#9:: Provost's revamping of university courses built regional economy
BY BARBARA FEDER
Mercury News Staff Writer
It was one of those small, quiet
events that become
extraordinary only in hindsight.
On July 1, 1955, Stanford President
Wallace Sterling
appointed Frederick Terman
provost, the university's
second-in-command. Coming as
it did during a sleepy
summer on campus, Sterling's
announcement merited only
a small article in the Stanford
Daily.
But Stanford -- and the region
that became Silicon
Valley --would never be the
same.
A brilliant, at times Machiavellian
engineer best
known for hooking up Bill Hewlett
and Dave Packard, Terman
created a symbiotic relationship
between Stanford,
industry and government that
would eventually vault the
university into international
prominence and seed the
valley's nascent electronics
industry with money and brainpower.
Terman is a towering figure
in the development of
Silicon Valley: He recruited
top scholars and created
unheard-of collaborations between
Stanford and local companies.
``If he isn't the father of
Silicon Valley, then
he's the grandfather,'' says
C. Stuart Gillmor, a professor of
history and science at Wesleyan
University who is
writing a biography of Terman.
``He had a fierce desire
for the West Coast in general
and the Bay Area and Stanford in
particular to take on the East.''
Terman spent nearly all of his
career at Stanford, and his
devotion to the school is legendary.
Son of famed
Stanford psychologist Louis
Terman,
Frederick Terman graduated
from Stanford in 1920, returning
to teach
after receiving his doctorate
in engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. By
1927, he was running the electrical
engineering department,
and
he became dean of Stanford's
school of
engineering in 1945. The only
time he left campus was during
World
War II, when he ran an
800-person radio engineering
lab at Harvard
for the war effort.
Terman was one of the
country's leading radio engineers;
he held 40
patents and wrote the
seminal
textbook in his field. By the
time he
became provost, he had built
the school of engineering into
a national
powerhouse and wielded a
considerable amount of power
on campus.
``Uncle Freddy,'' as he was
known, had been on the short
list for
Stanford's presidency in
1949, but the modest, workaholic
engineer
lacked the necessary
glad-handing and diplomatic
skills. Still, he was a
world-class networker and a
formidable salesman, and his
role as the
second-most powerful official
at Stanford gave him plenty
of clout to
achieve his goals.
At the time, Stanford was a
good university but
not a great one, a merely regional
institution
nursing a bad case of Harvard
envy.
Cash-poor but land-rich, Stanford
was struggling
financially. In 1955, quarterly
tuition was a mere $250. Stanford
was just beginning to reap
the benefits of its real estate
through the new Stanford Shopping
Center and Stanford Industrial
Park. And while MIT and Caltech
were rapidly developing
lucrative ties with industry,
Stanford, like other generalist
institutions in that era, held
back, fearful of losing academic independence.
National research
Terman scoffed at such attitudes.
He'd won
millions in outside grants
for his department and viewed close
relationships with industry,
government and the military as a
``win-win-win'' situation for
Stanford. He envisioned
Stanford as a self-supporting
university that
conducted top-flight research
in areas of national importance.
Contrary to the mythology that
surrounds him,
Terman never intentionally
set out to build a
regional economy, says Henry
Lowood, curator of
the History of Science and
Technology
Collections at Stanford.
Rather, the interlocking
relationships he fostered stemmed
from
Terman's frustration that his
students felt they
had to return to the East Coast
to advance their
careers. He wanted to create
opportunities that
would keep them close, in Stanford's
embrace.
As provost, Terman wasted no
time in revamping
departments he didn't think
were pulling their
weight. Some old-guard departments
with few
majors, like classics, were
eviscerated. Within
five years, the chemistry department
was
completely refocused on biochemistry,
and the number
of its professors who were
members of the
prestigious National Academy
of Sciences shot from
one to seven. In other departments,
he pressured
scholars to choose research
programs that
would bring in the most federal
dollars, according
to historian Rebecca Lowen's
book,
``Creating the Cold War University:
The
Transformation of Stanford.''
``His philosophy was that .
. . (to have) no
program was better than a mediocre
program,''
Lowood said. ``There was a
wholesale
reorganization of some departments.
It was very
ruthless.''
His reforms angered some professors
on campus. But
President Sterling and Stanford's
board of
trustees stood firmly behind
him.
Start-ups got access
Terman is famous for his early
financial support
of Hewlett and Packard, but
he also attracted top
graduate students by paying
them more than other
universities, and he even donated
his own
money for graduate fellowships
in engineering,
Gillmor notes.
Despite pressure to build homes
on Stanford's
pristine lands, he cannily
reserved the land for
campus use, encouraging businesses
to locate near
Stanford at the new industrial
park. He
presided over the move of the
Stanford Medical
School from San Francisco to
Palo Alto. And he
set up programs in which start-ups
got access to
Stanford research before it
was published -- and
students got opportunities
for internships and
jobs after graduation.
Terman's mission meshed neatly
with the country's
postwar obsession with science
and
educating new engineers, and
the money flowed in.
By 1963, the Stanford Industrial
Park was
home to 42 companies employing
some 12,000 people.
In 1965, after a decade as
provost,
Terman retired from Stanford.
He died in 1982.
Today as many as 100 ``Stanford
start-ups'' in
Silicon Valley have contributed
more than $65
billion to the economy, according
to a 1996
Stanford Business School study.
And historians are
still trying to tease out the
many tentacles of
Terman's legacy.
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