Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-nine

Gerhard took the reins in September of 1992. I was friendly with Gerhard and his wife, Regina, and Gerhard would consult me from time to time about various university matters. I also took it upon myself to make sure Gerhard became intimately acquainted with Stanford sports. When Stanford played the number-one-ranked University of Washington, Gerhard asked me to join him in the president’s box. The game was at night and, with television time-outs, was going on quite long. But Bill Walsh’s Stanford team was somehow still in the game late in the fourth quarter against the heavily favored Huskies.

As Stanford took the ball for one last drive, Gerhard turned to me and said, “It’s late. I’m going to go home now.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Gerhard,” I said, taking him by the arm, “if you leave now, your presidency is over.” He was a little startled but stayed as Stanford went on to a remarkable win.

Because of our relationship, I didn’t think much of it when my secretary came in to say that Gerhard wanted me to come to lunch one day; I knew the university was looking for a new provost, and I figured they’d settled on a candidate and he wanted to get my opinion.

When I arrived, Gerhard and I went into his sunny office and sat across from each other at the round table. After a few pleasantries he said, “I want you to become the provost of the university.”

I literally dropped my forkful of tuna back into the bowl. “This is a joke, right?”

His eyes twinkled a bit and he smiled. “No, Condi. I want you to become the provost.”

Perhaps to give me a moment to recover, he launched into a discussion of why he thought I should be provost. “I’ve decided that it’s time to skip a generation in leadership here at Stanford,” he said, referring obliquely to the numerous deans and department chairs undoubtedly expecting to be named provost. “After your experience in Washington, and having gotten to know you, I think you’re the right person to help me lead Stanford. In fact, I knew it the moment we met in Chicago.”

Gerhard then addressed my unspoken concern by saying that he was not making the appointment because I was a black woman, although he was delighted that I’d be the first to hold the job. He added that, at thirty-eight, I was also going to be the youngest provost by almost a decade. From his point of view, that would be the real issue, not my race or gender. He could have added that I had never been a department chair, let alone a dean—or he could have mentioned that I’d been promoted to full professor only about a month before.

The provost of Stanford has broad-ranging responsibilities for the academic program, the physical plant, and the budget. The deans report to the provost, along with most other senior officials of the university. Provosts’ responsibilities vary from university to university, but the Stanford job is probably the most powerful and broadest in all of academia. And these were not ordinary times. Stanford faced crippling challenges, and the provost would be expected to solve them.

I told Gerhard that I’d think about it overnight and call him the next day. As I made my way back to my office, memories flooded back of walking along the same colonnade as an insecure graduate student going to my first interview so many years before. I knew that I’d say yes and become provost—even though I was still totally stunned to have been asked.

I imagined how the news would be received on campus. Not only was I young, black, and female, but I was a Republican on a campus where that is rare. I focused on what messages I wanted to send to the faculty, the students, the alumni, and the trustees. The next day I went to see Gerhard and accepted the job.

The news was received somewhat better than I expected. People were surprised, of course, but with the exception of some grousing by a few faculty members about my being a conservative, there wasn’t much negative reaction. I no longer felt much trepidation about what was to come. In fact, I was pretty excited. A couple of days later I found myself driving through campus singing along with the theme from the early-eighties TV series The Greatest American Hero: “Believe it or not, I’m walking on air / I never thought I could feel so free / Flying away on a wing and a prayer / Who could it be? / Believe it or not, it’s just me.”

My most important responsibility as provost would be dealing with the university’s financial situation. I had to cut $20 million from the budget immediately. Moreover, the university needed money to rebuild the campus after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 had left the university severely damaged. All the easy budget cuts had already been made, I told the Faculty Senate, so we’d have to make significant cuts. “I don’t do committees,” I said. “I’ll consult widely. But someone will have to make decisions, and that will be Gerhard and me.”

There was a bit of a rumble through the room, but I don’t think anyone really believed me. It didn’t matter. I had made a promise to the trustees that I would balance the budget, and I was determined to do it.

Predictably, the pushback came from groups that had felt privileged and untouchable for political reasons. The ethnic centers (Asian American, African American, Chicano, and Native American) were the most offended. The protests heated up, and they called a town-hall-style meeting and asked me to attend. I expected a huge, angry crowd, and that’s what I got.

After a few strong words about how marginalized and victimized the ethnic students were feeling, the president of Stanford’s Black Student Union handed me the microphone. I resisted the temptation to say that I thought marginalization was a peculiar term for students who’d been given the chance at a Stanford education. Instead, I plunged into a presentation of the financial situation, saying that I’d asked the Physics Department for the same budget analysis. Everyone had to contribute.

During the question-and-answer session, a young woman yelled, “The problem is, you just don’t care enough for the plight of minorities.” The audience erupted in cheers. Then, not really having thought it through, I said, “You don’t have the standing to question my commitment to minorities. I’ve been black all of my life, and that is far longer than you are old.” The buzzing told me that I’d hit a nerve. The young woman sat down. I said a few words more and prepared to leave. But as I was turning away, the moderator decided that he would have the last word. I went back and took the microphone from him. “When you are the provost, you can have the last word,” I said. Then I left, feeling that I’d established necessary boundaries.

Throughout this difficult period, the headlines about me were brutal and the criticism came almost daily. I talked to Daddy every day, and he brought the perspective of someone who’d been through tough decisions in a university environment. I know that the barrage of criticism directed at me, some of it quite personal, bothered him. I assured Daddy that I wasn’t worried about the headlines, but he was concerned nonetheless. His reaction at that time has caused me to wonder how he would have dealt with my encounters with the rough-and-tumble environment of Washington when I was national security advisor and then secretary of state. I am sure he would have gotten through it, but I could tell that Daddy hated to see his “little girl” demonized.

Nonetheless, Daddy also helped me to see the student protests in a different light. He believed it important for students to find their political voices while in the university. He reminded me that they were, after all, quite young. I realized that Daddy was right when, shortly before graduation, the student who had moderated the town hall came to see me and asked how he could be more effective at leadership. In the classroom, I was always careful not to put a student down for a comment, no matter how inappropriate. To do so is to freeze the rest of the students, who will fear humiliation. The power relationship is unequal, and students feel it. I decided that I’d try to remember that in my encounters with them as provost. In any case, I had established a pretty tough line. Maybe it was time to back off.

The budget situation took most of my time, but I had to attend to other matters as well. A few games into the football season, Bill Walsh, the legendary coach who had returned to Stanford after extraordinary successes in the NFL, asked to see me for dinner on the Sunday after a home game. He had found the return to Stanford hard and ultimately unsatisfying. Initially, his team had been very successful, defeating Notre Dame at South Bend in the first year. But now, in his third year, Stanford’s football fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. The talent was thin and the execution flawed. Bill was in no mood to do what it would take to revive the program: spend days and weeks on the road trying to recruit players to come to Stanford. He was tired.

I told Walsh that I didn’t need one of sports’ greatest legends quitting five games into the season. I implored him to stay on, saying we’d do a proper search as soon as the season was over. In the end he stayed until the end of the season. We then launched a search for Bill’s successor. Tyrone Willingham, who’d been an assistant at Stanford and was now with the Minnesota Vikings, emerged as a top candidate. “We are going to be criticized for his inexperience,” I told Gerhard. “But everyone says he was great when he was here, and we all believe he’ll be a fabulous recruiter.”

“Do it,” Gerhard said. Then he added with a chuckle, “I don’t worry too much about being criticized for appointing inexperienced people.”

The press conference announcing Ty’s appointment was set for the next day. I woke up that morning and went down to get the paper. In the sports section I saw that Glenn Dickey of the San Francisco Chronicle had written that Stanford was about to hire an inexperienced coach because I’d insisted on bringing on a black person. I was furious and called Glenn. “You didn’t say that the University of Colorado hired Rick Neuheisel [who had also not been a coordinator] because he was blond,” I told him.

I also called Ty, who said that it wasn’t the first time he’d been underestimated. Willingham would go on to be one of Stanford’s most successful coaches, returning the Cardinal to the Rose Bowl in 2000 for the first time in twenty-eight years. Glenn Dickey later apologized, admitting that he’d been wrong about Willingham.

The truth is, issues of affirmative action are tricky in a university, whether in admissions, in faculty hiring and tenure, or in selecting a football coach. There is probably no single issue on which I’ve felt more misunderstood. For instance, I have been called an opponent of affirmative action. In fact, I’m a supporter of affirmative action—if done in what I consider to be the right way. No one can doubt that years of racial prejudice produced underrepresentation of minorities and women in all aspects of American life. Corporate boardrooms, management suites, and elite university faculties and student bodies have for our entire history failed to reflect even roughly the ethnic mix of the country. That is not acceptable in America, which is the world’s greatest multiethnic democracy.

Yet the question of how to remedy that situation is a delicate one. I’ve always believed that there are plenty of qualified minorities for these roles—even some who are “twice as good.” But the processes of selection, the networks through which people are identified, can very easily be insular and produce the same outcomes over and over. The answer lies in looking outside established networks and patterns of hiring. I consistently told the Stanford community quite openly that affirmative action had figured in my own case. Stanford traditionally found its faculty at peer institutions such as Harvard or Yale or perhaps the University of California—not at the University of Denver. But when, through the Ford Fellowship, I appeared on the radar screen, Stanford took a chance on me as an assistant professor. I always closed by saying that it had worked out just fine for me and for the university.

Unfortunately, very few minorities—particularly blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans—go to graduate school, the pool from which assistant professors are selected. I had to make this somewhat unpopular point frequently to defend the relatively meager number of minorities we hired onto the faculty in any given year, though those numbers increased during my tenure. When pressed by minority students, I’d ask for a show of hands regarding how many were going on to graduate school. Few hands would go up. I’d then tell them that I couldn’t create assistant professors out of whole cloth and that they should consider going to graduate school. And we tried vigorously to recruit good minority students to our graduate programs. Very often, though, we found ourselves competing for the same few black or Latino students who’d been identified by our peers, Harvard, Yale, and so on.

It is also true that in student admissions it is necessary to take race into account. I don’t know why, but minorities continue to score lower on standardized tests. Even after we adjust for socioeconomic status, this disparity holds. But as my own story about the results of my PSAT in high school shows, these tests are not fully predictive of a student’s success or failure. Over the years I have had students with perfect records at entry fail and students who were thought to have been marginal succeed. Yet the idea that minority students are getting a break at the expense of white students is one of the most toxic issues of our time.

The key to affirmative action, I believe, is not to lower standards but to look for good prospects where you would not ordinarily find them. Yet there are pitfalls with the whole concept of affirmative action. There is the stigma that is easily attached to minorities simply because there is a widespread belief that affirmative action figured heavily in every case. This leads to what President George W. Bush called (in the context of elementary and secondary education) the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Many times, well-meaning faculty would say that they were taking extra time with their “remedial students” to help them catch up. A little investigation would typically reveal that these professors equated “remedial” with “minority.” When I attended my first Phi Beta Kappa ceremony in 1994, I was surprised to see only two black inductees. I suspected that minority students were internalizing the message of inferiority and living down to the expectations that were being set for them.

I decided to start a program for freshman called Partners in Academic Excellence. Minority faculty and graduate students agreed to take fifteen or so minority freshmen to dinner once a week. The graduate students also mentored the freshman—for instance, by reading their class papers. My suspicions were confirmed when the black graduate students reported that the freshman were being given “courtesy” grades, higher than warranted so as not to affect their self-esteem. The problem, of course, was that easier grading early on left the students unprepared for the tougher subject matter that was coming.

Gerhard supported the program but worried that I was setting up a miniature “segregated” academic system within Stanford. Ironically, that was exactly what I was doing—trying to reproduce elements of my segregated childhood, when teachers did not worry about being called racists for their high expectations and “no victims” approach.

In time, we reworked the program to broaden its participation. We learned that student athletes suffered from the same prejudices, as did women students in math and the sciences. I was reminded again how difficult it is to overcome preconceptions and stereotypes—particularly for people who want so desperately to do the right thing for “those poor minorities and women.”

I loved the regular rhythm of the provost’s job, which gave me time to spend with Daddy. We continued to work together on the Center for a New Generation and saw it grow and prosper. I visited him at least twice a week, always going over after church on Sunday to watch sports, as we’d done so many years before. He and Clara and I went to Stanford football and basketball games together. Daddy loved my friends and became close to several of them. One day, standing on the practice field while watching spring football together, he turned to me and said, “I’m so glad I came here. Palo Alto is such a nice village. And it is awfully nice to be the father of one of the most important people in the village.”

I realized at that moment that Daddy was finally enjoying the comforts of the retirement he deserved. His life had turned around since those dark days in Denver when his professional life crashed around him. It had been hard work rebuilding his life after Mother’s death. But he had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. In 1994, for his work on behalf of minority communities in Denver and East Palo Alto, the National Alliance of Black School Educators presented him with their Living Legend award. In 1998, the City of Palo Alto honored him with a lifetime achievement award. And the community college system in California still awards John W. Rice Jr. diversity fellowships every year.

As good as life was, I knew that my time as provost had to come to an end. Gerhard had been president for seven years and was starting to think about his successor. I loved being provost but didn’t want to be president, even of Stanford, with the job’s emphasis on conducting the external affairs of the university—alumni and government relations and fund-raising. Gerhard needed a new provost who could be groomed to succeed him.

I was also beginning to feel that I’d done all that I could do. My tenure had been somewhat controversial, but I don’t doubt that the trustees appreciated the six budget surpluses I’d produced, the renewal of undergraduate education that Gerhard and I had championed, and the repair of the physical campus. Even the students had come to like me. When I announced I was stepping down from the post, the Stanford Daily ran an editorial entitled “Farewell, Provost Rice,” which featured a line that I will always treasure: “Condi leaves a legacy as a powerful administrator who cares about students.” Even the minority communities—particularly the black community—showed its appreciation with a wonderful farewell event, complete with gospel versions of my favorite hymns.

As for the faculty, I’m not so sure. I’d made a lot of tough decisions with directness and without showing much patience for the veto groups that populate a university faculty. Many colleagues called to say that they’d miss my clear and unapologetic leadership. Nonetheless, I’m sure that many others were relieved when, in the announcement of my decision to step down, I made clear that I was done with university administration. The fact that I’d signed on to help Governor George W. Bush in his run for the Presidency of the United States convinced everyone that I meant what I’d said. But I was absolutely truthful when, at the event held to honor my service, I said that being provost of Stanford was the best job I’d ever had.