Gerhard Casper looked downcast. "One of the most deplorable aspects of my presidency is the speed with which I have used up provosts," he admitted at his final Faculty Senate meeting June 8. But it was mock gloom, and the room erupted in applause as he announced that philosophy chair John Etchemendy would succeed John Hennessy as provost when Hennessy becomes president on September 1. It was only last July that Hennessy replaced Condoleezza Rice in the administration's No. 2 spot.
Like all Stanford provosts past, Etchemendy, 48, is a longtime professor. He earned his PhD at Stanford in 1982 and returned to the philosophy department in 1983 from Princeton, where he was an assistant professor. The new provost's research interests include logic, semantics and the philosophy of language. In recent years, he's focused on the role diagrams and other nonlinguistic forms play in reasoning.
His research led to spinoff work: he has developed software for teaching logic and computer science, and in 1994-95 he chaired the University's commission on technology in teaching and learning. Etchemendy dismisses fears that technology will supplant old-fashioned teaching, though. "I've always been a firm believer in taking whatever tools make better pedagogy and using them -- but not forcing them where they don't belong," he says. "Face-to-face interaction is an almost unbeatable way to teach." He should know: cited for "the most extraordinarily positive testimony from students," Etchemendy won the first Bing Teaching Award in 1992.
His popularity extends to faculty and staff, says developmental biology professor Lucy Shapiro, who co-chaired the search committee with Hennessy. "He was nominated by a vast number of people from across the campus -- I never saw anything like it." Nominators cited Etchemendy's sensitivity and effectiveness; one called him the best associate dean in living memory (he served from 1993 to 1997). "John is a coalition builder," she says. "If he says no, you don't hate him."
That quality will help in his new post. As the University's top academic and budgetary officer, the provost must be a master of tough choices. But Etchemendy is upbeat. "Stanford is so well positioned in so many ways," he says. The challenge, as he sees it, is to continue the University's "upward trajectory" despite an endowment that's dwarfed by those of other top-ranked schools, town-gown friction over the housing shortage, and the nationwide crisis in funding medical education.
Etchemendy lives in Menlo Park with his wife, Nancy, who writes science fiction and horror stories, and their 15-year-old son, Max, who, according to his father, is the only person the logician ever loses an argument to. Etchemendy allows that his new job is "a diversion from my chosen career" but says his experience on the recent presidential search committee -- months of intense conversations about Stanford -- drove home the importance of the work of the president and provost. Answering the call became that much easier. "You build up a weakness," he says.
One wonders what Max would say to the logic of that.
