SEPTEMBER 11

'Doing Something to Help Now'

WHEN STUDENTS RETURNED to campus this fall, the dust was still settling from September 11, and many were searching for answers. They found a natural place to turn: the Stanford faculty. Some 327 students enrolled in Technology in National Security —up from 145 last year. Beginning Arabic? International Politics? The same phenomenon. “I see a change in student awareness,” says associate professor of electrical engineering Greg Kovacs. “We have students coming in and saying, ‘I want to do something practical and applied to help now.’”

Many professors are also doing something to help now, by shifting their research emphases and advising policy-makers.

Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biological sciences, and Jack Liu, on leave from Michigan State, initiated their research project during a 49-hour car ride back to the Bay Area from Washington, D.C., where they were on September 11. They are examining the impact of changes in population structure—such as the increasing proportion of young men—on the growth of terrorism. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, is conducting an online survey of people’s responses to stress in the aftermath of the attacks (coping.stanford.edu). And associate professor of psychology John Gabrieli is part of a multiuniversity study collecting information about people’s memories and feelings upon hearing of the events.

For others, the attacks have meant more attention—and the prospect of additional funding—for ongoing projects. Kovacs, PhD ’90, MD ’92, for example, uses chip technology to detect changes in the physiological state of living tissues. A computer can then determine if a biological or chemical agent is present. Developmental biology professor Lucy Shapiro is working on a new class of antibiotics that will not be available for at least three years, but could fight anthrax and several other bioweapons. And David Relman, an associate professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology, continues to develop methods for detecting and recognizing infectious diseases by examining gene expression patterns in blood and other fluids. These techniques might eventually allow military or civilian populations to be monitored so the flu could be distinguished from, say, anthrax, at an early stage.

The federal government has called on several faculty members to contribute their expertise. Michael McFaul, ’86, MA ’86, an associate professor of political science, spent a good bit of fall quarter commuting between the Farm and Washington, D.C., where he consulted with congressional and administration officials about the possibility of building a new foundation for Russian-American relations. Economist Mark McClellan, on leave in the nation’s capital as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, has been coordinating proposals to assist workers displaced by the attacks; as a senior policy director for the White House on health-care issues, he also helped develop a policy on bioterrorism. And law professors Deborah Hensler and Robert Rabin were asked by the American Bar Association’s task force on terrorism and the law to help evaluate regulations for the federal government’s September 11 victims’ compensation fund, ensuring fairness in the distribution of payments and protection against fraudulent claims.

Humanists, too, have been hard at work, trying to harness the power of art, literature and history to help us cope with tragedy. In mid-September, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence, was on tour performing a work prompted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The composer, associate professor of music Jonathan Berger, DMA ’82, has since added an arrangement of a spiritual as a tribute to the September 11 victims. And classics professor Richard Martin says he is finding new meaning in depictions of violence, revenge, civilization and mortality in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Noting that both epic poems offer insights about the limits of humanity, Martin says, “I am sure my Stanford colleagues who study other voices of the rich ancient past are discovering the same impulse to re-examine and make use of that past in the harsh light of the present day.”

TOP JOBS

At Student Affairs, the Psychologist Is In

GENE AWAKUNI STILL SOUNDS more like the psychologist he was trained to be than the vice provost for student affairs he is now. Listen to him talk, and you’ll hear more about empathy and respect than budgets and policies. “I want my staff to have a student-centered philosophy,” he says in an interview. “Every encounter is an opportunity for development to occur.”

After all, Awakuni didn’t set out to become an administrator. But as director of psychological services at UC-Irvine in the mid-’80s, he was called in to help defuse student conflicts involving race and sexual orientation. Awakuni’s mediation efforts were so successful that, in 1988, he was asked to become Irvine’s special assistant to the vice chancellor for student affairs.

Since then, Awakuni has led student affairs at several universities, most recently as vice president for student services at Columbia University. At Stanford, he replaces James Montoya, ’75, MA ’78, who left the University to serve as vice president of the College Board. Awakuni will face several pressing problems, including insufficient student housing and rising costs of student health care. He is familiar with both areas: at Columbia, he had just completed a review of the student health-care plan, and during his tenure at UC-Irvine, he helped build one of the first residential education programs in the country. He is also the co-author of Resistance to Multiculturalism: Issues and Interventions (Bruner/Mazel, 1999).

Although Awakuni officially began work in Tresidder Union on January 2, he was a visible presence during Orientation in September. Fresh from a morning watching resident assistants clap, cheer and scream out the name of each approaching freshman, Awakuni said he could already tell there is no place like Stanford. “I want to immerse myself in Stanford culture and talk to as many people as I can,” he says. Sounds like the psychologist is still in.

Head of the Class

RECOGNIZING GENIUS: Associate professor of geological and environmental sciences Christopher Chyba was named a MacArthur fellow in October. In awarding the so-called “genius grant,” which pays a $500,000 no-strings-attached stipend over five years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation praised Chyba’s work on the origins of life and national security issues.

GOOD FELLOWS: Seven Stanford professors—Carol L. Boggs, Eric T. Kool, David B. McKay, Robert H. Siemann, James A. Spudich, Lucy S. Tompkins, MD ’62, and Paul A. Wender—were elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last fall. AAAS is the world’s largest federation of scientists and seeks to advance human well-being through science.

Cardinal Numbers

Year Army ROTC established at Stanford: 1916

Students voting in favor of ROTC expulsion in 1969 referendum: 1,387

Students voting against expulsion: 2,106

Buttons on a standard-issue Army uniform: 10

Army marching step, in inches, from heel to toe: 30

Navy marching step, in inches, from heel to toe: 21

Due date for Pentagon report investigating why Army and Navy marching steps are different: 2009

Sources: Stanford Archives; Army ROTC;
Navy ROTC

RELIGIOUS LIFE

Ministering to the Olympics

WHEN SHE WAS ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2000, the Rev. Joanne Sanders expected to minister to a small community of parishioners. But her work as an assistant dean for religious life has taken her from the pulpit in Memorial Church to the 50-yard line at Stanford Stadium; and in February, she’ll travel to Salt Lake City to serve on a multifaith team of 40 chaplains for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Stanford: You’ll be working in the Olympic Village, and you’ll be doing—what?
I really don’t know what to expect. It’s my understanding that they’ve built some kind of interfaith chapel and we’ll be offering religious services there. But beyond that, there will be personal needs. The athletes will have crises in their lives, or in their families’ and friends’ lives. You never know what might come up, let alone the uncertainty about terrorism.

You competed as an athlete in college and you coached collegiate tennis for eight years in Arizona before enrolling in divinity school. So you must have given a lot of thought to the relationship between sports and spiritual matters.
The connection between body, mind and spirit is so important—they really can’t be separated. And I’m more convinced every day about the spirituality of athleticism, and find myself asking, ‘Is sport itself a form of spirituality? If so, what’s it tapping into?’ I think about the kind of pressure, sacrifice and discipline that it takes to get to the Olympics, and I realize that there’s a sense of vulnerability in these elite athletes.

Do you work closely with the athletics department?
Teaching and coaching have always been near and dear to my heart, and I’ve been talking with Ted Leland and various coaches about developing a sensitivity to the diversity of student-athletes we have—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish. We’ve got young people who, for perhaps the first times in their lives, have a chance to explore and ask questions about who and what God is—and is not—and why they should care.

What about the request you got prior to the Arizona State University football game last fall?
The first home game was canceled after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the athletics department called before the ASU game and said they’d like a two-minute inspirational speech. So there I was in the middle of the field, projected on the JumboTron, trying to use what I would call universalist language, using names for God like Holy One and Source of All Comfort. It was a very delicate thing to do in a public venue, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh, boy, if my mother could see me now.’

SEMINAR ROOM

Seeking Deeper Understanding of the Koran

"AT THE END OF THE LINE, the reciter stops and lets his voice trail off,” one student said, visibly moved by the CD he’d just heard. “It gives the verse an ethereal quality, and gives you time to think about what the words are actually saying.”

As the audience of 13 listened to chapters 82, 91, 97 and 99 from the Koran (Qur’an), associate professor of history Ahmad Dallal pointed out the differences between the two principal recitation methods they were hearing—the straightforward tartil and more expressive tajwid.

The freshmen enrolled in the introductory seminar The Qur’an in History had read translations of the verses before class, but as they followed the words of the Islamic text and listened to the melodic invocations of Allah and the dramatic quavers that introduced apocalyptic themes, they appeared to be absorbing the lines for the first time.

“Students who take these seminars are driven and want to learn, and then there’s the incentive of wanting to know more about Islam today,” Dallal says. “They won’t come out of the class as experts on Islam or the Koran, but they will have a familiarity with the Koran and its place in history.”

A specialist in the intellectual traditions of Islam, the Lebanese-born Dallal is teaching this course for the second year in a row. He wants students to know about the many schools of thought that have interpreted the foundational scriptures, from fundamentalist, sectarian and mainstream to modernist. He asks them to reflect on a theme of their choice in written assignments—the notion of prophethood, the literary dimensions of the Koran, the question of authorship.

“This isn’t a course on religion, and it’s not about simply reading the Koran and figuring out its meaning,” he says. “It’s an exercise in historical methodology, and I want them to be aware of the diversity of interpretations that exist.”

The class does, of course, turn its attention to the text’s meaning, especially in light of recent violent acts committed in the name of Islam. As students have read selected passages from the Koran and the longer Hadith—sayings of Mohammed that were compiled in the third century and have been used to explain ambiguities in the Koran—they have encountered passages that trouble them. “I found it very disturbing,” one student said about a description of the Prophet punishing a group of men who had embraced and then denied Islam—by cutting off their hands and feet and burning out their eyes. “This describes some extremely violent behavior.”

Dallal encouraged the critical examination and then offered an explanation: “It does sound like very cruel punishment,” he agreed. “But those were common penalties by the standards of the time.”

But more often, he focuses on how different “historical communities” have related to the Koran over the years. Tajwid devotees, for example, turn out in hometown streets by the thousands to hear recitations, and are often moved to respond aloud (although few clerics participate and some criticize musical performances of the Koran). “Basically, people want to enjoy the text,” Dallal explained to the class as he turned up the volume on a CD that featured two well-known Egyptian reciters who have attracted fans across the Islamic world. “The Koran is fixed, [but there is] an interplay of form and content. It functions as an epic, oral tradition, and people contribute to it. Audiences often shout, ‘Yes, this is very true.’”

MEMORIALS

Remembering the Victims

STANFORD HAS CREATED five memorial scholarship funds to honor individual alumni killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. The fund in honor of Vincent Boland, MA ’01, will support graduate students in the School of Education’s program in learning, design and technology. The funds named for Ulf Ericson, ’48, MS ’49, and Naomi Solomon, ’70, MA ’71, will provide unrestricted scholarship support to undergraduates. The fund in memory of Waleed Iskandar, ’88, MS ’89, will provide scholarships to undergraduates studying engineering. And the fund in honor of Bryan Jack, MBA ’78, will endow fellowships in the Graduate School of Business.

“These scholarships represent our belief that education can heal and transform, that out of our grief we can build a better world,” says University President John Hennessy. “I can think of no better way to honor members of the Stanford family who lost their lives on September 11 than to reaffirm the importance of education in serving humanity’s highest ambitions.”

Scholarships from each of the funds will be awarded this academic year.

FACULTY

Wanted: Two Teaching Jobs at Same University

AS THE LIGHTS GO DOWN in the seminar room, two veteran Stanford instructors prepare for a little friendly sparring. On one side of the table sits Wanda Corn, one of the country’s leading authorities on American art history. On the other side is the U.S. cultural historian Joseph Corn, her husband of nearly 40 years. They’re showing their Photography as History students a slide image of a Civil War battlefield photo by Mathew Brady. Wanda begins by pointing out the picture’s artistic qualities. But for Joe, what’s really important is that Brady exposed Americans for the first time to the brutality of war through photography. “Sometimes we even play up our differences so that our students might learn about different ways of seeing and thinking,” Wanda later confesses. “They say they feel lucky to have been taught by a married couple that can argue and still like each other!”

Stanford has been home to the occasional husband-and-wife faculty duo ever since Earl and Mary Sheldon Barnes were appointed professors of education and history in 1891-92. These days, with women earning nearly half of all doctorates awarded in the United States, the sight of profs pedaling his-and-her bikes to their respective campus offices is increasingly common. While Stanford keeps no official count, an informal tally reveals at least 20 married couples and domestic partners teaching in departments around the University.

Many of the pairs—like the Corns, or Al and Barbara Gelpi in the department of English—met during their student days and went on to build their academic careers side by side. Other Stanford couples already had established themselves when they became smitten. Associate professor Donald Barr, a physician who teaches courses on American health care policy in the human biology program, first struck up a conversation with his future wife, political philosopher Debra Satz, while they were standing in a slow line for coffee at the Poli Sci Café. It turned out that each was trying to create a service-learning course. “I mentioned that I was working in the same area,” Barr, MS ’90, PhD ’93, says with a grin, “and the rest is history.” Psychologists Laura Carstensen and Ian Gotlib—she an authority on the elderly and he an expert on teenage depression—first met at an academic meeting 10 years ago. Four years later, they decided to get married—even though he was at Northwestern and she’d been working at Stanford since 1987. “Individually, we’d always put our careers ahead of our lives, and so we figured it was time to stop that and do something for us,” Carstensen says. “We felt that we would find jobs together somewhere, and if that meant going to North Dakota State, we would do it.”

Carstensen didn’t have to go anywhere—Stanford’s psychology department was happy to welcome Gotlib into its ranks. But not all academic pairs are so lucky. If spouses’ fields of expertise are too similar, departments may be disinclined to spend their limited funds hiring both. Conversely, there may be little incentive for far-flung departments to cooperate when partners want jobs in different schools. One person who tries to help: law professor Robert Weisberg. As special assistant to the provost, Weisberg, JD ’79, frequently lobbies deans and department heads and sometimes even offers temporary funding to pay the salaries of talented spouses. “We don’t create jobs, but if a spouse or partner seems eminently qualified to fill a need, and if there isn’t immediate funding for that slot, we might help out with some resources to get that person going,” he explains. “This is a challenging task, but successes in this endeavor have sometimes clinched great recruitments.” Among them: the husband-and-wife team of Tamar Schapiro and Dmitri Petrov, promising young philosophy and biology postdocs from Harvard, who were married in 1996 and managed to land coveted assistant professorships at Stanford in the fall of 2000. “We have married friends from Harvard, both historians, and he had to turn down a prestigious offer from NYU because they wouldn’t even consider doing anything for her,” Schapiro says. “By comparison, we are by far the most fortunate couple we know.”

Fortunate is a word faculty couples use frequently when talking about their lives together on the Farm. Before settling at Stanford last year, philosophy professor Allen Wood spent 20 years commuting 140 miles each way over often snow-packed roads to Cornell so that his wife of 35 years, medievalist Rega Wood, could continue her tenured position in philosophy at New York’s St. Bonaventure University. Likewise, political scientist Jean Oi and sociologist Andrew Walder—China specialists who were married in 1984 and came to Stanford in 1997—spent years catching buses back and forth from New York City’s “gruesome” Port Authority terminal to see each other when Oi taught at Lehigh and Walder at Columbia.

Now that they’re nesting on the Stanford campus with their teenage son, Walder and Oi can touch base occasionally during the workday, proofread each other’s publications and cover each other’s classes in emergencies. The high point of each year: jointly hosting a traditional home-cooked Chinese New Year banquet for their grad students and guests. “Jean’s red-cooked pork is a favorite,” Walder says affectionately. Unlike Joe and Wanda Corn, Walder and Oi haven’t taught as a team. But one day, that course, too, may be on the menu.

Campus Notebook

For the University, Some Belt Tightening
Stanford’s general funds will decrease by between $15 million and $20 million in the 2002-03 fiscal year, provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, announced in October. He asked University offices to develop initial budgets that reflected a 5 percent decrease in general funds. The overall budget will be refined this winter, as forecasts of energy costs and endowment performance become available.

Students Arrested in Protest at Hospital
Six Stanford students were arrested and charged with trespassing after they refused to leave a hallway at Stanford Hospital on November 29. They were among more than 100 students who protested the Medical Center’s decision to subcontract 10 of its 350 housekeeping positions. Members of the Stanford Labor Action Committee, which organized the protest, say they are concerned that subcontractor employees will not be paid a livable wage for the Bay Area. According to a Medical Center spokesperson, the outside employees will earn an average of $8.50 an hour and receive medical and other benefits; Medical Center housekeeping employees receive $12 an hour, on average, and a more generous benefit package.

A Gamble Pays Off—with Data
What can an 84-year-old Alaskan gambling tradition teach researchers about global warming? Plenty. In the Nenana Ice Classic, named for the village from which it hails, hundreds of thousands of people wager $2 each to predict the exact minute when the ice will begin to break up on the nearby Tenana River. In the October 26 issue of Science, postdoc Raphael Sagarin, ’94, and assistant professor of biological sciences Fiorenza Micheli compare the “quite accurate” data from the contest with Alaskan weather records and conclude that the time of breakup—5 1/2 days earlier now, on average, than in 1917—correlates well with temperature change over the decades. The information could be valuable indeed—last year’s betting pool carried a jackpot of $308,000.

Dishing Out Advice
A nine-member advisory committee began meeting last fall to review current recreational use of the Dish area and consider suggestions for changes. The committee, which includes campus leaseholders, students, community members and a researcher at the observatory, is chaired by human biology professor Russell Fernald. At press time, University administrators were also engaged in discussions with Santa Clara County officials over the siting of two trails in the Foothills. Under the General Use Permit approved in 2000, Stanford is obligated to permanently dedicate the trails in accordance with a countywide trail master plan.

Environmental Studies Gets the Go-Ahead
Next fall, Stanford will admit its first graduate students into the interdisciplinary program in environment and resources, approved by the Faculty Senate in October. The program, headed by geological and environmental sciences professor Robert Dunbar, is part of a larger initiative to better coordinate environmental studies at Stanford. It will award approximately five doctorates each year, as well as master’s degrees to those already enrolled in the law, business and medical schools. “We know that there’s a demand for this, that there are potential students out there who are looking for this kind of program,” earth systems program director Pamela Matson told the senate.

Kicking Off a $500 Million Campaign
The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health has launched a $500 million fund-raising campaign for the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and the pediatric research and training programs of the School of Medicine. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has donated $100 million to the campaign, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the hospital and aims to enable additional breakthroughs in children’s health. The hospital’s $71 million endowment is far below that of longer-established institutions such as Boston Children’s Hospital, which has an endowment of $800 million, and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, with $300 million.

Band Unbanned
On October 20, the one, the only, the incomparable Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band went where it had not gone in 11 years: a University of Oregon football game. The Ducks banned the Band after a 1990 halftime show during which Band members formed a giant chainsaw on the field and played Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song” to spoof logging practices that endangered Oregon’s spotted owl. No word on whether the Band will be allowed to return to the University of Notre Dame, the city of New Orleans, the People’s Republic of China or a certain McDonald’s in Washington state.

On AIDS Prevention, Walking the Walk
Approximately 200 students, faculty and staff joined provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, vice provost for campus relations LaDoris Cordell and women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer behind a “Stanford Cares” banner in the 10K Walk for Silicon Valley on October 14. Cordell, JD ’74, who spearheaded the effort to recruit faculty and staff to participate, has joined the walk for the past four years. “I have friends who have died of AIDS, and if it’s touched me, it’s probably touched everyone,” she told Stanford Report. The Stanford walkers raised more than $8,000 to benefit nine local agencies that specialize in AIDS prevention and support services.

WEEKENDS

A Reunion for the Record Books

REUNION HOMECOMING 2001 was scheduled to begin one month to the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., and at first, organizers were a little unsure whether alumni would still come. Come they did—a record 4,848 of them, bringing along some 1,862 guests. A capacity crowd filled Memorial Auditorium for the roundtable event, which brought Stanford professors together to address the question, “September 11: What Happened, and What Now?” Alumni also shared memories in their class tents, danced in the Quad until midnight, cheered the Cardinal football team through a hard-fought loss to Washington State and attended almost 60 Classes Without Quizzes on topics ranging from Hawaiian musical traditions to how to make high-tech paper airplanes. Noted Craig Goldman, ’81, in his class scrapbook: “How strange to listen to lectures on a full night’s sleep.”

EDUCATION

Reinterpreting Giftedness

GROWING UP IN A BORDERLAND—living in Mexico and attending Catholic school in El Paso, Texas—Guadalupe Valdés had a lot of explaining to do. “My grandmother spoke no English, and the Irish nuns across the border spoke no Spanish, so I interpreted for the family,” she recalls.

Now, the education professor studies other young interpreters—bilingual, predominantly Latino children of immigrants in the Bay Area. In a book to be published next year, Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Erlbaum), she argues that schools should identify many such youngsters as gifted in interpretation abilities. Moreover, she asserts, schools should design courses to improve these students’ bilingual skills and perhaps put them on a path for careers in interpreting or translating.

“The interpreting process is considered a tremendously complex problem-solving activity,” Valdés says. “People who have memory, who are analytic and who can cope with novelty are intelligent, according to a number of theories of intelligence. And here’s a real-life activity that seems to display these particular gifts.”

Valdés recently devised a simulated interpretation task for 25 high school volunteers. The students were asked to pretend they had been accused of stealing from a teacher’s purse. Valdés and her graduate students played the roles of concerned Spanish-speaking mother and strict English-speaking principal, challenging the high schoolers with tricky vocabulary, heated accusations and name-calling.

“We included some pretty aggressive remarks in the test, and we found that typically the kids would mitigate the language,” she says. “That told us that the students were particularly diplomatic and were making decisions and reading the world in ways in which they thought their parents might not be reading it.”

Valdés also talked with parents to find out why they chose one child over another to interpret. “Some mothers would say things like, ‘She’s the one who notices everything,’ or, ‘She listens carefully.’ We got some wonderful responses.”

Working with several graduate students, Valdés has developed a curriculum for young interpreters, and she’s seeking funding to implement it in local schools. “I’m less interested in their being declared gifted than I am in there being programs that will speak to the particular ability of these students,” she says. “They’re brokering between two worlds, heading off misunderstandings that go way beyond language.”