STANFORD: When you came into this job, what did you think was going to occupy your time?
Jon Levin: I wanted to renew Stanford’s distinctive spirit of excellence, openness, and optimism. The provost, Jenny Martinez, and I had three immediate priorities: to strengthen Stanford’s culture of inquiry and curiosity, to advance Stanford’s leadership in AI and data-driven discovery, and to make Stanford work better for its faculty and students. Stanford is an entrepreneurial place and it works best when there’s not too much red tape.
I also wanted to get out and learn from faculty, students, staff, alumni, and others who care about the university. That was one of the great joys of the year.
What took more of your time than anticipated?
There’s more uncertainty around federal support for universities than at any point in the past 80 years. The endowment tax, which Congress passed this summer, will have significant financial consequences for the funding of scholarships, graduate fellowships, and professorships. The federal government is taking a different posture on civil rights enforcement and international students. Support for research is far less certain. We have to navigate a path forward in all of those areas. I have spent a lot of time talking to people in Washington and around the country about the value of American universities: the innovation, the quality of education, why federal support is in the national interest, and why universities contribute so much to this country.
I have complete conviction that I could take practically anyone, walk them around the Stanford campus to see the range of things going on in classrooms, labs, faculty offices, athletics facilities, and the hospital, and they would come away a believer in research universities.
Where’s one place you could take them?
We hosted the secretary of energy at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to hear from faculty about battery research, where we’ve spun out probably a dozen companies, and to see the CryoEM facility, where we do ultracold imaging of molecules that has given rise to all kinds of scientific discoveries. He saw the first pictures from the LSST, which is the largest digital camera in the world and takes a picture of a third of the sky every night. It was built at Stanford and deployed this year at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. That’s an incredible example of partnership among the federal government, the university, and private philanthropy.
Tell me about connecting with students.
Reconnecting with undergraduates, who I’d been away from as dean of the business school, has been an unexpected joy. I emceed a pie-eating contest between the physics department and the math department on March 14th. Pi Day. That was memorable. And it has been fun to go running with the running club. It almost killed me in spring quarter. But I’m going to be back in the fall.
What do you think is going to happen in year two?
I want to spend considerable time on the undergraduate experience: residential education, where we need a renewed vision after the pandemic; the review and possible expansion of the freshman COLLEGE curriculum, which has been a great success; and the educational impacts of AI, where we need to wrestle with the advent of large language models. We modestly increased the number of undergraduates this year and have a task force looking at class expansion. We could admit more talented and deserving students while maintaining a transformative educational experience, and it would help reset the balance of undergraduates vis-à-vis the rest of the university, which has expanded. Particularly if other universities did the same, it could make a difference nationally to meet the demand for education at America’s great universities.
