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Eli’s Stanford Man
Members of the Yale Corporation—the University’s governing body—are often picked for their skills in specific areas of knowledge. Never before has a member been a former president of a peer institution. Meet Gerhard Casper, of Palo Alto.
Summer 2001
by Bruce Fellman

To the world at large, the Yale Corporation is one of those mysterious councils of elders that conduct the affairs of major institutions veiled in majesty and secrecy. But its members have been some of the most visible figures in American life. Over the years, the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall has seen a noble roster of statesmen (Dean Acheson '15; Cyrus Vance '39, ‘42LLB), clerics (Bishop Paul Moore '41; Henry Sloane Coffin, Class of 1897, 1900 MA), and captains of industry (Juan Trippe '20, J. Irwin Miller '31) deliberating around its gleaming conference table. But last September, President Levin expanded the pool of Corporation leadership to include an unusual candidate: the ex-president of one of Yale’s most vigorous competitors.

The newest member, Gerhard Casper, led Stanford University from 1992 to 2000, rebuilding its reputation in the wake of a financial wrangle with the federal government, and rebuilding its campus after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In addition, he made major changes in the way Stanford dealt with its alumni, and embarked on a reconfiguration of the Stanford undergraduate program.

His presidential experience aside, Casper, at 63, brings a unique breadth of experience to the Corporation. Born and educated in Germany, Casper earned a law degree at Yale in 1962, became a constitutional scholar, and went on to teach at Berkeley from 1964 to 1966. In 1979, after 13 years on the faculty of the University of Chicago law school, he became its dean (and a United States citizen), holding that position until 1987. From 1989 to 1992, he was the university’s provost.

But word of Casper’s Yale appointment was nevertheless greeted with a measure of anxietyin some quarters. Apart from his lack of a Yale College degree, Casper had headed an institution best known for its strengths in engineering and technology—traditionally not at the heart of the Yale academic culture. Moreover, while widely admired for its academic standing, Stanford remains for some Ivy League loyalists a bit too focused on athletics—in its own words, “a niche school for smart jocks.” President Levin—himself a 1968 Stanford graduate and an ardent sports fan—broke with tradition in 1999 by holding a “retreat” for the Corporation in Palo Alto. And last spring, Yale granted Casper an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Was Yale, some wondered, tilting perilously Coastward?

Other observers noted, though, that Casper’s experience could be seen as just what Yale needs at this point in its history. President Levin has long made it clear that Yale can not expect to remain at the very top of the educational pyramid by relying on its reputation in the humanities alone and last year (see “Serious About the Sciences”) committed $1 billion to the improvement of its programs and facilities in science and medicine.

And while the University’s athletic fortunes have been improving steadily in recent years (under the leadership of athletics director Tom Beckett, formerly of Stanford), they could no doubt benefit from the counsel of an academic chief executive with demonstrated success in blending brains and brawn. Beyond that, Casper has had a first-hand exposure to the College experience through his daughter, Hanna, who graduated in 1989. And he had an even more thorough introduction to the entire institution as the head of the team from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges that reaccredited the University last year. “I am not here to bring Stanford solutions to Yale,” Casper insists.

The solutions Casper brought to Stanford were hardly predestined to succeed. His heritage alone was the first hazard he faced. Although being German had never been an issue at the University of Chicago, it was used against him as soon as he arrived in Palo Alto. A few students reacted to his appointment with references to “Casper’s Third Reich,” and described the new arrival as “Der Fuhrer.” The emphasis on Casper’s German background (and that of his German-born wife, Regina, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford) took the new president by surprise.

“We came to California as Midwesterners,” he says, joking about his “Chicago accent.” But, he adds, “I brought some of this on myself when I quipped at the Stanford press conference introducing me that the only reason I was named president was that I could pronounce the university’s motto, Die Luft der Freiheit Weht—“The Wind of Freedom Blows.”

The ethnic crudities soon stopped, but Casper faced far greater problems. He had inherited a university still reeling from claims that it had overcharged the federal government by some $200 million for services and purchases (from flowers to a yacht) that were associated with Stanford research conducted with government grants. (In 1994, the parties reached an agreement under which Stanford paid $1.2 million and the government acknowledged that the university had done nothing wrong.)

No less daunting was Stanford’s budget deficit of some $37.9 million. With the aid of Condoleezza Rice, the expert on Soviet affairs Casper appointed as his provost in 1993 (and who is now national security adviser to George W. Bush), he was able to bring the deficit to zero by 1995. “Casper stopped the bleeding,” says Stanford’s vice president for development, John Ford.

Casper went on to do some aggressive rehabilitation. Under his direction, Stanford completed a quarter-billion-dollar program to repair structures that were damaged in the 1989 quake. Beyond that, Casper initiated a $1 billion effort to construct new buildings, many of which were designed by such prominent architects as James Stewart Polshek, Antoine Predock, James Ingo Freed, and Sir Norman Foster.

One issue that has continued to roil the Stanford campus since Casper stepped down as president (he continues to teach and do research at the school) is the use of the 8,000 acres of land it owns, only one-third of which is occupied by the campus. Due to the area’s economic boom—fueled in large part by Stanford’s own research—the cost of living has skyrocketed, and housing is increasingly hard to find. At the same time, Stanford is eager to expand. “Some of our neighbors would like to see our vast undeveloped areas preserved forever,” says Casper. “But Stanford has to grow, and we need to do more to engage the surrounding communities in a dialogue. I look with real envy at the constructive, symbiotic relationship that Yale has developed with New Haven.”

Closer to home, Casper oversaw a major restructuring of the way the university related to its alumni. Since its beginnings in 1892, Stanford’s alumni association (SAA) had been an independent organization run and funded by alumni. Casper, according to William Stone, the SAA’s president emeritus, felt that Stanford “was underserving its alumni” by having the link external to the university. Casper proposed making the SAA a university department, and although the idea sparked some resistance in the letters column of the Stanford alumni magazine, it was accepted by the alumni board of directors. “They always felt free to decline,” says Stone. “There were no tanks in Tiananmen Square.” As a result, he adds, “there’s a higher degree of engagement with the institution than ever before.”

As partial evidence of that, supporters of the change point to the university’s fundraising. When Casper arrived, Stanford had just completed the nation’s first billion-dollar campaign, but when he examined the sources of the money, the president found that the rate of participation was a mere 26 percent, compared with Yale’s 49 percent and Harvard’s 47 percent. “I was appalled,” recalls Casper. “We had not succeeded in connecting the alumni to the university; it was clear that we had a lot to learn from places like Yale.” Annexing the alumni association was only part of the reason, but added to Casper’s acknowledged personal skills at “working a room,” as development vice president Ford puts it, things have changed dramatically. Stanford’s rate of alumni giving in 1999 stood at slightly over 39 percent.

Gratified as he may be by the increase in the alumni financial participation at Stanford, Casper is even more enthusiastic about the changes he initiated in the undergraduate curriculum.

When Casper became Stanford’s president, the contrasts with the undergraduate life at Chicago were immediately apparent. Among Chicago’s appeals to students is the relatively small size of most of its classes. At Stanford, especially in the first two years, students were often forced to contend with enormous lectures—which Casper describes as a form of “distance learning”—and had relatively little face-to-face contact with members of the senior faculty. And then there was the Internet. “With all the challenges to the primacy of the traditional college that are coming from the Web and other kinds of distance learning opportunities, you have to ask why a residential education like the one offered at Stanford is supposed to be superior,” Casper says.

In 1995, after an extensive internal review of the undergraduate curriculum, Stanford inaugurated reforms that many see as Casper’s most enduring legacy. The heart of the overhaul is known as Stanford Introductory Studies. The program provides freshmen and sophomores with small seminar courses (nearly 250 are now available) that enable students to enter the intellectual fold at the beginning of their undergraduate careers, rather than at the end, when they would traditionally be eligible for seminar work. (Casper gives partial credit for the program to the sorts of courses he took as a student at Yale Law School, and those his daughter took while she was a Yale undergraduate.)

Even as a former president, Casper continues to work on the reforms he set in motion while still in office. He is now creating a year-long undergraduate course, to be team-taught with colleagues in the English and political science departments, on the notion of citizenship. “In putting the new curriculum together, we acted on the assumption that learning is not a one-way street,” he says. “The undergraduates contribute through their questioning—even their naïvete—and for professors, the uncertainty that sometimes results when our assumptions are challenged is good for us.”

Casper’s official responsibilities as a member of the Yale Corporation are to serve on the buildings and grounds committee, and on the institutional policy committee. His qualifications for those assignments would seem to be above reproach. But his years at the helm of an institution of Stanford’s stature would seem to make him a candidate for almost any committee the Corporation has to offer. “My experience may not have provided me with all the answers, but it has given me an enriched repertoire of questions,” says Casper.  

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