He gave a final exam the day before his furniture was packed in to a van for the move from the University of Chicago to Stanford.
“I didn’t have any TAs for the lecture course on the Roman economy, so I had to do the reading for all 84 students,” Richard Saller, the new dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, recalls. “Which was a very good experience.” It also meant that Saller had to correct all the papers and assign all the final grades for the course, which he did on the trip west to Palo Alto. “My wife drove us across country on I-80 while I read exams, with the dog draped across my lap in the passenger seat.”
Saller’s wife-cum-chauffeur is Tanya Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist who teaches in the department of anthropology. A specialist in medical anthropology, she has authored books on witchcraft (Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, Harvard, 1989), postcolonial elites (The Good Parsi, Harvard, 1996) and psychiatry (Of Two Minds, Knopf, 2000), and currently is finishing a volume about evangelical Christianity.
Since Saller took office last April, the former provost and dean of social sciences at Chicago has been meeting with heads of the 28 departments, 19 interdisciplinary degree programs and 20 research centers he oversees. Not to mention 500 faculty members. After spending 22 years at Chicago, Saller says it’s a lot to take in at once. “I do feel as if there’s a good experiment in brain imaging here—what happens when a good part of somebody’s memory suddenly becomes irrelevant, and a whole new set of names, faces and organizations have to be digested in a hurry.”
In the 1986-87 academic year, Saller was a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and in 2001 he was part of a team of specialists in ancient history who reviewed the academic standing of the classics department. In what he calls “one of those little quirks of history,” Saller was at a dinner on campus in May 2001, when then H&S dean (and applied physics professor) Mac Beasley “came in, smiling ear to ear, and said he’d just reached the final agreement on the Hewlett gift for $400 million,” he recalls. “I was green with jealousy, and I never dreamt that good things would come around in a way that I would be one of the principal beneficiaries of that gift.”
A Roman historian with special interests in social, economic and cultural history, Saller received ba degrees in Greek and history from the University of Illinois, and earned his doctorate from Cambridge University. The bookshelves in his new office are filled with red (Latin) and green (Greek) hardbound books. He tapped those roots when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, delivering an address on what lessons academic administrators could learn from the responsibilities of the 1st century Roman emperor.
“Calculated in bushels of wheat or tons of silver, I note that the Roman emperor’s budget for the whole imperial apparatus was only a fraction the size of mine [as provost],” Saller told the AAAS audience. “And his costs included not merely an administration, but 300,000 soldiers. This raises an obvious question: why don’t I feel as powerful as a Roman emperor? The most obvious answer is that I can’t throw faculty to the lions just because they disagree with me.”
As a professor in the classics department, Saller will teach a graduate seminar this year on gender and household production in ancient Rome. And as H&S dean, he continues to adjust to a new administrative schedule. “It’s not uncommon to spend an hour talking about the design for the lab building that will replace the Ginzton Lab, and then go into a meeting about Buddhist studies.”
In the dean’s spare time, he’ll likely climb aboard his custom-made Serotta road bike and head up Alpine Road into the long, challenging climbs of Portola Valley. How serious a cyclist is Saller? “The bike’s actually a lot better than I am.”
