Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-eight

I returned to Stanford tired but content. The university was again generous, telling me that I would not be required to teach until the fall quarter. That allowed me time to design my next research project—the one that I would use to make my case for promotion to full professor during the next academic year.

I didn’t miss Washington or the work in the White House. Even when the coup against Gorbachev took place in August 1991, leading to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in December, I didn’t regret my decision to leave. Throughout the spring and summer I worked again for ABC News as an expert analyst but largely kept my distance from the policy world.

One of my surprises upon returning to Palo Alto was just how much my father had established a new life and reputation of his own. Daddy had always been a magnet for people, and he’d become a powerful one in Palo Alto. Not only was he active with Stanford’s Public Service Center and the Department of Athletics, transforming what was once just a study hall for freshman football players into an academic resource and tutoring center for all Stanford athletes, but he had also become a well-regarded figure in East Palo Alto.

Not long after I returned home, one of Daddy’s new friends—Charlie Mae Knight, the superintendent of the Ravenswood schools in East Palo Alto—asked if I would deliver the districtwide commencement address. Ravenswood is an elementary and middle school district with no high school. Yet as I was sitting on the stage, it occurred to me that with extended families having come from all over the Bay Area and beyond to attend the ceremonies, the commencement exercises felt more like a high school graduation.

“This is an awfully elaborate commencement for eighth graders,” I said to Charlie.

“Well,” she said, “that’s because seventy percent of these kids will never finish high school. This is their last commencement.”

I was stunned, and realized that I knew very little of the poverty and lack of opportunity just a few blocks from my house.

That evening, I asked my father to tell me about the challenges for the school district, feeling a little embarrassed that I’d lived in the area for ten years and knew nothing, while my father, who’d moved to Palo Alto only recently, was actively trying to help. He told me about some of his efforts, including refurbishing an athletic field for the district. Daddy also told me about what Charlie Mae wanted to do. Ravenswood had had eleven superintendents in ten years and the odds were long, but he was impressed with her toughness and commitment. He was going to be a partner to her and mobilize resources from Stanford to help. “Stanford has been running its own programs and its own agenda in East Palo Alto,” he said. “It’s about time that someone ask the people there what they need.”

My father was just doing what he’d done all of his life: following in his father’s footsteps of educational evangelism. I resolved right then to get involved too, and asked Charlie Mae to lunch a few days later. She talked about the need for extended-day learning activities, saying that children had nothing wholesome to do after school. Most extracurricular activities such as music and art had been cut because of budgetary pressures. Charlie and I agreed that I’d pull together some people who might be interested in helping, and after some discussions a group of community leaders from Palo Alto planned to launch the Center for a New Generation (CNG).

We had no idea how hard it would be. There was a political power structure in East Palo Alto that was suspicious of outsiders and determined to keep control. It didn’t help that I was from Stanford, which, as my father had noted, had a well-deserved reputation for giving the help they decided the community needed without asking the community what it wanted. There were also a number of nonprofits in East Palo Alto run by residents of the city that were little more than jobs programs for the staffs of the organizations. Money had flowed to these programs from corporations and foundations with little demand for accountability. In this way, Palo Alto had eased its conscience, but it was hard to argue that kids were being helped by what my dad called “guilt money.” Some of the directors of these programs, who were often powerful people in the city, saw the CNG as a threat to their funding sources.

To break through, we had to work very hard. We held community meetings, and also scheduled numerous meetings with the Board of Education. We brought the chair of the school board into the effort, which helped immensely. And we addressed the city council. I finally lost my cool when one of the members asked what was in it for me. I shot back, “Nothing. But there is something in it for your kids. Why are you so hard to help?”

The experience taught me many tough lessons about the difficulties of community organizing and the power of entrenched interests. I also learned that nonprofit management could be an oxymoron; several of the staff members possessed good hearts but little management skill. But by the summer of 1992 we were able to launch the program for children in grades five to eight. Each summer 250 kids were exposed to hands-on math and science instruction, language arts, instrumental music, dance, and art. The curriculum was repeated as an after-school program for 150 kids. We hired the best teachers from the school district and paid them very well, hoping they’d take the innovative curriculum back into their regular classrooms. College students, including many athletes from Stanford, acted as mentors for the kids. The students were chosen on the basis of teacher recommendation, but we were determined that the program be not just for the “talented tenth” or for remedial education. Instead, it was conceived of as an enrichment program.

The crown jewels of the program were the instrumental bands, which made me remember how important bands were to my black heritage in the segregated South. Today there are five Centers for a New Generation spread across East Palo Alto, East Menlo Park, and now heavily Hispanic Redwood City, and they have partnered with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. I particularly enjoyed working with Daddy to bring these programs into being, and I am sure my grandfather John Wesley Rice Sr. noted and approved of the way the experience sparked my own determination to be an educational evangelist.

Though I was very busy, I also made four trips to Russia during this period, enjoying my freedom to visit the country as a faculty member rather than a government official. These were important visits as I saw firsthand the disorientation and humiliation of the Russian population after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years later, that extended time in Russia helped me to understand the appeal of Vladimir Putin, who promised Russians order, prosperity and respect.

Like most at Stanford, I was following with some interest the impending change in leadership at the university. The school had gotten into a dispute with the federal government about payments for costs associated with government contracts. It was a headline-grabbing scandal, with charges that Stanford had overbilled the government to the tune of $200 million. Don Kennedy, who for ten years had been the highly successful leader of the university and to whom I had been quite close, decided to step down.

I didn’t expect to be appointed to the committee that would choose the next president. After all, I’d been away from Stanford three out of the last four years. But one day in September I received a call from the chairman of the Board of Trustees. “We need you to help find a new president,” he said. “This is going to be a tough process because the university is really hurting and a lot of people don’t like the direction it has been going in. And I hate to tell you this, but it will take a lot of time. Will you serve?” I readily accepted.

Before joining the search committee I hadn’t known how many difficulties Stanford was facing. There had been massive budgetary cuts and layoffs as the federal government slashed payments to the university amid the dispute. Moreover, there was a serious rift between conservative alumni and the school. Conservative faculty were also disaffected, feeling that the university was compromising academic excellence in the service of political correctness.

One of the precipitating events occurred in 1988, when the university had ended the core humanities curriculum, called Western Civilization. Western Civ had been deemed to be about “dead white men” and therefore unacceptable for a multiethnic, multiracial, multigendered campus. The course had been replaced with Culture, Ideas and Values, also known as CIV, without the offending “Western” preceding it. CIV’s curriculum required race, class, and gender components and at least one book by a “woman of color.”

The rifts became chasms when Stanford rejected the request of the family of Ronald Reagan to establish his presidential library on campus. Ostensibly, the excuse was traffic congestion at the site, but everyone knew that it had been the agitation of a small but vocal faculty group that forced the university to turn down the library.

Stanford wasn’t exactly falling apart, but it was a very polarized place. There was even a split concerning intercollegiate athletics, with some saying that the university’s commitment to Division I sports meant a lowering of academic standards. The new president obviously would have a lot of work to do.

After several months, the search committee identified a handful of prospects with the unquestioned academic credentials and administrative experience that would be required of Stanford’s president. Then we took to the road to interview the candidates. No sitting university president or provost wants to be identified as a candidate for a job, only to fail to be selected. Thus we always disguised our travel to avoid leaks about who was being considered.

A group of us were sent to Chicago to interview Gerhard Casper, the provost of the University of Chicago. After about an hour during which Gerhard, an eminent constitutional lawyer, quizzed us as much as we did him, he turned to me. “You are representative of the next generation of leadership at Stanford,” he said. “What do you think is the greatest challenge?” I answered that the university had strayed from its core purposes and was trying to do too much.

The discussions continued, and as we walked out of Gerhard’s apartment and into the frigid Chicago night, I turned to a fellow committee member and said, “I could work for him.”

The committee deliberated for a few more weeks, but well ahead of schedule we decided that Gerhard Casper was likely the right man to lead Stanford. He came to Los Angeles to meet the committee one last time in secret. There we had a truly open and frank discussion. Gerhard was known as a conservative with very traditional views of the role of the university. The University of Chicago didn’t even have intercollegiate athletics. We worried that there might be some issues with the fit between this distinguished silver-haired German immigrant and northern California’s informality. I even asked Gerhard if he believed in affirmative action, citing my own case as one that had worked out pretty well. He said that he did, explaining that he believed diversity and excellence were not enemies. After several hours, we were comfortable with our choice. We believed that Gerhard saw Stanford’s unique strengths and that he’d put the university back on course. And he wouldn’t try to make our beloved university into something it didn’t want to be.