I SETTLED into a studio apartment in the Alma Village Apartments in Palo Alto. It was about two miles from campus, alongside the Caltrain railroad tracks. The apartment complex overlooked a gas station, which never seemed to have any customers, and a strip mall with a Lucky’s grocery store, a cleaners, and a Chinese restaurant whose kung pao chicken was of questionable origin. My rented furniture was a little classier than the red plastic sofas in Michelle Towers in Washington. And “Moon Palace,” as Janne, who also lived there, nicknamed it, had a swimming pool, where at the age of twenty-five, I finally learned to swim.
Unable to afford a new ride, I gratefully accepted my parents’ old car, delivered to my door in Palo Alto by one of those drive-away services. Boris, my cute little Oldsmobile Omega of Notre Dame days, had long since become an unreliable ride. So I drove to Stanford each day in a huge green Chevrolet Impala that the fellowettes nicknamed the “football field.”
Galvez House was a great place to work and had supportive staff, including our “den mothers,” Barbara Johnson, Gerry Bowman, and Nancy Okimoto. I made rapid progress toward finishing my dissertation, an accomplishment that had eluded me in Denver. “Dissertations don’t write themselves,” I tell my students now. It’s a fact that I learned from the discipline of getting up every day and writing a few hours in the morning. I was the only morning person among the fellows and largely had the office to myself until about noon. Once Janne, Gloria, and Cindy arrived I found that my productivity slowed as we engaged in hall conversation about everything from missile defense to movies. We went to dinner together a couple of times a week. And Janne and I would go shopping, one such trip to Saks resulting in the purchase of our first pair of Ferragamo shoes, which neither of us could afford but bought anyway. I also established a lifelong friendship with Chip and his partner, Louis Olave, who often invited us to their house for dinner and dancing to Louis’s amped-up stereo. I loved Stanford.
That didn’t mean that I’d overcome the insecurity associated with my rapid ascent from Denver to one of the world’s best universities. It could be a bit intimidating, learning from prominent national policy makers such as Bill Perry, who had just returned to Stanford after being President Carter’s undersecretary of defense, and Sid Drell, a leading scientist and arms control expert who graciously spent time tutoring me in the physics of nuclear weapons.
Though I began to feel comfortable in elite academia, I still had moments of doubt. Every fellow was required to prepare a seminar on his or her dissertation. While the exercise was intended to be a helpful step toward finishing the dissertation, it was actually a fairly nerve-wracking experience. Seated at the head of the table in the overcrowded conference room, I started out slowly, looking for any sign of approval as the presentation went along. About halfway through I saw a Japanese colonel who was visiting that day nodding vigorously in support of what I was saying. This fired me up. If my presentation on civil-military relations was meeting with the approval of this career military officer, I must be doing well. The affirmation fueled me through the rest of the presentation and the question-and-answer session that followed. I finished and walked over to him, hoping to engage him about my topic. It was then that I learned he spoke no English.
A few weeks after my seminar, John Lewis, the program’s director, called me into his office. John was one of the world’s most eminent China scholars and quite a character. He spoke in staccato sentences that often made him hard to follow. John also had a habit of confusing the fellowettes, calling blond Janne “Gloria” or, even more amazingly, calling me “Janne.” But John had an amazing eye for talent and a tremendous capacity for institution building. John was personally responsible for bringing several people to Stanford early in their careers who went on to reach star status at the university. By the time I’d arrived there, he had almost single-handedly built Stanford’s international security program into one of the nation’s strongest.
John started our conversation with a somewhat disjointed but clearly positive assessment of the seminar I’d given. He said that the Political Science Department had invited me to give a seminar for their faculty the following week. I said that I’d just given the only seminar that I was capable of giving in that time frame. John said that I should give the same seminar because the audience would be different. I agreed to do so.
The next week I repeated the presentation that I’d given at Galvez House for a somewhat smaller but far more skeptical audience in the mahogany-paneled Graham Stuart Lounge in Building 160 on the main quadrangle. Universities have a rigid hierarchy. Interdisciplinary centers such as the Arms Control and Disarmament Program are viewed with suspicion by university departments such as political science, which see them as too policy-focused and insufficiently attentive to the rigors of disciplinary research. At Stanford, only the departments can hire and tenure faculty. And they rarely hire them from places like the University of Denver.
When I’d finished the presentation, the first question came from Heinz Eulau, the chair of the Political Science Department. Heinz was a German Jewish émigré who’d spawned the “behavioral revolution” in political science. Put simply, Heinz believed that the study of politics was a science and any worthwhile project had to be quantifiable in some way. The kind of analytical/descriptive work that I did was not scientific enough for him. And he looked down on “area studies,” which posited the uniqueness of, say, Russia, or the importance of the study of culture and language in China.
I knew Heinz’s work and braced myself for what I expected to be a hostile question. He took his time, taking one more puff on his pipe before speaking. “How,” he asked after what seemed like an eternity, “can any of what you have said be rigorous enough to have any theoretical value? You can’t measure anything.” I’d anticipated that line of attack. Going back to the work I’d done at Notre Dame, I explained that I could not quantify the relationship between Soviet power and the response of the Czech military but that I could ask rigorously structured questions and examine alternative explanations. I then proceeded to do so. Heinz cocked his head to the side and his eyes twinkled—something that I later learned to read as a signal of approval. The rest of the question-and-answer session went smoothly.
A few days later, John called me in again. The Political Science Department had an opening for a specialist in international political economy, and Heinz wanted me to apply. “But John, I do international security,” I protested.
“That’s okay. Just apply,” he told me.
So I put together my resume and the one article that I had written and sent it forward to the department. The answer came back that they were looking for someone in political economy. Nonetheless, they’d been impressed with my work and wanted to explore a three-year “term appointment,” meaning that it could not lead to tenure. In addition, I would serve as the assistant director of the Arms Control Center. Chip would be promoted to associate director. I told John that I was interested and wanted to talk to Heinz about it.
I walked across campus that sunny and warm April afternoon wondering if indeed I was about to join the Stanford faculty. “Could this really be happening?” I asked myself out loud. I walked into Heinz’s office on the third floor of Building 160. I looked out the window at the main approach to the university, feeling very much preoccupied with the question that I was asking. Heinz came in and sat down. But he didn’t offer the term appointment. “Would you be interested in a tenure-line appointment?” he asked. At first I didn’t think I’d heard him correctly. I asked if he meant a regular tenure-line appointment as an assistant professor.
“Well, yes,” he said. He then proceeded to explain that the eminent Soviet expert, Alexander Dallin, and several other faculty of the Political Science Department had been very impressed with my seminar and wanted to hire me. They had done an evaluation of my work, consulting specialists in the field of international security and Soviet studies, as well as reading some chapters of my dissertation. This wasn’t the kind of national search (
widely advertised with many applicants) Stanford usually conducted. “This is the file of someone whom we’re about to hire after completing a big search,” he said, pointing to a file at least three times as thick as the one that he had for me. Then he got to the point that he was trying to make. “You do understand that there would be nothing special done for you at the time of tenure,” he said. “You’ll sink or swim just like everyone else. It won’t matter how you got here. Only 30 percent of the people who come up for tenure get it. In fact, there is a review after three years, and it is likely that you won’t make it through that.”
“I see,” I said. “That sounds fair. After three years you can see if you like me, and I can decide if I like you.”
Heinz smiled. I don’t think he had ever encountered anyone naive enough about faculty hiring at an elite university to say something so dumb.
A few days later, I got a call from Cecilia Burciaga, Stanford’s affirmative action officer, asking if we could have lunch. We went to the Faculty Club and talked for a while. At the end of the conversation she said that she wanted to meet me because my case had been unusual. Usually she was in the position of pushing departments to hire minorities. This time the department had come to her. If a department was willing to hire a minority professor, the university would provide the money for half of the position. Even with that incentive, departments were reluctant. “How did this happen?” she asked. I told her the story but I didn’t really understand what was going on myself.
Years later, after having been on the other side of faculty hiring, especially as provost of Stanford, I understood exactly what had happened. Stanford, in an effort to diversify its faculty, had made it possible to hire minorities without going through the “normal” processes. The Department of Political Science saw a young black female Soviet specialist and decided to make an affirmative action hire.
Contrary to what has sometimes been written about me, I was and still am a fierce defender of affirmative action of this kind. Why shouldn’t universities use every means necessary to diversify their faculty? And frankly, any new assistant professor, no matter how promising, is a risk: some will succeed and some will not. Tenure is a proving ground. A lot happens between hiring and judgment day.
I went home for Easter a few days after receiving the Stanford offer and talked it through with my parents. Sitting in the kitchen, my father and I at the table, my mother preparing dinner at the stove, I asked their advice. While I was thrilled that Stanford wanted me, I still had reservations about an academic career. I had job offers from RAND and Science Applications and was not sure what to do. Sitting in the kitchen, Daddy asked how much each job offered. RAND and SAIC were comparable, about $26,000. Stanford offered $21,000. “Take the $21,000,” he said.
I was surprised, not because he wanted me to take the lower salary but because I had assumed that he’d want me to stay in Denver. “Why?” I asked.
“It’s Stanford,” he answered.
I explained that the “process” had been irregular and asked what he thought of being hired under affirmative action. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Their ‘processes’ have been excluding us for years. Just go and show them how good you are.”
After Easter, I returned to Stanford and made an all-out effort to finish my dissertation, working seven or eight hours every day toward its completion. The reviews from my committee were positive. This was especially true of the evaluation I received from Michael Fry, by far the most difficult critic. He’d left the Denver deanship for the University of Southern California and suggested that I come down to Pasadena to go over his comments. After dinner at his home, he launched into his comments, but it was clear that he thought my work was nearly done. That night, I stayed at the Frys’ home. As I lay in bed, a deep sense of satisfaction, almost wonder, came over me. I was indeed about to become a PhD, and I had landed a coveted job at Stanford. I said a little prayer of thanksgiving and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
My Rookie Season
THE AUGUST commencement at Denver University was really a cause for celebration. Both my high school and my undergraduate graduations had been anticlimactic. Now, with the receipt of my PhD and the job offer at Stanford, my parents and I could acknowledge that all they had tried to do—even that premature stab at early education when I was three—had paid off. The night before the ceremonies, there was a large reception at the Phipps Mansion, a beautiful old white elephant that had been deeded to the university by one of Denver’s most important families. At one point, the master of ceremonies read off a list of where the PhD students had been hired. When he read my name and said Stanford, there was an audible reaction of approval and surprise. My parents just beamed.
The ceremony itself wasn’t particularly memorable. This time my father did not march with the Denver faculty. He said that he wanted to sit with my mother, but I suspected that he was starting to feel alienated from the university, and that worried me.
Several friends had traveled from out of town to attend commencement and there were many more from Denver. My parents held a big dinner afterward at our favorite restaurant. At the dinner, Daddy choked up when trying to make a toast. It took him a while to regain his composure and to say, “Your mother and I always knew that you were special. You are God’s child.” My parents had said this before to friends and family, and I always found it embarrassing. I tried to deflect the comment by saying something like “We’re all children of God.” But that commencement night Daddy wouldn’t be deterred, repeating the phrase again and again. Finally, I just changed the subject to make a joke about the gifts that I’d been given. “You all gave me household gifts,” I said. It was true. I had gotten fancy candlesticks and linens as well as a beautiful set of silverware. “Maybe you thought this was a bridal shower,” I joked.
I returned to Stanford and moved to new housing. Gloria Duffy and I rented a house together not far from the campus. The old house was constantly in need of repair. I came home one rainy evening to find that the water heater had burst. Another night I walked into a frigid house only to find that the ancient radiator had given up the ghost. But at least the house had more room than the little studio I’d rented in Palo Alto when I had first come to Stanford. And when various appliances were not breaking down, it was a pretty nice place to live.
I wasn’t required to teach in my first quarter at Stanford. That’s not unusual, since the university tries to give new assistant professors a chance to get their feet on the ground before taking on the Stanford student body. But I would be required to teach three courses after the first of the year. And unfortunately, graduate school doesn’t really prepare students for teaching responsibilities. At best, an advanced graduate student will act as a teaching assistant to faculty a few times. The whole process of graduate education is geared toward compiling a research record. That is the basis on which elite universities hire assistant professors. In those days, no one even asked whether the job candidate could teach. Frankly, they still don’t.
I sat down with Heinz to decide what three courses I would teach. Obviously, it made sense to offer a course on civil-military relations, the topic of my dissertation. I said that I could also offer a course on Soviet policy in the Third World. But I had no earthly idea what else to propose. Heinz asked whether I could teach something called “Elite Politics.” I immediately said yes, though I didn’t really know what one would do in such a class. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, Heinz said, “Let’s co-teach the course in the spring.” I felt as if I’d been delivered from certain doom, and readily agreed. I would teach civil-military relations in the winter. In the spring, I would teach Soviet policy in the Third World and co-teach “Elite Politics” with Heinz.
As winter quarter approached, I realized that my proposed course on civil-military relations had not been listed in the course catalogue. The irregular process by which I had been hired had somehow failed to trigger the normal mechanisms. An embarrassed Eul
au said that the department would widely “advertise” my course. When January rolled around, six—yes, six—students had signed up. Moreover, because the course was a late addition, all of the classrooms were booked. Thus, the morning of my first class at Stanford, I walked to the other side of campus and met my six students in the old chemistry building. The classroom even had one of those old sliding blackboards and a periodic table of the elements. I hadn’t been in a room like that since Mrs. Sutter’s chemistry class at St. Mary’s Academy. After the major earthquake of 1989, the building would become uninhabitable, and I’d feel just a little pang of nostalgia when, as provost in 1995, I gave an initial order to demolish “Old Chem.” But others had fonder memories of the campus relic, and so it remains today, fenced off and boarded up, waiting for the wrecking ball—or for a donor to save it.
I was anxious at the outset of the class that January morning. Stanford students have a well-deserved reputation for showing young faculty who’s smarter—and of course the students assume they are. The course met three times a week, and I was struggling, working late into the night to read and reread the material that I had assigned. I was just flat-out exhausted every day.
At my first departmental faculty meeting about two weeks into the quarter, I looked around at all of the giants of the field gathered there—Seymour Martin Lipset, Gabriel Almond, Robert North, Heinz Eulau, and Alexander George, among others. I was having another one of those “they must have made a mistake in hiring me” moments when Marty Lipset looked over at me and smiled. “First-year teaching is hell, isn’t it,” he said. I laughed, but he was absolutely right.
Over the quarter I grew accustomed to life in the department. It wasn’t always easy since there were only two women—Judy Goldstein and me—both of us junior faculty. It didn’t help that Heinz often addressed the assembled faculty as “gentlemen.” In time, I started to realize that I was a really good teacher. My first students gave me outstanding evaluations, and when I taught the course the next year, its ranks swelled to fifty. By the third year, “The Role of the Military in Politics” was overenrolled and I cut off admission at 120.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 18
