The experience taught me many tough lessons about the difficulties of community organizing and the power of entrenched interests. I also learned that nonprofit management could be an oxymoron; several of the staff members possessed good hearts but little management skill. But by the summer of 1992 we were able to launch the program for children in grades five to eight. Each summer 250 kids were exposed to hands-on math and science instruction, language arts, instrumental music, dance, and art. The curriculum was repeated as an after-school program for 150 kids. We hired the best teachers from the school district and paid them very well, hoping they’d take the innovative curriculum back into their regular classrooms. College students, including many athletes from Stanford, acted as mentors for the kids. The students were chosen on the basis of teacher recommendation, but we were determined that the program be not just for the “talented tenth” or for remedial education. Instead, it was conceived of as an enrichment program.
The crown jewels of the program were the instrumental bands, which made me remember how important bands were to my black heritage in the segregated South. Today there are five Centers for a New Generation spread across East Palo Alto, East Menlo Park, and now heavily Hispanic Redwood City, and they have partnered with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. I particularly enjoyed working with Daddy to bring these programs into being, and I am sure my grandfather John Wesley Rice Sr. noted and approved of the way the experience sparked my own determination to be an educational evangelist.
Though I was very busy, I also made four trips to Russia during this period, enjoying my freedom to visit the country as a faculty member rather than a government official. These were important visits as I saw firsthand the disorientation and humiliation of the Russian population after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years later, that extended time in Russia helped me to understand the appeal of Vladimir Putin, who promised Russians order, prosperity and respect.
Like most at Stanford, I was following with some interest the impending change in leadership at the university. The school had gotten into a dispute with the federal government about payments for costs associated with government contracts. It was a headline-grabbing scandal, with charges that Stanford had overbilled the government to the tune of $200 million. Don Kennedy, who for ten years had been the highly successful leader of the university and to whom I had been quite close, decided to step down.
I didn’t expect to be appointed to the committee that would choose the next president. After all, I’d been away from Stanford three out of the last four years. But one day in September I received a call from the chairman of the Board of Trustees. “We need you to help find a new president,” he said. “This is going to be a tough process because the university is really hurting and a lot of people don’t like the direction it has been going in. And I hate to tell you this, but it will take a lot of time. Will you serve?” I readily accepted.
Before joining the search committee I hadn’t known how many difficulties Stanford was facing. There had been massive budgetary cuts and layoffs as the federal government slashed payments to the university amid the dispute. Moreover, there was a serious rift between conservative alumni and the school. Conservative faculty were also disaffected, feeling that the university was compromising academic excellence in the service of political correctness.
One of the precipitating events occurred in 1988, when the university had ended the core humanities curriculum, called Western Civilization. Western Civ had been deemed to be about “dead white men” and therefore unacceptable for a multiethnic, multiracial, multigendered campus. The course had been replaced with Culture, Ideas and Values, also known as CIV, without the offending “Western” preceding it. CIV’s curriculum required race, class, and gender components and at least one book by a “woman of color.”
The rifts became chasms when Stanford rejected the request of the family of Ronald Reagan to establish his presidential library on campus. Ostensibly, the excuse was traffic congestion at the site, but everyone knew that it had been the agitation of a small but vocal faculty group that forced the university to turn down the library.
Stanford wasn’t exactly falling apart, but it was a very polarized place. There was even a split concerning intercollegiate athletics, with some saying that the university’s commitment to Division I sports meant a lowering of academic standards. The new president obviously would have a lot of work to do.
After several months, the search committee identified a handful of prospects with the unquestioned academic credentials and administrative experience that would be required of Stanford’s president. Then we took to the road to interview the candidates. No sitting university president or provost wants to be identified as a candidate for a job, only to fail to be selected. Thus we always disguised our travel to avoid leaks about who was being considered.
A group of us were sent to Chicago to interview Gerhard Casper, the provost of the University of Chicago. After about an hour during which Gerhard, an eminent constitutional lawyer, quizzed us as much as we did him, he turned to me. “You are representative of the next generation of leadership at Stanford,” he said. “What do you think is the greatest challenge?” I answered that the university had strayed from its core purposes and was trying to do too much.
The discussions continued, and as we walked out of Gerhard’s apartment and into the frigid Chicago night, I turned to a fellow committee member and said, “I could work for him.”
The committee deliberated for a few more weeks, but well ahead of schedule we decided that Gerhard Casper was likely the right man to lead Stanford. He came to Los Angeles to meet the committee one last time in secret. There we had a truly open and frank discussion. Gerhard was known as a conservative with very traditional views of the role of the university. The University of Chicago didn’t even have intercollegiate athletics. We worried that there might be some issues with the fit between this distinguished silver-haired German immigrant and northern California’s informality. I even asked Gerhard if he believed in affirmative action, citing my own case as one that had worked out pretty well. He said that he did, explaining that he believed diversity and excellence were not enemies. After several hours, we were comfortable with our choice. We believed that Gerhard saw Stanford’s unique strengths and that he’d put the university back on course. And he wouldn’t try to make our beloved university into something it didn’t want to be.
chapter thirty-nine
Gerhard took the reins in September of 1992. I was friendly with Gerhard and his wife, Regina, and Gerhard would consult me from time to time about various university matters. I also took it upon myself to make sure Gerhard became intimately acquainted with Stanford sports. When Stanford played the number-one-ranked University of Washington, Gerhard asked me to join him in the president’s box. The game was at night and, with television time-outs, was going on quite long. But Bill Walsh’s Stanford team was somehow still in the game late in the fourth quarter against the heavily favored Huskies.
As Stanford took the ball for one last drive, Gerhard turned to me and said, “It’s late. I’m going to go home now.”