Faculty members have wanted to play a more prominent role in University planning decisions and community relations for years. Now, the Senate’s planning and policy board has recommended adding professors to the provost’s capital planning group and creating a new faculty committee on community affairs.
When local surveys ask about Stanford as a property owner and a neighbor, “there are as many negative opinions as positive ones,” geophysics professor and board chair Mark Zoback, MS ’73, PhD ’75, told the senate in June. In University-commissioned polls, residents tend to give Stanford high marks for its performance as an academic institution, but lower responses for the University as a supporter of public schools and as a landowner.
With 3,500 more employees working at Stanford today than there were 10 years ago, the senate policy board also called for some brakes on campus growth. Noting that much of the increase can be traced to the success of the medical center and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Zoback urged the University to provide the social sciences and humanities with nurturing and funding to ensure that Stanford remains a “balanced institution.”
