New Senate chair retains
touch of youthful rebellion
BY JAMES ROBINSON
Poised to assume the
chairmanship of the Faculty Senate on Thursday, Professor
Brad Efron knows all about dealing with Stanford's
administration: After all, he's been chairman of the
influential Advisory Board of the Academic Council,
associate dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences,
chairman of the Statistics Department and, somewhat
earlier in his Stanford career, editor of the Chaparral
satire magazine, a position that got him kicked off
campus.
Efron was suspended in a
headline-grabbing 1961 controversy that instilled in him
a strong belief in free speech, which, he says, he'll
carry with him as he presides over a sometimes fractious
faculty in his new leadership position.
He succeeds Fran Conley,
professor of neurosurgery and chief of staff at the Palo
Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System, whose term
expired at the end of the last academic year. Among the
items on the agenda of the first meeting of the 31st
Senate are discussions on honors programs (see story,
page 6) and Latin American studies.
Efron brings to his new
role experience both as a professor and a graduate
student. On his way to receiving a PhD in statistics,
Efron was editor of the Chaparral when it
published "Layboy," a parody of Playboy magazine.
According to a 1961 story in the Palo Alto Times,
among the articles the administration found offensive was
one titled "The Ass and the Cuckold," which
university officials labeled "a burlesque of the
Incarnation or Virgin Birth." A representative of
the San Francisco Roman Catholic Archdiocese was not
amused either, and complained to the university. The
administration banned the magazine and suspended Efron
for four months. Efron was not contrite, chiding student
government leaders who, he told the Stanford Daily,
were "falling all over each other to fall in line
with the administration's position." But even
students who were offended by the parody thought Efron's
punishment was too harsh according to newspaper reports.
The San Jose Mercury
wrote: "Does [Efron] regret the publication? 'Yeah,
I regret that I was kicked out,' he said with a smile.
But then he sobered up and said seriously: 'My only
regret is that it was misinterpreted.'. . . [Efron]
indicated he hopes to return to Stanford in the
fall."
Return he did, earning a
Ph.D. in 1964 and becoming assistant professor of
statistics in 1966. Efron was elevated to full professor
in 1974; his academic career at Stanford has seen a raft
of achievements and distinctions, including a 1983
MacArthur Prize.
In his office in the
Statistics Department's spanking-new Sequoia Hall, the
reading on "Professor Efron's Emotional
Barometer" was stuck in the "neutral"
position last week. The handmade device on the wall by
his desk theoretically ranges in readings from
"death" to "orgasm" but, Efron
explained, the needle kept falling off so he nailed it
to "neutral." Whatever the climate, Efron, wiry
and lean, exudes intense, perhaps even nervous, energy.
But, he is quick to say, "I don't feel tense."
Recalling the Chaparral
incident, Efron said his biggest concern following
his suspension was that he would be drafted into the
military as a result of briefly losing his automatic
deferment.
The controversy, he said,
"did give me a feeling, since then, that I've never
wanted to shut people up." He said it also made him
more sympathetic than he perhaps would have been
otherwise to his faculty colleagues "who got knocked
around in the late 1960s over free speech, drugs and
politics. . . . I've had residual sympathy for the
contrarian point of view."
Efron, now 60, was elected
chairman of the Senate by a vote of his fellow senators,
a demonstration of his popularity with faculty. He said
assuming the new post was "a mild honor,"
adding he had "already done most other things,"
such as chairing the Advisory Board. That position put
him in the delicate role of hearing the faculty
disciplinary case against Dr. Adolf Pfefferbaum, a
tenured professor of psychiatry charged with neglecting
his academic duties. The board earlier this year
recommended suspending Pfefferbaum for three years and
fining him $20,000 a recommendation President Gerhard
Casper agreed to although he initially called for
Pfefferbaum's dismissal.
The Advisory Council
deliberated the Pfefferbaum case in private, as it does
most cases. "You can really say what you mean"
in the council, Efron said, while in the Faculty Senate
which includes 55 members, additional ex officio
members and the presence of the news media "it's
hard to be perfectly frank."
Nonetheless, Efron is
looking forward to leading a senate that will not shy
away from hot topics, even if they don't require senate
action. And he is introducing a new agenda item
tentatively dubbed "Personal Opinion" that will
allow one senator at each meeting to read a prepared
statement on an issue of his or her choosing.
Efron seems divided
between a desire for more controlled meetings he'd
like senators to, in a general way, prepare more of their
remarks ahead of time and an affection for the
unpredictable. "It's sort of fun to see the
emotionalism" that senators sometimes bare during
passionate discussions, he said.
This year is likely to
produce intense discussions on the issue of faculty
housing, he predicted, even though the Senate has no
formal role in the matter. The high cost and shortage of
area housing "has made it hard to recruit new
faculty," he said. "The university has a lot of
programs that help, but the question is, should there be
more housing on campus and should more areas be opened
up? To make a difference, we need a couple of hundred new
lots."
Like last year, the heated
issue of the number of women faculty members at Stanford
is likely to surface.
"I hope we have a
more reasoned debate" on the topic, Efron said,
adding he believed the faculty was less polarized on the
matter than last year's debate indicated. "I hope
people bring their written ideas before meetings and
don't just respond on the spur of the moment. I'll give
them first shot" at speaking, he added.
In general, however, Efron
does not expect many sparks to fly during this year's
senate meetings. "It doesn't look very exciting, but
you never know."
There may be more
discussion on Stanford's continuing emphasis on
undergraduate studies. Efron praised Casper's commitment
to revamping the undergraduate curriculum. "It was a
brave and difficult thing to do and it has worked very
well. You have to pay for it somehow, and this
administration knows how to pay," he said, adding
that faculty members don't feel threatened by the
creation of new teaching billets for undergraduate
studies. He also welcomed Casper's expansion of the
President's Scholars program, which guarantees research
funding to promising freshmen. "There should be more
of that."
Reflecting on Stanford in
1998 compared to the university's position in the '60s
and '70s, Efron said he has been "a great admirer of
how [this administration] has the university really
moving a lot closer than I thought it would be to the top
of the academic heap." Of Stanford's peers, he said:
"They're sweating us now. We're serious competition
in lots of areas."
But while he applauds many
of Casper's initiatives, Efron clearly will maintain an
independant voice in the Senate. In 1992, he and Casper
engaged in a sharp exchange at a senate meeting on the
issue of indirect costs. In that same year he also
disagreed with his faculty colleagues by opposing the
senate's endorsement of a plan to extend health coverage
to domestic partners of faculty and staff.
"I'm against taking
an advocate's role in defense of a proposal which is so
far removed from our expertise in academic and scholarly
policy," Efron was quoted as saying during the
debate.
A few months later, the
Board of Trustees and Casper agreed to extend health
insurance and other benefits to same-sex domestic
partners.
It's clear the university
community should not expect a shy senate president in
Efron. But neither does he expect to create the kind of
furor he and the Chaparral spawned on campus in
1961. "It's the most famous I've ever been," he
said, perhaps a hint of nostalgia in his voice. SR
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