Stanford Today Edition: July/August, 1998 Section: Features: The Cold War Era and the Modern University WWW: The Cold War Era and the Modern University


THE COLD WAR ERA AND THE MODERN UNIVERSITY




With the publication of her book, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (University of California Press, 1997), Rebecca S. Lowen touched off new controversy around a crucial period in Stanford's history. The book, which started as Lowen's doctoral thesis at Stanford, examines the school's emergence as a national research powerhouse and its role both as a model and as a case study of the mechanisms that drove such transformation.

Stanford Today invited a group of eminent Stanford scholars to discuss the book and its findings. The forum was moderated by David Ritson, emeritus professor in the Physics Department. The panelists included:

>Richard Lyman, a historian who first came to Stanford in 1958 as professor of history and became, in turn, vice president, provost, and president from 1970 to 1980. After leaving Stanford, he served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation. He returned to campus in 1988 to head the Institute for International Studies, where he is now a senior research fellow.

Barton Bernstein, a historian of public policy and Stanford professor since 1965. He is the author of several books, including The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues. He was Rebecca Lowen's thesis adviser.

Robert Rosenzweig, a political scientist who came to Stanford in 1962 and served as university associate dean, vice provost, and vice president. He left Stanford in 1983 to become president of the Association of American Universities until 1993.

Timothy Lenoir, chairman of Stanford's History and Philosophy of Science Program, a faculty member since 1987. His specialty is the history of modern science.

BART BERNSTEIN:

Creating the Cold War University covers roughly a 30-year period - the early 1930s into the early 1960s. It covers a period where Stanford, at the beginning of the 1930s, probably would have ranked somewhere among the top 15 to 18 universities in the country. By the end of the period, in the early 1960s, it was ranked roughly in the top handful of universities, and one might say it was poised for its next movement toward greatness, where certainly by the 1980s it has ranked generally in the top 10 universities along with Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech and a few other places.

To some, the 30-year period is one of virtually unalloyed triumph - more money, more prestige, a national reputation, a far more famous faculty, better students. To others, it's a more alloyed pattern. It's one in which there has been some imbalance in the university, a privileging of particular activities, some devaluation of teaching, and indeed in some ways a loss of community, although the community of the 1930s was markedly truncated, was heavily anti-Semitic and barred other kinds of people.

In her book, Rebecca Lowen tries to explain the transformation, and she uses the Cold War as a central, interpretive and descriptive web, very astutely beginning her analysis in the early 1930s and pointing out something that most analysts did not know or had forgotten - namely, the staff of the 1930s, rooted in an anti-status philosophy, were linked to a world in which people had deep suspicion of the federal government and federal money because that would mean control and a locking of university processes. By the 1950s, among the administration and many trustees there was an erosion of those concerns and very often an enthusiastic adoption, at the behest of Fred Terman, the dean of engineering and the provost, to embrace and often avidly to seek such federal funding.

She argues that this was not an inevitable process. Stanford was far more successful in doing this than many other universities. A number of the others ranked in the second half of the top 18 in the 1930s did not move in that direction. There were benefits, there was a price, but to put the matter in numbers, by 1960, about 40 percent of the operating budget at Stanford came from federal contracts. Eighty percent of that came to engineering and physics. If you were to take a photograph of that situation versus 1933 or 1934, the numbers there would have been zero, or close to zero, and that marks in a dramatic though capsule form some of the transformation that occurred.

Now, Lowen didn't contend she was doing the history of Stanford. She chose not to look at the medical school, at the law school, at the business school, at ROTC, at overseas studies, at what was taught in Western Civilization, at the recalculation of the syllabus, or even at what the English and History departments were doing, but rather to focus upon the action, where the money was and where the galvanizing lubricant for transformation was. In that, she argues, and I think appropriately, that Fred Terman was a unique individual who recognized the situation, defined it and skillfully promoted it. Whether that was shrewd or not is a matter of dispute, and I'm sure there will be disputes. But it meant that certain fields were privileged, others were devalued. There was undoubtedly some injury to undergraduate education, there was a substantial rise in Stanford's prestige. She also goes beyond locating matters about the Cold War university to pointing out that by the 1950s, the techniques that Terman had introduced, the values that he represented and believed in, allowed him in other areas of activity outside engineering and physics to transform the university amid the Cold War, but not in line necessarily with Cold War values. By the 1950s as provost he could substantially impose his will upon departments and thus there was an erosion of department responsibility.

Shifting focus to the Political Science Department, she argues that in the late 1950s, partly in a Cold War context and substantially because of his success as a Cold War entrepreneur, Terman had the capacity despite the desires of the department to tell them basically they could not hire a philosopher or political theorist and instead they should move to a new kind of political scientist that was coming into vogue. She's charting a transformation: an administration substantially imposed, often with important alliances with faculty over the wishes of other faculty. It's an argument about struggle, an argument about allocation of resources. It's an argument that had a dramatic resolution.

RICHARD LYMAN:

Becky Lowen shows what can result from mining of archival and other sources that yields a lot of fascinating stuff. It is a very, very far cry from what has been dominant in the writing about higher education today, either nostalgic puffery, self-congratulatory on the part of individual institutions, usually taking on some retired faculty member to write a glowing history of the institution, or, on the other hand, the polemical "Prof Scam" kind of book which is out to assert that higher education is indeed a rotten kingdom from beginning to end.

I think she leaves out one delineation of difference between Stanford and the Ivies which may be relevant and goes way, way back, and that is that even in the minds of the Stanfords there was a belief in the desirability of coupling practical training with more traditional kinds of liberal arts education. Ivy League people sometimes wonder how you can have an Ivy League-like institution where the Schools of Earth Sciences, Business and Engineering loom so very large. I think that it does go right back to the Stanfords' vision in the first place, as well as to Herbert Hoover's strong hand in the early years.

Where I think the book gets into the most difficulty, and here I clearly don't see entirely eye-to-eye with Ms. Lowen's dissertation adviser, is in its inattention to aspects of Stanford's development in the years she looked at that don't fit her thesis. Bart Bernstein has said she concentrated on where the action was, and as a loyal member of the History Department, I take umbrage at that, because history was certainly a department where as much as in any other the action was in the 1960s, the very years right in the middle of which Barton Bernstein came to Stanford. It was a department bursting into national prominence quite as remarkable as that of physics or electrical engineering, but also almost entirely without reference to federal money and federal patrons. To read a book, the subtitle of which is The Transformation of Stanford, in which the following individuals never appear - Gordon Craig, Gordon Wright, David Potter and Carl Degler, presidents of the American Historical Association, Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, etc. - is a little weird. Now, of course, where I say, "don't fit her thesis," I'm sure Bart would say, "are not relevant to her concern."

Fred Terman is inevitably the single most important figure in Ms. Lowen's story, and I don't think she exaggerates his importance. Incidentally, I think she's right in arguing that it's often pictured that the faculty and the federal sponsors got together and pulled the administration along with them, and that is palpably untrue at Stanford.

At times I think Becky Lowen expects somewhat unreasonable things of Terman, and I want to quote the last two sentences on page 103 because they illustrate the kind of thing I mean. She writes: "Clearly, Terman's opposition to managing a government laboratory and to programmatic research was not rooted in lofty ideals about academic science and free inquiry. In suggesting that the university select only those governmental contracts compatible with the university's academic program, Terman was guided mainly by practical considerations."

Well, it seems to me to expect him to have done so for the other sort of lofty reasons is a little like faulting a dog for not flying or a snake for not walking. Fred Terman was not a philosopher and never pretended to be one. He was an engineer with all the implications you want to draw from that.

ROBERT ROSENZWEIG:

The virtues of the documentary record that is created by memoranda and letters, and the weaknesses of that record are displayed in this book. There are a lot of things that you can learn from records of that kind, and there are a lot of things that can be really, really misleading. Among the things that are most misleading at a university are interactions between departments and the administration over personnel matters. Departments will do and say things about personnel cases for the formal record that at least some of their members don't mean and will say different informally. That's a problem that occurs at several points in this book.

The outline of the postwar history of American universities has been told a number of times. It is, in broad terms, that emerging from a war in which science and technology had played a key part, important policy makers concluded that it made more sense to support scientists in universities than to take scientists from universities, as had happened in the war, and bring them to other places where they could be supported in their scientific and technological work. That policy produced significant federal support for university-based science and technology research, and that grew further following Sputnik and grew still further through the Cold War and further yet through the development of the National Institutes of Health, which by the time Lowen's book ends had a total funding that exceeded the total funding of university-based research for the Department of Defense.

Lowen's book tells part of the Stanford story. There's no question that Fred Terman used Defense money to leverage the growth, first of electrical engineering, then at the School of Engineering when he became dean, and then used broader federal funds in very similar ways to leverage the growth of other parts of the university after he became provost. He is the central figure in Lowen's book, but she really hasn't captured either Terman or his accomplishments fully or fairly, in part because she's used too narrow a focus - the Cold War - to explain too complex a subject.

My reading of Fred Terman is that his plans for Stanford actually have little to do with Cold War ideology because I don't think Fred thought much about ideology. As Dick Lyman said, he was not a philosopher. I don't think he was even particularly a political person. Those ambitions were by no means limited to science and technology. While he never personally, intellectually or emotionally had a feel for the humanities or the social sciences, he was prepared to believe that they, too, were important, that Stanford was to become a first-rank university, and therefore he was prepared to devote significant resources to their development. What he was always unwilling to do was to waste money on what he believed or what he was persuaded was mediocrity. One of the secrets of university development that Fred Terman understood and that I think is important to the history of Stanford and explains about the Chemistry Department, the Biology Department and other departments, is that mediocre departments will never improve themselves left to their own devices. It takes outside intervention to persuade or coerce or otherwise produce a situation in which mediocrity is transcended by the introduction of quality. That's the true meaning of the steeples of excellence philosophy Fred professed to use in the development of Stanford.

TIM LENOIR:

I happen to work on some of the same materials of Lowen's research, particularly those associated with Fred Terman and the development of various engineering fields - computer science, in particular - here at Stanford. I am very impressed by the quality of the research that has gone into this book. At the same time I think the book would have benefited from a comparative perspective.

One of the things that Rebecca Lowen decries - she doesn't really come out and say it so bluntly - is that the steeples of excellence idea was pitted against the notion of a balanced faculty. A balanced faculty in biology, for example, that would offer not only courses in biochemistry and promote research in biochemistry and molecular biology, but also on organismic biology and taxonomy and other sorts of fields. And that Terman, because he was seeking government support for building Stanford as an institution, emphasized in building steeples of excellence, picking out particular areas that had funding opportunities.

From my reading, that is the way you make great institutions. Every institution builder I have studied in Germany pursued steeples of excellence. When Rebecca Lowen tells the story about the Stanford Biology Department and Terman's realization that it would be possible to move this department toward what she calls "reductionist biology," she does it in a rather pejorative way. Reductionist biology is molecular biology, biochemistry. It's the biology that Arthur Kornberg had done, it's the biology that Paul Berg does, it's the biology that Don Kennedy professes, and so forth.

In the 1960s, it was the biology that made this university great, and the idea that one should focus resources around those people, three of whom had already won Nobel Prizes, and also Carl Djerassi, who was a part of this group, was a very good one. As it was in 1958, to bring back the Stanford Medical School, the Stanford Hospital from San Francisco was to construct links between the biology departments and the medical school and create a whole new kind of Stanford Medical Center. We see the outcome of that. It was a very successful enterprise. It has produced some of the most important medicine of the last generation, and so the program of building steeples of excellence seems to have worked in many ways.

BERNSTEIN:

In addressing Dick Lyman's remark that Rebecca Lowen had neglected the wonderful improvement of the History Department in the early 1960s, I point out that with the exception of her last chapter, the book ends around 1961 or so. The appointments of Gordon Craig and David Potter are 1961 and 1962. The appointment of Carl Degler is 1968. So three out of the four cases asserted is a hardly surprising omission. Now maybe the argument is that the book should have gone to 1965. Possibly it should have been a longer book. Possibly it should have been lots of things, but that's not what it's about, so one isn't surprised. Gordon Wright's name doesn't appear. The curriculum of Western Civilization isn't discussed. The anti-Semitism of the History Department in the 1950s is omitted. There are other things omitted. Some blemishes, some improvement, but that's not what the book is about. I think Bob Rosenzweig has raised very substantially a basic problem that all historians face: How do we reconstruct the past? Either systematically as historians or sometimes less systematically as humans in a complicated society. How do we recollect? How accurate is it? How good are documents? How good are multiple interpretations? How does one resolve the difference? This is not a discovery unique to Lowen's book that is heavily documented in a period where recollections are often flawed, many of the folks are dead.

A remark was made that Fred Terman didn't have an ideology and didn't have politics. There was a character, I think Tartuffe, who discovered only belatedly in life that he talked a thing called "prose." I would argue Fred Terman had a very definite ideology and was markedly unaware of it, and that's part of the effort of the historian to reconstruct. To see him as non-ideological I think is quite wrong-headed. And to believe that he didn't have a politics is, I think, equally wrong-headed. In Fred Terman's world, the politics were so self-evident that only the entailments had to be uttered. The framework never had to be uttered because it was never challenged. One of the tasks of this kind of a book is to construct a consensus in which people operate and then to look at the differences that occur within that framework. Bob remarked that we know the contours of the development of modern universities in science and technology, and I think we do. What we don't know is the next level. We could also summarize North American history without great dispute in probably 30 pages. Textbooks sometimes do it in 300 pages. The point is that intellectuals start disagreeing when the analysis becomes more closely grained, more explicitly causal, and makes an effort to bring out certain salient factors and argue about what happened.

ROSENZWEIG:

Almost everything that Rebecca Lowen describes of Fred Terman's actions and that she ascribes to a Cold War motivation is equally plausibly explainable by my hypothesis that his primary objective was to build Stanford University into a world-class university, independent of or separate from any other ideological or political motivation. I think that's consistent with his own historic connection with the university, with his family connection with the university, and it certainly is consistent with everything I saw. Of course, he and everybody has a politics, even if you don't have politics. That in itself is a kind of politics, and we all act in some sense out of what we believe or what we don't believe, but that doesn't mean that every act is political, or that every act is ideological, or that that's the motivation for all of our actions. I think that she has over-interpreted the role of ideology and politics in Fred Terman's university- building strategy.

LENOIR:

In defense of what Rebecca Lowen wrote, she does in fact talk about the Carnegie and the Ford Foundation funding of various fields. The point there is not that the Cold War is just Department of Defense money, but that focusing on Terman, if there was a kind of style of administration and building steeples of excellence, it was first with the use of Defense money and then carried over into his administrative style in other domains, particularly when he went after foundation money to build the biology departments and medical school.

Two things the book doesn't emphasize strongly enough: One is about the claim that Terman and that generation of administrators had very little interest in teaching but were only interested in a research university, which doesn't really correspond to my reading of the Terman files. There are massive numbers of little sheets in Terman's folders that are teaching records of professors he would follow - checking out how many students they have in their classes, the increase in class size, the very detailed dimensions of what's being taught in the course. He actually got in touch with people and told them how he thought they could fix that.

The other thing I don't find in this story has to do with Stanford's external relations, particularly to Silicon Valley. One of the things that Terman clearly was trying to do was to establish conditions under which local industry would be affiliated with Stanford and would want to contribute to Stanford. He was worried about training high-class engineers who would only be able to find positions in East Coast companies, so that the potential source of revenue to the university from alumni in donations and things of that sort would be elsewhere, so he did a number of things, through the development, for example, of the cooperative program and the affiliates program to encourage collaboration with industry. He also established the West Coast Electronics Manufacturing Association, which was an organization that basically got together and shared information about technology and also cooperated in setting standards. This is crucial for the development of the electronics industry and of the spirit of cooperation and at the same time intense competition that has distinguished this region from other places like Route 128. If you look at the comparison of figures of dependence, of Department of Defense contracting in Silicon Valley companies versus Route 128 companies, you find that while both were very heavily dependent, Route 128 stays very heavily dependent on government contracting while Silicon Valley companies do not.

DAVID RITSON:

Would you like to comment on the affiliates program? It always worried me personally, because people had to pay an admission fee of $10,000, which then entitled you to go to briefing sessions on the latest research and to meet students. I'm curious whether you agree that the affiliates program was more of a relatively exclusive club for the more high-flying companies.

ROSENZWEIG:

I think most of the businessmen I've talked to over the years who were involved in the affiliates program argue that it's not the early access to research that was of greatest benefit to them, because most of that appears in the literature quite rapidly anyway, but it was access to students. I think they got to know who the best students were.

BERNSTEIN:

I'd like to go beyond the euphemism of the enhanced placement center to say that it does sound as if it was a contractual arrangement to purchase access. One can decide it's invidious or mutually wonderful, but it does bar certain people and it includes other people. Let me just raise an issue beyond that, which lurks in all this. I think it was wonderful for the students by and large. It was undoubtedly good for many of the companies involved, but it does raise a question about allocation of resources in a society and also about what happens to those who can't afford the entry fee. The university is willfully making selectively available some of its resources and knowledge and access to students to people who will pay certain things and not to other people. Now, you may think that's appropriate. Private universities obviously do have a serious problem. They need money. On the other hand, they also speak frequently of openness of information, equal access, obligation to the society en masse. It's not clear to me necessarily that second set of values is fulfilled, and rather I suspect it's violated.

RITSON:

There was a policy of steeples of excellence that everybody agrees was successful. But is it something of a model that we want to carry on, is it something we would like to see our current university administration doing?

ROSENZWEIG:

Depending on how neutral you wanted to define that term, there isn't any alternative for a university that hopes to sustain quality into the future. One of the things that is now supposedly understood is that no university, not Harvard, not Stanford, not Berkeley, can do everything, at equal levels of quality. Choices have to be made because resources are limited, and that's what you could call steeples of excellence. The question is how those decisions are going to be made and who ought to make them. There are some costs that you're willing to sustain because they are essential to one's conception of a university. The Department of Classics, for example. Hard to imagine a serious university without a first-rate Department of Classics, or at least the representation of high-quality classical instruction and research. The question that isn't considered in the book and maybe shouldn't have been but still is important: Is this a better university now than it would have been had the university taken the course that is implicit in Lowen's criticism of Terman and his strategy? And I think the answer to that is quite unambiguous. Stanford is now a better university, however one wants to define a good university, than it would have been under the alternative scenario. This is by far a better university than it was in 1955 or 1945, and it has done that without significantly sacrificing basic research and teaching in the humanities and in the social sciences. ST