BUSINESS SCHOOL

Ethics in the Wake of Enron

ON THE FIRST DAY of business school, Elena Perron’s study group is called to the front of the lecture hall to explain how the Enron Corp. violated principles of corporate social responsibility.

Marker in hand, Perron draws a boxed “gray area” in the middle of a horizontal line on the white board. At one end, the line reads “legal”; at the other, “illegal.” In the boxed area, Perron argues, Enron violated its fiduciary duties to its shareholders. Managers set up bogus partnerships to hide millions of dollars in losses and did not report millions of dollars in loans. “Their entire objective was to hide information from investors,” she says.

Weeks before, Perron was talking over those same issues with her colleagues at Goldman Sachs in New York, where she worked in the investor marketing group. “People there were very concerned about how we can improve the financial reporting and the transparency of companies,” she says. They were also very curious about how her professors at the Graduate School of Business would teach ethics.

Here’s how: David Brady, professor of political science and ethics, cuts to the chase in the first 10 minutes of class. “Should I steal if I can get away with it?” he asks Perron and her 61 classmates. “No!”

Welcome to P235: Ethics, a course about managerial decision-making that Brady, David Baron and other Stanford faculty have been teaching for 30 years. They examine ethics as a basis for self-regulation and look at theories that provide moral guidelines, including utilitarianism and justice. Also on the syllabus: what is a company’s responsibility beyond maximizing profits? What is the role of financial institutions?

For the past five years, students have taken the intensive, weeklong course as part of the required preterm curriculum. “We look at how to conduct business in a corrupt society, at genetic testing in the workplace, environmental justice, and Nike and the sweatshops,” Baron says.

Last February, as details about Enron’s corporate greed and collapse became public, Baron was finishing the fourth edition of his textbook, Business and Its Environment (Prentice Hall, 2003). He quickly inserted material about Enron before sending the manuscript to the printer. Baron also spent a lot of time on the phone responding to reporters. “They want to know, ‘Is everybody doing what Enron did?’ And the answer is no, of course not. And [they ask] ‘Are we changing the curriculum?’ And the answer is no, we have always done ethics, and we’ve always had it integrated into other courses.”

David Kreps, MA ’75, PhD ’75, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Business School, concurs. “If you looked at our catalog, you’d see E200: Managerial Economics and think, ‘No ethics here,’” he notes in an online forum for alumni. “But you’d be wrong, and the fact that ethics is there and, I suspect, woven into many of our courses makes for much more effective teaching and discussion.”

Take the course Ed Lazear teaches about incentives and productivity. “It’s a numbers-oriented course, and people tend to think that’s inhuman—to think about people as numbers,” says the professor of business and Hoover Institution senior fellow. “But there are ways to structure buyouts, for example, so that both the firm and the workers benefit. The basic theme is that if you do the right thing, workers benefit more.”

Back in P235: Ethics, Brady displays a cartoon of a CFO, feet on desk. It says, “I swear that, to the best of my knowledge (which is pretty poor and may be revised in future), my company’s accounts are (more or less) accurate. I have checked this with my auditors and directors who (I pay to) agree with me.” But Brady’s parting shot is perfectly serious: “What caused the Enron collapse? Greed gone awry.”

TOWN & GOWN

Where to Put the Trails

ALMOST TWO YEARS after the University signed the 10-year General Use Permit (GUP) with Santa Clara County that governs development on Stanford lands, construction has not yet started on two public recreational trails that the GUP requires. “We want to begin the process of making them a reality,” Gordon Earle, vice president for public affairs, wrote to the county board of supervisors in August. But two months later, he acknowledged that negotiations had reached an impasse.

Under the terms of the GUP, the University can develop 2 million square feet of academic facilities and up to 3,018 new housing units on the core academic campus as long as it meets 128 conditions. One of them calls for two 16-foot-wide trails on Stanford lands that would link hikers and bicyclists to other regional trails. Stanford has spent nearly $500,000 planning an eastern trail along Page Mill Road and a western route along Alpine Road, and the University expects to spend at least $8 million on construction of approximately five miles of paved pathways. The point of debate is where, exactly, to locate them.

The GUP stipulates that the trails must be located in areas that the University agrees to dedicate solely for that purpose. Stanford consistently has said that it wants the trails on the edge of its lands, to protect its rights as a property owner and ensure future flexibility for pursuing its academic mission. Both the GUP and the Countywide Trails Master Plan show the trails on the periphery of Stanford lands, and Stanford and county park department staff came to an agreement last December on two such trails. But the board of supervisors must approve the agreement, and seven environmental organizations—Acterra, the Committee on Green Foothills, Mid-Peninsula Action for Tomorrow, Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, People for Access to Trails in the Hills of Stanford, the Sierra Club and the Stanford Open Space Alliance—are lobbying the supervisors for different trails. The groups have proposed routes that veer into the interior of University lands, shadowing Campus Drive and curving up toward the Dish area. In August, the University said it was not obligated to pay for a $172,555 supplemental environmental review that includes the newly proposed trails.

At press time, Earle had received no official response to the letter he wrote to the county supervisors summarizing the University’s position, and public hearings had not yet been scheduled. “The ball is in their court,” he said. “They’re deciding what the next step will be.”

Cardinal Numbers

Inches kelp can grow in a single day: 6

Resident seals on Hopkins Marine Station land: 250-500

Sharks tagged by Hopkins researchers since 1999: 28

Largest bluefin tuna tagged this year by Hopkins researchers: 535 pounds

Shelf life, in years, of a can of Starkist albacore tuna: 4

Alumni surnamed Hopkins: 113

Sources: Hopkins Marine Station; Starkist; Stanford Alumni Association

EDUCATION

Motivating Kids to Learn

DEAN OF THE SCHOOL of Education Deborah Stipek recently finished gathering data for a study of achievement and motivation among 400 low-income kids in California, Vermont and Pennsylvania. Her latest book for parents, Motivated Minds: Raising Children Who Love Learning (Henry Holt and Co., 2001), co-authored with journalist Kathy Seal, follows a previous volume addressed to teachers, Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 4th ed., 2002).

STANFORD: We hear a lot today about teaching to the test. Are you concerned about this?

President Bush’s recent “no child left behind” education legislation is going to make it a federally mandated requirement that every state has to test every kid. There are real consequences to how students score on literacy and math, so what do you think is going to happen to social studies, science and the arts—and everything else that goes into producing a well-rounded person? Accountability is important, but the tests will have the effect of narrowing the curriculum and promoting an instructional program that is focused on performance on multiple-choice tests, rather than real learning.

The number of Advanced Placement tests for high school students is also increasing?

The number has increased substantially. And to the degree that a student’s success or a school’s reputation is based on passing the test, it’s going to drive the instructional programs. There are teachers who purposefully resist that and say, ‘We’re here to enjoy world history, and that’s what the course is about,’ but that’s a very hard path to take, and it takes a very courageous teacher to [do it].

So what is happening to learning?

A theme that runs through all of my work and my parenting is the notion that we undermine the love and excitement and enthusiasm for learning that children are born with. We have all kinds of cultural policies, practices, norms and beliefs that almost guarantee that by adolescence it’s a rare child who sees that learning can be fun.

What do your studies of motivation in elementary school children tell you?

If you ask kindergartners how smart they are, they rate themselves very highly, and they’re hard to discourage—it’s amazing how robust their optimism and enthusiasm are. But by third grade, kids have kind of figured out where they are on the continuum, and just as disconcerting is the fact that they’re quite comfortable evaluating themselves as smart or dumb on a very narrow dimension. Developmental research over the last 20 years has demonstrated again and again a decline in children’s motivation to learn.

Are you discouraged by that?

No. What makes me optimistic and energizes me to work harder for school reform is observing children in different contexts. You can see a seventh-grader move from one classroom to another and go from being a passive, tuned-out kid to being an eager, enthusiastic learner who can’t be suppressed. So the decline is not inevitable. Teachers can do something about it, and parents can do something about it.

FACULTY

Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend

WHEN GERALD GUNTHER WAS a young instructor of political science and constitutional law at Brooklyn College and City College in New York, he wanted to know more about the unfamiliar legal terms in the textbooks he was using. So he decided to continue his own studies. “I really viewed law school as one thinks of castor oil: an unpleasant experience that would be good for me,” he told Stanford Lawyer in 1974.

Gunther went on to graduate from Harvard Law School magna cum laude and become one of the country’s foremost authorities on constitutional law. He died July 30 of lung cancer at his campus home. He was 75.

Growing up in 1930s Germany, Gunther had his first exposure to questions of free speech when his first-grade teacher called him a “Jew pig.” His family emigrated to New York in 1938, and he earned degrees at Brooklyn College and Columbia University before going to Harvard. He then clerked for federal appellate judge Learned Hand—about whom he would later spend 20 years writing an award-winning biography—and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. While teaching at Columbia Law School, Gunther mentored a future justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1962, and was himself frequently mentioned as a candidate for the high court during the 1970s and ’80s.

Gunther “was a beloved teacher to four decades of law students,” says Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan. In the weeks after his death, colleagues and former students paid tribute to him on a Law School website. “Gerald Gunther was a wonderful con law teacher,” wrote Michael Melcher, JD/MBA ’94. “But what I remember most is his fondness for merriment and wordplay, which he displayed each year at the time of the Law School musical. Not only did he attend each performance, but he also cheerfully participated: in 1991, he played himself; and in 1992, he played God! Both were very suitable roles for Professor Gunther.”

Gunther is survived by his wife of 53 years, Barbara; two sons, Andrew and Daniel, JD ’83; two grandchildren; and his brother, Herbert Gutenstein.

OVERSEAS STUDIES

Visiting Israel

THEY CHOOSE TO STUDY abroad in a war zone. Every year, a few Stanford students travel to Israel. They go because they want to learn more about the region and its cultures. But mostly they go because they are Jewish and want to support their religion’s homeland. “When Israel’s in trouble, it’s even more important for me to be there,” says Keira Goldstein, ’02.

Studying in Israel is not as easy as in, say, Kyoto or Oxford, where Stanford has established centers. Although Overseas Studies would like to open a program in Jerusalem, academic director and earth sciences professor Amos Nur told Stanford Report in May, “we cannot [do so] unless a sufficient peace emerges.”

Meanwhile, students take leaves of absence, attend classes through another university, then apply to have the credits transferred. And because the State Department has issued a warning against traveling to Israel, Stanford policy prohibits undergraduates from tapping University funds to support their trips.

Senior Tali Golan, an international relations major focusing on the Middle East, spent last fall at Tel Aviv University. “I had a hard time sophomore year when the Intifada started, trying to understand what was going on from so far away,” she says.

Once Golan arrived in Jerusalem, though, the gravity of the situation became clear. “There were three huge attacks in one day,” she recalls. “I can remember getting on the bus and thinking, ‘Is this the bus that is going to blow up next?’” Uri Pomerantz, also a senior who studied at Tel Aviv University, accidentally left his backpack in a café there once. When he returned just minutes later, everyone inside had been evacuated and the authorities were hosing off tables, fearful that his backpack might contain a bomb.

Even in a nerve-racking atmosphere, Pomerantz was able to critically examine the conflict. “Both Palestinians and Israelis are right,” he concludes. “There needs to be a compromise.”

POLICY

New Rules on Relationships

IT'S AN AGE-OLD QUESTION: should faculty date students?

In the past year, universities across the country have revised their sexual harassment policies to make the answer clear: no.

Stanford’s new policy, which went into effect this year, states that such sexual or romantic relationships are “inconsistent with the proper role of the teacher” and “the University therefore very strongly discourages [them].” It also states that anyone in a “position of greater authority or power” in a consensual relationship—faculty, staff or student—must report the relationship to his or her supervisor, department chair, dean or human resources officer. That person also must recuse himself or herself from any supervisory or evaluative role over the other person in the relationship. Failure to take either step is grounds for discipline by a faculty committee. Previously, the policy contained just a “note” explaining some of the pitfalls inherent in consensual relationships.

Some universities, including Ohio Wesleyan and the College of William and Mary, explicitly prohibit faculty members from engaging in sexual relationships with students they supervise, advise or evaluate. Duke University recently adopted a policy similar to Stanford’s, advising that faculty “should not” engage in such relationships.

“We’re trying to have people recognize that it is not in line with the academic mission of the University to have people engaging in unprofessional relationships,” says Laraine Zappert, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who serves as director of Stanford’s Sexual Harassment Policy Office. “It’s a politically and professionally dumb thing to do.”

Zappert’s office oversees sexual harassment investigations and organizes training workshops. Zappert also counsels those concerned about being unjustly targeted. “Protecting your professional reputation is the best way to prevent false accusations from rising to the level of a sexual harassment complaint,” she tells them. “If you have a reputation for sexualizing your environment, or engaging in relationships with people who work for you, you’re going to have a harder time convincing people that you’re behaving professionally and properly at all times.”

MAJORS

The Humanist Premeds

TONYANNA BORKOVI IS HAVING A BALL her senior year. She hopes to try out for some plays in the drama department and plans to write her honors thesis on therapeutic and pathological aspects of drama in a play and two films.

So she’d like to study at the Royal Academy in London next? Go on to graduate school? Do performance art?

Yes and no. Borkovi has already taken the Medical College Admission Test and wants to become a primary care physician. She is one of a handful of undergraduates who are majoring in the premed option of the program in interdisciplinary studies in humanities and who will graduate with a transcript packed with required chemistry, biology, physics and math courses—and a bachelor of arts in humanities.

Why not major in biology? “Because the whole process of being in premed is extremely trying, and you’re in constant competition with your classmates,” Borkovi says. “Instead, I like the discussion and listening to other people’s ideas that I’ve found in humanities classes, and the bonds between people that are essential in theater.”

“It’s not that the specific study of Nietzsche is something students need in medicine, but rather how he writes and how he engages thought,” explains Helen Brooks, PhD ’80, acting director of interdisciplinary studies in humanities. “But I think it takes a while for premed students to be confident that medical schools are behind a major like this.”

Bring ’em on, says Phyllis Gardner, associate professor of medicine and a former senior associate dean at the Medical School. “I would love a student who has a broad humanistic perspective because a lot of being a physician is an art,” she adds. “You can’t just stand outside the door and throw your stethoscope around. You’ve got to listen and put it together, and that’s what the arts and humanities help one do.”

PASSIONS

Giving It a Go

“UH-OH. It looks like something bad happened.”

Mathematics professor Daniel Bump keeps glancing at his computer screen, tracking every move of the Go game that’s taking place somewhere in etherland. A player, probably European, is taking on GNU Go, the open-source software program that Bump and two dozen others worldwide have been rewriting and improving since 1998.

“This is a very turbulent game,” he says, pointing to two phalanxes of stones collecting at opposite ends of the simulated board. “All these stones look to me as if they’re going to die.”

Bump, who specializes in number theory, discovered the ancient Asian game of territory in a Portland, Ore., Go club when he was 16. These days, he usually gets up at 5 or 6 a.m. to feed his cats and check on any programming suggestions that came in overnight. Two other programmers—one in Sweden and one in Germany—also moderate the traffic. There are a number of computerized Go games on the market, but GNU Go is the only one that has its source code published on the Internet.

The action on the screen is heating up, and Bump’s colleague in Germany, who is watching the game at 11:30 p.m. his time, posts a comment: “Missing G5 is a typical GNU mistake.” Bump scans the stones, then punches out a reply: “Do you mean move 73?” A few seconds later comes the flickering response: “Yes.”

GNU Go is not a particularly speedy competitor—not yet as strong as an average Go player. With 361 different intersections on the board and 180 stones per player, Go has even more potential variations than chess, plus tens of thousands of standard opening moves to consider. At the moment, however, Bump is focusing on a posse of renegade white stones that is trying to avoid being captured by the black team, i.e., GNU Go.

“E8 bad,” he types.

“And surprising,” the German mathematician replies.

“Can we kill the upper left?”

“I would not think so.”

But white soon makes a fatal mistake, and the game, which has lasted about an hour, begins to wind down. Bump—who is working on a book titled The Mathematics of the Rubik’s Cube between games—says he expects to be refining GNU Go for years to come. “Very interesting things happen on the board,” he adds. “It’s full of surprises.”

Campus Notebook

A New Degree for Lawyers from Abroad

In September, the Law School launched a new LLM (master of laws) degree for 18 foreign-trained lawyers who will specialize either in corporate governance and practice or in law, science and technology. The one-year program aims to expose experienced lawyers to American-style legal training and thinking. “The more lawyers can become familiar with multiple legal systems, the more the practice gains,” says professor Margaret Jane Radin, ’63, a specialist in cyberlaw and e-commerce and director of the science and technology LLM program.

First Premeds, Now Pregrads

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded $1 million to Tim Stearns, an associate professor of biological sciences and genetics, to build creative undergraduate courses. Stearns plans to develop a “pregrad” program that will attract students who are considering graduate work in biology, rather than MD degrees. Undergrads in the program will be able to take a course in biological experimentation that relies more on journal articles than on textbooks, conduct research alongside professors and attend conferences where they’ll meet working scientists.

From the Med Center, News on Adult Stem Cells

Many scientists believe that embryonic stem cells, which can differentiate into any type of tissue, could someday be used to manufacture replacement organs and cure genetic diseases. When President Bush restricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines last year, however, some turned their attention to adult stem cells, hoping they would prove as versatile. But a recent study of mice by leading adult stem-cell researcher Irving Weissman, MD ’65, a professor of cancer biology, and postdoctoral fellow Amy Wagers casts some doubt. One adult blood-forming stem cell singlehandedly repopulated the mice’s blood and immune cells, but formed few, if any, other types of cells. “I hope it tempers the enthusiasm for adult stem-cell plasticity,” Wagers says. “Maybe it’s not the answer that it appeared to be.”

Who’s in Charge of the Band?

Giancarlo Aquilanti, an Italian composer and conductor who has directed the Stanford Wind Ensemble since 1997, has accepted the post of musical director of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band. Aquilanti, DMA ’96, is not responsible for policing the unpredictable ensemble, but he is attempting to teach members how to read music. “I hope that their interest will begin to shift to music and that they will think of themselves more as a musical group than a social event,” he says. “But that may be a few years off.”

Medical Rounds

LET THEM EAT BREAD: An estimated one in 200 Americans suffer from celiac sprue, or gluten intolerance. If they eat foods containing wheat, rye or barley, they can suffer severe, even fatal, intestinal damage. In the September 27 issue of Science, researchers working with chemistry and chemical engineering professor Chaitan Khosla identify the cause of the disease, a fragment of gluten that resists digestion. Next up: testing treatment with peptidase, a dietary enzyme made by a bacterium.

Survey Says

BEST-EDUCATED: The community of Stanford, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, has a higher percentage of adults over 25 with bachelor’s degrees—94.6 percent—than anyplace else in the nation.

WHICH IS IT? In its 2003 guide to graduate schools, U.S. News & World Report ranked Stanford’s Graduate School of Business No. 1. But in a September report, the Wall Street Journal placed it 39th. Dartmouth’s Tuck School nabbed the WSJ top spot.

TIED FOR FOURTH: And speaking of U.S. News, Stanford, along with Duke, MIT and Caltech, ranked behind No. 1 Princeton, No. 2 Harvard and No. 3 Yale in the magazine’s oft-criticized—and oft-consulted—survey of universities’ undergraduate programs.

LEANING LEFT: The 2003 edition of Princeton Review’s The Best 345 Colleges ranked Stanford 12th among schools where “students are still nostalgic for Bill Clinton.” Campus conservatives will be relieved to know that UC-Berkeley ranked eighth.

IN PRINT

The Life and Times of Dostoevsky

IT ALL STARTED in 1954. Joseph Frank, then the Christian Gauss lecturer at Princeton University, was writing a lecture for a seminar on existentialism and modern literature. In preparation, he reread Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—and it embarked him on his life’s work.

“I began to see connections between Dostoevsky’s work and the literary, philosophical and sociocultural situation in Russia at the time he was writing,” says Frank, who moved from Princeton to Stanford in 1985 and is now a Stanford professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature. “Most of the critical literature I had read about him had rather neglected this aspect or had thought it wasn’t important at all. I wanted to place him in his time.”

So Frank set out to do just that. And last spring, at 83, he completed the fifth and final volume in his 2,451-page series on the Russian writer, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton University Press, 2002). Part biography, part literary criticism, it follows Dostoevsky from his return to Russia after a stay in Western Europe through the writing and completion of The Brothers Karamazov to his death.

Frank’s own biography has a few surprises. Though he attended both New York University and the University of Wisconsin, he never earned a bachelor’s degree because he couldn’t afford to pay for school after the death of his parents. After working as an editor in Washington, D.C., and sojourning in France on a Fulbright scholarship, Frank attended the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ultimately received his doctorate in 1960. During the mid-1950s, he also taught himself to read Russian, so he could have access to the critical literature and original texts of Dostoevsky’s works.

Mantle of the Prophet, Frank says, was the most difficult of the five volumes to write “because of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, which only comes to the fore in the last period of his life. I found it very hard to cope with that, but I did the best I could.” A more enjoyable challenge: “trying to write well about [Dostoevsky’s] novels.”

By all accounts, Frank has succeeded. His second volume, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton University Press, 1983), won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. The third, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton University Press, 1986), was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1987.

“Frank’s greatest contribution to Dostoevsky studies has been to place Dostoevsky solidly in the history of European ideas,” says Robert Belknap, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures at Columbia University. “Frank taught us to see Dostoevsky’s works as responses to intellectual waves and political passions that were a part of our own past.”

—AMY KOVAC, ’99, MA ’00

TRENDS

What's Hip-Hop Doing in Academia?

SHANNON ASHFORD SAYS her family was down with it, but friends in the dorm were blown away when she told them she was taking a class called “The Language of Hip-Hop Culture.”

“They were just so astounded that Stanford would have it,” recalls Ashford, ’02. “But hip-hop is a culture, and one of my missions has been to get it considered more seriously in academic life. Which is why I ended up doing my senior honors thesis on it.”

Ashford is in tight company. On some 30 campuses nationwide—including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UC-Berkeley and now Stanford—a young generation of scholars who grew up with rap and graff(iti), b-boying and deejaying, sampling and scratching, is proudly bringing the culture of the street into the classroom. Or, in the parlance of the academy, they are applying the tools of discourse analysis and ethnographic field methods to the study of the latest chapter in the book of oral tradition.

“People in the United States may not fully appreciate the exponential growth of hip-hop internationally,” says education professor John Baugh, who participated in a panel at a 1998 American Anthropological Association meeting that looked at burgeoning hip-hop communities in Japan, Europe, South Africa and South America. “It’s really quite spectacular.” Translation? It’s fly. Def. Dope.

Baugh is the dissertation adviser of H. Samy Alim, 25, a New Jersey native who grew up with the music of Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five at the local roller rink. Co-author of the seminal work Street Conscious Rap (Black History Museum, 1999), Alim taught the linguistics class Ashford took last fall. Unlike researchers who have focused on the violence, anger and misogyny of some rap (the spoken form of hip-hop), Alim argues that the hip-hop nation, as it’s sometimes called, has prevailed for more than three decades because it is infused with an ethos of community activism. What better way to read that culture, he suggests, than by trying to understand the language and including it in the curriculum. “Hip-hop heads don’t battle with knives or guns, but with dance moves and rhymes,” Alim says. “The rhyme may land on the beat, or off it, with no wasted space and no wasted syllable. Hip-hop uses the traditional poetic forms of metaphor and simile, but it’s a whole new way of viewing poetics.”

While rap may not have a poetic rep with its critics, the times could be a-changin’. In May, the Committee on Black Performing Arts convened Hip-Hop in Conversation II, a symposium that looked at the history of the hip-hop nation, its growth among European working classes and the challenges faced by women performers. And in October, the University hosted about 50 scholars of African-American vernacular English at a conference where the lyrics of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur and the “filmic speech” of hip-hop movies took alternate turns in the spotlight. “Every young person who grows up in America today has been schooled in rap,” says linguistics professor John Rickford, who helped organize the conference. “Whenever I teach my course in African-American English, a large percentage of students choose to write on rap and hip-hop.” Recent papers looked at the work of Missy Elliott and the enduring LL Cool J, who recorded his first Def Jam album in 1984 and is on the charts this month with a new, profanity-free album.

As for hippest faculty member? No doubt. That would be drama professor Harry Elam, who has written about the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson as it relates to hip-hop culture. But Elam’s claim to fame among students stems more from who he happens to be than what he writes. When GangStarr, led by rapper Guru, performed in Dinkelspiel Auditorium in the spring of 1995, Elam was given a front-row seat. As he walked down the aisle, he could hear the admiring whispers that followed him: “That’s the Guru’s brother.”

STUDENT LIFE

Support for Gay Freshmen

WHEN FRESHMAN and transfer students opened their registration packets at Orientation this fall, each found a CD-ROM package listing welcome events for students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (collectively described as LGBT). Those who popped the disks into their computers were invited to choose from folk, hip-hop and techno soundtracks, then given a virtual tour of Stanford’s LGBT Community Resources Center.

Why th CD? “The only way we could make students who need resources aware of what we have to offer was to make the entire incoming class aware,” says center director Ben Davidson. “The majority of our constituency is closeted or questioning.”

But that may be changing. “The age at which people are coming out is getting lower and lower,” he says (one estimate is that the median age is between 15 and 17). “Universities across the country are seeing more admitted freshmen who have been out in high school.” And Stanford, like other universities competing for a talented pool of students, is taking steps to reach this growing population. Last May, the University joined more than 40 institutions, including Harvard, Yale and Brown, at the nation’s first college fair for gay high schoolers. The Boston fair, which drew 2,000 students, “was absolutely something Stanford wanted to participate in,” says Marcela Muñiz, ’97, an assistant dean of undergraduate admission.

Once LGBT students arrive on campus, the center works hard to support them. This fall, a new academic and advising program included a workshop at which frosh met openly gay faculty and heard about the research graduate students are doing in LGBT studies. Winter quarter workshops will address tougher issues—dealing with depression and anxiety, and finding financial aid for those who are disowned by their parents when they come out.

“The bulk of our students are struggling to find a place for themselves, to feel accepted, to feel part of a social network,” Davidson says. “What they want, instead of [just] events or speakers, is concrete support as they negotiate challenging academic and social terrain.”

HEALTH RESEARCH

What Alcohol Can Do to Women

YEARS OF STUDYING MEN who have drunk as much as two tons of alcohol in their lifetimes tells Edith Sullivan that alcoholism has toxic physical effects. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans show dramatic shrinkage and structural abnormalities—“really nasty-looking brains”—and cognitive tests have demonstrated that these men have impaired problem solving, visuospatial abilities, working memory and balance.

Now, Sullivan, a neuropsychologist, neuroimager and associate research professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, is finding that alcoholic women also may have substantial damage.

“With women, we’ve had a harder time finding abnormalities in brain structure,” Sullivan says. “We have to use a different set of tools and dig a little deeper.”

Sullivan’s new study of 34 women used diffusion tensor imaging to reveal abnormalities in the brain’s white matter that were not detectable with conventional MRI scans. The initial findings suggest that “alcoholic women are not so badly off as the men in their motor capacities,” Sullivan says. “But that’s not to say that they’re not impaired, or that women can drink with impunity.” The study also suggests “possible evidence of recovery” as a result of abstaining from alcohol.

Sullivan says the new findings should help patients and agencies understand that alcoholism does result in serious brain and functional abnormalities—that “this is not a three-day problem.” On the plus side, she adds, “I’d be delighted to see that with continued sobriety there is a total reversal of deficits in brain structure and in brain behavior. That may be a touch optimistic, but significant improvement would be something to aspire to.”

THINK TANKS

Camaraderie and Cheesecake at the Center on the Hill

LUNCH IS GOURMET FARE—chicken jambalaya, black bean soup, an overflowing salad bar and a sliver of cheesecake—and the view of the Stanford environs from the patio tables is equally dreamlike.

Which just might be the point. Scholars who are invited to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, up in the Foothills near the golf course and observatory, are expected to reflect, cogitate, theorize, converse, analyze and dream—big time. “Lots of our fellows think of this as the mother of all summer breaks,” says director Doug McAdam, a Stanford professor of sociology. “We hope they’ll use the time here to open themselves up, explore new possibilities and launch new projects.”

McAdam, who specializes in social movements and so-called contentious politics, spent two years as a fellow at the center before being appointed director one year ago. He remembers what it was like when there were no—what?—telephones, way back in the mid-’90s. “The culture of the place historically has been almost like a monastic retreat,” he says. “You were not to be distracted from the important work you were doing, and that meant there weren’t any phones in the studies. If you got a call, you were apprised of it, but you were encouraged not to take it. And if you did take it, you had to sit in a little phone booth with the rain pouring down outside.”

Although the center is now wired for laptops and Internet gizmos, the pace is laid back, even by California standards. Blue herons and the occasional nonpoisonous snake make appearances, and the daily volleyball game is a favorite with many. “It was the wonderful physical and laugh-filled break in the day that I needed before returning to my writing,” says education professor emeritus Larry Cuban, PhD ’74, who spent the 1999-2000 academic year on the hill and is one of more than 160 Stanford faculty members who have been awarded fellowships. He not only completed two books there—Oversold and Underused: Computers in Schools (Harvard University Press, 2001) and How Can I Fix It: An Educator’s Guide to Solving Problems and Managing Dilemmas (Teachers College Press, 2001)—but also found near-nirvana. “It was the closest I have been to the university ideal of a community of scholars.”

The center’s library holds more than 1,200 books that have been written on the premises since the doors opened in 1954. Sitting on Stanford land but governed by an independent board of trustees and funded by private foundations, the center does not accept applications, but rather issues invitations for the coveted fellowships. During the residence year, each fellow teaches one Wednesday-evening seminar on her or his work, but that’s the only required project. There is space for 48 scholars, with several from overseas institutions and no more than five from Stanford. Humanists constitute about one-third of the group. The list of former fellows reads like a Who’s Who in the Academy: art historian Svetlana Alpers, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, economist Victor Fuchs, author Bernard Malamud, philosopher John Rawls and literary critic Ian Watt. Each scholar is paid up to one-half of his or her academic salary, and many stay on as long as they can. “The day we close down in mid-August, we have to go around with a bullhorn and say, ‘We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up,’” McAdam jokes.

In the year he has served as director, McAdam has been targeting a new cohort that he calls “eve-of-tenure” scholars. He believes that the tenure system is failing universities because assistant professors have to work within a narrow disciplinary focus to gain tenure, and therefore aren’t producing risk-taking scholarship. “I’m convinced that arguably the most important use of the fellowships is to bring the most promising young scholars here and say, ‘You don’t have to think narrowly anymore, so try to think more broadly and live inside the logic of an ambitious new project that’s been rattling around in your brain,’” McAdam says. “Intervening at that critical moment in their careers could strengthen, safeguard and enhance the long-term productivity of the social and behavioral sciences.”