I met with members of the senior class yesterday, and one of the students asked me what had been my most pleasurable moment that day, yesterday. The question was easy to answer. It was, when at six o'clock on National Public Radio, which I listen to when I shave, I heard that Steven Chu, a member of our departments of Physics and Applied Physics, had received the Nobel Prize. It was, of course, the second such moment in two days, as Myron Scholes of our Business School had preceded Professor Chu on Tuesday.
When I attended the press conference that Professor Chu gave later that morning, I was particularly touched by the fact that Steve began by talking about all those who had come before him in his own field of study, who preceded him working on the problems that interest him. As I said yesterday afternoon at the party that the Physics Department and the Applied Physics Department gave for Steve, it reminded me of a remark by Michael Polanyi, who once talked about the apostolic succession of scientists, and I think Steve very vividly pointed to the fact that scholarship is an intergenerational team, or at least group, effort. And different from the apostolic succession of bishops, it works only when the quality of those who succeed is high. The quality of our faculty and the quality of our students is the sine qua non of the enterprise, and it is in that spirit in particular that I think we should congratulate Professor Chu. (Applause.)
I came across on the web a Reuters' report about [our recent] freshman convocation, and it talked about the Clintons. I quote from the writer's item that I took off the web: "The Clintons had front row seats at the university's official welcoming convocation outdoors at the school's main square. (Laughter). Clinton appeared to be struggling to stay awake (laughter) during a long speech by university President Gerhard Casper." This is highly defamatory because, first of all, the speech was only 30 minutes, and though obviously too long for the sound bite culture, my wife, who was sitting next to the president, assured me that he was intensely listening to me. . . .
Today will be longer (laughter), but don't, please don't struggle to stay awake. It's perfectly all right for you to have a little nap while I go on.
In my off hours over the last few months, I wrote a little report that has become a little book, really, and is entitled "Cares of the University." It purports to be a five-year report to the Board of Trustees and the Academic Council, but it really is an attempt to unfold a few of the complexities of the university as an institution. It obviously involves stock-taking on my part concerning the last five years, but also detailing how Stanford addresses its main concerns. The members of the Academic Council will receive it shortly in the mail - it looks like this - and others may request it from the Office of University Communications.
Now, it is not a corporate report, let me assure you. Nor is it the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, but it is fairly direct. I do not think it will win next year's Nobel Prize for literature, but I still recommend it warmly for reading.
"Cares of the University" begins with a section on the "vision thing," and on Stanford's mission. There is also a section on the university's mission and politics, and I should like to quote from a passage dealing with the call for a grape boycott, though the particular concerns that triggered the grape boycott are not my subject matter here, but rather the general point and the general issue that was raised in 1994.
On the issue of serving grapes on campus, in 1988, the university had responded to a demand for a grape boycott in support of farm workers and improvements in their working conditions by giving members of each student residence choice. After the 1994 demands for a grape boycott by the university and a year of inquiry into the issue, we concluded that the called-for university-wide boycott of grapes was not justified, though we did not overturn the old policy. In a joint statement, Provost Rice and I said, and I quote from this joint statement:
We understand . . . that the grape issue is of significance to members of the Chicano community, an essential and valued part of Stanford University. Stanford is committed to access to higher education for all, and has worked hard to diversify its student body, faculty and staff. That increasing diversity makes it more important than ever that the university not take political stands on the ground that a particular group or a portion of a group feels strongly about a specific cause. Doing so would cast the president and officers of Stanford as judges of the relative moral and political weight of the positions of the university's many voices. Taken to its extreme, the university would become a patchwork of limitation and regulations based on the political causes of different groups. That we cannot permit. The university is foremost a place for teaching and learning and research. Its fundamental purpose is not the resolution of political issues no matter how pressing or how important. Only when such issues directly affect the core teaching and research mission or other important institutional issues should Stanford's officers attempt to bring the university's weight to bear on the political process. For the most part, the delicate task of balancing the myriad interests and beliefs of Americans and of collectively resolving social issues lies elsewhere - in our democratic institutions. There, as citizens, Stanford students, faculty and staff influence the course of events through the exercise of individual rights and responsibilities.
During the Vietnam era protests at many universities, Stanford included, even those students and faculty members who were not among the protesters stood largely by while the universities were made vehicles for opposition to national policies, and in the process were severely damaged. Has it been learned that universities are very fragile institutions? I hope the answer is yes. While Provost Rice and I clearly had the support of many, even more remained silent. I hope their silence did not signify lack of understanding or concern about that fragility. And that concern very much remains with me today because I have been reading over the last few months a fair number of expressions in the secular press nationwide that seem to reflect a sense of nostalgia for the days of the '60s and early '70s at American universities. As somebody who was at Berkeley and the University of Chicago in those days, I must confess, I have no sense of nostalgia at all. The fragility that universities displayed in that period was extraordinary, and it would be very well worth our while to remember that.
On another question touching core values of a private university, I found myself in the last five years to be part of a small minority, at times seemingly a minority of one. May 1994 also brought a lawsuit against the university by conservative students. In 1990, the Student Conduct Legislative Council had adopted an interpretation of the Fundamental Standard titled "Free Expression and Discriminatory Harassment." The interpretation spelled out when the face-to-face use of racial epithets or their equivalent would be viewed as harassment by personal vilification and therefore as a violation of the Fundamental Standard. This was the so-called Grey interpretation. In 1992, the California Legislature made California the only state in the union to eliminate the freedom of private universities to deal with speech according to their own values. It prohibited private institutions other than religious ones from disciplining students on the basis of speech - I quote the legislation - "that when engaged in outside the campus is protected from governmental restriction by the First Amendment."
The Corry case challenged the Grey interpretation of the Fundamental Standard under this Leonard Law that by a sleight of hand had transformed the First Amendment from a protection of private citizens and institutions against government into a vehicle for forcing private institutions to do what government wanted them to do.
On February 27, 1995, the Santa Clara County Superior Court held that the Grey explication of the Fundamental Standard was unconstitutionally overbroad, that it did not proscribe all fighting words and was thus an unconstitutional viewpoint-based rule, and that the Leonard Law was constitutional.
It is ironic that while opposing the university's rule on First Amendment grounds, the court endorsed the Leonard Law. I thought the First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of association was about the pursuit of ideas. Stanford, a private university, for better or worse, and I actually believe for worse, had the idea that its academic goals would be better served if students never used racial epithets to vilify fellow students. I say, I think this was a rule adopted for worse only because it was predictable how the reaction would be, and Stanford in the end suffered tremendously.
The California Legislature apparently did not like, however, that idea that students should never use racial epithets to vilify fellow students, or that Stanford should be free to enforce it, for it prohibited private secular universities and colleges from establishing their own standards of civil discourse. Religious institutions alone in this state can claim First Amendment protection in this regard.
In spite of my strong views, I decided not to appeal this decision. It did not seem appropriate to spend Stanford's limited resources of money, time and attention to fight a case that given the superficiality of debate in the media and public was portrayed as involving only the legitimacy of what hyperbolically they refer to as "speech codes." I am sometimes asked which decisions of the last five years I regret. Not appealing the Corry decision in the interest of defending Stanford's right to set its own values is a prime candidate for that [short list of] regrets.
The First Amendment seems to have become a club to hit people on the head with. It is interesting to relate the Corry case to the recent controversy concerning the Stanford Band. The Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band. The Stanford Band's performance at the stadium does not raise a free speech issue as such because the First Amendment certainly does not guarantee the right to perform in the Stanford Stadium before football crowds. The issue there in the Stanford Stadium was civility. We should not invite guests to our own home and then insult them. The charge of elitism for once seems justified to me. The band lacked the plain civility of ordinary people. However, if the band had uttered its inanities about the Irish and the potato famine in White Plaza, there would have been no question of their right to do so. I hope they don't treat this as an invitation. Indeed, the Grey interpretation of the Fundamental Standard would protect them if it were still in force. It was all about explicating the fact that a general attack, general expressions, would indeed continue to be protected at Stanford.
In connection with another dispute, this one involving the Stanford Daily in recent weeks, I received an e-mail from an alumnus - let us call him Jones. I want to quote from this e-mail: "It is my belief [this is a rather typical e-mail message one gets in the course of the day] - that you as president should take an active position to encourage that exchange of ideas as did Wallace Sterling and Donald Kennedy rather than to hide behind the office of the president. Perhaps if you are unwilling or unable to support academic and press freedom, you would be better suited for some position other than as the president of a great university which prides itself on its motto, Die Luft der Freiheit weht.
Well, it is often tempting to take Mr. Jones' advice.
I should like now to turn to review of some of the most important aspects of the last five years. And some of them I will just kind of use as references and not deal with in any detail; most of them, as a matter of fact.
Among the academic initiatives, of course, one of the most important and one that had the most consequences was the appointment of the Commission on Undergraduate Education and the implementation of almost all of its recommendations in subsequent years. From my point of view, the reform of academic requirements that has taken place independent of the commission's work is also relevant to the context. Out of the commission's follow-up came the Science, Mathematics and Engineering Core, a great and interesting experiment that I hope will be beyond the stages of an experiment, and of course, a new core requirement that replaces the old CIV, and the new one is Introduction to the Humanities. Robert Musil, the great writer, once said, "If I want a world view, then I must view the world." Viewing the world is not the same as surveying the world. It has been the case for much longer than a century that we cannot cover Western civilization, let alone all other civilizations and all aspects of the human condition, in the freshman year, in all four years of college, in a lifetime. Depth is more helpful than breadth. What is important is that our students do not lose the art of reading - reading texts, pictures, human artifacts. To read, to read carefully. Less is more. To re-read, to read in dialogue, to interpret, to interpret in context. It is also important that students become part of the unceasing process of inquiry, and also acquire the capacity of reflecting about the human condition across cultures. We need to introduce freshmen to the intellectual habits necessary for a lifetime, and aim at developing an understanding of the human condition in history and diverse cultures - to a complete understanding, but a probing one that stresses different ways of looking at the world within the humanities.
We think of the new Introduction to the Humanities; the Science, Mathematics and Engineering core; the re-defined distribution requirements; the Freshmen Seminars; Sophomore College; Sophomore seminars; dialogues and tutorials as part of a whole, as an integrated approach to the first two years of college at Stanford. Therefore, we have given the name Stanford Introductory Studies to the new initiatives and related programs in the freshman and sophomore years.
There is probably no document that we have produced this year of which I am prouder than the catalog of 175 - it's actually over 175 - Stanford introductory seminars for freshmen and sophomores. Ramón Saldívar has been an incredibly effective leader in bringing about this result. This is a very important contribution to Stanford and to the future of Stanford, and of course I hope, I hope fervently, that we would be able to consolidate the gains that we have made this year.
There have been many other initiatives involving the academic side of the university on admissions and yield. In particular, I mention only early decision, and I mention the President's Scholars Program. Those among you who were present at the dinner two nights ago for this year's crop of President's Scholars, the new freshmen coming in as part of this program, will have been as impressed as I was by the richness that it promises, and not only promises but in terms of a report we will see actually demonstrates.
But in addition to undergraduate admissions issues - obviously we dealt with a great number of other issues over the last few years - I mention in particular Stanford Graduate Fellowships and some other issues. After discussions with the provost and the cabinet and upon the recommendation of Charles Kruger, the vice provost and dean of research and graduate policy, and a faculty steering committee on Ph.D. fellowships, in 1997, I allocated $10 million to begin Stanford Graduate Fellowships, a national competition for up to 100 new three-year fellowships in the sciences and engineering to be awarded each year. We also began raising funds to provide permanent support for this program, with the goal of raising at least $200 million in endowment, and I'm pleased, of course, that in little more than one year, we have raised somewhat a little more than $115 million toward this goal. This past spring, we admitted the first class of Stanford graduate fellows. Our overall acceptance rate of 56 percent was significantly higher than the faculty steering committee had expected for such outstanding students who had multiple offers from leading universities.
While the Stanford Graduate Fellowships were designed to address the uncertainties of federal government support, I am also greatly concerned about the level of fellowship support for graduate students in the humanities and some of the social sciences. In the past we have supported them from general funds and with the help of the Mellon Foundation, one of the few private foundations that continues to be firmly devoted to higher education. The Mellon grant is nearing its end, and competition among universities for the best graduate students is intense. Stanford faces special pressures given the expensive Bay Area housing market, and the impact on graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and, for that matter, faculty and staff. We will clearly have to address these issues and we are ready to do so in the next couple of years.
Finally, we are seeking endowment to annually bring 25 of the most promising graduate students from the Asia-Pacific area to Stanford for graduate study in all areas. The Asia-Pacific Scholars Program is beginning this fall on an experimental basis until full funding has been secured and we are working very hard at indeed achieving that.
I would like to remind you that also related to academic concerns, the Commission on Technology in Teaching and Learning under John Etchemendy performed miracles in the years of its existence. Its work in the future will be headed by Geoff Cox. The most important initiatives that came out of the commission, obviously from my point of view, are the Learning Lab and the Education Technology Ventures Office that we want to establish to relate more effectively to the opportunities that may exist for Stanford.
We also in the last few years addressed other academic issues, such as the closing of the Food Research Institute or the merging of Operations Research and Engineering-Economic Systems. These were very difficult discussions and very difficult decisions because there is no question that those who disagreed with us thought that we were indeed violating Stanford's mission in this area or that area. I do believe, however, and I have not changed my views on this, that in these instances, we did the right thing.
Related to academic affairs, of course, are a myriad of other matters many of us have already forgotten such as the development of a faculty conflict of interest and conflict of commitment policy. Professor Bratman mentioned the Student Judicial Charter of 1997 that involved many hours of intense work on the part of many members of the faculty, the student body and the administration. I mention the development of a sexual harassment policy during my first year as president, and we will now have reporting a task force the provost appointed on student residences and matters related to student housing more generally.
Of great importance in the academic area, I think also, was my reaffirmation of affirmative action as Stanford's policy. Affirmative action raises issues that are among the most difficult that a society can confront. It is of utmost importance, and continues to be of utmost importance, that those who participate in the debate about affirmative action refrain from demonizing their opponents. All of us on all sides of the issue are, and will be, open to criticism. Those who believe as I do, that American society continues to be color conscious and therefore cannot yet afford to be color blind, need to remember, nevertheless, the arbitrariness of racial and ethnic labeling. In my statement, I expressed that Stanford had been established to serve the betterment of mankind through its activities as a university. In 1902, amending the founding grant, Jane Stanford made the point that the public at large, and not alone the comparatively few students who can attend the university, are the chief and ultimate beneficiaries of the foundation. Jane Stanford had also urged resisting stratification of society. This task cannot be accomplished unless the country's demographic diversity finds its presence on campus. It is Stanford's very characteristic that it has never been one-dimensional, and yet the university has been able, especially over the last four decades, to become one of the world's most selective institutions. Our capacity to pursue many excellences will remain undiminished as long as we continue to get the balance right and do not waiver in our commitment to quality.
I remember vividly the fall of 1992 when - I'm now turning to the organizational side of the university - I radically reduced the number of vice presidents of the university from 10 to five and we have since reduced it further, though I just recently added one for medical affairs, to my great relief. Probably no appointment has given me more pleasure than the appointment of Dean Bauer as vice president for medical affairs. We saw those changes, but we also have - I was going to say we have a new provost, no, our provost has been in her job very effectively for quite a while now, but in 1993, she was a new provost - we had a change in the provost's office. We had dean successions in Humanities and Sciences, in Education, in Earth Sciences, in the School of Medicine and in Engineering. We brought in early a new general counsel and we organized, indeed, the legal office. A new vice president for business affairs and CFO has come in more recently, Mariann Byerwalter. We established the office of CIO, chief information officer, and made major investments in new information systems. We engaged in a review of business practices and their re-engineering - for instance, changes in Facilities Project Management and . . . sponsored projects. I appointed two counselors to the president for university-industry relations. We established an Office of Campus Relations comprising the Office for Multicultural Development, the ombudsperson and the sexual harassment coordinator. And we, of course, engaged in a very major reorganization of the Medical Center. First, with the establishment of Stanford Health Services; then followed the integration of the Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford into Stanford Health Services, and now, finally, the creation of UCSF-Stanford Health Care.
In the last two years, that is, after the 1994 opening of SHS, we realized that creating SHS was only the first step in strengthening our position in the changing health care marketplace. Like all universities with medical programs, we faced a number of options. Some academic medical centers have simply eliminated programs. Some are selling out to or merging with for-profit community-based delivery systems. Others, most recently George Washington University, are joining with for-profit hospital corporations and crossing their fingers that they will be able to retain their missions of public service. We decided a different response made more sense.
Following an encounter now known as the "walk in the woods," between then-chancellor Joseph Martin of the University of California-San Francisco and me in the spring of 1995, we began that summer discussions with UCSF about merging our clinical activities. I should mention that the "walk in the woods" took place in Palm Springs, where there are neither woods nor people ever walk, as far as I can see. The level of quality presented by the combination of UCSF and Stanford is, to use a term popular with today's students, awesome. As a third party review commissioned by the Regents of the University of California made clear, we will be more than the sum of our parts - going from leadership in six specialties each, to leadership in 20 with our combined strengths.
I am especially pleased about what this merger will do for the pediatric programs at Stanford and UCSF, and the established excellence at Packard Children's Hospital. The combined program is expected to be the West Coast leader in specialty services for children.
And last, but by no means least, this partnership offers long-term potential not just for outstanding patient care but for joint projects between two leading medical schools. With closer coordination and cooperation in teaching, training and research, we can strengthen even further our ability to move new medical treatments from the laboratory bench to the bedside. This translation of basic science discoveries into effective treatment thrives where the activities are side by side in an academic medical setting. The two universities owe much gratitude to their faculties and staff for working imaginatively and in the spirit of cooperation to address our present dilemmas. On the faculties, in particular, many will have had, and indeed will continue to have, doubts about so radical and risky a step. Contrary to the frequently repeated cliché about risk vs. academics, the faculties eventually accepted the leadership provided especially by their deans, Dr. Bauer at Stanford and Dr. Haile Debas at UCSF.
Many American universities are conscientiously attempting to change the status quo in academic medicine and respond imaginatively, even daringly, to the challenges that have come our way. Indeed, what could be more daring than the cooperation of two universities - one private, one public - that until yesterday thought of themselves mostly as competitors. We are truly seizing the present as made up of first days.
Now, I should like to turn to a few other issues. On the financial side of the university, we established consolidated budgeting, we continued our efforts at cost reductions and the provost established revenue-constrained budgeting. We settled our conflicts with the Office of Naval Research. We re-introduced a restricted funds contribution to infrastructure costs, and I do not even mention such matters as extending benefits to domestic partners of gay employees or changing the staff retirement program from defined benefits to defined contributions.
With respect to the physical infrastructure of the university, we have been engaged and continue - it is now coming to its end - the restoration and seismic strengthening, overall a $250 million effort. But we are also pursuing new projects. We have a new computer science building, we have the new Allen Center as an extension of the Center for Integrated Systems, we are rebuilding the museum and will reopen in January 1999, we are making progress on the Science and Engineering Quadrangle, and indeed the Statistics Building and the SEQ Teaching Center will open shortly. We have just dedicated the new graduate student residence for students of the Business School, the Schwab Center, and we have also dedicated graduate residences at the corner of Campus Drive and Santa Teresa which we have named for our former president, Richard W. Lyman. We are now engaged in the first phases of the construction of the Center for Clinical Sciences Research.
There has been with respect to all of that a change about which we have not talked very much and I have talked very rarely. When I first came to Stanford and I had my first meeting with our very excellent architect, David Neuman, I asked how we selected architects at Stanford, and he informed me that the architect's office and others involved would pick them from a list. I then asked what role did the president play in all of this, and I was firmly told none. And I changed both of those features. We subsequently introduced design competitions for all major projects and I actually chaired the competitions. These design competitions have brought us architects such as Antoine Predock, Jim Polshek, James Ingo Freed, Ricardo Legoreta and now Sir Norman Foster. And I would like to say, and very happily, that all the credit for the changes that are taking place, in particular on Serra Mall - if you have not recently walked Serra Mall, I urge you, start at the east end and go to the west end, or start at the west end and go to the east end, it is a miracle mile; I don't think it's a mile, but whatever, walk it and look at it - the credit goes to the architects, of course, and only to the architects. However, in this instance, I happily accept most of the blame, if not all, and of course, people will dispute aesthetics forever and rightly so.
I now turn to another physical infrastructure issue and that is Sand Hill Road. Maybe I should drink a sip of water before I do that. Maybe it will firm me up. By now you have heard a great deal about the Sand Hill Road Project and the November 4 ballot measures. In the clamor, the one thing that is getting drowned is why the university needs this project. The comprehensive set of proposals that constitute Measure O was obviously negotiated in the longest and most detailed approval process in Palo Alto history. The university in no way got all it would like. Indeed, the financial package agreed to by Stanford and the City of Palo Alto substantially increased the university's costs. But Measure O provides two items of critical importance to Stanford: first, a solution to the Sand Hill Road bottleneck that will also greatly improve access to the medical center; and second, housing on land zoned for housing. The short supply of housing near campus is perhaps the greatest foreseeable threat to the university's future because it severely handicaps recruitment and retention of the faculty and staff the university needs. If O were to get rejected, and its competitor, Measure M, adopted, all of the approvals for the Stanford projects granted by the Palo Alto City Council would be nullified.
[Regarding] Measure M: After five years of hard work and $8 million in direct costs, my answer is an unequivocal no. Our opponents seem to believe that Stanford stands for nothing in this dispute. I hope my record over the last five years has made it clear that I mean what I say and that I say what I mean. As fiduciaries, neither I nor the Board of Trustees can agree to squander resources on a measure that brings no benefits by comparison with Measure O, but imposes unconscionable costs on the responsible use of the legacy that Leland and Jane Stanford created for the benefit of future generations and their pursuit of teaching, learning and research. I will not be a party to such an undertaking.
Indeed, let me turn from that subject to one that is in some ways related, and that is the endowment. For instance, one part that so easily generalizations are made about is the shopping center . . . income from the shopping center pays for financial aid for students and all the other activities of the university. With great frequency I read in the newspapers or hear from alumni that Stanford is wealthy. I am never sure what wealthy means in the case of an institution that makes no profits and subsidizes both learning and research. The reference usually is to our endowment, which amounted to approximately $4.5 billion as of August 31, 1997. Income from endowment in fiscal year 1997 was estimated as at 12 percent of our revenues. Budgeted endowment income for the 1998 fiscal year amounts to 14 percent. To those of our alumni who say we are wealthy, I always like to respond that it does not feel that way if the university has to raise anywhere between 84 and 88 percent of its revenues every year anew. And a stock market slump could make that situation worse.
The university's endowment grew from $2.4 billion on August 31, 1992, to approximately $4.5 billion, as I just said, five years later. New gifts over these five years accounted for approximately one-fifth of this rise. The jump in the market value in the most recent years, coupled with expenditure constraints, resulted in endowment payment as a percentage of revenues rising to a budget of 14 percent for this fiscal year. However, we remain far behind our competitors on this measure. At Princeton, the same figure is more than twice as much. For the overall financial health of the university, it is essential that we increase the role endowment income plays in the university's finances, but without having that goal accomplished for us by reductions in the other sources of revenues, where our exposure is great. In short, we need to place more emphasis on raising additional endowment funds. The present situation is not one that provides a high level of comfort. In the last years, we were able to achieve gift results that without a campaign were at or, for the last two years above, the level of the centennial campaign, expressing results in 1987 dollars. In nominal dollars, we have raised $1.275 billion over five years. The outcome confirms the high quality of the Stanford Development Office, even in its slimmed-down version, as well as the continuing commitment of many supporters who responded magnificently to the project needs the university had identified. The results would be wholly satisfying were it not for the fact that other universities have gone on to conduct their own mega-campaigns. Harvard alone is headed towards $2 billion to 3 billion, Columbia is aiming for $2.2 billion over 10 years, Yale just concluded a five-year $1.7 billion campaign, while even among the public universities, Berkeley and UCLA, are going for at least $1 billion. Stanford needs clearly to assign a high priority to thinking about its fundraising future.
And with that, let me turn more generally to the future and conclusion.
What are the university's priorities or, at least, what are the university's priorities as I see them? First of all, we are fully committed to the sympathies that followed from combining teaching and research, believing it to be the most fertile source of innovation. As I never tire of saying, it is a faculty's task to inform and challenge the students, and it is the students' task to question and challenge the faculty. From this follow two initiatives of great importance. First, Stanford Introductory Studies and the efforts we must make to consolidate our gains, as I said earlier, and in particular, to fully fund what our ambitious plans are for the first two years. And of course, from this follows also our continuing commitment to Stanford Graduate Fellowships and raising the $200 million of endowment that I spoke about, and from it follows efforts that we must take to address fellowship support for graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Secondly, I believe that synthesis to be important also for our global interactions, especially those with Asia, and therefore from this follows the effort to firmly establish the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program, which is part of a larger Asia-Pacific initiative on the part of the university.
Third, and these are not, the priorities are all equal, they are not ordered, please. This is very important for you to understand. We believe that we need to strengthen the humanities further. I say further because a lot has happened over the last few years that we can be proud of. However, what I would like to achieve is that the humanities at the university will be a more visible and dynamic participant in shaping, enriching and challenging the intellectual agenda across the university. As a first step, and upon the request of Deans Shoven and Holloway of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the provost and I have decided to establish four Professorships for the Humanities and the Arts, which the university will fully fund at the level of $3 million of endowment per chair. The professorships will be held in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and will be allocated to departments for the duration of the appointment of the chair holder. These professorships will enable humanities departments to appoint the most distinguished scholars working in these fields today. The opportunity to make such appointments should encourage departments to think ambitiously and imaginatively about ways to strengthen the humanities as a whole.
Furthermore, I will establish and fund a series to be known as Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts. The series should examine the appropriate tasks for the arts and humanities as we look toward the future. It will fund visits of distinguished humanists from around the world for lectures and panels. It will also fund small symposia on the relationship between the humanities and other disciplinary clusters such as the social sciences and engineering. I have asked Professor Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature and a member of the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian, to serve as the director of this effort.
Finally, we have begun a detailed review of the university's fundraising priorities in the arts and humanities generally.
Fourth, we are, of course, and will continue to be concerned with the changes in opportunities that information technology is bringing to higher education, and from this follows continuing university investment in infrastructure and programmatic initiatives, in particular, the Stanford Learning Lab and the Educational Ventures Office and making sure we are getting them to work, and I have no doubt about the Stanford Learning Lab in this respect.
Five, we need to continue our renewal of the physical infrastructure of the university. I think the university has done a tremendous job over the last five years. By the end of the decade, I think we will be in as good a shape as any place in the country, if not better, but that does not mean that we must for a moment give up and indeed, other problems are lurking, not on the horizon but just around the corner, like the chemistry building.
Six, we need, carefully, of course, to implement the merger of the inpatient and outpatient clinical services of Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco, and seize the opportunities to which I referred earlier that I think it offers for cooperation between the two universities. [Seven], we need to maintain a sound financial base, and from this follows working for continued support of research by the federal government - there is no substitute for the federal government - raising capital for infrastructure and endowment, and continuing our reforms in annual giving.
And eight, we need to rethink all aspects of the university to retain our capacity to innovate and be flexible, and from this follows a continuous concern for reducing bureaucracy and following a client-oriented approach for faculty, students and alumni.
Last year at this occasion, I said that I was at times bemused by the way some of our workers are referred to as "support staff." And I said in this connection something that I would like to repeat in conclusion. I believe at the university all of us are support staff - secretary or president, lab technician or provost, groundskeeper or dean - because all of us are here for only one reason, to support faculty and students in their vision, in their vision, and to support the university's core mission of teaching, learning and research.
I thank you very much.
And I will now be happy to entertain questions. Are there any questions? Our microphones are in the aisles. If there are no questions, I will conclude that all of you fell asleep during this lengthy exit.