Read the full text of Stanford's interview with Provost Rice.
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NO. 1 FAN: Bidding farewell, Provost Rice extols the virtues of big-time college sports. |
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Linda Cicero |
Has Stanford changed in the last six years?
The essential Stanford has not changed very much. This is a place where research and teaching come together in very important ways. There is a little bit of a frontier mentality that makes us different from our counterparts on the East Coast. Everything from the fact that we sit in the Silicon Valley to the fact that we play big-time college athletics sets us apart. But some of the emphases have changed. We've emphasized the links between research and teaching. We've worked hard to emphasize the academic side of what we do. The University went through some very difficult times in the late '80s and early '90s, but in large part we've recovered after the earthquake. We're on better footing than we were seven years ago.
Do you see a difference between students today and students of the early 1980s, when you started teaching?
Students today are much more concerned about what career they're going to have and are probably less willing to take than when I was in college. It's a sign of the times, a sign of pressures from society, pressures from parents, pressures from peers to make all of it pay off.
You and President Casper have sought to reform the first two years of the undergraduate experience. What's the overall goal?
A big thread is getting faculty into serious intellectual engagement with freshmen and sophomores. We're learning that our students are ready for those experiences a lot earlier than one would have thought. Also, we're emphasizing undergraduate research more. Even if a student is never going to do a dissertation, or never going to do a major research project, just probing something really in-depth is a very important pedagogical tool.
When you became provost in 1993, Stanford was reeling from a sort-of triple whammy&emdash;federal reimbursement rates for research were cut back after the indirect-cost controversy, massive earthquake repair bills were piling up and there was a recession in the early '90s. What was the hardest part about being the chief budget officer during that period?
Constantly having to say no. In the first couple of years, there was very little to which I could say yes. Also, we had to restructure the administrative units of a lot of departments. That was hard, laying off people. That's not fun.
What did you learn from these experiences?
That I'm able to make tough decisions. I think that you have to have a certain decisiveness about things. People would rather have an answer of "no" than have no answer.
Cutting the budget must have forced you to focus hard on priorities.
That's right. Clearly, undergraduate education was a priority, the physical restructuring of the campus, the growth of technology, the focus on teaching. Then there was the selective rebuilding of academic departments going through great demographic shifts, where you had to make some senior appointments.
Which departments?
Well, the humanities in general. But there were also major demographic issues in political science, in psychology. The Law School had large gaps in some areas, like in law and economics. Making selective decisions to support these departments was very important. I'll give you one very good example. We were always one of the strongest places on China. And then comes a few retirements, and a couple of junior faculty members leave -- and suddenly we were very weak on China. So we had to make some strategic key appointments there, and we did.
From 1990 to 1995, your office received an average of two to three faculty grievances a year. In the 1997-98 academic year, that number grew to 10. Why?
A lot of them have to do with tenure appointments. I'm not sure if the message about tenure is really getting stated in the right way for junior faculty. Maybe the expectations are unrealistic about the chances, and then people take it as a reflection, somehow, on them that they didn't get tenure. In fact, the historic rate is about 50 percent, far lower in some disciplines. It's a very tough evaluation; it ought to be a tough evaluation. I'm sure that some mistakes are made. But the University's making a very critical decision at that point, and so it's not surprising that it's a very, very high bar.
Are grievances increasing because department chairs are granting tenure in marginal cases&emdash;making the deans and the provost overrule decisions and be the bad guys?
I have seen cases where chairs have simply decided to pass off a difficult decision. I've seen that.
In a farewell editorial, the Stanford Daily wrote that you're a "campus celebrity . . . an administrator with panache [who seems] less like a ruler of a faraway land and more like a human being." With press like that, how can you possibly leave?
I have to. When I decided that, at least at this stage in my life, I didn't want to go on in higher ed, the most important thing became to get back to what I do, which is international politics. I haven't been to Russia in 21