Here. An excerpt:
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"....
[University President] 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 [former Stanford President] 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.”
I'm curious what readers at Stanford or others familiar with Stanford think about this portrait. Signed comments will be strongly preferred, though students may post anonymously, as long as they use a valid e-mail address.
