When Matthew Kahn came to teach at Stanford, Stern Hall was under construction, Fred Terman was engineering dean and Harry Truman was talking about a Fair Deal. That was 1949 -- which means that this fall, Kahn, 71, marks a half-century as an art professor on the Farm. Campus officials say it's a feat of endurance that is "highly unusual," perhaps a record. "I'm pulling my weight, God knows," says Kahn, grinning in the living room of his stunning campus Eichler home, which he helped design in the late 1950s. "Depending on the skills of the medical profession and my own self-discipline, I mean to go on."
A native of New York, Kahn was 21 when he arrived at Stanford, after just three years of study at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art. To this day, he says without apology, "I hold no degree. Zilch." Kahn's students don't seem to mind. An expert in design, he covers topics from introductory design principles and color theory to product design and metalsmithing. He is renowned for his engaging lectures and imaginative assignments ("Produce a three-dimensional object that is particularly gratifying to handle. Use any material that works"). In 1993, he won a Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. In a nominating letter, one student wrote, "No one leaves these lectures doubting the centrality of design to man's physical and spiritual existence."
Kahn's artistic interests run from architecture to painting, textiles and jewelry-making. "There is a feeling that design is less 'artistic' than the fine arts, because of the external demands made on it by industry," he says, "but I think the stimulus of use can be a wellspring of creativity." Many of his former students have become successful designers in their own right -- as have his own two Stanford-educated offspring, Ira, '72, and Claire, '77.
