Asked about their experiences with the Daily, Stanford’s president and three of his predecessors gave candid, and therefore mixed, reviews. Here are excerpts.
John Hennessy
I don’t know that [the Daily] tells me anything I didn’t already know, but it sometimes gives me a good sense of student body opinion. It often tells me that something going on in the University is misunderstood, at least by the reporters covering it.
I try to compliment them when they’ve done a particularly good job wrestling with a tough issue. They did that this year with the issue of free speech. With a student body that tends to be liberal, it is important to remind them that the right to be heard must be protected for those speakers who share their views [and] for those with more conservative views. I was pleased that the Daily handled it so well.
Gerhard Casper, 1992-2000
What got to me wasn’t the editorials, but carelessness in reporting. It is bad enough to see how often the commercial press makes mistakes. When students get “facts” wrong, a university president begins to worry about the institution’s educational efficacy.
That said, the Daily was often at its best when it did analytic pieces about various endeavors at Stanford. The most courageous among the editors-in-chief, in my years as president, was Carolyn Sleeth, ’98, who formulated and defended the paper’s policy concerning Chelsea Clinton, ’01, i.e. that [she] would be treated like any other student. When Carolyn took action against a columnist who, in her judgment, had violated the policy, all hell broke loose. By sticking to her principles, Carolyn made a substantial contribution to the academic atmosphere on campus. We still owe her thanks for that.
Donald Kennedy, 1980-1992
The Daily’s relevance on campus was variable. Its quality changed, sometimes dramatically, as editorial teams changed. It had some very high-quality editors: Sam Howe Verhovek, ’83, now at the New York Times, [who] did great work on Stanford’s relations with government; later Doug Jehl, ’84, also now at the New York Times; and still later Debbie Rubenstein, ’89. I also think of Brad Crystal, ’82, [who did] superb work in digging into the Stanford budget and presenting it more clearly than had been done previously. John Wagner, ’91, did a very careful job reporting on the indirect cost issue in 1990-91, and resisted (with others) real [pressure] on the part of [Rep. John] Dingell’s staff to take an antiadministration position. Instead, the Daily was neutral and fair. The Daily tried to do a fair job on the Reagan Library and the Hoover battles with the faculty. In general, I’d say their influence was positive, but it was hard for them to maintain perspective amid the overblown rhetoric on both sides.
Richard Lyman, 1970-1980
I recall one instance in which [the Daily] had a very positive influence, although the administration at the time didn’t think so. They ran a series of articles covering the case of Lucille Allen, the dean of women who encouraged female students to report on English professors who used lewd material or behaved in a lewd way in class. The Daily insisted on publicizing the case even when urged not to, and in the aftermath, we never had a women’s or men’s dean again; everything became fully integrated.
On the other hand, the Daily had a terribly negative impact when they reprinted an article of some notoriety entitled “Student as N*****.” It argued that students were so downtrodden and ignored that their plight was equivalent to that of a Negro. It was so horribly insulting to the civil rights movement, to blacks, to the faculty charged with teaching them, to everyone. I wrote an excoriating letter, which they printed.
