Not many Stanford professors can say they've been kicked off the Farm. But Brad Efron was suspended for four months when he was a graduate student in 1961, and the experience turned out to be a good career move. The highly publicized case, which erupted after he published a racy parody of Playboy in the Chaparral, "did give me a feeling, since then, that I've never wanted to shut people up," the wiry 60-year-old statistics professor explains. "I've had residual sympathy for the contrarian point of view."
Efron's zest for controversy didn't diminish after he was readmitted to his PhD program, nor later when he became a Stanford faculty member in 1966. In 1992, he and Casper engaged in a sharp exchange at a senate meeting on the issue of indirect costs. More recently, as chair of the influential advisory board of the Academic Council, Efron had the delicate task of hearing the disciplinary case against Adolf Pfefferbaum, a tenured professor of psychiatry charged with neglecting his academic duties. (The professor eventually was suspended for three years and fined $20,000.) Efron also has served as associate dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences and chairman of the statistics department -- all while compiling an impressive academic record and winning a 1983 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Currently the Max H. Stein Professor in the departments of statistics and health research and policy, he is internationally recognized for his applications of statistical theory to public health and medicine.
As senate chair, Efron hopes to strike a balance between his affection for the unpredictable ("It's sort of fun to see the emotionalism," among senators, he says) with a desire for more orderly meetings. One of his first planned innovations is a new agenda item, tentatively dubbed "Personal Opinion," that would allow one senator at each monthly meeting to read a prepared statement on an issue of his or her choosing. No matter what the professors say during those sessions, don't expect Efron to kick anybody out for going too far.
