Stanford University is so
startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat
from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes
through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to
buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard.
Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the
“Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while
they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are
generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their
names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets,
but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and
computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of
Silicon Valley.
Innovation comes from myriad sources, including
the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself
as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April,
Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion
dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are
Stanford graduates in their late twenties. The initial investor was a
Stanford alumnus.
The campus, in fact, seems designed to nurture
such success. The founder of Sierra Ventures, Peter C. Wendell, has been
teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital part time at the business
school for twenty-one years, and he invites sixteen venture capitalists
to visit and work with his students. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of
Google, joins him for a third of the classes, and Raymond Nasr, a
prominent communications and public-relations executive in the Valley,
attends them all. Scott Cook, who co-founded Intuit, drops by to talk to
Wendell’s class. After class, faculty, students, and guests often pick
up lattes at Starbucks or cafeteria snacks and make their way to outdoor
tables.
On a sunny day in February, Evan Spiegel had an
appointment with Wendell and Nasr to seek their advice. A lean
mechanical-engineering senior from Los Angeles, in a cardigan, T-shirt,
and jeans, Spiegel wanted to describe the mobile-phone application,
called Snapchat, that he and a fraternity brother had designed. The idea
came to him when a friend said, “I wish these photos I am sending this
girl would disappear.” As Spiegel and his partner conceived it, the app
would allow users to avoid making youthful indiscretions a matter of
digital permanence. You could take pictures on a mobile device and share
them, and after ten seconds the images would disappear.
Spiegel
needed some business advice from campus mentors. He and his partner
already had forty thousand users and were maxing out their credit cards.
If they reached a million customers, the cost of their computer servers
would exceed twenty thousand dollars per month. Spiegel told Wendell
and Nasr that he needed investment money but feared going to a
venture-capital firm, “because we don’t want to lose control of the
company.” When Wendell asked if he’d like an introduction to the people
at Twitter, Spiegel said that he was afraid that they might steal the
idea. Wendell and Nasr suggested a meeting with Google’s venture-capital
arm. Spiegel agreed, Nasr arranged it, and Spiegel and Google are now
talking.
Spiegel
knows that mentors like Wendell will play an important part in helping
him to realize his dreams for the mobile app. “I had the opportunity to
sit in Peter’s class as a sophomore,” Spiegel says. “I was sitting next
to Eric Schmidt. I was sitting next to Chad Hurley, from YouTube. I
would go to lunches after class and listen to these guys talk. I met
Scott Cook, who’s been an incredible mentor.” His faculty adviser, David
Kelley, the head of the school of design, put him in touch with
prospective angel investors.
If the Ivy League was the breeding
ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm
system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said,
Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are
Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a
director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a
successful former entrepreneur. Stanford’s Office of Technology
Licensing has licensed eight thousand campus-inspired inventions, and
has generated $1.3 billion in royalties for the university. Stanford’s
public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies “trace their
origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.” They
include Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay,
Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent
Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
John
Doerr, a partner at the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers, which bankrolled such companies as Google and Amazon,
regularly visits campus to scout for ideas. He describes Stanford as
“the
germplasm for innovation. I can’t imagine Silicon Valley without Stanford University.”
Leland
Stanford was a Republican governor and senator in the late nineteenth
century, who made a fortune from the Central Pacific and Southern
Pacific railroads, which he had helped to found. Stout and bearded, he
could be typecast, like Gould, Morgan, and Vanderbilt, as a robber
baron. Without knowing it, this man of the industrial revolution spent
part of his legacy establishing a center for what would become the Age
of Innovation. After his only child, Leland, Jr., died, of typhoid
fever, at fifteen, Stanford and his wife, Jane, bequeathed more than
eight thousand acres of farmland, thirty-five miles south of San
Francisco, to found a university in their son’s name. They hired
Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, to create an open
campus with no walls, vast gardens and thousands of palm and Coast Live
Oak trees, and California mission-inspired sandstone buildings with
red-tiled roofs. Today, the campus extends from Palo Alto to Woodside
and Portola Valley, spanning two counties, three Zip Codes, and six
government jurisdictions.
Stanford University opened its doors in
1891. Jane and Leland Stanford said in their founding grant that the
university, rather than becoming an ivory tower, would “qualify its
students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life.” From its
early days, engineers and scientists attracted government and corporate
research funds as well as venture capital for start-ups, first for
innovations in radio and broadcast media, then for advances in
electronics, microprocessing, medicine, and digital technology. One of
the first big tech companies in Silicon Valley—Federal Telegraph, which
produced radios—was started by a young Stanford graduate in 1909. The
university’s first president, David Starr Jordan, was an angel investor.
Frederick Terman, an engineer who joined the faculty in 1925,
became the dean of the School of Engineering after the Second World War
and the provost in 1955. He is often called “the father of Silicon
Valley.” In the thirties, he encouraged two of his students, William
Hewlett and David Packard, to construct in a garage a new line of audio
oscillators that became the first product of the Hewlett-Packard
Company.
Terman nurtured start-ups by creating the Stanford
Industrial Park, which leased land to tech firms like Hewlett-Packard;
today, the park is home to about a hundred and fifty companies. He
encouraged his faculty to serve as paid consultants to corporations, as
he did, to welcome tech companies on campus, and to persuade them to
subsidize research and fellowships for Stanford’s brightest students.
William
F. Miller, a physicist, was the last Stanford faculty member recruited
by Terman, and he rose to become the university’s provost. Miller, who
is now eighty-six and an emeritus professor at Stanford’s business
school, traces the symbiotic relationship between Stanford and Silicon
Valley to Stanford’s founding. “This was kind of the Wild West,” he
said. “The gold rush was still on. Custer’s Last Stand was only nine
years before. California had not been a state very long—roughly, thirty
years. People who came here had to be pioneers. Pioneers had two
qualities: one, they had to be adventurers, but they were also community
builders. So the people who came here to build the university also
intended to build the community, and that meant interacting with
businesses and helping create businesses.”
President Hennessy
believes that the entrepreneurial spirit is part of the university’s
foundation, and he attributes this freedom partly to California’s
relative lack of legacy industries or traditions that need to be
protected, so “people are willing to try things.” At Stanford more than
elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in
which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess
a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for
the better. Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by
their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty
millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.
Hennessy earned six hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars in salary
from Stanford last year, but he has made far more as a board member of
and shareholder in Google and Cisco.
Very often, the wealth
created by Stanford’s faculty and students flows back to the school.
Hennessy is among the foremost fund-raisers in America. In his twelve
years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen
billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised
more money than any other American university.
Like other élite
schools, Stanford has become increasingly diverse. Caucasian students
are now a minority on campus; roughly sixty per cent of undergraduates,
and more than half of graduate students, are Asian, black, Hispanic,
Native American, or from overseas; seventeen per cent of Stanford’s
undergraduates are the first member of their family to attend college.
Half of Stanford’s undergraduates receive need-based financial aid: if
their annual family income is below a hundred thousand dollars, tuition
is free. “They are the locomotive kids, pulling their whole family
behind them,” Tobias Wolff, a novelist who has taught at Stanford for
nearly two decades, says.
But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture
has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a
gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and
student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.
Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities. A quarter
of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students
are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per
cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether
Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning,
between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery
for its own sake.
David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian who has taught at Stanford for more than forty years, credits
the university with helping needy students and spawning talent in
engineering and business, but he worries that many students uncritically
incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not
nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of
pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of
innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s
in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to
the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and
investigation for its own sake.”
In February,
2011, a dozen members of the Bay Area business community had dinner with
President Obama at the home of the venture capitalist John Doerr. Steve
Jobs, who was in the late stages of the illness that killed him, eight
months later, sat at a large rectangular table beside Obama; Mark
Zuckerberg, of Facebook, sat on the other side. They were flanked by
Silicon Valley corporate chiefs, from Google, Cisco, Oracle, Genentech,
Twitter, Netflix, and Yahoo. The only non-business leader invited was
Hennessy. His attendance was not a surprise. “John Hennessy is the
godfather of Silicon Valley,” Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who
as an engineering student co-invented the first Internet browser, says.
Hennessy
is fifty-nine, six feet tall, and trim, with thinning gray hair and a
square jaw. He talks fast and loud, one thought colliding with the next;
he bubbles over with information and data points. His laugh is a sharp
cackle. Hennessy grew up in Huntington, Long Island. His father was an
aerospace engineer; his mother quit teaching to rear six children. As a
child, he read straight through the sixteen-volume encyclopedia his
parents gave him. He studied electrical engineering at Villanova
University and went on to earn a doctorate in computer science at Stony
Brook University. He married his high-school sweetheart, Andrea Berti,
and, in 1977, became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at
Stanford.
Hennessy’s academic work focussed on redesigning
computer architecture, primarily through streamlining software that
would make processors work more efficiently; the technology was called
Reduced Instruction Set Computer (
RISC). He co-wrote two
textbooks that are still considered to be seminal in computer-science
classes. He took a year’s sabbatical from Stanford in 1984 to co-found
MIPS Computer Systems. In 1992, it was sold to Silicon Graphics for three hundred and thirty-three million dollars.
MIPS
technology has contributed to the miniaturization of electronics,
making possible the chips that power everything from laptops and mobile
phones to refrigerators and automobile dashboards. “
RISC
was foundational,” Andreessen says. “It was one of the maybe five or six
things in the history of the industry that really matter.”
Hennessy
returned to teaching at Stanford, and became a full professor in 1986.
In 1996, he was elevated to dean of the School of Engineering. He had
little time to teach, but he marvelled at the inventions of his graduate
students. He describes the time, in the mid-nineties, when Jerry Yang
and David Filo took him to visit their campus trailer, which was
littered with pizza boxes and soda cans, to show off a directory of Web
sites called Yahoo. He calls this an “aha moment,” because he realized
that the Web was “going to change how everyone communicated.”
In
1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate students, showed
Hennessy their work on search software that they later called Google. He
typed in the name Gerhard Casper, and instead of getting results for
Casper the Friendly Ghost, as he did on AltaVista, up popped links to
Gerhard Casper the president of Stanford. He was thrilled when members
of the engineering faculty mentored Page and Brin and later became
Google investors, consultants, and shareholders. Since Stanford owned
the rights to Google’s search technology, he was also thrilled when, in
2005, the stock grants that Stanford had received in exchange for
licensing the technology were sold for three hundred and thirty-six
million dollars.
In 1999, after Condoleezza Rice stepped down as
provost to become the chief foreign-policy adviser to the Republican
Presidential candidate George W. Bush, Casper offered Hennessy the
position of chief academic and financial officer of the university. Soon
afterward, Hennessy induced a former electrical-engineering faculty
colleague, James Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics (which
purchased
MIPS), to give a hundred and fifty million
dollars to create the James H. Clark Center for medical and scientific
research. Less than a year later, Casper stepped down as president and
Hennessy replaced him.
Hennessy joined Cisco’s corporate board in
2002, and Google’s in 2004. It is not uncommon for a university
president to be on corporate boards. According to James Finkelstein, a
professor at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, a third
of college presidents serve on the boards of one or more publicly traded
companies. Hennessy says that his outside board work has made him a
better president. “Both Google and Cisco face—and all companies in a
high-tech space face—a problem that’s very similar to the ones
universities face: how do they maintain a sense of innovation, of a
willingness to do the new thing?” he says.
But Gerhard Casper
worries that any president sitting on a board can pose a conflict of
interest. Stanford was one of the first universities to agree to allow
Google to digitize a third of its library—some three million books—at a
time when publishers and the Authors Guild were suing the company for
copyright infringement. Hennessy says that he did not participate in the
decision and “never saw the agreement.” But shouldn’t the president of a
university see an agreement that may violate copyright laws and that
represents a historic clash between the university and the publishing
industry? And shouldn’t he worry that those who made the decision might
be eager to reach an agreement that would please him?
Debra Satz,
the senior associate dean for Humanities and Arts at Stanford, who
teaches ethics and political philosophy, is troubled that Hennessy is
handcuffed by his industry ties. This subject has often been discussed
by faculty members, she says: “My view is that you can’t forbid the
activity. Good things come out of it. But it raises dangers.” Philippe
Buc, a historian and a former tenured member of the Stanford faculty,
says, “He should not be on the Google board. A leader doesn’t have to
express what he wants. The staff will be led to pro-Google actions
because it anticipates what he wants.”
Hennessy has also invested
in such venture-capital firms as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and
Foundation Capital—companies that have received investment funds from
the university’s endowment board, on which Hennessy sits. In 2007, an
article published in the
Wall Street Journal—“
THE GOLDEN TOUCH OF STANFORD’S PRESIDENT”—highlighted the cozy relationship between Hennessy and Silicon Valley firms. The
Journal
reported that during the previous five years he had earned forty-three
million dollars; a portion of that sum came from investments in firms
that also invest Stanford endowment monies. Hennessy flicks aside
criticism of those investments, noting that he isn’t actively involved
in managing the endowment and likening them to a mutual fund: “I’m a
limited partner. I couldn’t even tell you what most of these investments
were in.”
Perhaps because his position is so seemingly secure,
and his assets so considerable, Hennessy rarely appears defensive. He
knows that questions about conflicts of interest won’t define his
legacy, and they seem less pressing when Stanford is thriving.
Facebook’s purchase of Instagram made millions for, among others,
Sequoia Capital—which means that it made money for Hennessy and for
Stanford’s endowment, too.
Two decades ago, when the Stanford humor magazine, the Chaparral, did a spoof issue with the Harvard Lampoon, the Chappie,
as it’s called, rearranged Harvard’s logo—“Ve Ri Tas”—to “Ve Ry Tan.”
Sometimes the campus stars are athletes. This year, the quarterback
Andrew Luck is the likely No. 1 pick in the N.F.L. draft. He stayed
through his senior year to earn a degree in architectural design. “I sat
next to him in a class once,” Ishan Nath, a senior economics major,
says. “I didn’t talk to him, but I sneezed and he said, ‘Bless you.’ For
the next month, like, ‘I got blessed by Andy Luck!’ ” But, at Stanford,
star athletes don’t always have the status they do at other schools.
When Tiger Woods was a student, in the mid-nineties, not everyone knew
who he was. One classmate, Adam Seelig, now a poet and a theatre
director, spotted Woods practicing in his hallway one night and returned
to his own dorm to ask who “this total loser practicing putts at 11 P.M. on a Saturday night” was.
Thirty-four
thousand high-school seniors applied for Stanford’s current freshman
class, and only twenty-four hundred—seven per cent—were accepted. Part
of the appeal, undoubtedly, is the school’s laid-back vibe. There are
nearly as many bicycles on campus—thirteen thousand—as undergraduate and
graduate students. Flip-flops are worn year-round.
“To me, it
felt like a four-year camp,” Devin Banerjee, who graduated last year and
is now a reporter for Bloomberg News, says. “We had so many camp
counsellors. You never felt lost.” Michael Tubbs, a senior who was
brought up by a single mother and whose father has been in prison for
most of his son’s life, says that he could not have attended Stanford
without a full financial-aid scholarship. He is an honors student, and
marvels at how financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students
who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the
first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.
After he graduates, Tubbs plans to return home to Stockton, California,
to challenge an incumbent member of the city council this fall.
To
listen to students who are presumably in the most anxious, rebellious
period of their lives express such serenity is jarring. One afternoon, I
met with some undergraduates at the CoHo coffee-house. They almost
uniformly described an idyllic university life. Tenzin Seldon, a senior
and a comparative-studies major from India, was one of five Rhodes
Scholars chosen from Stanford this year. She said that Stanford is
particularly welcoming to foreign students. Ishan Nath, who also won a
Rhodes Scholarship, disagrees with those who say that Stanford is a
utilitarian university: “There are plenty of opportunities for learning
for the sake of learning here.” Kathleen Chaykowski, a junior, was a
premed and an engineering major who switched to English, and last year
was the editor-in-chief of the
Stanford Daily. She spoke about
the risk-taking that is integral to Silicon Valley. “My academic adviser
said, ‘I want you to have a messy career at Stanford. I want to see you
try things, to discover the parts of yourself that you didn’t know
existed.’ ”
Each year, Hennessy visits four to five freshman
dormitories to field questions. When he visited the Cedro dorm, on
January 30th, the forty or so students gathered around him in the
recreation room often asked the kinds of benign question posed to
celebrities on TV shows: Did he miss computer science? Or they sometimes
asked the questions of young careerists: To be successful, what should
we do?
The students’ calm, however, belies the stress that they
are under. “Looking around, most everyone looks incredibly productive,
seems surrounded by friends, and ultimately appears to be fundamentally
happy. This aura of good cheer is contagious,” the editorial board of the
Stanford Daily
wrote in early April, in an essay that described the Stanford duck
syndrome in detail. “Yet this contagious happiness has its dark side:
Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel
abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over
this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the
situation.”
In late 2010, Mayor Michael
Bloomberg announced that New York wanted to replicate the success of
Silicon Valley in the city’s Silicon Alley, and he called for a public
competition among universities to build an élite graduate school of
engineering and applied sciences on city-owned land. Seven universities
submitted proposals for a campus on Roosevelt Island, and Stanford was
widely viewed as the early front-runner.
Stanford’s proposal
contained a cover letter from Hennessy that conveyed his sweeping
ambition:
“StanfordNYC has the potential to help catapult New York City
into a leadership position in technology, to enhance its entrepreneurial
endeavors and outcomes, diversify its economic base, enhance its talent
pool and help our nation maintain its global lead in science and
technology.” Stanford proposed spending an initial two hundred million
dollars to build a campus housing two hundred faculty and more than two
thousand graduate students. It pledged to raise $1.5 billion for the
campus.
This was not to be a satellite campus. It would be solely
an engineering and applied-science school. Hennessy proposed that each
department base three-quarters of its faculty in Palo Alto and a quarter
on Roosevelt Island. Nor was it to be solely a research facility.
(Stanford has one at Peking University, in Beijing.) Faculty members
across the country would share videoconference screens, and students in
New York would be able to take online classes based in Palo Alto.
Stanford’s chief fund-raiser, Martin Shell, who is the vice-president
for development, says, “New York City could be the place we could begin
to put into place a truly second campus. One hundred years from now, we
could be a global university.”
Not everyone on Stanford’s campus
shared Hennessy’s enthusiasm. Members of the humanities faculty were
upset that Stanford proposed to create a second campus without including
liberal-arts faculty or students. Casper, the former Stanford
president, asked whether the Roosevelt Island project would “reinforce
the cliché that we are science and engineering and biology driven and
the arts and humanities are stepchildren.” According to Jeffrey Koseff,
the director of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, there
were “mixed feelings,” because of fears that resources would be drained
from the Palo Alto campus. And there were additional questions: Would
Stanford be able to recruit top faculty and students to New York when
the technological heart of the country was in Silicon Valley? Could
Stanford really reproduce in New York its “secret sauce,” a phrase that
university officials use almost mystically to describe whatever it is
that makes the school succeed as an entrepreneurial incubator?
Exactly
what that sauce is provokes much speculation, but an essential
ingredient is the attitude on campus that business is a partner to be
embraced, not kept at arm’s length. The Stanford benefactor and former
board chairman Burton McMurtry says, “When I first came here, the
faculty did not look down its nose at industry, like most faculties.”
Stanford’s proposal to New York, almost as a refrain, repeatedly
referred to the “close ties between the industry and the university.”
People
may remember Hennessy’s reign most for the expansion of Stanford into
Silicon Valley. But his principal academic legacy may be the growth of
what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now
promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business,
medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors
to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have
them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a
particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines.
Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to
collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years
ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff
Koseff says. “John changed that.”
Among the bolder initiatives to
create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the
d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the
school of engineering.
Its founder and director is David Kelley, who, with a thick black
mustache and black-framed eyeglasses, looks like Groucho Marx, without
the cigar. His mission, he says, is to instill “empathy” in his
students, to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges
posed in class, and to provoke them to be creative. Stanford is not the
only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others,
does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most
audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and
revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school
concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health
and wellness; and K-12 education. The d.school space is open, with
sliding doors and ubiquitous whiteboards and tables too small to
accommodate laptops; Kelley doesn’t want students retreating into their
in-boxes. There are very few lectures at the school, and students are
graded, in part, on their collaborative skills and on evaluations by
fellow-students.
Sarah Stein Greenberg, who is the managing
director of the d.school, was a student and then a fellow. Her 2006
class project was to figure out an inexpensive way for farmers in Burma
to extract water from the ground for irrigation. Greenberg and her team
of students travelled to Burma, and devised a cheap and efficient
treadle pump that looks like a Stairmaster, which the farmer steps on in
order to extract water. A local nonprofit partner manufactured and sold
twenty thousand pumps, costing thirty-seven dollars each. In his
unpretentious, book-filled office, John Hennessy displays items that
have been produced, at least in part, by Stanford students to assist
developing countries, including a baby warmer for premature babies; the
simple device’s cost is one per cent of an incubator’s.
In late
January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme
Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor,
consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from
thirteen departments, including engineering, political science,
business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter,
and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was
to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children.
Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.
David Janka, a
teaching fellow, who walked about the class’s vast open space wearing
tapered khakis and shoes without socks, invited the students to gather
in groups around the white wooden tables to discuss how to address these
challenges. Patell and Janka were joined by David Beach, a professor of
mechanical engineering; Julian Gorodsky, a practicing therapist and the
“team shrink” at the d.school; and Stuart Coulson, a retired venture
capitalist who volunteers at the university up to fifty hours per week.
“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right
and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really,
really better.”
Justin Ferrell, who was attending Stanford on a
one-year fellowship, on leave from his job as the digital-design
director at the Washington
Post, said that he was impressed by
“the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy,
committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the
Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.
Multidisciplinary
courses at Stanford worked for two earlier graduates, Kevin Systrom and
Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram. In 2005 and 2007,
respectively, Systrom and Krieger were awarded Mayfield fellowships.
(Only a dozen upperclassmen are chosen each year.) In an intense
nine-month work-study program, fellows immerse themselves in the
theoretical study of entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership, and
work during the summer in a Valley start-up. Tom Byers, an engineering
professor, founded the program in 1996, and says that it aims to impart
to fellows this message: “Anything is possible.” Byers has kept in touch
with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite
humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who
could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.
The
most articulate critic of the way the university functions might be the
man who used to run it. Gerhard Casper, who is a senior fellow at
Stanford, is full of praise for Hennessy, and the two men clearly like
each other. Nonetheless, it wasn’t hard to find a few daggers in a
speech that Casper gave in May, 2010, in Jerusalem. The United States
has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each
other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of
relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through
disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and
not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college
degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a
graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two
years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a
major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of
disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not
broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.”
Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on
solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that
academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but
will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to
“its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of
truth.” Casper said that he worried that universities would be diverted
from basic research by the lure of new development monies from “the
marketplace,” and that they would shift to “ever greater emphasis on
direct usefulness,” which might mean “even less funding of and attention
to the arts and humanities.”
When I visited Casper in his office
on campus this winter, I asked him if his critique applied to Stanford.
“I am a little concerned that Stanford, along with its peers, is now
justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity
and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a
research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a
development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks
draining more resources from liberal arts at a time when “most
undergraduates at most universities are there not because they really
want to get a broad education but because they want to get the
wherewithal for a good job.”
John Hennessy is familiar with
Casper’s Jerusalem speech. “It applies to everyone—us, too,” he says.
Getting into college is very competitive, tuition is very expensive,
and, with economic uncertainty, students become preoccupied with
majoring in subjects that may lead to jobs. “That’s why so many students
are majoring in business,” Hennessy says, and why so few are humanities
majors. He shares the concern that too many students are too
preoccupied with getting rich. “It’s true broadly, not just here,” he
says.
Miles Unterreiner, a senior, fretted in the
Stanford Daily that
students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming
“slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time
being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that
is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual
results,” he wrote. “Bentham and Mill would be proud. We excel at making
rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment,
which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy
Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any
decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”
“At
most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,” Casper
told me. Two members of the humanities faculty—David Kennedy and Tobias
Wolff, a three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for his short
stories—extoll Stanford’s English and history departments but worry that
the university has acquired a reputation as a place for people more
interested in careers or targeted education than in a lofty “search for
truth.”
Attempting to address this weakness, Stanford released,
in January, a study of its undergraduate education. The report promoted
the T-student model embraced by Hennessy. The original Stanford “object”
of creating “usefulness in life,” though affirmed, was said to be
insufficient. “We want our students not simply to succeed but to
flourish; we want them to live not only usefully but also creatively,
responsibly, and reflectively.” The report was harsh:
The
long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the
accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh
connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s
education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and
problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most
departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential
capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover
how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their
extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead
curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the
different spheres of their experience.
Like
any president of a large university, John Hennessy is subject to a
relentless schedule of breakfasts, meetings, lunches, speeches,
ceremonies, handshakes, dinners, and late-night calls alerting him to an
injury or a fatality on campus. His home becomes a public space for
meetings and entertaining. He juggles various constituencies—faculty,
administrators, students, alumni, trustees, athletics. The routine
becomes a daily blur, compelling a president to want to break away and
seek a larger vision, something that becomes his stamp, his legacy. For a
while, it seemed that StanfordNYC might provide that legacy.
Hennessy
declared that a New York campus was “a landmark decision.” He invested
enormous time and effort to overcome faculty, alumni, trustee, and
student unease about diverting campus resources for such a grandiose
project. “I was originally a skeptic,” Otis Reid, a senior economics
major, says. But Hennessy persuaded him, by arguing that Stanford’s
future will be one of expansion, and Reid agreed that New York was a
better place to go first than Abu Dhabi.
On December 16, 2011,
Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the
university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy
praised “the mayor’s bold vision.” But he was seething. In January, he
told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After
seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly
wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a
full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible.
The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s general counsel and
lead negotiator, added “many millions of dollars in penalties that were
not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure
to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the
fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over
thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so
poorly by a reputable party.” One demand that particularly infuriated
Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not
Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city
lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who
did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford
officials. However, city negotiators were undoubtedly aware that Mayor
Bloomberg, in a speech at M.I.T., in November, had said of two of the
applicants, “Stanford is desperate to do it. Cornell is desperate to do
it. . . . We can go back and try to renegotiate with each” university.
Out of the blue, Hennessy says, the city introduced the new demands.
To
Hennessy, these demands illustrated a shocking difference between the
cultures of Silicon Valley and of the city. “I’ve cut billion-dollar
deals in the Valley with a handshake,” Hennessy says. “It was a very
different approach”—and, he says, the city was acting “not exactly like a
partner.”
Yet the decision seemed hasty. Why would Hennessy, who
had made such an effort to persuade the university community to embrace
StanfordNYC, not pause to call a business-friendly mayor to try to get
the city to roll back what he saw as its new demands? Hennessy says that
his sense of trust was fundamentally shaken. City officials say they
were surprised by the sudden pullout, especially since Hennessy had an
agreeable conversation with Deputy Mayor Steel earlier that same week.
Steel
insists that “the goalposts were fixed.” All the stipulations that
Stanford now complains about, he says, were part of the city’s original
package. Actually, they weren’t. In the city’s proposal request, the due
dates and penalties were left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of the
New York City Economic Development Corporation, who was one of the
city’s lead negotiators, says that these were to be filled in by each
bidder and then discussed in negotiations. “The more aggressive they
were on the schedule and the more aggressive they were on the amount,
the more favorably” the city looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the
negotiations, he said, he tried to get each bidder to boost its offer by
alerting it of more favorable competing bids. At one point, Stanford
asked about an ambiguous clause in the city’s proposal request: would
the university have to indemnify the city if it were sued for, say,
polluted water on Roosevelt Island? The city responded that the
university would. According to Pinsky, city lawyers said that this was
“not likely to produce significant problems,” and that other bidders did
not object. To Pinsky and the city, these demands—and the
twenty-million-dollar penalty if the City Council’s approval was
delayed—were “not uncommon,” since developers often “take liability for
public approvals.” To Stanford, the stipulations made it seem as if the
goal posts were not fixed.
Three days after Stanford withdrew,
the city awarded the contract to Cornell University and its junior
partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the oldest
university in Israel. Not a few Hennessy and Stanford partisans were
pleased. “I am very relieved,” Gerhard Casper said.
Jeff Koseff,
who played golf with Hennessy within a few days of Stanford’s
withdrawal, recalls, “He was already talking about what we could do
next.” One venture that Hennessy was exploring, though there is as yet
no concrete plan, is working with the City College of New York to
establish a Stanford beachhead in Manhattan. Deputy Mayor Steel says,
“I’d be ecstatic.” Still, a Stanford official is dubious: “John’s
disillusionment with the city is pretty thorough.”
Another
person who is pleased with the withdrawal is Marc Andreessen, whose
wife teaches philanthropy at Stanford and whose father-in-law, John
Arrillaga, is one of the university’s foremost donors. Instead of
erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of
its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an
opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to
every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to
build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to
me, tragically undershooting our potential.”
Hennessy, like
Andreessen, believes that online learning can be as revolutionary to
education as digital downloads were to the music business. Distance
learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the
cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home,
do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right
now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of
online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the
long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how
yet.”
This past fall, Stanford introduced three free online
engineering lectures, each organized into short segments. A hundred and
sixty thousand students in a hundred and ninety countries signed up for
Sebastian Thrun’s online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class.
They listened to the same material that Stanford students did and were
given pass/fail grades; at the end, they received certificates of
completion, which had Thrun’s name on them but not Stanford’s. The
interest “surprised us,” John Etchemendy, the provost, says, noting that
Stanford was about to introduce several more classes, which would also
be free. The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase
efficiency without decreasing quality?”
Stanford faculty members,
accustomed to the entrepreneurial culture, have already begun to clamor
for a piece of the potential revenue whenever the university starts to
charge for the classes. This quest offends faculty members like Debra
Satz, the senior associate dean, who regards herself as a public
servant. “Some of the faculty see themselves as private contractors,
and, if you are, you expect to get paid extra,” she says. “But, if
you’re a member of a community, then you have certain responsibilities.”
Sebastian Thrun quit his faculty position at Stanford; he now
works full time at Udacity, a start-up he co-founded that offers online
courses. Udacity joins a host of companies whose distance-learning
investments might one day siphon students from Stanford—Apple, the News
Corp’s Worldwide Learning, the Washington
Post’s Kaplan University, the New York
Times’
Knowledge Network, and the nonprofit Khan Academy, with its
approximately three thousand free lectures and tutorials made available
on YouTube and funded by donations from, among others, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and Ann and John Doerr.
Since so
much of an undergraduate education consists of living on campus and
interacting with other students, for those who can afford it—or who
benefit from the generous scholarships offered by such institutions as
Stanford—it’s difficult to imagine that an online education is
comparable. Nor can an online education duplicate the collaborative,
multidisciplinary classes at Stanford’s d.school, or the personal
contact with professors that graduate students have as they inch toward a
Ph.D.
John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that
digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly
believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because
they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in
recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more
convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for
a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied
to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students,
and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an
online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and
wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.
But online
education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford.
Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture
capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has
been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now
Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more
efficiency is synonymous with a better education.
In mid-February,
Hennessy embarked on a sabbatical that will take him away from campus
through much of the spring. His plans included travelling and spending
time with his family. The respite, Hennessy says, will provide an
opportunity to think. Of all the things he plans to think hard about, he
says, distance learning tops the list. Stanford, like newspapers and
music companies and much of traditional media a little more than a
decade ago, is sailing in seemingly placid waters. But Hennessy’s
digital experience alerts him to danger. He says, “There’s a tsunami
coming.”
♦
Yes, it's barely two years since Facebook made it possible to slap the
Like button onto content on external websites, which in turn has
expedited communication about everything from news stories to videos to
photos to fundraising appeals, making Facebook the leading referrer of
traffic to many content sites, as well as probably being responsible for
helping get innumerable Kickstarter campaigns funded.
And yet, today, we take this system (which has been adopted by others, like
More
often than not, they'll send you straight to their Facebook page. The
social network has created powerful tools for brands to build excitement
(and evangelism) among consumers, and companies are choosing to use
those pages as their primary home on the web. Even GM, which provoked a
stir earlier this week when it was reported the automaker was killing
its $10 million Facebook advertising budget, said it would nevertheless
continue to invest in its brand pages--to the tune of $30 million, no
less--because, the company said, "it continues to be a very effective
tool for engaging with our customers."
