During one of my visits to the residence halls this year, a student, in a discussion of the University's finances, asked me: "Hasn't the University become just a business?" At first, I was taken aback a bit and puzzled how I should respond. For one, being a business is certainly not a bad thing. Second, an institution that subsidizes both students and research and can balance its books only because of gifts from alumni and friends, hardly meets the most rudimentary expectations concerning profit maximization.
Then, however, I began to reflect about what the question might be a response to. Students have become as aware as anybody else that Stanford University (with its hospital) has an overall budget in excess of $1.5 billion. They know how hard it is to balance that budget. They know that in attempting to achieve economies we must examine and re-examine all our activities. They see the "price" go up (never mind that it does not cover the full costs). They find their university involved in hassles with accountants, government auditors, and their own faculty over the appropriateness of charges for direct costs and indirect costs. And they see the institution at which they are students engaged in competition with other universities for faculty, students and resources.
Students at the contemporary American university see many of their faculty increasingly preoccupied with red tape in the form of grant applications or grant expenditures reports or reports necessitated by government regulators of one kind or another. They are told that their faculty, given the fierce competition for research funds, have to file ever more applications for ever shorter periods of support. No wonder that some students believe that some faculty members are more interested in research than teaching. They understand that some of their faculty, for instance, in the medical and engineering schools, self-finance portions of their own salaries. They read in the newspapers that universities should facilitate technology transfer to businesses. In the same newspapers, they can read about conflicts of interest caused by these very links between academia and industry.
Students find staff, too, burdened by an excess of bureaucratic tasks. Much of this is due to government regulation, some to university self- regulation. The size of the institution brings about seemingly endless meetings where good people feel they are wasting time, and too often are right. Staff worry about future cutbacks and job security.
The students worry about their own financial security. I recall a disciplinary case where a student was in emotional turmoil because he believed that his family was questioning his decision to attend Stanford when an education could be acquired elsewhere for a lot less cost. Students compete for grades. They compete fiercely to get into the "right" graduate schools or to get the best job - or perhaps any job at all.
There is also the phenomenon that, in the contemporary university, interest groups - student, faculty and staff interest groups - have multiplied and are becoming ever more vocal and demanding. People feeling that funding decisions frequently are zero-sum games seek strength in numbers and go on to differentiate their interests from those of others in the university. While there may be a vague understanding that all desirable things are not attainable at the same time, the trade-offs are always somebody else's concern.
Alignments take priority over intellectual searching. The denominator is not any longer being a citizen of the university but membership in some group we favor. "Is she one of ours?" has, unfortunately, for some become a more important question than "Does she have an argument?" Instead of welcoming new people, or new ideas, as universities should, instead of extending a cooperative hand, some faculty, staff and students retreat to defending turf.
There clearly is a lot of malaise in the contemporary university. Much of it may be traced to what I should like to call the "hustle factor" (though you could probably also call it the "hassle factor") and to what my questioner in the dorm thought of as "business." The notion of a golden age of simplicity and quietude must be treated with the sense of irony reflected by the adage: "The sad thing is that in a little while these will be 'the good old days'." Yet, I have little doubt that there has been what Jacques Barzun almost thirty years ago referred to as a "damaging shrinkage of time within the university": "Time now flows there at the same rate as outside, which accounts for the pressure and strain that every academic denizen groans under..."
Nor is the phenomenon an American exclusive. In 1989, a French television magazine published a review of a telecast about Stanford in which it referred to the conditions at our university as "paradise." The magazine also said: "If one believes what one sees, Stanford is the modern incarnation of the Abbey of Theleme as it had been imagined by Rabelais. Organized, constructed and laid out like a real town, it is an island of liberty in the sole service of learning and knowledge." While we often find it difficult to see the forest for the trees, our French admirers saw a forest they thought admirable. But the real point of the program was for French domestic consumption: the implicit and explicit contrast to the French universities by comparison with which Stanford seems to be a Garden of Eden.
In the United States, as well, many envy our intellectual and material resources. Stanford may not be the Garden of Eden, but it comes awfully close. Even our fountains flow again. More important, while we are not exempt from the tensions of society, Stanford is indeed a place where studies blossom and the minds move, where the search to know constitutes the highest value. The quality of our students, their commitment to diversity are reasons to celebrate. Maybe it is time we counted our blessings, not just our complaints. It would be very rational indeed if we made sure that we do not get carried away by gloom and doom as we face an ever more competitive world.
Not that the notion of university competition is new. Frederick Terman, who more than any other individual is responsible for Stanford's ascent to the first rank of universities, found, I quote: "This game of improving an educational operation is great fun to play because it is so easy to win. Most of the competition just doesn't realize that education is a competitive business, like football..." Even after a year, football as a metaphor for education still sounds strange to my ears. But the point of the quotation is not its metaphorical imagination. Competition certainly has been a concept well-understood and present at Stanford since the end of World War II. It was Terman, the provost, who imposed standards of efficiency and productivity on departments. And, as a recent student of the Terman years comments, "although not the inventor of the idea of the self-financing university teacher, he did much to promote it and to develop institutional norms and policies at Stanford in order to realize it." Among the things that have changed is the fact that "the competition" has long since realized what Terman learned during the war years.
Where do we stand at present? I should like to concentrate on a small number of issues since, I believe, no point is served if my talk were to imitate the State of the Union address. My omission of topics is meant to signal nothing about the university's or my personal interest in any of the many subjects I could be and, undoubtedly, should be talking about.
First, let me turn to the overall situation of the university, its strengths, and the challenges I see in the political and economic environment. I shall then devote the rest of this report to the matter of undergraduate education.
As I have said, the most important point, one all too frequently overlooked as we had to concentrate on budget cuts, is the fact that Stanford remains an exceedingly good institution whose financial health is perhaps no better, but certainly not worse, than that of its major competitors. As measured in terms of the overall quality of faculty, students, staff, programs and plant, ours is as good a place for teaching, learning and research as any I know. For example, just this year, two members of our faculty were elected to the National Academy of Engineering, six to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and ten to the National Academy of Sciences. And, displaying both their excellence and diversity, Stanford students recently made a splendid showing in the most selective overseas study competitions. Three were named Rhodes Scholars (one each from the United States, Canada and India), three (all of them women) were selected Marshall Scholars, and two were named Truman scholars. These are indices of the most important point about Stanford, that, as we face the future, we face it with as good and imaginative a group of people as one could wish to be surrounded by. There will be challenges aplenty, there never again will be business-as-usual, the "good old days" will not return; but we have all the intellectual resources one could wish to cope with Stanford's present or future challenges. I invite all to engage in the creative search for solutions that has been Stanford's hallmark. I urge you to do this as citizens of the university and always to be open to a better argument, rather than to end debate because somebody is viewed as not belonging to the group or cause we favor. As long as we maintain our commitment to intellectual quality and open discourse, we shall be successful, even if we do not have all the financial resources we wish we had.
Provost Lieberman, a few weeks ago, discussed the Operating Budget Guidelines for 1993-94 with the Academic Senate. I do not want to repeat that discussion here. However, I do need to stress two points. First, the 1993-94 Operating Budget provides $2 million of unrestricted money for new programs. For the future vitality of the university, that is too small a sum, even though we confidently expect to raise additional moneys for academic initiatives outside the framework of the Operating Budget. Second, we shall not achieve a balanced budget by 1995 in spite of the fact that by the end of next year, and since the Repositioning Program, we shall have accomplished annual expense reductions, primarily in the administrative areas, of nearly $50 million. In order to get to budget equilibrium and increase our programmatic flexibility, further review and reductions of activities, including academic ones, will be necessary. As President Kennedy said a year ago at this occasion, Stanford must consider how best to organize itself to be the most effective institution possible under new constraints.
This effort will not be undertaken as a crash initiative that will result in turmoil, but by means of a steady re-examination of everything we are doing. I view our overall financial situation as basically and comparatively strong. However, the economic uncertainties that will characterize the rest of this century and the demands by everybody with whom the university deals for controls on costs mean that we shall have to engage in a continuous process of improving our effectiveness and efficiency, the need for which is not going to end - not next year, not the year after, and indeed not in the year 2000. "Business as usual" will be no return to business as usual. A Consolidated Budget Project, a Business Practices Review, a Comprehensive Capital Plan are well under way; a Financial Planning Project is about to begin.
Let me turn for a moment to the vexing issue of indirect costs. The acute attention so heavily focused on Stanford two years ago has subsided, but the wounds that were opened have not fully healed. We still have significant issues to resolve with the government. Our problems lie in two distinct areas: clearing up outstanding matters of the past and putting current relations on a sound basis.
With respect to the past, the federal government has been unable so far to reach a decision concerning disputes that go all the way back to 1981. Issues of the past are complicated by pending litigation in a qui tam suit that has been filed against Stanford by a former government employee who, if successful, would recover for his personal benefit as well as that of the government. This suit is still under seal in federal court, and although Stanford has been informed of the suit, we have not seen it, nor will we be able to see it until the Department of Justice completes its examination of the allegations and decides whether it will join the suit. I can make no substantive comment on this pending litigation, but I can tell you that I am satisfied that our legal staff and outside counsel are doing all that is possible.
More progress has been made on our current relations with the government, but much remains to be done. My first official act as president was to write to the Chief of Naval Research, Admiral Miller, and express my strong commitment to ending our disputes with the government and, especially, to improving our current relations. We subsequently obtained a provisional rate of 60.3 percent for the current year - which, while less than our costs, is substantially closer than the 55.5 percent rate that had been in place for two years. Our highest priority now is to continue to work with the government to obtain a stable, multiyear rate that will more nearly cover our costs while also accommodating faculty concerns to keep rates as low as possible.
Our work on these indirect-cost issues has been assisted by a strong team. The Board of Trustees has established a special Committee on Indirect Cost Oversight. Members of the committee include some of the board's most distinguished and experienced businessmen and lawyers. Until recently, this committee was chaired by Warren Christopher, who stepped down from the board when he became United States Secretary of State. It is now chaired by John Bryson, chief executive officer of Southern California Edison. Our negotiations are being conducted by our chief financial officer in collaboration with the dean of research. I am confident that our team working on these issues is performing its duties professionally and ably. But I must also report to you that our frustration level is very high.
By the end of this academic year, Stanford will have spent, over a three-year period, $27 million on accountants, auditors, and consultants to address issues raised by federal government auditors. Counting both Stanford staff and outside help, we estimate that this effort has consumed over 125 person years - that is the equivalent of one person working fulltime for 125 years. In response to requests, we have provided the Defense Contract Audit Agency with 115,000 pages of documents, and we have separately provided 150,000 pages to the Justice Department. Yet, despite our considerable efforts, the government has not resolved a single major issue.
I am deeply worried about what our experience portends for the future of the partnership between universities and the federal government in general. As many commentators have noted, the university-government partnership has largely been responsible for the conduct of America's basic science program and for America's continued scientific and technological leadership in the world.
The President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, whose Committee on Research-Intensive Universities was chaired by David Packard and Harold Shapiro, submitted a report last December entitled Renewing the Promise: Research-Intensive Universities and the Nation. I quote from it:
In our rapidly changing world, the United States faces ever increasing economic and technological challenges and environmental, public health, and national security concerns that differ from the past. The Council believes that, more than ever, our nation will depend on its colleges and universities for the generation of the new knowledge and talent needed to maintain world leadership. The "promise" must be renewed.
I could not agree more. The United States must remain committed to the support of original research of the first rank, and the investments in education and training that go with it. This commitment must include a commitment to science. While "science and technology" are thought of by many as more or less the same thing, they actually are not, as our colleague Paul Berg has repeatedly emphasized.
The President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology identifies "weak points in the system and suggests some corrective measures for universities and federal agencies, as well as state governments, industry, and other supporters of universities." In order to make the greatest possible contribution to the nation and in order not to lose the partnership with the government that has characterized the last 50 years, universities undoubtedly will have to change.
Among the recommendations of the President's Council is one calling on the universities to review, in a searching and comprehensive manner, the nature and quality of their teaching programs with a view to improving teaching performance and productivity. I now should like to turn to this issue.
As many of you know, in my speaking engagements recently I have raised the idea of re-examining the way in which we organize our undergraduate program. Predictably, this idea has been condensed into a single headline: "Stanford President Favors Three-Year Degree!" But, of course, the three-year degree is only the most superficial aspect of what I should like us to consider.
American undergraduate education has reinvented the past with great regularity over the course of the last century. As our colleague Professor Carnochan shows in his soon-to-be-published book, The Battleground of the Curriculum, there have been, since the days of Charles Eliot at Harvard, essentially two opposing forces fighting over the college curriculum: those espousing the free elective system and those favoring a more prescriptive approach. Eliot's support of unfettered choice referred to characteristics of American democracy: "What could be more desirable... than what is elective, free, and supportive of initiative and self-reliance?" His argument, however, assumed that the choice was "between requiring nothing and requiring everything, the latter being impossible."
The opponents, on the other hand, feared insubstantiality in American higher education, intellectually empty spaces. They argued the need for teaching the means of knowing, as well as the need for knowledge. Entirely free election they considered impossible in light of what students bring to college. They have also stood for a quest for purpose. I quote Bliss Carnochan: "Lacking adequate criteria of purpose, we do not know how well our higher education works in practice or even exactly what working well would mean. We could do better on both counts."
The creation of the first modern research universities in the United States - Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Chicago among them - was an occasion for great experimentation with the undergraduate curriculum. The founding presidents of these institutions, including David Starr Jordan, wrestled continuously with the problem of making the introductory and, even when prescriptive, relatively unfocused liberal arts curriculum fit in a university dedicated to research and highly specialized training. Jordan said at one point: "Sooner or later Stanford must choose whether it will be a college or a university, for it has not the funds for both."
Fortunately, Stanford found a third choice, bringing the work of the college more fully into the rest of the university. This has proven a great benefit both to our undergraduates and to the university. The students have as resources for their education the facilities and faculty of a great research institution. The rest of the university gains much from the energy, dedication and fresh thoughts our undergraduates bring to their studies. As Edward Levi, the former president of the University of Chicago, has said: "The excitement and brightness [of college] arise, I think, because of the willingness of the [unroutinized] mind..., if sufficiently challenged, to test the boundaries that convention has laid down. The result can be a partnership between faculty and student in which the faculty member is also challenged to try to point a path through a subject matter, or to exemplify that subject matter in the more careful view of a particular situation."
It is also the case that college education has taken on a social significance that is at least as important as its educational significance. It is the foundation of what Jacques Barzun, former provost at Columbia, calls our "Mandarin" system. Richard Atkinson, the chancellor of the University of California-San Diego, refers to a view of education as preparatory: Grade school prepares for high school, high school prepares for college, and so on. If you get into the right prep school and the right college and the right law school, you are on the "high-status" track in our society. In this view of the matter, the "right college," needless to say, is a place like Stanford. A college degree is expected to lead to a good job, or at least to admission to a good graduate or professional school.
Stanford has never had the disdain for the practical that permeates some institutions of higher education. The founding grant charges the university with establishing education programs that will "fit the graduate for some useful pursuit." Now, before I am accused of being "merely vocational" in my outlook, I hasten to say that I do believe in liberal education. I do believe in the search to know, and in the "disinterested, joyously obsessive pursuit of truth." Before becoming a university president, I even indulged in such pleasures with some regularity. But I also find wisdom in the words, again, of David Starr Jordan:
A practical education is one which can be made effective in life. We often abuse the word practical by making it synonymous with temporary or superficial. It should mean just the opposite. An education which takes but little time and less effort, and leads at once to a paying situation, is not practical. It is not good, because it will never lead to anything better. There is nothing more practical than knowledge, nothing more unpractical than ignorance.
And, continuing from the same passage:
The chief essentials of education should be thoroughness and fitness. The most thorough training is the most practical, provided only that it is fitted to the end in view.
My concern about the state of undergraduate education in our country comes down to this: I worry that we often do not have a clear end in view. And because we do not have a clear end in view, we have too few measures of whether our curriculum is appropriate and effective; we have increasing difficulty in defending the cost of our educational "product" to students and their families. Just last week, I received a letter from a father, sharply criticizing me for the most recent tuition increase, pointing out that his family is already $100,000 in debt to pay for their daughter's Stanford education and wondering whether it is worth it.
I have found that my comments on this subject strike a responsive chord among large numbers of alumni, parents, students and faculty. My purpose is to raise open and honest questions to which I do not have preconceived answers, but which I believe Stanford should attempt to answer.
It has been fully 25 years since Stanford comprehensively examined the principles underlying its undergraduate programs. While there have been periodic and substantial revisions to the curriculum since then - most recently the introduction of the Cultures, Ideas and Values programs - the essential features of the present undergraduate curriculum were devised in 1968 under the auspices of the Study of Education at Stanford (SES) project. Reading that document today is to recall - as I do - what it was like to live in the Bay Area in the late '60s. Freedom is the essential virtue in the document; compulsion of either faculty or students is eschewed; prescribed courses are suspect because they reflect someone else's preferences and values. The SES proposals build upon the concept that, and I quote, "the objective toward which curricular planning should strive is, to the extent possible, to let the teacher teach what he wants to teach and the student learn what he wants to learn."
In the years since the SES report, the number of requirements has remained roughly constant, although a considerable amount of prescriptivism has crept back into the curriculum. Stanford students now must complete one course in each of eight specific areas, in addition to completing the CIV sequence. They must satisfy a gender studies requirement, and they must demonstrate proficiency, if not fluency, in a foreign language. As a group, these required courses are intended to guarantee a breadth of exposure for the student; while the "major" is supposed to provide depth.
The question is whether our present system of distribution requirements provides breadth in a meaningful way, or whether it merely provides the student with a smattering of this and a smattering of that, which can hardly constitute what we believe to be the essentials of education. To a critic, the distribution requirements appear to give roughly equal weight to the disciplines of the university: this is education by proportional representation. In the end, however, it is still unclear what we as a university expect the student to gain from this guided tour of our many disciplines. We run the risk of promoting what Torsten Husen, the Swedish scholar, calls "multi-disciplinary illiteracy."
I do not presume to propose a new undergraduate curriculum, but I do propose that we embark on a new and comprehensive study of undergraduate education. I will offer some suggestions to begin the debate.
I suggest that we form our requirements not around the number of disciplines to be sampled, but around the particular intellectual skills that we believe are requisite for one to be well-prepared for the future. I have in other contexts quoted from a British proposal that may provide a useful characterization of this approach. It emphasizes underlying intellectual, scientific and technological principles rather than narrow specialist knowledge. It favors developing the ability "to analyze complex issues, to identify the core problem and the means of solving it, to clarify values, to make effective use of numerical and other information, to work cooperatively and constructively with others and, above all perhaps, to communicate clearly both orally and in writing."
I agree with a long tradition that holds that one purpose of college is to teach students "how to think." Unless one is equipped to reason independently and critically, no accumulation of facts will add up to a sufficient education. To that end, we may want to develop courses that focus on the very tools of thought and analysis themselves. What are the tools of good thinking? Logic is one, as the foundation for the construction of arguments and the evaluation of evidence. The "scientific method," as it is often called, is another, as are the mathematical and computational sciences and the discipline of statistics. A basic mastery of these tools is surely part of what it means to be educated. At a time when facts are available literally at one's fingertips through increasingly sophisticated networks of information, the mark of the educated person will be the ability to make use of that information effectively.
While it is a cliche covering kindergarten through graduate school to stress the need to teach students how to think, it would also be desirable to provide students with something "to think with" or "to think about." For instance, I agree with the tradition of attempting to expose students to cultures and social systems other than our own. We at Stanford have much to be proud of in developing courses that are balanced with respect to cultural and other biases, and in promoting international experiences at our many campuses abroad. But I worry that we have not gone far enough in acquainting all of our students thoroughly with at least one other culture. No introductory course can do justice to another civilization. To develop any kind of meaningful appreciation for another culture, one must engage in serious scholarship in the language, history, literature and art of another people. We may want to expect all students to devote a much larger portion of their careers to this kind of activity. In this vein, I submit that demonstration of language proficiency by examination is a poor and inadequate substitute for genuine facility with a foreign language.
Finally, as is already recognized in Stanford's curriculum, I agree that students at an American university should graduate with an appreciation of American civilization: our history, our government, our institutions, our culture, but also our failures. Stanford, which has as part of its charter the goal of educating good citizens, should take this obligation as seriously as any university.
To reiterate: I do not maintain that these suggestions constitute a satisfactory core curriculum at Stanford or anywhere else. But I do submit that they might serve as a useful starting point for debate.
Engineering and science majors, of course, constitute a special case to which we must give careful attention. The great challenge is to allow students sufficient freedom to explore other disciplines while, at the same time, satisfying more precise requirements for their area of specialization. But even in this case, we may improve our course offerings by clarifying the intent and content of the curriculum we consider essential for all undergraduates. We might also keep in mind that the present distribution of requirements between undergraduate and graduate work may deserve reconsideration. Do we really need to stuff undergraduates as if they were "geese in Gascony"?
Let me now return to the "three-year degree" headlines. We cannot decide how long a student should attend college until we decide what a student should achieve in college. We currently have a curriculum which essentially functions to fill up four years. Our students come and, by and large, take courses for four years even when they have accumulated enough credits to graduate much earlier. Fully one-quarter of the students who graduate in the normal four years have the necessary 180 credits by the end of their third year, and could graduate if they wanted to. One quarter of the four-year graduates manage, within the space of that time, to complete more than one major, more than one undergraduate degree, or a coterminal master's degree. In short, they are already following a "three-year program" of sorts. The fact that they stay beyond the minimum amount of time speaks highly of our students, and of their parents who are helping to pay for the additional time. We should do nothing to make these students feel unwelcome. But I believe we do our students a disservice by not making clear to them that the social convention of four years in college is far less important than the content of the education one receives prior to graduation. And, as a purely practical matter, as the cost of our education rises, we must increasingly focus on essentials. From our standpoint, what are the most important elements of our curriculum that we offer to students? From our students' standpoint, what are the critical and necessary elements of a Stanford education?
To extend and broaden this discussion, I shall establish a Commission on Undergraduate Education at Stanford as a successor to the 1968 Study of Education at Stanford. Its charge will be to consider the undergraduate curriculum in light of the changing needs of our students, the emerging opportunities and challenges of the 21st century, and the increasing need to focus more intently on the basic objectives of the institution. I will announce the membership of this commission after consultation with the Academic Senate Committee on Committees as well as the present and incoming provosts, deans of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Dean of the School of Engineering. The commission will include faculty, students, academic staff and alumni, and will have a full-time director. I expect its work to continue through the next academic year, with a report to the university by July 1, 1994. We must clarify the purpose of our undergraduate programs and see to it that the content of our programs clearly supports that purpose.
To that end, the commission should consider whether the range of undergraduate degrees and majors is appropriate and, indeed, affordable in light of the cost pressures to which I referred at the beginning of my remarks. It should articulate those educational goals that are common to all undergraduate programs at Stanford. It should consider whether accelerated programs might be designed enabling more students to graduate in less than four years. It should consider the special educational requirements of students in the engineering and science disciplines. It should consider whether various modalities of teaching are used to their maximum effect, including individual tutorials and research projects, seminars and non-traditional instructional aids. And it should review the effectiveness and appropriateness of ancillary services that support the undergraduate program, including the undergraduate advising system, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the residential education program.
The greatness of Stanford University depends on maintaining leadership in the three areas of undergraduate education, graduate education and research. In an age used to hype and "dramatic" gestures, it is too little understood that few things in life are more dramatic than the advances, often serendipitous advances, that result from the slow boring of boards that we call education and research. David Starr Jordan, at the end of our university's second decade, addressed the same point. I quote: "It is said that Rome was not built in one day, nor Stanford in a century; but it is being built, quietly, honestly, steadfastly, stone after stone..." Building Stanford in that manner is what I invite all of you to contribute in cooperation with one another to Stanford's second century.