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Gerhard Casper became Stanford University's ninth president in 1992 after spending the previous 23 years at the University of Chicago as a law professor, dean of the law school, and provost.
Casper, 59, is a native of Germany who received his law degree from Yale and taught briefly at Berkeley before moving to the University of Chicago. His wife, Regina, is a professor of psychiatry in the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Since assuming the top post at Stanford, Casper has embarked on several initiatives. He formed the Commission on Undergraduate Education (CUE) in 1993 to take an intensive look at the undergraduate curriculum, and many of the CUE recommendations have since been implemented.
One year ago, he announced two new initiatives. One, the Stanford Graduate Fellowships, had a fund-raising goal of $200 million to privately fund 300 graduate student science fellowships, and is now more than half way to its goal. The second, Stanford Introductory Studies, features a Freshman Seminars program, which begins this fall and will require the hiring of 20 new faculty members.
Casper has also been heavily involved in the effort to merge Stanford Hospital with the two UCSF medical centers in San Francisco, has been closely involved with Stanford's Sand Hill Road development plans, and embarked on a public campaign last year to convince U.S. News & World Report magazine to revise its popular annual college guide, which rates American universities.
Along the way, Casper has also taught classes in the political science department and, last year and this year, a course on constitutionalism in the Sophomore College, a summer program. He also maintains every other week an open office hour, when any student can come and talk with him, and he visits quarterly with students to hear their concerns during his "Tea & Cookies" meetings at Tresidder Union.
Casper was also able to recently publish a book he started before coming to Stanford, "Separating Power: Essays on the Founding Period," published by the Harvard University Press.
Casper was interviewed by the Weekly's Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak in late April. An edited transcript of that interview follows.
Palo Alto Weekly: You were named president five years ago in March. In those five years, what have been your high points, the things you've tried to do and have been able to accomplish?
Casper: That is really very easy to answer: the changes in undergraduate education, the concept of Stanford Introductory Studies, that in some ways build on the Commission on Undergraduate Education (CUE), and my overall effort to make sure that Stanford undergraduates will continue to have as challenging an education experience as humanly possible.
We will offer 50 freshman seminars this fall. We will cover half the entering class with freshman seminars in the very first year, essentially a year after I announced this initiative.
Weekly: Why are the changes in undergraduate education important enough so that people in the community should take note?
Casper: It is important to Stanford, to the communities surrounding it, to the state, because of the extraordinary significance college education has for the future of the country. Just as diversity at Stanford is important because it provides the educational context for undergraduates, I think it is very important that the future leaders of the country, whom we certainly are educating, go through an experience where they have really been challenged every step of the way.
It is important also for the future of Stanford because I do believe that information technology really is going to change higher education and that eventually there will be a greater reliance on distance learning. I think it is very important to make clear in what way Stanford hopes to add value in the future.
I obviously believe that the large classroom has a role to play in some context, but I believe that it is the give and take that is possible in a seminar that will make the difference.
Weekly: What about the flip side of the coin? In the last five years, have there been things that have been more frustrating to you than you had thought they would be?
Casper: The way I think of the last five years is that I have undertaken a number of academic initiatives, and I have undertaken a number of major organizational initiatives, going from the reorganization of administrative offices, to financial and development.
Obviously, you do not succeed in every respect. What is frustrating is that even as we make progress, even as all of that has occurred, the housing market on the Peninsula explodes in ways that leave us reeling.
And I have to worry, from year to year, about levels of federal support (for research), and changes in government regulations affecting our costs have allowed fewer and fewer costs to be recovered from federal research costs.
So you try to take a step ahead, and you have taken a step ahead, and then there you are, either right back to the starting position or a half-step ahead. And that is as life is, and life is frustrating.
Weekly: Richard Lyman was president for 10 years, your predecessor, Don Kennedy, was president for 12 years, and you've been here for five. Have you thought about when a natural endpoint will come? And, maybe there comes a time when you can't keep up the pace of this tremendous effort?
Casper: This is a actually a question that has worried me. I have been running at a very fast pace, and I don't think that pace can be quite maintained. And one hopes that it is not necessary to maintain that same pace, though I don't see any change either in my environment or my personality. It also takes my willingness to step back, and obviously I feel if I have something to do, I will try to do it.
I think in people like Lyman and Kennedy and me you have university presidents who came from the faculty, and that in some ways has always been our main identification. Kennedy has gone back with gusto to playing the role of a faculty member. Does the question occur to me, "When will this end or should it end?" Of course it does.
I should begin to worry about myself when I don't ask myself that question anymore. One is always aware of the costs of this.
As I said to a group of staff recently, we are all staff here supporting the faculty and students, and basically, I know no better form of public service than that. One's term is not predetermined.
I think of the question of how long one can go on, at any given moment. At present, I do not think radical thoughts in any form.
Weekly: Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
Casper: I am a perfectionist really in one area. I can delegate quite happily, and the senior people who work for me would all confirm that. Yes, I have my standards, I have my expectations. I can not only delegate happily, but things can also go wrong, and I am not particularly upset.
Weekly: You don't kill the messenger?
Casper: Oh, no. I'm not known for throwing temper tantrums or anything like that. Well, once or twice, perhaps.
Weekly: Would you care to talk about those one or two times?
Casper: No, because we all sometimes reach a point where we just break, and "enough is enough."
But there is an area where I am actually too much of a perfectionist. And that is where it comes to written words, including my own.
I do get some help in giving speeches, but I write my own speeches. I have to be satisfied with them. I go over every letter that goes out over my signature.
When it comes to words, well, you must have picked that up . . .
Weekly: I've always had the sense that the State of the University address you give to the faculty every year is something that is very personal.
Casper: Absolutely.
Weekly: I also don't have the sense that this is something you come to on a Tuesday and say, "Oh, I have to knock something off by Thursday . . ."
Casper: Oh, it goes for weeks. Sometimes, if it is very important, for months. Being a wordsmith and worrying about getting something right is very time consuming, and a real drawback on my part.
Weekly: Do you spend a lot of time traveling in your work, visiting various alumni clubs?
Casper: I spent last weekend in San Diego, and two weeks before in New York.
In New York, there were 550 people. Nowadays, I usually give a short presentation on my priorities and where Stanford is these days, and then I answer questions from the audience, and they can never be predicted.
It is also true that whatever I say at an occasion like that will determine for a long time how they think about Stanford. So I take those things seriously.
Weekly: Are there any particular concerns you're hearing from alumni around the country?
Casper: I'll give you a number of questions. But you should not believe in any way that they are representative. You are in a room with 550 people and someone raises her hand.
In the last set of meetings, I have found a lot of interest in issues having to do with admissions. Clearly, the subject is on people's minds in this season of the year.
When I was in San Diego, the first question was about legacies, and it came in an accusatory tone and assumed that Stanford was rather different from its competitors in that it paid no attention to legacy status--which is not true, but never mind that. And then there were other questions about admissions. There were some very sophisticated questions.
Weekly: How do you spend your personal time? Do you and Regina have things that you particularly like doing?
Casper: Our main joy, and unfortunately in the last five weeks we haven't been able to do it at all, is to go up to Jasper Ridge. We like hiking. We hike a lot. We will also go anywhere else in the Santa Cruz mountains. We like to do it for at least two hours.
We also like music and have been supporting the Lively Arts at Stanford, both personally and otherwise. So we go to occasions on campus. Do we go off campus to music? We do go to the symphony once a season or so, because we are invited, or to the opera. But almost all the cultural events we go to are on campus.
Regina and I also both like the theater, and we have actually been very impressed by what the Stanford students put on for the Drama Department. For instance, this year they did an "Inspector General" that was absolutely magnificent.
We are also both readers. We read a lot. We also like to travel a lot, as a vacation. Our favorite country is Italy.
Weekly: When was the last time you were there?
Casper: Well, I was in Rome for a day last summer, just to attend an exhibition of sculpture and other antiquities that my friend had curated, having to do with the theme of Odysseus.
Two years ago, we went to Naples and Pompeii.
Weekly: Do you have a favorite place in Italy?
Casper: Tuscany. I always say, if you can't live in Tuscany, the next best thing is the Bay Area.
Since I have been at Hoover House (the presidential residence at Stanford), I have planted five cypresses on the theory that if you can't be in Tuscany, at least you can plant cypresses.
Weekly: The University of Chicago doesn't play football. I've been told you have been seen from time to time at Stanford games. Are you growing more accustomed to American football?
Casper: Well, there is a whole set of expectations, and university presidents are very other-directed, and clearly I try to make it to home games. And yes, I have warmed up to it, and I can now make out what a forward pass is and enjoy it.
Weekly: Let's look forward for a minute. The Commission on Undergraduate Education was a major undertaking on your part. Do you have a list that says, "Future Initiatives of Gerhard Casper?"
Casper: I have what is now known in Building 10 as "the Chinese priorities." They are named because I had a delegation of Chinese university presidents for breakfast and they wanted to know what my priorities are, so I sat down at my computer and wrote out my priorities and afterward circulated them, so they've become known as the Chinese priorities.
They are solidifying the synthesis that comes from combining teaching and research, and that means Stanford Introductory Studies and Stanford Graduate Fellowships. Those two initiatives, while in some ways completely separate, also serve the same purpose, which is to ensure that we will have very high quality students who are not only challenged but who also challenge us.
The relationship between faculty and students is a wholly dialectic one going both ways. A very good university needs very good students to remain a very good university.
We still have to raise (another $92 million) for the Stanford Graduate Fellowships, and we have to raise endowment for the support of Stanford Introductory Studies (to hire an additional 20 faculty members). We thought we could cover 50 percent of it through the reallocation of present teaching resources and the other 50 percent having new faculty.
I clearly remain concerned about our making the best use of our position on the Pacific Rim, and the Asia-Pacific Scholars Initiative is one way to express that. We are very much concerned with trying to raise endowment to bring Asian graduate students here, on a highly selective basis. While we have made progress, fund-raising for that purpose has been harder than I thought it might be.
Weekly: Does Stanford now have graduate students from China?
Casper: We have a lot of graduate students from China and other Asian countries, but they are presently mostly coming on the same basis all our other graduate students come, that is, with support on research grants and other sponsored programs.
What I had hoped is that we could establish a program for 50 or so graduate students from the Asia-Pacific area, not limited to China, that would be selected on a highly competitive process modeled on the Rhodes (scholarships), and we are still pursuing that.
In addition to the Commission on Undergraduate Education, the other big commission I appointed was the Commission on Information Technology in Teaching and Learning. We are going to push this to a new level next year, and we'll establish a permanent center for innovation in teaching. The emphasis there will be on the use of information technology in our present teaching activities to improve them, but also looking toward what role can distance learning play in Stanford's future.
This is a very, very difficult question, because basically everybody hypes it and talks about it, but most everybody is quite clueless about the extent to which there will be a substitution of information technology for in-residence learning. Some is probably going to occur, if distance learning is high quality, and if it is cheaper. There has to be some tradeoff, particularly as people are worried about the high costs of college.
Weekly: Doesn't that go contrary to what you're trying to do in introductory studies in having a closer relationship between younger students and faculty?
Casper: You are exactly right. That is indeed why I am so emphatic about Freshman Seminars and so on, because I want to make it very clear for people to understand what Stanford values most highly in terms of student-faculty interaction.
But distance learning--you and I will not be asked (about it). It will occur, whether we want to or not. I will not be able to block distance learning, even if I don't believe in it. And therefore, the question of how Stanford relates to it is a question that for us is unavoidable.
A lot is happening, but what isn't happening is the development of high quality instructional software, because it is so expensive. It calls for such a huge investment that no one is making it.
There is another aspect of information technology and distance (learning) that can actually offer potentially very interesting new ways of learning. We now have a dedicated link to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. This year, for the first time, we had seminars in real time, that is, at the same hour in Stockholm and here, Stanford and Swedish students.
Weekly: Does that mean someone doing this at 3 a.m. or something?
Casper: No, I think it is a nine-hour time difference, and they can do it in the evening.
We had a seminar on Hamlet that was done both at MIT and Stanford.
So there are opportunities for collaboration in the future that we don't really yet understand very well.
Then, we do need to renew the physical infrastructure of the university. We are engaged, as you can see just from walking around the campus, in a major renovation and restoration program, with some new construction. But the emphasis is on renovating the rapidly ailing facilities.
I believe that we need to reorganize the delivery of academic health care, and expedite the movement of knowledge from bench (laboratory) to bedside. The time I've devoted to the merger of the inpatient and outpatient clinical services with UCSF is dedicated to that programmatic priority, and that has gone through various stages. If we close (the deal) in September, the next phase will be implementation, and that will be very difficult because two different institutions have to grow together.
Weekly: You said earlier that you are spending an extraordinary amount of time on this merger now in dealing with the Legislature. Where do you think that is right now? Is the Burton-Kopp bill going to be trouble for the merger?
Casper: I certainly hope not, because my basic position remains unchanged. I believe this merger can work only if the emerging institution is a not-for-profit institution to be sure, but a private one. I think, in the present marketplace, we would not be able to survive if our competitors could get access to information they can get nowhere else in the marketplace and from no other company.
So, since we are offering California so much, the potential of Stanford and UCSF working together is, to use a term popular with current students, awesome. I mean, really awesome. And I surely hope the Legislature fully understands that it would be a tragedy if that was thwarted.
. . . In still talking about the future, Stanford clearly has to maintain a strong financial base, and that means I have to work, all of us have to work, for continued support of research by the federal government. We have to raise capital for our infrastructure, for our endowment, and we have to continue with reforms of annual giving.
And then there are the daily tasks, the overhaul of our administrative information systems, my continuous concern for reducing bureaucracy.
Weekly: Is there anything about the Sand Hill Road approval process that has surprised you?
Casper: The intensity has not surprised me at all. That I would have expected. But what I have not been prepared for is the length of the process. I have never seen anything like this.
Universities are fast, by comparison.
I think Larry Horton had the best way of looking at it. He reminded us all that it took fewer years to conduct the Civil War than to get this permission from the city of Palo Alto. The length of it has been astounding, and the costs that go with have been staggering, just staggering.
Weekly: One last question. When the Stanford search committee came knocking on your door at the University of Chicago, if you had said "No, thanks," if that had happened, there is probably a pretty good chance that you would be sitting right now in the office of the president of the University of Chicago.
Casper: I guess so.
Weekly: Do you have any regrets?
Casper: No, not one.
In particular, the first couple of years were pretty difficult. But let me explain why they were difficult, and that's very important.
What is very difficult is to move into an institution as its president, laterally. Had I stayed in Chicago, where I had been for many years, I would have had my friends. People would have known me as a faculty member. Gerhard Casper would have had a persona other than as being the president of the institution.
And I did not really fully understand the extent to which I would remain, for so many people, an abstraction, because I was the president.
Weekly: Or under such scrutiny.
Casper: Yes, and the scrutiny.
Weekly: If you remember, in the first year or so, there was this almost endless speculation about your politics.
Casper: Yes, exactly. But in my inaugural address I had actually issued a vision statement. Well, I had actually talked about it and spent a whole summer writing it. If you go back now to my inaugural speech, you will find almost everything I did.
What is very hard to realize is that for most people, you are only someone in the hierarchy, even if it is at the very top. That was driven home to me once when I was in another city and traveling with a Stanford faculty member, who I had seen more of than others. As we were parting, he said to me, "Gerhard, it was really very nice to spend this time with you and hear your views on politics and other matters." And I suddenly realized that even for him, I had been mostly an abstraction. The day permits so little time to just shoot the breeze.
That was the highest cost of moving.
Going back to your question, I have no regret. This was just the right challenge at just the right time.
This is a magnificent place, very different from the University of Chicago, but a place to which I have been happy to relate to.1
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