Publication Date: Wednesday Jan 7, 1998

Inside the ivory tower

Academic Duty, by Donald Kennedy; Harvard University Press; 310 pp.; $29.95

In his 12 years as Stanford's president, Donald Kennedy gradually assumed a role, with a handful of others like Harvard's Derek Bok, as a prominent spokesman for higher education in the country. He also represented a continuum at Stanford that linked him to Stanford's emergence in the 1960s as a university of not just regional but national importance under then-President Wallace Sterling. Kennedy was then a popular young biology professor.

Richard Lyman served as provost for three years under Sterling before assuming the presidency in 1970. Kennedy later served as Lyman's provost for one year after serving in Washington, D.C., as the Food and Drug Administration commissioner during the Carter administration. When Lyman retired in 1980, Kennedy assumed the presidency.

Kennedy's presidency ended badly, however, in 1992.

Kennedy and Stanford had already been the targets of criticism from conservatives, especially William Bennett, the secretary of education, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, for the faculty decision to revamp the introductory humanities curriculum in 1987-88.

But that wave of criticism, which was political and had little to do with the curriculum changes or the process of the changes, was nothing compared to what awaited Kennedy and Stanford in 1990-91.

In the spring of 1990, a new accountant arrived on campus to oversee Stanford's federal research grants, especially the money that Stanford received as overhead, or indirect costs, on its grants.

Paul Biddle almost immediately began making wild accusations of how Stanford was milking the government for inappropriate costs on its federal research grants.

Biddle got the ear of an influential congressmen, John Dingell, D-Michigan, who called for congressional hearings on the issue. Along the way, one of Dingell's staffers reportedly leaked confidential information to the San Jose Mercury News, which had been trumpeting Biddle's claims that Stanford might have overcharged the government $200 to 300 million in the previous decade.

The story had some good bits, from a news standpoint. There was the yacht donated to the Athletic Department that was berthed in Alameda. Part of its upkeep, through very sloppy accounting at Stanford, was billed to the government. The same was true for flowers and household linens at Hoover House, the presidential residence at Stanford.

All of this made for salacious headlines and badly bloodied Stanford's image nationally.

In the end, Stanford repaid $1.5 million to the government, which was far from the $200 million or more Biddle kept trying to pin on Stanford. But the scandal rocked Stanford, and Kennedy stepped down in 1992. He is now president emeritus and the Bing Professor of Environmental Science.

It would be easy to say that Kennedy was done in by some poor internal accounting, by an overly aggressive government auditor, a zealous congressman and an ambitious newspaper reporter, all of whom had their own agendas.

But the truth is that Kennedy and other Stanford officials did not come off well publicly, especially in the Dingell committee hearings.

Kennedy acknowledges that criticism in "Academic Duty," his new book about the state of higher education and of our research universities. "Academic Duty" is a thoughtful overview of the current complexities and difficulties facing academia, and is likely to be closely read in academic circles. It should be more widely read than that, though, because our private research universities like Stanford are in a sense also public entities--they teach our young people, they prepare our future leaders, and they advance the knowledge for everyone.

Universities also uphold one of our most cherished freedoms--freedom of speech--within the fabric of their existence. By extension, this protects the freedom of inquiry that is central to the pursuit of new knowledge.

The standards of excellence in scientific research are crucial not only to the existence of research universities, but also to who we are as a people and a society.

Kennedy is able to weave together all the threads and complexities of what universities are today--the problems they face internally, how they are perceived publicly, how teaching and research remain out of balance--into one thoughtful overview.

"Academic Duty" does have a few calls for alarm for those who work in research universities, as tipped off by the the title of the book.

Academic freedom carries with it a corresponding academic duty, Kennedy explains, mainly to students, which is in danger of going unfulfilled.

When I was in Chicago over Christmas, I talked about the book to a friend who teaches at Northwestern. The idea that a former university president would write that universities were failing in their academic duties appealed to my friend.

Stanford and other elite universities are producing more graduate students with doctorates than there are jobs available in academia. Compared to even a generation ago, it is much more difficult to get a faculty position after receiving a doctorate, and assistant professors are finding it more difficult to win tenure once they do win positions.

Kennedy writes:

"Surely it is part of academic duty--maybe even the central part--to prepare students realistically for productive and rewarding lives. If we cannot do that realistically for our own doctoral students, we have failed a basic obligation. Yet the scientific community and the universities have failed to face up to this problem."

"Academic Duty" touches on a range of current issues facing universities--finances, teaching, advising, course evaluations, cheating, ethics, and more--and often uses hypothetical case studies to illustrate a particularly thorny issue.

For anyone interested in the health of the best universities and the difficulties they face today, "Academic Duty" is revealing, thought-provoking and, ultimately, troubling.

The origin of current problems, Kennedy thinks, "has much to do with our failure to come to grips with responsibility in the university. Having been given a generous dose of academic freedom, we haven't taken care of the other side of the bargain."

Back up to the Table of Contents Page