CAMPUS QUOTE
"This is without question the best team I've ever coached."
-- Dick Gould, who has led the men's tennis squad to 16 national titles in 26 years. His team went 28-0 this year and beat Georgia in the finals.
News and features about Stanford and its graduates
Business Is Booming
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| DEPARTING DEAN: Spence has steered the GSB for eight years. |
There’s a lot to inventory in the booming decade of Spence’s tenure. The school has benefited from -- and contributed to -- the Silicon Valley revolution, a burgeoning international economy and an explosion of start-up companies. Among the GSB’s innovations are new programs in global management and entrepreneurial studies. Under Spence, the school has recruited lecturers from the high-tech and venture capital industries, and it has teamed up with the engineering school on interdisciplinary projects in computing and manufacturing. Spence also oversaw the revamping of the curriculum and the introduction of a dozen new executive education programs.
The GSB’s corner of campus is mushrooming, too. A $31 million business school dorm, the Schwab Residential Center, opened last year, and a new faculty office building is under construction. Student demand, meanwhile, continues to grow. This year, a record 7,000 applicants vied for 360 first-year MBA places.
Spence says the GSB aims to be the top management school in the world, adding, “We’ve made a good start.”
Road Trip
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| DEEP THOUGHTS: Summer in NYC | |||
“The Thinker” joins seven other Rodin bronze casts brought in from around the country for the exhibit, which runs through August 31. Several million people are expected to see the pieces, which sit in the center’s Channel Gardens, overlooking the famous ice rink. It being New York, the sculptures are under 24-hour guard and coated for protection against pollution and the elements.
“The Thinker” is one of 187 pieces by Auguste Rodin, the 19th-century French master, in Stanford’s collection. They’re a partial gift from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. Gerald Cantor, who died in 1996, sought to make Rodin available to a wide audience. “Going to Rockefeller Center is the fulfillment of Mr. Cantor’s ultimate dream,” says Rachael Blackburn, the executive director of the foundation. “How much more public can you be?”
In all, Rodin made just 18 full-sized casts of “The Thinker.” Stanford’s will be back on its pedestal in time for classes in September.
Quiz Wizards
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| STACKS OF KNOWLEDGE: Stanford won the National Quiz Tournament thanks to the encyclopedic recall of Marshak, Taber and Molesworth. | |||
These were among the questions the Stanford College Bowl team answered to win the National Quiz Tournament at Vanderbilt University in April.
To get to the finals, Stanford’s four savants endured 17 grueling rounds of questions covering everything from particle physics to pop culture. The key match was the ninth, when Stanford bested Harvard, 370 to 260. “We not only beat them, we wasted them,” says senior Rachel Marshak. “We thought, ‘Wow, we can really do this.’ ” Stanford went on to crush the University of Chicago in the final round.
To prepare, the players met twice a week to quiz each other with puzzlers from previous tournaments. Junior Adam Kemezis says the atmosphere was relaxed: “It’s not a high, rarefied-air kind of thing.” Rounding out the crew were senior Alan Taber and doctoral student Jesse Molesworth.
Oh yeah -- the sport that began on frozen European canals is speedskating. And the painting is El Greco’s “Burial of the Count Orgaz.”
The Waiting Game
Patience pays off. Just ask Gabriel Almond, whose doctoral thesis has finally been published -- 60 years after he wrote it.
As a pugnacious University of Chicago grad student in 1938, Almond refused to delete an unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller from his study of New York City politics. Rockefeller was a huge contributor to the university; without the change, Almond’s faculty adviser declined to recommend the work for publication.
“I was briefly angry,” says Almond, 87, a retired Stanford political science professor who lives in Palo Alto. “Then I went off to war. When I came back, there were other books to write.”
He went on, in fact, to publish more than a dozen books. Meanwhile, his thesis became an underground favorite among students who discovered it in the university’s library. When Chicago professor Terry Nichols Clark was putting together a series of books on urban policy for Westview Press, he decided to include the cult classic.
Almond now says he was “too big for my britches” as a young academic. If he could make the decision again, he would delete the Rockefeller section from the thesis to get his adviser’s approval. “I would just publish that part somewhere else,” he says.
Steinbeck Country
As one of its most famous dropouts, he is beloved by Stanford. But John Steinbeck is also a favorite son of Salinas, Calif. On June 27, the city unveiled the National Steinbeck Center, a combination museum, study center and archive dedicated to the Nobel-winning writer who sporadically attended classes on the Farm from 1919 to 1925 and later published 31 books.
The $10.3 million center includes interactive exhibits where visitors can haul water in a bucket, as the Joads did in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or look at plankton through a microscope, as Doc Ricketts did in Cannery Row (1945).
The heart of the center is its archive of 30,000 letters, manuscripts, films and artifacts -- including the “Rocinante,” a camper Steinbeck drove while researching Travels with Charley: in Search of America (1962). Charley is also the subject of the 18th Steinbeck Festival, held at the center this year during the first week of August.
But if you can’t make it to Salinas, remember Stanford Special Collections has its own impressive Steinbeck cache: nearly 29,000 documents that illuminate the author’s work.