That June day in 1993, just over a year after they first met, Condi had no reason to think Gerhard’s invitation to meet him in his office was anything more than another chance to talk about a committee decision or some other administrative matter. The meeting turned out to be anything but routine, however.
“I did not beat around the bush,” said Gerhard. “I said to her, ‘Condi, I want you to be the next provost.’ And there was really silence. You know, Condi is not someone who’s easily stunned by anything, but there was absolute silence on the other side of the table.”
It was a lot to take in. As provost, she would be the first black person, first woman, and youngest individual ever to hold the job. At thirty-eight, she was more than twenty years younger than all of her predecessors had been when they took the office, and she would go into the number-two power spot, leapfrogging the usual positions of chair and subsequently dean of a department. Without previous experience in managing a department’s finances she would be responsible for the university’s entire $1.5 billion annual budget. She would also be the chief academic officer, making policy decisions that affected the 1,400-person faculty. But Gerhard was convinced she would perform well in the job. “I knew it would be somewhat controversial because universities have a strong civil service expectation,” he said. “If you are to be provost, you should have been dean, you should at least have been a department chair . . . but I was absolutely convinced that she was competent.”
Casper also remarked that most of the controversy that followed the announcement revolved not around Condi’s race, gender, or lack of experience, but over the fact “that Condi was a Republican and most American universities are primarily made up of Democrats.” Some members of the faculty and student body were concerned that Condi’s conservative political views would sway the decision-making levels of the university toward the right, but Condi responded to those concerns by stating that her politics would not come into play in her job.
Condi entered the job at a difficult time as Stanford, like other universities, was facing budget cuts in the slowing economy. In addition to the recession, they also had enormous repair costs from the earthquake that rocked the Bay area in October 1989 and caused damage to 200 buildings. The repair bill reached $200 million. When Condi became provost, the university’s deficit stood at $20 million. “Stanford—like all universities—is in a maelstrom of change,” she said after accepting the position as provost. “Just as I was fortunate to be given a chance to help shape America’s response to the extraordinary events that ended the Cold War, I am honored that President Casper has placed faith in my judgment and ability to meet Stanford’s challenges.” She also described the source of her commitment—a deep admiration for the university that had grown stronger over the years. “When I decided to return to the university two years ago, I did so with even greater commitment to, and appreciation of, the freedom of thought, exploration and expression that the academy allows,” she said. “There is no other environment that can match the energy of a place like this.”
With her new appointment, Condi changed her plans for the summer. She had scheduled a four-week trip to the oil fields in Kazhakstan, where she would do research for a book, as she told The New York Times. As a Chevron director working on a deal in that country, however, her academic and corporate schedules were clearly going to overlap. She cancelled the trip and crammed on the university budgeting process instead. She had never faced a billion-dollar budget, and reducing the deficit would surely entail firings and cutbacks that would make her unpopular on many levels of the university. But winning a popularity contest had never been on her itinerary, and she knew that conflict would be an unpleasant yet necessary part of getting the university’s finances on track. She wasn’t afraid of the problems that would undoubtedly arise should she have to trim departments and initiate staff layoffs. “I tell my students, ‘If you find yourself in the company of people who agree with you, you’re in the wrong company,’” she said.
To some people at the university, erasing the budget deficit was a pipe dream that could not be accomplished. But Condi spent the next few months constructing a strategy that she outlined in a memo to deans and administrators in November 1993. The plan called for reductions in department budgets and student services, possible layoffs and the consolidation of support staffs. In an interview with the campus paper, she assured students that the university was not reeling from a crisis but working productively toward solutions like the rest of the nation. “I actually don’t think of this as a budgetary crisis,” she said. “This is just managing in the ’90s. Every American institution out there is going through the same questions.”
“There was a sort of conventional wisdom that said it couldn’t be done . . . that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to live with it,” said Condi’s fellow professor, Coit Blacker. “She said, ‘No, we’re going to balance the budget in two years.’ It involved painful decisions but it worked, and communicated to funders that Stanford could balance its own books and had the effect of generating additional sources of income for the university.” Many of those painful decisions involved firing people, a process that Condi dreaded but that she considered absolutely necessary to turn the budget around. “I always feel bad for the dislocation it causes in people’s lives,” she said. “When I had to lay people off, I eased the transition for them in any way I could. But sometimes you have to make difficult decisions, and you have to make them stick.”
Her job was not easy, and often not pleasant. “In the first couple of years, there was very little to which I could say yes,” she said. “Also, we had to restructure the administrative units of a lot of departments. That was hard, laying off people. That’s not fun.” But she felt that making clear decisions and staying on course was more productive than letting issues simmer for months or years. She prided herself on being able to make tough decisions. “I think that you have to have a certain decisiveness about things,” she said. “People would rather have an answer of ‘no’ than have no answer.”
In addition to the shadow of the deficit, another dark cloud hung over Stanford’s finances when Condi became provost. The university was embroiled in an investigation over alleged overbilling for indirect costs, part of the monies used to perform the thousands of federally supported research projects at the university. Federal research projects are funded with grants that cover two types of expenses, direct and indirect costs. The first are easily identifiable, such as laboratory equipment, supplies, and professors’ salaries for a specific project. Indirect costs, however, cover the utilities, library materials, building maintenance, use of support staff, and other items that are not easily attributed to specific projects. The university and the government agree on an overall percentage of those goods and services to be billed as indirect costs. In Stanford’s case, the percentage billed for indirect costs were the highest of any university in the nation at 74 percent. This meant that a professor who budgeted $100,000 for a research project would receive an additional $74,000 to cover indirect costs for a total grant of $174,000.
In 1990, the federal office that oversees the research budget claimed that Stanford had overcharged millions for indirect costs. The wide-scale audits that followed made big news in the press and Stanford’s reputation was put on the line. The complex auditing process, with dozens of accountants reviewing Stanford’s books at any given time, gave Condi additional supervisory duties in an already demanding job. But when the investigations were completed in 1994, no wrongdoing was found. The federal government “concluded that it has no claim against Stanford for fraud or any wrongdoing or misrepresentation regarding indirect cost submissions,” wrote Gerhard Casper in a public statement.
In addition to unhappy reactions to the job cuts that came with her budget-slashing plan, Condi made some controversial decisions as provost that put her on the firing line. For years, reports had been submitted about the need to hire more women faculty, pointing out that several de
partments had never hired a woman professor and that, except for the provost, no woman served in the university cabinet. In 1997, Condi admitted that progress was very slow on the issue. She reported that in 1993 the percentage of women on the faculty was 15.8 percent and by 1996 had risen to 17.8 percent—an improvement, but not an earth-shattering one. “Obviously this is slow, steady progress in the right direction,” she said, “but I’d emphasize that the numbers are not flying up.”
Studying the problem, Condi came to the conclusion that the most fundamental roadblock was the slow turnover in senior positions. “You see 1 to 2 percent turnover rates in the tenured faculty,” she explained. “So you simply know that if you’re not enlarging the size of the faculty, percentages are going to move slowly. That’s an arithmetic fact. People may not like that arithmetic fact, but it is an arithmetic fact.”
One incentive to bring more women into faculty positions involved creating a fund for new positions, tailor-made to outstanding women candidates who did not meet specific criteria for other openings. Other than that, the provost’s critics felt that she did not do enough to enforce affirmative action, even though she admitted in meetings that she was a product of affirmative action hiring back in 1981. Condi did not want to send the message to women that Stanford was recruiting them to fill a quota rather than hiring them on their merits. She felt that the positive aspect of showing a commitment to women by setting quotas “is more than outweighed by the downside, which I believe makes people feel as if they are being targeted for the wrong reasons.”
Condi did believe in affirmative action as a starting point in some cases, such as her own, where she was given an opportunity to prove herself but only during a probationary period, after which she was judged strictly on her performance in the political science department. “Done in the right way, affirmative action can be very helpful,” she said. But this did not compel her to institute quotas or make any other sweeping affirmative action policies at the university.
The provost’s affirmative action stance became headline news at Stanford again when she upheld a dean’s decision to not grant tenure to Karen Sawislak, assistant professor of history. Outraged students formed demonstrations on campus, but Condi explained that the dean is held responsible for the quality of the faculty and his decision stands. The provost and advisory board review tenure decisions to make certain that proper procedures were followed in making the determination whether or not to grant tenure. In the Sawislak case, Condi explained, all the procedures were in order. “Tenure is granted to those who have achieved true national distinction in research and excellence in teaching,” she said. “It is a very tough standard, and the dean must decide whether it has been met and make certain that the standard is applied evenly throughout the school. A departmental vote, even a unanimous one, does not usurp the dean’s role in this regard.” She added that affirmative action was not a consideration at this stage, citing a Stanford policy written in 1985. The policy states that affirmative action pertains to the time of search and appointment and the assistant professorship years, but not to the period of tenure review. As she had explained in the Senate meetings about the need to hire more women faculty, Condi drove home the university’s established policy of using affirmative action as a starting point only.
Another controversial issue during Condi’s tenure as provost involved a new core curriculum, “Introduction to the Humanities,” which overhauled both the method and the content of the undergraduate humanities experience. This program, launched in 1997, replaced the previous humanities curriculum entitled “Cultures, Ideas and Values” while expanding upon that program’s multicultural approach. The new humanities course included updated study plans, such as interactive Internet projects and group projects that took the place of final exams. Both the provost and the president of the university fully supported and helped create the new curriculum in the hope that more freshmen would be attracted to humanities courses. Only 12 percent of freshmen showed an interest in studying the social sciences, philosophy, languages, literature, or the arts, a fact that many faculty and administrators were anxious to reverse. “Introduction to the Humanities” included readings on non-Western cultures as well as courses that covered issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Condi supported the multicultural aspect of the new curriculum, stating that the story of Western civilization is incomplete without the story of the cultures that it confronted. “The argument that I have never bought . . . is that the study of Western civilization—devoid of the study of all the other civilizations that helped to shape it—was the smart thing to do,” she said. “Human history has been the story of clashes of civilizations and that is the interesting part about it. . . . I never understood the critique that you should teach only Western civilization.”
The changes in curriculum and teaching style were a group effort, spearheaded by a faculty committee and strongly encouraged by Provost Rice and President Casper. “I think the experience that an undergraduate has here in the first two years is just 180 degrees from where it was,” said Condi after the course was launched. “Much more in touch with faculty members, much more small group oriented, much more research oriented.”
Another hot issue that arose during Condi’s term as provost was a housing shortage for graduate students. In May 1998, a group of 1,000 students rallied on campus and 100 camped out for a night on the Quadrangle to protest the shortage of affordable housing. Nearly 900 graduate students who applied for on-campus housing were turned away for lack of room. Condi announced that the university would build new facilities but that the project would take approximately two years after being approved. In the meantime, housing remained a major problem, one which she passed on to her successor.
In spite of controversy over affirmative action, new multicultural programs, and other issues, Condi was widely respected for her achievements with the university budget. At a meeting with the Faculty Senate in May 1996, she announced that the university was not only out of the red, but holding a $14.5 million reserve. “This is something the entire university should be proud of,” she said, attributing the success to spending cuts, a large increase in the value of Stanford’s endowment, and record-breaking fund-raising successes. “I’m very proud we’re fiscally sound now,” she said, but cautioned against going back to old habits. “Universities tend in times of relative flush to keep growing and add functions, and to stop thinking of the necessity for consolidation,” she said. Positions that had been eliminated would eventually be reinstated, for example, moving the ledgers toward another budget crunch. “It seems almost as if there’s a pendulum,” she said, “and you have to be very tough to not have the pendulum swing.”
During her role as provost, Condi continued to teach as a professor of political science. She also renewed her commitment to the piano, joining a faculty chamber group and studying seriously in private lessons. The man who suggested she begin performing again was a colleague at Stanford. “Condi was the provost when I was dean of the law school,” said Paul Brest, who is currently the president of the Hewlett Foundation. A violist, Paul took up the instrument when his children began taking music lessons. “The provost meets with the deans once a month or so,” he said, “and I had heard that she had once been a really serious pianist. I came to one of my monthly meetings with the piano part to the Schumann piano quartet and asked her, ‘How about we play this?’ When she agreed, we started up a piano quartet that played pretty regularly for five years.” The group’s cellist was Walter Hewlitt and the violinists varied, but were primarily Stanford Law School graduate Andrea Chavez and staff member Karen Lindblaum.
Paul said that Condi loved playing piano quartets and quintets and was an excellent chamber music musician. “There’s always a lot of give and take in a quartet,” he said, “with comments like ‘please don’t rush that’ or ‘please play a little bit softer.’ Condi goes so easily with that. She has a very good ear, and she’s a wonderful pianist. String players a
re always complaining that the piano is playing too loud, it becomes kind of a joke; but she’s able to take criticism, give criticism, and just work with the group. She’s a real team player. You have to do that if you’re playing chamber music.”
This group gave informal recitals in each other’s homes, and enjoyed exploring piano trios, quartets, and quintets by Schumann, Brahms, and others. It offered a challenging musical outlet without the pressure of public performances. But eventually Condi became more serious and set her sights on performing with the Muir String Quartet, a world-class group that often came to Stanford to perform as a scheduled stop on its North American concert tours. Formed in 1980, the Muir Quartet is the resident quartet at the Boston University School for the Arts and winner of the 1981 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. The group is named for the legendary naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir, and donates the profits of its recordings to environmental organizations.
Condi had become friends with the Muir Quartet by reading through pieces with them during their Stanford visits. The quartet always played an informal concert in someone’s home before their Stanford performance, and Condi wanted to work up a piece that she could play with them at one of these pre-concerts. The quartet agreed, and Condi began rehearsing the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor. This work, considered the pinnacle of Brahms’ chamber music, demands virtuosic technique, especially in the third movement, a scherzo marked Allegro. Condi was already taking piano lessons with associate professor George Barth when she decided to tackle this piece.
“When we began working I didn’t know what to expect,” said George. “She’s a busy woman, and I thought that maybe she would just have a dilettante approach to things. We started working on a Chopin nocturne and the Beethoven Sonata No. 7 in D Major. She soon said she wanted to ‘put more time into this,’ so I decided to turn up the heat and see how far we could go. I discovered that there was no upper limit to what she could do. I pushed and she responded, every week she came ready to go, intensively working on everything. She worked with great intensity and concentration and remembered everything I said—all the nuts and bolts. She made great progress, and I was really impressed.”
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