Dialogue - Winter 2025

Look Both Ways

The October issue included a review of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future, a book that encourages creators not to succumb to runaway design, which fails to anticipate a product’s potential emotional and environmental harms.

Until we, as individuals and as a society, tie our everyday behaviors to a firm responsibility for the end results that we can already see—as well as those that we might only be able to imagine—we will go on “getting run over,” as the authors so wisely put it. I am in favor of addressing the next step in this process, bearing in mind it took quite a while (and a lot of money) to arrive at this point. Those of us with children and grandchildren have our work cut out for us.
Doug Owen, MBA ’66
Clackamas, Oregon

First Day of School

An October story showcased coupons from a 1953 frosh welcome packet. We asked about your memories from your first day on campus.

In 1954 I arrived by train from L.A. wearing a suit, hat, gloves, and heels, but my great-grandmother’s steamer trunk—with almost all my clothes—didn’t arrive for a week. 
Liz Konold, ’58

I dumped my stuff in a pile in the middle of my dorm room, then went to Toyon to hang out with my best friend from high school, who was also entering Stanford. When I finally got back to my room shortly before dinner, my roommate introduced himself and said, “I thought you’d expired.” We went down to dinner together and remain best friends to this day.
Brian Wright, ’79

Faculty Farewells

The October issue included an obituary for Howard Bruce Franklin, PhD ’61, the only tenured faculty member ever to be dismissed from Stanford.

I was surprised and greatly saddened by the obituary section, in which extensive coverage was given to the death of a discredited professor and only a few lines given to one of the most stellar surgeons in Stanford history. Donald Laub was a smart, skilled, technically superior reconstructive surgeon who pioneered and developed two areas of important reconstructive surgery. His creation of the Interplast program (now ReSurge International) provided surgical correction of cleft lip and palate deformities in children around the world. Organizing this program and making it successful was a herculean effort. Two or three times a year, Laub organized trips consisting of volunteer medical professionals. None received a stipend, and Laub arranged for most of the supplies to be donated. As chair of the department of anesthesia at the time, I recognized that the anesthesia trainees [on the trips] received experience in difficult airway management and monitoring that were not available at Stanford Children’s Hospital. In subsequent years, many graduates of that program wrote to say that the Interplast experience was a highlight of their training and that it served them well in their careers. 

Laub also pioneered and developed complex surgical techniques required of gender-affirming surgery. Despite intense criticism from some sources, he maintained the highest ethical and professional standards of patient evaluation and care. In some sense, this was a labor of love for Laub. The patients could never compensate him for the tremendous amount of time required of him. Laub was a creative, innovative, pioneering reconstructive surgeon and a wonderful, caring human being. Stanford is fortunate to have had him.
C. Philip Larson Jr., ’55, MS ’87
Westlake Village, California
Professor emeritus, anesthesia and neurosurgery

Thank you for the obituary of H. Bruce Franklin. My love of reading novels as a lifetime pursuit started in his class. How can one forget the way he read directly from the work we were studying—a model for my own teaching. The decision to terminate was tragic, as he was right about the war and was also a scholar and one of the best teachers I had as an undergraduate. To me, the tribute was an acknowledgment of his dedication to Stanford.
Don Boileau, ’64
Ashburn, Virginia