Inaugurations at Stanford University

BY LISA TREI

John L. Hennessy's inauguration this month marks the 10th time that Stanford has welcomed a new president. Pomp and circumstance, some of it invented during prior presidencies, will accompany the colorful ceremony in Frost Amphitheater on Oct. 20. Just as the event has reflected the era in which it takes place, presidents have put a personal stamp on their own installations. Some presidents didn't have inaugurations, due to war and financial constraints, while others sought to celebrate the good times with a full-blown affair. While an early president refused to wear a cap and gown because he considered it undemocratic and impolite, the past two presidents have donned a flowing crimson robe created just for the occasion.

The university's first president, David Starr Jordan, didn't have an official installation. He accepted Sen. Leland Stanford's offer to become president on March 22, 1891, but it was the university's opening day, Oct. 1 of that year, that is regarded as the date he took office.

Stanford became an instant university that day, prompting a New York newspaper to later dismiss the former California governor's ambitious venture as "a rich man's folly." Twice the number of students expected, including many women, arrived on opening day. "Our university has no history to fall back upon; no memories of great teachers haunt its corridors," Jordan told a crowd gathered in the Inner Quad. "No tender associations cling ivy-like to its fresh new walls. Traditions and associations it is ours to make."

Over the years, Stanford has done just that.

Vice President John Casper Branner was on a field trip in Brazil when he was named Stanford's second president in May 1913, largely due to the lobbying of alumnus Herbert C. Hoover, a member of the Board of Trustees. The campus waited until Branner, a geologist, returned and hosted an official ceremony on Oct. 1 of that year. In his address in the Quad, Branner said, "I warn you at the outset that you must not expect to find in me any of the evidences of Chancellor Jordan's genius. I am compelled by nature and by principle to depend not on the inspirations of genius, but on routine work directed to a definite end. I cannot promise to be diplomatic, but you can always count on my frankness and my straightforwardness, which are more important, I hope, in our dealings with each other."

In an aside that the Office of Development might take issue with today, Branner criticized the practice of asking alumni to support their alma mater. He told a story about a woman who was constantly pestered for financial support after she graduated from "a famous college for women." He said: "With this sort of thing I have no sympathy. It is too suggestive of the cannibal king who raised his own children for his own food."

Branner was also up front about his plans concerning retirement. He wanted to leave by the end of the 1914-15 academic year, just after he turned 65, "before old age can fasten me on the institution as an unproductive and unwelcome pensioner." Branner retired in the fall of 1915.

On Jan. 1, 1916, alumnus Ray Lyman Wilbur, dean of the School of Medicine, became Stanford's third president. He refused to wear an academic cap and gown during the inauguration ceremony because some of the invited guests, including his friend and university trustee Timothy Hopkins, were not eligible to do so. Hopkins was a wealthy philanthropist but had no college degree, which was common for a person of his social standing. Wilbur wrote in a letter to Hopkins, "In a university that grants no honorary degrees, that has many connected with it who cannot wear gowns, the new President feels that he cannot as a courteous gentleman wear anything that will make a guest of the University or a friend feel out of place. I am going dressed as a man, not as a priest, scholar or doorkeeper."

Wilbur wore a top hat and dress coat to the ceremony in Memorial Church on Jan. 22. His speech, which was partly jotted down while sitting in a duck blind during a hunting trip, was equally democratic and practical. Quoting from Stanford's Founding Grant, he said the goal of a university is "to qualify its students for personal success and direct usefulness in life."

Concerning faculty, Wilbur noted, "The university professor should be looked upon as a highly developed useful citizen, not as something apart, imponderable, cloud scraping." He added about the campus body: "There can be no place for the mentally stagnant; no place for those who fail to grow each year. The university must be untrammeled in its right to rid itself of the incompetent and indolent among its students and the ineffectives and mediocrities in its faculty."

While Wilbur's presidential address in 1916 may have raised a few eyebrows, the mood lightened when Wilbur and the alumni club in New York City carried out "An Exchange of Greetings by Telephone," which was arranged by the chief engineer of American Telephone and Telegraph less than a year after the nation's first transcontinental call. Wilbur chatted from the Stanford Union (now the Old Union) with the alumni club's president and the president of the New York women's club. The event wrapped up with a woman in New York singing the first verse of "Hail, Stanford, Hail," followed by the university's student chorus completing the second verse.

Wilbur served for 27 years, retiring in 1943.

Donald Bertrand Tresidder became president at a time when Stanford was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and had seen its ranks of students and faculty depleted by the Second World War. His ceremony was appropriately simple. A file on Tresidder's installation in the University Archives contains a single announcement, typed on a piece of thin, crumbling khaki-colored paper. On Oct. 14, 1943, Tresidder was "presented" to an all-university assembly in Memorial Auditorium that consisted of "faculty, staff and officers of the Army." Mindful of the university's finances, Tresidder wanted to wait until after the war to hold a grander affair. That time never came. Tresidder died suddenly from a heart attack on Jan. 28, 1948.

The inauguration hoopla surrounding John Ewart Wallace Sterling, Stanford's fifth president, sharply contrasted with simple installation of his predecessor. On Oct. 7, 1949, Sterling was inaugurated as president in the Laurence Frost Amphitheater, the first time the space was used for such a purpose. According to a report by Marion Rice Kirkwood, chairman of the inauguration program, delegates from 244 educational institutions and learned societies participated in the academic procession. Almost 300 faculty members and senior representatives of Stanford also marched into Frost. Invitations were sent to 2,250 friends of the university and the Stanford Alumni Review issued a special invitation to all alumni. Announcements of the inauguration were sent to more than 250 leading universities abroad. Altogether, almost 5,000 people witnessed the ceremony, which four radio stations covered live.

Sterling's address, titled, "A Lofty Purpose Shared," is not as memorable as his remarks made at a pre-inauguration dinner at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. In that speech, Sterling criticized the educational standards of entering students. "It seems to me that in the past quarter century, colleges and universities have been obliged to do work which was formerly and properly done in grade schools," he said. "I see no reason, for instance, why colleges need to provide courses in 'bonehead English.'" Sterling went on to make a plea for improving educational standards: "I believe education to be a serious business; no business is so serious in a democratic society."

Sterling helped to liven up the inaugurations of presidents who succeeded him by asking chemistry Professor Eric Hutchinson to devise university heraldry for the 1967 Commencement. An accomplished calligrapher and manuscript illuminator, Hutchinson spent more than a year working on the project. He consulted with the deans of Stanford schools, with other universities that use flags and with heraldic authorities in England. Although the university offered little raw material to work with ­ there were no Stanford or Lathrop family coats of arms ­ Hutchinson used the rules of heraldry to devise school shields that were then incorporated into colorful flags.

By the time Sterling retired in 1968, Stanford had enjoyed its greatest period of growth. But it was also a period of political strife on campus. Two days before Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer's inauguration on June 14, 1969, vandals bombed a telephone booth near Frost and damaged folding chairs inside the amphitheater. In response, Santa Clara County Superior Court expanded an injunction first issued following a sit-in in Encina Hall on May 1. It specifically prevented students and non-students from disrupting the inauguration and Commencement.

Pitzer was successfully installed as Stanford's sixth president. But in what presaged what was to come, he remarked, "It would be a great honor to accept the presidency of Stanford at any time, but this year the responsibility appears particularly heavy." Pitzer's tenure lasted only 18 months. In a resignation letter to the Board of Trustees, he wrote that "deep divisions beset our country" and "as a result, pressures tending to distract or disrupt the educational process have increased significantly. These trends have made it increasingly difficult to obtain the very broad and active support from all those groups who together are responsible for the well-being of the university."

Provost Richard W. Lyman succeeded Pitzer. In keeping with the times and the university's financial constraints, he decided against holding a formal inauguration. Instead, Stanford's seventh president held a series of talks and dinners with faculty, students and alumni. At a dinner for faculty in Maples Pavilion on March 9, 1971, guests paid their own way: assistant professors, $5; associate professors, $7.50; and professors and senior staff, $10.

Acting as master of ceremonies, former president Sterling injected some levity into the affair. Noting that Lyman was a student of British history, Sterling said, "I thought it might be of comfort to him to know that in these troubled and trying times there appears to be one place in Britain where, in case of need, he might find some calm and repose. The place is St. Andrew's University. I suggest it as a possible refuge by virtue of having read what its vice-chancellor and principal had to say in the university's prospectus for the year 1970-71. I quote, 'Apart from an isolated incident of violence in 1470 when the dean of the faculty of arts was shot at with bows and arrows, and if one glosses over the Jacobite demonstrations of 1715, the university has been singularly free of student unrest.'" Lyman remained in office until the end of the 1979-80 academic year. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies.

When Donald Kennedy assumed office as president on Aug. 1, 1980, he had been a faculty member for 20 years. Hutchinson found nine yards of red silk in San Francisco that was used for the presidential gown first worn by Kennedy. A Baroque trumpet fanfare kicked off the inauguration ceremony on Oct. 12 and heraldic flags added a festive touch to what was later described as a "Stanford family affair." In his speech, Kennedy said that leadership is more than management, and that a president must do more than maintain structure and conserve momentum. "In the end, leadership works best ­ indeed, may work only ­ when it is closely faithful to the institution's own character," he said. Kennedy promised the audience an era "in which we will be aggressively ambitious for this splendid institution."

Stanford's eighth president remained in office until August 1992. A high-profile disagreement with the federal government over reimbursement for the indirect costs of research overshadowed many of his accomplishments. The president emeritus remains on campus as a faculty member in biological sciences and at the Institute for International Studies.

Gerhard Casper was provost of the University of Chicago when he became the university's ninth president on Sept. 1, 1992. About 7,000 people attended Casper's inauguration in Frost on Oct. 2, including Lyman and Kennedy, who came as "emeritus bookends," according to Kennedy. Drama Department senior lecturer Pat Ryan read from the writings of Jane Stanford, and guests were entertained by a concert of carillon bells ­ something that Hennessy will have to forgo because the bells of Hoover Tower have not yet returned from a renovatory jaunt to Belgium.

Casper's inaugural speech stressed the importance of academic freedom. "Only in one respect must the university be rigidly conservative," he said. "It must protect the openness, the rigor, the seriousness of its work in education and research." Following the ceremony, guests were invited to visit Memorial Church ­ open for the first time since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Casper's reception in the Quad began with a mariachi band and ended with a two-hour-long receiving line of well-wishers. Casper's wife, Regina, had to wear gloves to protect her hands because they were sore from greeting so many people the previous day.

Hennessy's upcoming inauguration will include the pageantry associated with earlier installations. About 10,000 people ­ faculty, staff, students, alumni, local government officials and college presidents ­ are expected to attend the ceremony and a reception afterward in the Quad. Hennessy's taste for jazz will be reflected in the program ­ the Stanford Jazz Workshop Ensemble will perform several times and, at the president's request, will play "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copland after the processional is completed. Casper, Kennedy and Lyman, who will participate in the program, will look on as the president's crimson robe is presented to its third wearer. The jazz ensemble and the Stanford Chamber Chorale will perform a piece of music composed for the event by alumnus and lecturer Giancarlo Aquilanti. The piece, "The Call of the West," is based on a quote from Jane Stanford. Afterward, guests will be invited to join Hennessy; his wife, Andrea; Isaac Stein, chairman of the Board of Trustees; and his wife, Madeleine, for a reception that will feature a variety of student performing groups and that long receiving line. SR