Farm Report

BUILDING 10 Rice on Students, Tough Decisions and Her Oil Tanker

Read excerpts from Stanford's interview with Provost Rice.

SHE TAUGHT AT STANFORD, worked as a national security aide in the Bush administration, then returned to Stanford and served as provost. Now Condoleezza Rice wants to try the private sector. She'll step down from the University's No. 2 position in June. During her six years on the job, Rice has tamed Stanford's budget, wrestled with housing and tenure problems, and worked to increase student-faculty interaction. A member of several corporate boards (including Chevron, which named an oil tanker for her), Rice plans to sign on with an investment bank. She's also an adviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush. Rice talked recently with Stanford editor Bob Cohn. The full text of their conversation appears below: 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. In the first two years undergraduates spend a lot of time in very large general education courses, CIV and so forth, and there really wasn't the opportunity to be with a faculty member in an intense exploration of ideas, and faculty were not as engaged teaching particularly freshmen, because they were teaching general education subjects, not from their own research base. The Freshman Seminars, for instance, give a faculty member an opportunity to teach from his own research base, and I think that's a different kind of interaction with a student than if you're standing up in front of a large class. 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. Can you afford this decrease in the faculty-student ratio? We have to afford it. It's just really important that productivity not be thought of as a faculty member in front of 300 people. In the education enterprise, productivity might be dealing with 10 students over a period of time. Do you see Stanford coming closer to the Yale and Harvard college models of all freshmen living together in a semi-enclosed area? I certainly would never think borrowing from those models [laughs], but I think that we're taking some of the best aspects of freshman housing and maybe frosh-soph experiences. You know, it's very interesting that we always have at Stanford much more demand for freshman housing than we were able to accommodate, and so part of what we've done is just to make more freshman spaces available to those who want them. A few students thrive in a four-class dorm, but the way we had thought about residential education didn't really recognize that the first two years are very different from the last two years, and that the requirements of advising, residential intervention, residential advising, as well as academic advising are different for freshmen -- even different for sophomores than for freshmen -- but very different from what a junior or senior needs, who's already found a department, found a major. So this is more focused around what the academic requirements say about the model of residential life for different stages in the student's career. Another piece of that, by the way, is that we've also begun to rethink our model for graduate residential education. We had sort of taken the undergraduate model of residential education and transposed it to the graduate experience. But graduate student needs are very different. Staying on the teaching front, as provost you've had a lot less time to teach than you did when you were a professor, of course, but I know you have been doing Sophomore College the last three years. What's it like being back in the classroom? Oh, I love being in the classroom. I love teaching Sophomore College. It's a very intense teaching experience. Everybody I know loves it and finds it one of the most exhilarating and yet one of the most tiring experiences, one of the most demanding experiences, because to make what you study accessible to students who really have no background -- and you have them for two hours a day so you have their complete attention -- but it requires a very different kind of teaching. I also teach a political science seminar every year, called The Transformation of Europe, which is for juniors and seniors and graduate students. I've very much enjoyed teaching that too. When you became provost in 1993, Stanford was reeling from a sort-of triple whammy -- 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. A former dean says that "negotiating with Condi over a budget is no picnic." You take that as a compliment. Yeah, I take that as a compliment. These are scarce resources, and we get them from hard-won endowment, from people who give us annual gifts, from research dollars, dollars to support research from the government, and from tuition. That's it. We end up raising every year about 85 percent of the budget, and you can't disperse it lightly. You really have to make tough decisions, and budgets have to reflect priorities. I've never believed in across-the-board budgeting. When I worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every question you asked the Chiefs had the same answer: a third of a ship, a third of a plane and a third of a tank, because it was completely distributed. The Army, Navy and Air Force were going to get their piece. And that's no way to reflect priorities. So one of the things that we tried to do very early on was to tell people that some things were going to get funded and others weren't. Now, as the University's resources have grown, we've been able to fund more, but in those early years we had to make pretty tough calls between some very virtuous, as Gerhard often puts it, ideas. 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. You suggested that perhaps, junior faculty are not adequately informed of how high the bar is. They might know mathematically what the rates are, but everyone's giving them a green light all the way along. And it's a fine line, because you want to be encouraging to junior faculty. You don't want to say, "Boy, you know, this is a virtual impossibility," because you'd like people to believe they're going to be in the 50 percent who make it. But when you're in the 50 percent who don't, and you are completely surprised by that, it suggests to me that senior faculty and chairs are not being as straightforward as they might be about how difficult it is. Are grievances increasing because department chairs are granting tenure in marginal cases -- 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. We know from some of the recent reports specifically that some of these grievances do come from women who are claiming that the University is inhospitable to women junior faculty. Are you surprised or bothered by those allegations? Of course I'm bothered. I don't want to talk about specific cases, but I just think that for junior faculty, in general, it's not an easy road. The twin demands of excellence in research and teaching and the fact that nobody can give you an exact roadmap -- nobody can punch you into the Yahoo!.map and say here's the map to tenure -- makes it a very stressful time. I think people are also dealing with family issues, housing issues, and childcare issues and it's just not easy. But we're trying to do a better job of counseling people, a better job of getting chairs to really work with junior faculty to develop a plan for that faculty member. It might still not succeed. But I do think that it's not an easy road, and because Stanford is a friendly place, because Stanford, unlike some of our peer institutions, doesn't have great separation between junior and senior faculty -- there are places where I've given seminars that the pecking order is so clear that when you ask for questions, the senior faculty ask questions first, then the junior faculty ask questions, then the graduate students ask questions. And a junior faculty member would never dare ask a question until he's sure that every senior faculty member has asked whatever questions are on their mind. We don't have anything like that at Stanford. And that lack of formality may also belie the difficulty of actually achieving tenure. Why is it so hard for Stanford to bring more women into tenured positions? Well, you're dealing with several problems. One is history, and I don't mean the history of the University, I mean the history of American culture. When you think about the fact that the denominator moves very slow -- we have not increased the size of the faculty essentially at all -- and the numerator moves really slowly -- turnover's like 1, 2% per year -- then the current faculty's going to be more a reflection of the faculty of the past than of the faculty of the future. And that's why percentages, particularly tenured women, go up so slowly. So that's one problem that you're dealing with. The other thing is women are increasingly going to graduate schools, and law schools, and business schools and medical schools, but the distribution of women across the range of disciplines in which Stanford hires is uneven. In some of the disciplines in which we're heavily weighted -- engineering, the hard sciences -- the number of women in the pool is relatively small. So you're competing for a very, very small number of people with a lot of universities who also are trying to increase the number of women on their faculty. So high standards, slow-moving turnover and pools that are not evenly distributed. Now, part of what we try to do to deal with that is that when women or minorities -- minorities is a bigger problem -- are turned up in searches, we very often encourage the department to go ahead and hire even if the person isn't identical to the place in the pool. But it's a very tough problem. It's changing, but it's just changing more slowly than everybody would like. The other issue that you have indicated frustration over is graduate student and junior faculty housing. You said at one point that you felt like the University's chief real estate agent. What impact is the housing crisis having on grad student and junior faculty recruitment? With grad students we had a problem last year. If you think about the kind of peak hiring time or peak recruiting time for graduate students, it was at the time when the graduate students were very disaffected about what was going on in the housing market and rents had gone up 38 percent. I think it affected our ability to matriculate graduate students. The harder group is really junior faculty, and then, perhaps even harder, newly tenured faculty who -- maybe they come, they rent for three or four years, they get to year seven, they get tenure, and now they have a kid, or two kids, and the place that they rented as a junior faculty member is really not adequate. Those are the people who I'm concerned about. You're talking about people we want, we've identified as among the best in their field. Exactly. Among the best in their field. We take them through all the tests, we've grown up somebody we really want to keep, and now we've also stamped them with the imprimatur of Stanford tenure, and there are ten universities out there, all with cheaper housing. That's in many ways the most vulnerable group. What do we do? Well, part of the reason that we're thinking about more on-campus housing is to address that group. When people say, "Well, it's not very much housing," yeah, but if I could deal with that group, which is not a very large group, but a very vulnerable and important group, it would make a huge difference to Stanford's future. 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 2 1