DONATIONS

Making the Most of the 'Largest Gift Ever'

JODY MAXMIN says her head is "still spinning from the generosity of the Hewlett family."

The associate professor of art history and classics likely speaks for many in the School of Humanities and Sciences, which received $300 million -- in largely unrestricted endowment funds -- from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation on May 2. The foundation gave another $100 million to Stanford's Campaign for Undergraduate Education. According to the New York Times, the combined $400 million is "believed to be the largest gift ever to a university."

Hewlett-Packard co-founder William R. Hewlett, '34, Engr. '39, who died January 12, established the foundation in 1966. The gift honors his "lifelong devotion to Stanford and his passionate belief in the value of a liberal arts education," says his son, foundation chair Walter B. Hewlett, ms '68, ms '73, DMA '80. "Had he lived, I am certain this is something he would have done himself."

Established in 1948, h&s is the largest of Stanford's seven schools, responsible for about 80 percent of undergraduate teaching, with 500 faculty members in 28 departments ranging from art to applied physics. But raising unrestricted funds for the school has historically been difficult. The Hewlett Foundation gift to h&s should pay out about $15 million per year, and University officials plan to use it as a challenge to raise a total of $1 billion in endowment funds for the school.

How the income from the gift will be spent is not yet clear. As a hint of the many ways the funds might bolster the school, however, Stanford asked professors what they would do with $5 million.

French professor Brigitte Cazelles: What a great dream! I would organize a series of undergraduate seminars that would take place in situ -- that is, in a specific region of France, to explore texts in close connection with the "cultural geography" whence they originate. For example, On the Track of the Troubadour Poets, a seminar whose itinerary would follow the emergence and development of love poetry in southern France, from the region of Poitiers, associated with Guillaume d'Aquitaine; to the southwest, associated with Jaufré Rudel; to the south center, associated with Bernard de Ventadorn; down to the southeast, associated with Foulques de Marseilles.

History professor Paul Seaver: If I had gobs of money, I would immediately increase the stipends of our graduate students [in] the humanities. What an impoverished society we are creating if we ignore philosophy, literature, art, music and history. If there was any money left over, I would try to start an undergraduate honors program in history and literature, which has always seemed to me to be the one aspect of Harvard's overrated undergraduate education worth emulating.

Biological sciences professor Paul Ehrlich: The vast majority of "educated" people are ignorant of basic science and mathematics, the nature of the scientific enterprise and its sociology, and the escalating importance of science in human affairs. I would use the money to establish and support a world-class, three-quarter course sequence that would be required of every undergraduate.

Biological sciences professor Joan Roughgarden: I feel the time is long overdue to bury the hatchet between the humanities and sciences. It's hard to find topics on which scientists and humanists need to know the other's scholarship. While I love Shakespeare, I don't need the latest commentary on the old bard, and a humanist who loves bird-watching probably doesn't need the latest demography of bird populations. Yet one major area [of crossover] does exist: human diversity. Humanists of many disciplines have written about cultural and historical aspects of human diversity, and biologists have written about the material, bodily and behavioral aspects of human diversity. Neither has consulted with the other, though. I propose that the University create a research center devoted to the intersection of science and the humanities on the topic of human diversity.

CAMPUS RELATIONS

Considering Responses to 'Hate Speech'

RACIST, SEXIST and ugly, yes. But is it a hate crime?

"Rape all Asian bitches and dump them," read graffiti scrawled with black marker on classroom walls in History Corner and the Center for East Asian Studies on March 14 and 15, during Dead Week. "Nuke Arabs." "Nuke Niggers." "This is a whites only classroom." "White man rules." And so on.

It was the 29th "threatening incident" logged this academic year by assistant dean of students Tommy Woon, who since 1997 has been developing a protocol to deal with intolerance on campus. Within a few days of the graffiti's appearance, University president John Hennessy and vice provost for campus relations LaDoris Cordell, JD '74, circulated an e-mail note to department chairs and administrators, urging anyone who found similar slurs to notify the campus police. Hennessy -- wearing a white ribbon of solidarity distributed by the Stanford Student Diversity Coalition -- told the Faculty Senate on April 19 that the police thought the scrawls were the work of a single individual and that they had advised against publicizing the incidents widely, in an effort to avoid a "copycat effect."

Outside the Law School lecture hall where the Senate meets, several dozen students gathered to protest what they described as the University's "delayed and inadequate response" to the graffiti. And earlier that day, 150 students had handed out flyers in White Plaza that called on the University to "work with students to establish a stronger schoolwide protocol for dealing with hate crimes."

That's not the term assistant professor of communication Laura Leets would use, however. She says the graffiti is protected by the First Amendment. "Do I think it should be? Yes. Do I think Stanford has a problem with hate crime? No. To be a crime, there must be behavior -- like firebombing a synagogue or beating somebody up."

Leets notes that hate speech does cause injury, however, and says that must be widely acknowledged. "The recipients of the hate messages are saying, 'Don't blow this off -- listen to us,'" she says. "And I think what the administration needs to do is validate the feelings of students who were harmed and reassure them that someone does care."

Last fall, Leets designed an online "Act of Intolerance" survey to gauge responses to hate speech and ask for constructive ways to deal with it. When the graffiti was discovered on campus, she posted her survey -- along with photographs of the writing -- on the web. She soon received more than 400 responses. She is still analyzing those replies, but says an initial reading suggests there's "a problem of miscommunication, where students and the administration are talking past each other."

Leets's prescription: campus discourse that considers questions like "How do we respond?" and "What can we do to right this wrong?" "Doing that," she says, "will make us all stronger."

PUBLICATIONS

The Daily's Choice

AS THE STANFORD COMMUNITY grappled with how to respond to graffiti containing ethnic slurs, editors of the Stanford Daily were trying to decide whether to publish "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too," a full-page advertisement by conservative writer David Horowitz. The ad has ignited protests at campuses around the country this year with statements like "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one." More than 30 student papers rejected the ad outright, and those that published it sparked a backlash. At Brown University, students who objected to the ad confiscated all the copies of the Daily Herald they could find, and editors of UC Berkeley's Daily Californian issued a front-page apology for being "an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry."

The Daily published the ad on May 9 -- as a guest editorial, without accepting payment from Horowitz. They also gave the Black Student Union space for a full-page response. Why? Student papers ought to be "an excellent forum" for discussing controversial issues, said editor in chief Nadira Hira, '02, adding that she hoped a campus dialogue would result.

Cardinal Numbers

Commencement speakers Stanford has had: 92

Commencement speeches by women: 7

Commencement speeches by Ted Koppel: 2

References to revolution in Harper's editor John Fischer's 1967 commencement speech: 13

References to LSD: 1

Cost to print one Stanford undergraduate diploma: $6.96

Cost to earn one: $140,000

SOURCES: Stanford Archives; Stanford University Financial Aid Department

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Feminist Studies Celebrates 20 Years

THEY WANTED TO signal, back in 1981, that the new interdisciplinary program wouldn't be just about women. So they named it the Program in Feminist Studies -- the first in the country with that title.

"We saw our mission as reaching out to all students, male and female," history professor Estelle Freedman explains. "We wanted to look at the relationship of sex and gender to broader questions of society and politics, including racial and other inequalities and movements for social justice."

This year, the program celebrated its 20th birthday. To help cut the cake, some of its more than 100 graduates returned in June for a daylong celebration and symposium about feminism and the arts, politics and public service. Panelists included Laura Kay, '81, an associate professor of astronomy and women's studies at Barnard College; documentary filmmaker Dayna Goldfine, '81, whose credits include Frosh and Now & Then; Ana Matosantos, '97, a health policy analyst with the California legislature; Stephanie Poggi, '82, former editor of Gay Community News and Sojourner; and Masum Momaya, '99, a consultant on social-justice issues for foundations and nonprofit businesses. The symposium also marked a changing of the guard, as Freedman stepped down from the program she helped launch and linguistics professor Penny Eckert became its eighth director.

Freedman, a specialist in U.S. social history and women's history, is wrapping up 13 years of teaching Feminist Studies 101 with a new book, No Turning Back: The Historical Case for Feminism, due in spring 2002. Aimed at a general readership, the book is informed by students' feedback over the years, and it reflects how feminist studies has broadened from its initial focus on US history to become a multidisciplinary, global field. "It's about why feminism emerges when it does and the different shapes it has taken," Freedman says. "After all, there have been a variety of feminisms since the 18th and 19th centuries -- liberal, socialist, anarcha, lesbian, Christian, Asian-American, African-American, Jewish. There's no one feminism."

Incoming director Eckert, a sociolinguist who has studied disappearing peasant dialects in the Pyrenees and polarized groups of teenage students in Detroit (which she dubbed "jocks" and "burnouts"), is crossing the final Ts on her own new book, Language and Gender Practice. She says some students in her feminist studies course are glad to be there, but others are resentful because they are only taking the class to fulfill the University's gender studies requirement: "They tend to think one of two things -- either that feminism has happened and they want to get on with things, or that they're going to hear in class what they've heard all their lives."

The continuing challenge, Eckert says, is to get students to look past their preconceived notions of feminism and see its constant evolution. "They dismiss it, and we're asking them not to dismiss it."

MUSIC

Hot Days, Cool Jazz

HER MEZZO "sounds a crystalline note of vulnerability," according to the New York Times. And her touch on ebony and ivory has a "hard-swinging grace."

Jazz vocalist, pianist, arranger and composer Dena DeRose is one of 70 artists who will sizzle at the Stanford Jazz Festival in July and August. And, like many of the performers, DeRose will teach tomorrow's aspiring headliners at the workshop that accompanies the festival.

"This will be my sixth summer at Stanford, and I've now got some students who come back every year," says DeRose, who teaches at Long Island University during the school year. "It's cool that they've actually been working on the stuff I've given them the previous summer -- I love to see that progress."

DeRose is among the hundreds of musicians Jimmy Nadel has brought to campus in the 29 years he's been running the summer workshop. Like many of them, she's matured professionally as the workshop has grown. "When she first came out here, Dena was just establishing herself in New York and wasn't that well known," says Nadel, '72, a lecturer in the music department and one smooth alto sax player. "But she's definitely a rising star now and her concert will sell out this summer."

More than 700 teenagers and adults have signed up for classes with such jazz legends as drummers Tootie Heath and Louie Bellson, bassist Christian McBride, singer Madeline Eastman, pianist Benny Green and trumpeters Jim Cullum and Brazilian-born Claudio Roditi. Nadel will teach Inside Jazz, a four-session Continuing Studies course for nonmusicians.

The festival will feature a new big band work by Sam Rivers, co-commissioned by Stanford and the National Endowment for the Arts. A 75-year-old saxophonist who started his career in 1940s Boston, Rivers went on to perform with Miles Davis and launch New York City's loft-jazz scene in the '60s. "Rivers is a visionary of jazz," says Nadel. "He's an energy player who's associated with the avant-garde, but he has his feet solidly on the ground and knows how to produce complex arrangements for big band -- not the swing of the '40s, but a contemporary musical statement. Like August 2001." Like, cool.

FRESHMEN

Reading, Writing and Rhetoric

"RHETORIC!" English professor Robert Polhemus declared with a dramatic flourish, moments before the Senate approved changes to the freshman writing requirement in May. "I want to rescue the beauty and the appropriateness and the precision of the word 'rhetoric,' the age-old art and science of effective persuasion and logical ability in writing and speaking."

The new Program in Writing and Rhetoric is a continuation of the first-year requirement that has been in place since Stanford's founding. It differs from the current program in two key ways: students who earn a 4 or 5 on Advanced Placement tests in English will no longer be able to take a one-quarter course instead of a two-quarter one, and students will learn oral and visual communication skills in a state-of-the-art multimedia classroom. Writing classes will remain small -- 15 students, tops -- and the 150 different syllabi that instructors now use will be consolidated.

The AP test is "trivial," says English and linguistics professor Elizabeth Traugott, who chaired the committee that recommended the changes in the writing program. "It gives no evidence of ability to write at the level expected here." In other words, it doesn't evaluate rhetoric.

STUDENT LIFE

Tech Times

MOORE'S LAW states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double every 18 - 24 months. But Stanford students measure technological change in four-year increments -- the time it takes for an undergraduate class to move through the University. A look at the three most recent "generations":

CLASS OF '93:
Frosh with computers: 50%

Gadget of Choice:
Macintosh SEs or Classics with 9-inch black-and-white screens. Few connected to the Internet before they hit the garage-sale heap.

Getting Connected:
E-mail was a novel way to keep in touch with friends at universities around the country, if your dorm had a computer cluster. But not everyone took advantage. "Why would I want e-mail?" recalls Laura Klein. "We still made flyers for parties."

Surfing Report:
World Wide What? The web wasn't even born until sophomore year. But class members took to it quickly, co-founding Excite and FogDog and becoming early employees of Yahoo! "The Stanford undergraduate class of 1993 . . . burst onto the scene just as the World Wide Web was coming into its own," the New York Times noted in February 2000.

CLASS OF '97:
Frosh with computers: 65%

Gadget of Choice:
A PowerBook was the must-get. You could take notes on it as you sat in Chem 31 -- and annoy the pencil pushers around you.

Getting Connected:
For the first time, all residences had networked computer clusters, and virtually every student signed up for an e-mail account upon arrival. Still, the typical inbox was more likely to contain a message from a friend than a TA.

Surfing Report:
"Even in '96, people were still treading with skeptical feet into the Internet world," says Casey Harmon. "Java was 1.0, and web applications weren't really even around yet," Michael Hoefer adds. But a few prescient computer science majors stopped out to join dot-coms -- including Hoefer and Felipe Lloreda, who co-founded Alyanza Software.

CLASS OF 2001:
Frosh with computers: 85%

Gadget of Choice:
Palm™ handheld organizers are on the rise, though the Stanford Bookstore says it sells as many paper-based planners as ever.

Getting Connected:
"You name it, I use e-mail for it," says Loren Sacks. He's not alone: nearly 2 million messages pass through Sweet Hall every day, and 8,400 mailing lists allow private discussion for groups from first-floor residents of Otero to campus ice hockey fans.

Surfing Report:
It's all about the web. No need to subscribe to a newspaper, buy a CD, conduct research in Green -- or even get out of bed to go to class, if the course offers real-time video feed. But dot-coms are so 1999. "Start-ups are out," Alok Sindher told the Stanford Daily. He's going for "something a little more Old Economy"--management consulting.

-- Corinne Purtill, '02

HUMANITIES

In Defense of Second Languages

MARY LOUISE PRATT, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and comparative literature, was recently elected second vice president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association, the professional organization for scholars and teachers of languages and literatures. She will ascend to the presidency in 2003.

STANFORD: What will be your first priority for the MLA?

We somehow have to create a public discourse that expresses what people care about in the humanities. Everyone who goes to college comes out with a story about the one literature or history or philosophy course that changed her life, but for some reason we don't have a good way of giving the public terms with which to defend what we are about.

You've just finished a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, working with econometricians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists. What was a lunchtime conversation like?

Well, one group was working on adolescent problem behaviors -- drug use, alcohol use, pregnancy. And for me, the first question had to be, how is it that in some cultures the adolescent is not an object of suspicion, but a completely beloved creature? And what is "problem behavior"? Who is it a problem for? Us? The kid? For the people who'd gotten the grant from the federal government to figure out what to do about teen pregnancy, those kinds of speculative things weren't part of their job. But it's got to be somebody's job.

What else do you hope to accomplish during your MLA term?

For people not to be able to understand each other is a terrible thing, so I want to get us to see that it's really desirable to know more than one language. The first bilingual education battles in the United States were fought in Texas by Germans who wanted the right to continue schooling in their language, and in the 19th century, there were more newspapers in the United States published in other languages than in English. The idea of everyone speaking only English wasn't prescribed until the 1900s. But today the country is becoming more and more multilingual, and I think the ideal citizen has to be a polyglot, which is the norm in many, many countries.

Have you seen any encouraging signs on the national level?

Oh, yes. Despite organizations like "US English," you can see people's attitudes to second-language learning changing. And there's political capital involved -- President Bush held a Cinco de Mayo celebration on the White House lawn this year for the first time. Apparently he also made a speech in his Spanish, which is horrifying, and [House minority leader] Dick Gephardt was asked to comment in Spanish. It reminds me of growing up in Canada, watching the first Anglo politicians trying to speak French in public. It made your hair stand up if you cared about the language, but for French speakers, the fact that they were doing it was very important.

Inquiring Minds

Electric Avenue: They are about 50,000 times shorter than a human hair is wide, they conduct electricity, and they are made out of something called oligophenylenevinylene. They're nanowires, organic molecules synthesized by associate professor of chemistry Christopher Chidsey, PhD '84, and graduate students Stephen Dudek and Hadley Sikes in collaboration with scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. If the teeny-tiny wires prove capable of connecting to molecules in the human body, scientists might use them to create biological sensors that measure glucose levels in diabetics or hormone levels in menopausal women. Nanowires might also assist in identifying DNA from crime scenes.

What a Pest: Put the bug spray down, because it's not doing anything. Stanford researchers led by associate professor of biological sciences Deborah M. Gordon have found that household pesticides don't kill off the multi-queen colonies of Argentine ants that plague the Bay Area and several other regions around the world. Nor does it help to wipe the crumbs off the counter. The key to controlling the ant population? Mild weather, say the researchers. The insects are more likely to invade homes during winter rainstorms and summer droughts.

Antibiotic Assembly Line: Can an everyday bacterium be genetically engineered to produce new forms of a workhorse antibiotic? Yes, according to Chaitan Khosla, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical engineering. Khosla and his colleagues inserted the largest working genes to date into harmless E. coli, which cranked out a modified version of erythromycin, a common penicillin substitute. The approach is more efficient than chemical modification at creating novel antibiotics that can overcome resistant bacterial infections.

RESEARCH

Doctoral Programs Flunk a Test

SIX YEARS AFTER their group project was due for Professional Responsibility and Academic Duty, Chris Golde and Tim Dore have submitted a 58-page paper that is making national headlines.

"At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Doctoral Students Reveal about Doctoral Education" surveys 4,114 candidates at 27 universities about their training and how effectively it prepares them for academic careers. Does PhD work get a passing grade? Not from arts and sciences students, who say it doesn't adequately train those who actually land faculty jobs -- about half of the 45,000 who apply -- for teaching and administrative duties.

According to the report, a fundamental "mismatch" exists between the goals of doctoral education and students' expectations, exacerbated by the paucity of academic jobs. "Students are not well prepared to assume the faculty positions that are available, nor do they have a clear concept of their suitability for work outside of research," write Golde and Dore, both PhD '98.

Or, as one respondent put it, "graduate education is designed to create academics, of which there is a gross oversupply. Yet the everyday world of consultants, government, industry, business, pre-college education, etc., needs qualified people."

Nor is the road to a doctorate particularly well paved, the researchers say. "Undergraduates have a pretty good idea of what required courses they have to fulfill to get a degree, but the doctoral process can be overly mysterious," says Golde, an education policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Not knowing how long a program will take, where the fellowship money will come from and how often one's work will be reviewed can take a toll, she adds. "And for a grad student sitting in an adviser's office, asking those questions can feel quite scary and dangerous."

What's more, says Dore, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia, the current apprenticeship model of doctoral education -- an iteration of an older German tradition -- is outdated. "A lot of emphasis is placed on a single adviser, and it's unrealistic to expect that a student is going to get everything he needs from one mentor."

Dore and Golde met in 1995, when they both enrolled in the professional responsibility seminar taught by University President Emeritus Donald Kennedy. The course was designed to help prepare future faculty members to work in university environments. But Kennedy got an eye-opening insider's perspective from his students, who surveyed dozens of colleagues and found many of them profoundly disappointed with their experience.

Kennedy tapped the Pew Charitable Trusts for some funding, and Golde and Dore expanded the survey to include students on other campuses. They released the new results in January.

As Dore examines organic molecules and keeps his eye on the ticking tenure clock, he's also launching a new seminar at Georgia for undergraduates hoping to get into graduate schools. He has a thing or two to tell them.

Head of the Class

Good Company: What do you get when you take Woody Allen, Madeleine Albright and three Stanford professors? A group of recently elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

W.S. Di Piero, an English professor who teaches poetry courses, Roeland Nusse, professor and associate chair of the Medical School's department of developmental biology, and chemistry professor W.E. Moerner will be formally inducted in Cambridge, Mass., on October 13.

Wonders of Science: Charles Y. Prescott, a professor of physics at SLAC, and Christopher Field, PhD '81, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington on campus and associate professor, by courtesy, of biological sciences, are among the 72 new members of the National Academy of Sciences.

DRAMA

Summer Theater of the Absurd

ON A STAGE FILLED with empty chairs, two archetypally old people entertain their party guests. Or do they?

"Is anybody really there?" muses associate professor of drama and classics Rush Rehm in an interview. "Who's sitting on whom?"

The Chairs, Eugène Ionesco's comic existentialist romp, opens July 19 for a four-week run in Pigott Theater, formerly the Little Theater. This year's offering from Stanford Summer Theater reunites San Francisco actor and mime Geoff Hoyle, who plays an old woman, with Jarek Truszczynski, a veteran performer with the Polish National Theater, as her really, really old husband. Rehm, PhD '85, rounds out the cast as an orator hired by the elderly couple to help deliver their message, and the production is directed by Aleksandra Wolska, PhD '00, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.

Now in its fourth season, SST showcases a different playwright each year, staging one play and organizing a daylong symposium in collaboration with the Continuing Studies program.

Professor emeritus Martin Esslin, who coined the phrase and authored the book The Theater of the Absurd more than 40 years ago, is flying in from England for the July 28 symposium. Joining him is pal Herbert Blau, ma '49, PhD '54, founder of the San Francisco Actors Workshop and former director of the Stanford Repertory Theater of the late 1960s and early '70s. They'll lead a Stanford faculty discussion on "Fool's Gold -- Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd." Lest it become too dry and academic, members of The Chairs cast will intersperse snippets from The Bald Soprano, Ionesco's sly take-off of his attempts to learn English from a phrase book. "He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow," one character declares. "In real life, one must look out of the window," comes the response.

Does SST aspire to, say, grow into a repertory company? Not exactly. "We had to take a break for a year because cabaret almost killed us," Rehm says about a Brecht-Weill production SST took to China in 1998. "By the time we got to Shanghai, we'd cut 30 minutes of the show and learned why Broadway try-outs are a good idea."

Speakers' Corner

Veggie Power: Actor Woody Harrelson biked onto campus in May, clad in clothes made from hemp and followed by an "eco-bus" powered largely by vegetable oil. It was all part of his West Coast college speaking tour, which included a standing-room-only address in Kresge Auditorium. After opening with a few jokes and answering questions about his movie career, Harrelson got serious, criticizing the war on drugs and advocating veganism and civil disobedience in support of environmental causes. "The seed I want to plant," he said, "is that you make the connection between what you're doing and what's going on in the world."

Campus Notebook

Language Merger Put on Hold: The proposed consolidation of the foreign language departments is on hold until fall quarter. Following a contentious Faculty Senate discussion, Provost John Etchemendy announced on May 3 that he was appointing a blue-ribbon committee to study the proposal and consider alternatives. "What I took as the strong message from the discussion . . . was that we should slow down," said Etchemendy, PhD '82. In a follow-up memo to faculty, he added that related offers from the dean's office -- including funding for new senior faculty positions--"have been taken off the table," and two current searches for scholars of European literature have been frozen.

A Think Tank Gets the Go-Ahead: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching won county approval May 8 to build a new facility in Stanford's Lathrop District, adjacent to the Dish area. The Committee for Green Foothills attempted to block plans for the 21,000-square-foot building, claiming that it threatened the habitat of the endangered California tiger salamander and fell outside the University's growth boundary. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors denied the environmentalists' appeal but required that Carnegie move its site downhill 35 feet to make the building less visible, and take steps to keep tiger salamanders out of the construction zone.

Discrimination Suit Settled: Stanford in May settled a lawsuit brought by former medical research scientist Colleen Crangle without admitting any wrongdoing. A San Jose jury had awarded Crangle $545,000 last year, finding that the University had retaliated against her after she complained of gender discrimination. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, and both sides dropped their appeals. Crangle, PhD '84, who now runs a local research company, said, "I will continue to tell my story and to work for change."

Remembering a Shining Star: As a mentor for doctoral students from underrepresented groups -- including almost 40 African-Americans and Sally Ride, '73, MS '75, PhD '78, America's first woman in space -- solar physicist Art Walker was a "guide star," according to Bob Byer, MS '67, PhD '69, chair of applied physics. Walker, who died April 29 after a long battle with cancer, had recently presided over a Stanford meeting of the National Conference of Black Physics Students, where he encouraged 250 high school, undergraduate and graduate students to stick with physics. At a daylong campus celebration in his honor last September, Walker received a medal from NASA, and former students recalled his contributions to the black community at Stanford.

Sending Off the Vice Provost in Style: More than 100 students and staff donned red construction-paper bow ties and gathered in White Plaza in late May to pay tribute to vice provost of student affairs Jim Montoya, who stepped down June 30 to become vice president of the College Board. Montoya, '75, ma '78, worked at Stanford for 10 years, initially as dean of undergraduate admissions. Top administrators praised his dedication to students and reminisced about his enthusiastic performances in Gaieties. As the Stanford Band closed the event with a rousing rendition of "All Right Now," a plane flew overhead bearing the message, "Thank You Jim Montoya."

Graduate Student Charged with Sex Offense: Alexander Simon, a doctoral student in cancer biology, was arrested May 17 for attempted lewd and lascivious acts with a child. Simon, a volunteer safety instructor at local elementary schools through a program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, allegedly sent a 10-year-old student an e-mail message containing a cartoon of rabbits mating. Her father contacted the San Mateo County sheriff's department, and two detectives took over the girl's e-mail account. According to the department, Simon's messages became progressively more explicit, and he was taken into custody at a meeting he thought he had arranged with the girl. He has pleaded not guilty.

Fire Guts Career Development Center: A two-alarm fire swept through the Career Development Center May 26, causing an estimated $300,000 in damage. No one was injured in the weekend blaze, and student reference files were unharmed. It took two hours for 30 firefighters from Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Santa Clara County to contain the fire, which gutted much of the two-story building and destroyed computers. The facility housed career counselors and posted job and internship listings for students and alumni. The center has been temporarily relocated to the Bakewell building on Galvez Street.

For Med Students, Help Is at Hand: The Stanford Mobile Med project is teaching doctors of the future about the future of doctors. The pilot program has equipped 240 medical students with Palm Vx personal digital assistants, onto which they can download study materials and classmates' contact information, as well as drug interaction data and Stanford Hospital's acceptable ranges for common medical tests. In the future, says associate professor of medicine Phyllis Gardner, "doctors will have PDAs to access patient histories, results of physicals, other electronic medical records and laboratory information. We're training students for that."