Hoover director, faculty members spar on political diversity of institution’s scholars

BY ANDREA M. HAMILTON

When Director John Raisian appeared at the Faculty Senate Thursday to report on the Hoover Institution for the first time in 13 years, he came prepared -- with a French WWI-era helmet. "Just in case," Raisian joked, alluding to the bad old days of stormy relations between Hoover and the senate.

Raisian's predecessor, W. Glenn Campbell, was a staunch cold warrior who during his 29-year tenure built Hoover into an internationally recognized think tank that was closely aligned with the Reagan administration. Campbell had a contentious relationship with the senate, many members of which denounced Hoover as a "right-wing think tank" that had no place on a university campus. Campbell -- not above publicly baiting his opponents -- in return called those who opposed him "Huns" and left-wingers.

"Glenn explicitly picked fights with Stanford faculty. He was fighting communism in the [former] Soviet Union and communism on this campus -- that was how he raised money," Raisian said in an interview, quickly adding that this is no longer the case. However, when Campbell was forced into retirement in 1989 after an unsuccessful battle to bring the Reagan Presidential Library to the Stanford campus, Raisian inherited his unpopular mantle.

Hence the helmet.

At his 1989 appearance before the senate, Raisian noted, he had actually worn the helmet. Last week, he merely had it at the ready, a nod to his efforts to improve relations with the university. After a long hiatus, Raisian said, it was time reopen the dialogue between Hoover and Stanford, and acknowledge some of the positive changes over time.

"Things change," Raisian told the senate. "I welcome this opportunity to renew and talk about what I think is some [of the] academic progress that has been made at Hoover, and on behalf of the university."

Raisian first outlined the basic structure of the think tank, officially called the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. First and foremost, he stressed, Hoover is part of Stanford University. "We're not some independent agency that's renting buildings on your campus. ... The director of Hoover reports to the president of Stanford."

Raisian has two masters: In addition to President John Hennessy, he reports to Hoover's Board of Overseers, which oversees its budget, fundraising and mission. Raisian described that relationship as "strictly an advisory committee. ... President Hennessy is a key figure," he said. "To the extent the Board of Trustees of Stanford trumps the president, then there has been a working relationship between the Board of Trustees and the Board of Overseers." That includes getting the trustees' approval to nominate members to Hoover's board. "My reporting to the president is very much akin to a dean reporting to the provost," he added.

A brief history of Hoover

The institution was founded in 1919 as the Hoover War Library by alumnus and later U.S. President Herbert Hoover as a repository for materials related to WWI that he had collected during his postwar relief efforts.

Hoover "had a vision that perhaps the study of this documentation that he was gathering while distributing war relief materiel could serve to promote peace in future times," Raisian said. Today the library and archives collection is among the largest of its kind in the world, with some 60 million documents, 1 million published volumes and 25 miles of shelving, Raisian added proudly. While one-third of the library's users are from Stanford, visitors also come from 41 states and 39 countries to do research, he said.

The collection and the institution grew over the years, and during the late 1940s the institution began bringing in fellows to study the archives and consider larger international issues. In the 1970s, a domestic studies program was developed; today Raisian said the balance is roughly even between domestic and international studies. The primary research focus is "politics and economics, and the interaction of the two, or political economy," Raisian said. The mission statement, drafted by Hoover in 1959, highlights the institution's commitment to private enterprise and minimal federal government action, as well as to "recall the voice of experience against the making of war."

Campbell's fundraising prowess -- as well as his ability to attract big-name scholars by hiring retired policy figures and securing joint faculty appointments to help pay their salaries -- helped turn Hoover into a powerhouse of an institution. When Campbell arrived in 1960 as Hoover's handpicked choice for director, the institution had a $2 million endowment. As of Aug. 31, 2002, the Hoover Institution had a $238 million endowment. Today the institution has an annual budget of $31 million, with approximately half coming from endowment income and the balance from fundraising. The institution raised $18 million in donations last year ($14.7 million of that in expendable funds), most of it from private sources and individuals, Raisian said. A small portion of donations is from foundations and corporations; no funding comes from the government. The library and archives budget is $5 million -- of which Stanford contributes $1 million in general funds, the only university funding Hoover receives.

Appointment process 'just like faculty'

Today, Hoover has 141 fellows, and Raisian said its ties to the university have grown closer over the years. Twenty of the fellows hold joint appointments as Stanford faculty, 13 are Stanford faculty with courtesy appointments at Hoover and another 13 are Hoover fellows with Stanford courtesy appointments. Twelve of the 141 fellows are women; 11 are people of color. Fellows "are at the very top of the field academically," Raisian said.

He also sought to debunk the notion that the selection process for fellows is ideologically driven. "Our appointment procedures actually mimic that of any department within the university," Raisian said -- an assertion several faculty took issue with during the senate discussion.

According to Raisian, under current guidelines for appointing senior fellows, one or more members of the Advisory Board of the Academic Council serve on an ad hoc committee with the provost and faculty with expertise in the candidate's area of research to evaluate nominations from the Hoover board. "Letters go out to top reviewers in the profession to evaluate candidates under consideration," Raisian said. The ad hoc committee makes its recommendation for the president's final approval.

David Palumbo-Liu, comparative literature, asked if any Hoover candidates had ever been turned down. Hennessy clarified that the appointment process outlined by Raisian is only for senior fellows; other categories of fellows are selected by Hoover. Hennessy said joint appointments go through "the normal faculty appointment process, exactly duplicate to that." He could not recall a senior fellow having been turned down.

Michael Bratman, philosophy, asked about outside evaluation and assessment; specifically, did candidates receive "the same sort of independent assessment from an independently chosen set of referees?" Provost John Etchemendy assured him that was the case: "That's not surprising when you think about the types of appointments being made. They're much like senior, tenured appointments being made by more [of] a search waiver type of procedure in the rest of the university."

Debra Satz, philosophy, said she was concerned about intellectual diversity and wondered if Hoover's process limited the pool of candidates to a narrow band of the political spectrum. "If we're really interested in constructing knowledge, we want to draw, I thought at a university, from the broadest pool of prospective possible opinions," Satz said.

"That's the part where I feel a tension between the mission of the university and the missions [of Hoover]. I'm all for public policy and think tanks. But I want policy think tanks to draw on a larger range of ideas and perspectives," she said.

Raisian rejected the notion that "all Hoover fellows think alike. ... We have a large diversity of thinking at the institution. Now, is it as large as it can be? Probably not. But it's awfully wide."

Other faculty hammered at the same issue from different angles. Joanne Martin, business, asked how many fellows at Hoover were Republicans versus Democrats. Raisian said jokingly that outside Hoover, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in some departments on campus was on the order of 90 to 10. "It's OK to be Democratic, I guess, but not Republican," he gibed. (Hennessy pointed out that considerations of party affiliation are expressly prohibited from any university appointment.) Stephen Haber, political science, who holds a joint appointment with Hoover, also challenged the notion that Hoover was a monolithic intellectual environment. He noted that the mission statement was really a series of "questions about public policy. They're not answers to public policy questions.

"If you actually look at what people do, as a practical matter in their research, they pursue those questions across a broad range of methodological approaches, such that the notion that there's some sort of ideological litmus test is simply false," Haber said.

Eamonn Callan, education, suggested that being "forthright and more direct" about Hoover's partisanship and ideology might lessen the debate over its right to exist at Stanford. Hoover's political partisanship is quite clear from its mission statement and website, he said.

"That said, it's a partisanship that is sufficiently inclusive to embrace a certain limited diversity of political views, and a great deal of outstanding scholarship can be done under the auspices of that particular political partisanship.

"Let's be honest about this," Callan concluded. "There is no shame in partisanship."