Working Toward a ‘Living Wage’ Policy
After discussions with concerned students, University administrators have begun to develop a “living wage” policy, President John Hennessy announced February 7. Under the policy, which follows guidelines adopted by the city of San Jose and is expected to go into effect this summer or fall, workers who are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement and who receive medical benefits will be paid at least $10.10 per hour; those without benefits will earn a minimum of $11.35 an hour. The policy will apply to permanent University employees and to employees who perform tasks that could be done by Stanford employees and are hired under subcontracts worth more than $100,000 and lasting at least one year. A similar plan is under review at the Medical Center.
Being Neighborly
Student musical performances. A nondenominational service in Memorial Church. An exhibit of research under way at Jasper Ridge. Free car seat safety checks. Youth Olympics. The opening of a recently discovered time capsule Jane Stanford planted in the Quad. They’ll all be part of Stanford’s first Community Day, a free, daylong open house on April 7. Administrators hope the event, held in conjunction with the University’s annual Founders’ Day, will strengthen Stanford’s relations with neighboring cities.
Once Again, It’s Fraternity Row
In late January, the office of residential education announced that it would award additional Row houses to fraternities for the first time in more than 30 years. Phi Kappa Psi will move into 592 Mayfield next fall, and Sigma Nu will receive its house, 557 Mayfield, the following year. Unless an organization forfeits a house in the meantime, by fall 2003, the University will have reached its 25 percent cap on Greek housing along the Row. At that time, seven of Stanford’s 16 recognized fraternities and three of its eight sororities will be residential.
For Stanford Hospital, a New CEO
In April, Martha H. Marsh will take the helm of Stanford Hospital and Clinics. The new president and chief executive officer comes to Stanford with more than 23 years of experience in health care, most recently as director of the UC-Davis Heath Care System. “These are challenging times for all academic medical centers,” says University President John Hennessy. “Martha Marsh is a skilled leader with the ability to make the critical decisions that will help the Medical Center continue to provide excellent patient care while achieving financial stability.” Marsh succeeds Malinda Mitchell, MS ’85, who retired in May after 26 years with the hospital.
Tuition’s Up—But Not as Much
The Board of Trustees set tuition rates for the 2002-03 school year in its February meeting. Undergraduate tuition, room and board will go up by $1,663, or 4.9 percent, to $35,884—less than last year’s increase of $1,749. The Graduate School of Business will see the highest tuition hike: 7.9 percent; all other graduate programs will cost 5 percent more. Citing this year’s “difficult economic climate,” board chair Isaac Stein, JD/MBA ’72, said the trustees were “very conscious of the financial burden placed on students and their families.”
For Commencement Speaker, Former Provost Rice
National security adviser and former University provost Condoleezza Rice is expected to talk about the aftermath of September 11 as the invited speaker at Stanford’s 111th Commencement on June 16. Noting that she occupies “a central place on the world stage,” University President John Hennessy says Rice also “has a long-standing relationship with the University and a deep loyalty to its students, faculty and staff.” Rice, on leave as a professor of political science and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, joined the Stanford faculty in 1981 and served as provost from 1993 to 1999.
Help with the Math Homework—For Parents
What do prom dresses, school lunches and baseball statistics have in common? Plenty, according to teaching associate professor of education Shelley Goldman. Parents can use all three to help their middle school children with math. In collaboration with WestEd, a nonprofit agency, Goldman has embarked on a five-year project to show parents how often they use math in their everyday lives—and how they can teach their children to do the same. It consists of hands-on workshops, a parent resource guide and a television special that will air this summer. Parental involvement in a child’s education typically drops off during the middle school years, Goldman says, “just when math starts getting hard.”
Happy Birthday, World Wide Web
Futurists, entrepreneurs, academics and computer pioneers gathered at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in December to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. web server. With encouragement from Tim Berners-Lee, who had set up the world’s first server in Switzerland, SLAC physicist Paul Kunz and his colleagues made a bibliographic database of 300,000 physics references available worldwide in 1991. Berners-Lee demonstrated it to an international group of more than 200 physicists, and “people went home from this meeting telling their colleagues of a new way to access [the database],” Kunz told Stanford Report. “It was called the World Wide Web, and it was great.”
