• printable version

College days of student activism inform Richard Shaw’s perspective on work

BY KATHLEEN J. SULLIVAN

When Richard Shaw talks about the experiences that helped shape his values, he tells stories about his childhood in Colorado and Vermont, his undergraduate days on an activist campus during the Vietnam War, his marriage to an American Indian.

And about the "eye-opener" that was California.

"I had never really known what made the world tick until I moved to California," said Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, during his "What Matters to Me and Why" talk in Memorial Church on Jan. 17.

Shaw and his wife, Delphine Red Shirt, and young son moved to California in 1983 after he became associate director of admissions and records at the University of California-Berkeley.

"I came to Berkeley, I came to Northern California … and I just—my jaw dropped," Shaw recalled. "I said: Oh, this is what the world is, that is, in all its beautiful diversity."

He said the "microcosm of the world" he found on campus—individuals from all walks of life—opened his eyes and expanded his horizons.

"I started to understand and realize what an amazing array of perspectives people have," Shaw said. "It did significantly inform my perceptions about things—even more than being at Dartmouth [where he was an undergraduate] or being at the University of Colorado [where he attended graduate school]. I've told many that I didn't feel I started to grow up until I came here."

In an hour-long talk before an attentive audience, Shaw, 57, described many experiences that had had a significant impact on his life, including the divorce of his parents when he was 12. After his parents separated, Shaw left Denver, his hometown, and moved with his mother to Vermont.

"These were hard times," he said. "They are hard times. They do have impact. And I see it in my work all the time. There are close to 24,000 applicants to Stanford this year. And I read biography—that's my job. I read incredible biographies about kids that faced certain kinds of things growing up and what it has meant to them. I relate deeply to this."

As a teenager, Shaw attended a private school in upstate New York, an experience that taught him independence, he said, and gave him the ability to think and be on his own.

Following in his father's footsteps, Shaw attended Dartmouth College in western New Hampshire. It was 1968, and one of the first people he met—an older student who later became a mentor—had just returned from Paris, where he had marched alongside French students protesting the Vietnam War.

Shaw said those four years were a time of "incredible questioning" about the war.

"We just spent almost all of our free time saying, Why?" he said. "Why are we doing this? What does it mean? What implications does it have for us?"

Shaw was one of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the May Day demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1970. His activism put Shaw at odds with his father, the Republican state chairman of Colorado, who disowned him.

"He didn't want to spend his tuition dollars for me to march around in D.C. or anywhere else," Shaw said, adding that they later reconciled.

His undergraduate years helped Shaw understand what he wanted in life.

"What I valued the most was being in an environment that was openly free about communication—the ability to communicate often and constantly and honestly," he said.

He realized he had already found such an environment—and didn't want to give it up.

Shaw said he thought to himself: "Well, why don't I stay in college the rest of my life?"

The comment brought a laugh from audience members who knew he had done just that.

Shaw started by earning a master's degree in college student personnel, guidance and counseling from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he also ran large residence halls for eight years.

"To be with people in the most formative parts of their lives is really pretty powerful stuff," Shaw said. "They're just not old curmudgeons. You know what I mean. They're always willing to think about things flexibly. They're willing to change."

Before coming to Stanford in September 2005, Shaw had also held top admissions posts at the University of Michigan and Yale University. It is a field he said that he loves.

Shaw said his wife and three children, aged 10, 17 and 27, have also had a profound impact on his life. He credits his Lakota wife, who grew up in abject poverty in South Dakota, for giving him a fresh view of spirituality by teaching him about her traditions.

"What I learned in all of this and what I value is how important it is to respect each other," Shaw said. "To respect who you are—individually and where you come from. To respect the individual and the whole—the community from which they come. And to have unconditional positive regard for people from all races, any race; people from all religions, any religion; people from all cultures, any culture."