Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty

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 that never seemed to have any customers, a strip mall with a Lucky’s grocery store, a cleaners, and a Chinese restaurant whose kung pao chicken was of questionable origin. But the “Moon Palace,” as one of my friends who also lived there nicknamed it, had a swimming pool, where at the age of twenty-five I finally learned to swim.

Boris, my cute little Oldsmobile Omega of Notre Dame days, had long since become unreliable, and, unable to afford a new ride, I gratefully accepted my parents’ old car. Thus I drove to Stanford each day in a huge green Chevrolet Impala that my friends nicknamed “the football field.”

Galvez House was a great place to work, and 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 which we bought anyway. I also established a lifelong friendship with Chip and his partner, Louie Olave, who often invited us to their house for dinner and dancing to Louie’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 to learn from prominent national policy makers. Though I began to feel comfortable in elite academia, I still had moments of doubt. For example, 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 thought, I must be doing well. The affirmation fueled me through the rest of the presentation and the question-and-answer session that followed. When I finished I 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 and one of the world’s most eminent China scholars, called me into his office. John said that the Political Science Department had invited me to give a seminar for their faculty the following week. So the next week I repeated the presentation that I’d given at Galvez House for a somewhat smaller but far more skeptical audience. When I’d finished the presentation, the first question came from Heinz Eulau, the chair of the Political Science Department. 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 (a status that may be granted to a professor after a trial period of several years, and which protects the faculty member from being dismissed for no cause). 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. But when I got to Heinz’s office, he didn’t offer me 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. But he proceeded to explain that the eminent Soviet expert Alexander Dallin and several other faculty members of the Political Science Department had been very impressed with my seminar and wanted to hire me. Usually they didn’t do things this way, instead conducting an intensive search from among hundreds of candidates when there was a position open.

“You do understand that there would be nothing special done for you at the time of tenure,” he went on. “You’ll sink or swim just like everyone else. It won’t matter how you got here. Only thirty 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 naïve enough about faculty hiring at an elite university to say something so dumb.

A few days later, I got a call from 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’d wanted to meet me because my case had been unusual. Usually she was in the position of pushing departments to hire minorities. If a department was willing to hire a minority professor, the university would provide half the money for the position. Even with that incentive, departments were reluctant. But this time the department had come to her. “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 the 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. The tenure process 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 several other job offers and was not sure what to do. Sitting in the kitchen, Daddy asked how much each job offered. Stanford was offering $21,000, about $5,000 less than the others. “Take the twenty-one thousand,” 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.