into the fields in which we have the greatest challenges, especially the sciences. There are a lot of reasons for that, which the task force looked into. The second problem is that there is slow turnover of faculty, and so it will take longer to make progress with changing the composition of the faculty. But I think we are making that progress.
Q. When do you think the board will see its first female chair, and when will the university have its first female president?
A. I think that both those things can happen at any time. I don't think that gender, having been involved in both of those [position deliberations], was a factor in either. I think that's true for most of our peer institutions. Of our peer institutions, there are certainly a number of them that have women as presidents. It could just as easily have been Stanford.
Q. When do you think we will be calling Harvard the "Stanford of the East," instead of the other way around?
A. I call it the "Stanford of the East" all the time. I think the good side of the Harvard comparison is that it gives us something to compete with. But I think it's important to remember that even the Harvard Crimson referred to Stanford as the only true American university. Stanford has always marched to a different beat. We aspire to excellence in everything we do and we do it more broadly. Since we are smaller than Harvard, that means that in any given area, we lack the depth of activity that they have. But we have a full complement of study fields and we maintain the entrepreneurial willingness to take on experiments with interdisciplinary initiatives. So what I think the Crimson meant is that we're not a transplanted model of the European university system.
Q. What are you most proud of during your tenure as board chair?
A. Probably the overall state of the university today and the progress that was made through some challenging times. At this moment in time, the hospitals are doing really well and are operating profitably. So is the university. Also, protecting our lands from political grandstanding was something that was important to me because I think it is a critical part of the board's responsibilities. It's always easier to make trade-offs to address current needs over what might be in the best interest in the future.
I also don't know if you've heard about my ties. I had for years complained about the Stanford ties. There were no good Stanford ties where the design and the quality of the tie were of good quality. Finally, I decided that I would do it myself. So I got some graphic design help from someone in the [Stanford Alumni Association] and I went to a tie company that was willing to customize a tie for me. I designed the tie and decided to give them as presents to people who had made my time at Stanford so positive an experience. And for the women, I had the tie's fabric made into tote bags. I probably have gotten more positive feedback for the ties than anything else that I ever did. I thought the tie was also emblematic of the tie we all feel toward the university.
Q. What would you differently if you could go back in time?
A. I probably would have spent even more time trying to work on the issue of community relations. Stanford is large and has its faults, but I think Stanford has been a remarkably good neighbor and has done many things that have tremendously benefited the local community. Somehow, we have never been successful getting people to understand and remember those benefits when some kind of regulatory issue occurs. For example, almost half of the Palo Alto schools are located on Stanford lands, and we have made additional cash contributions to Palo Alto schools that are unprecedented for any other landowner in the city. Yet we can't get people to remember their appreciation for these actions for very long. I think if we had worked harder on our communications, we could have built better relations between town and gown. I hope to keep working on that issue as I live in Palo Alto and love both town and gown.
Q. Any last parting words or advice for the Stanford community?
A. I think that the magic of this university is not just what people get out of it but what they continue to put back into it. I am always in awe of the people I meet who give so much back to the university. It has been a privilege to be a part of that. One of the greatest rewards of working as chair of the board has been that there are very few times in our lives that we get to touch an institution that truly makes a difference in the world and not just to us as individuals. Stanford is such a place.
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