Profile in Courage
Michael Greenberger and Marna Tucker inadvertently risk exculpating Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan by attributing their resistance to her efforts to reform the derivatives markets to something so trivial as her gender. Rubin and Greenspan opposed her not because she is a woman, but because she threatened what they and their fellow Wall Street mafiosi foolishly believed to be a rigged casino from which they could only profit at the expense of Middle America. Were Born male, their response might well have been less misogynistic, but would nevertheless have been equally hostile.
I take great pride in my degree from Stanford Law School and think the world of its faculty. Yet I cannot help being reminded that Stanford’s law and business schools have produced far more complaisant errand boys and girls for Wall Street and its minions in Washington than they have courageous reformers.
It would appear that even Born rose to the position from which she blew the whistle only because she was both remarkably intelligent, able and persistent, and for most of her career posed no threat to the established order. After all, Arnold & Porter is hardly a hotbed of Naderite reformism.
This is not to demean her accomplishments. To the contrary, that she maintained her extraordinary sense of right and wrong and profound integrity despite her long association with so many who lack both only increases my admiration for her.
Alumni publications naturally promote self-congratulation. It would therefore be unreasonable to expect the magazine to investigate the degree to which Stanford grads have enthusiastically played key roles in subverting our financial markets and federal government in the service of their masters. Perhaps, however, it would supply the Stanford community with a healthy opportunity to examine the degree to which great universities more often than not produce exceptionally capable but fundamentally nihilistic graduates who far too often devote their exceptional talents to service of values quite opposed to the values great universities should, and pretend to, promote.
Sadly, for every Brooksley Born they produce, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and Yale produce a hundred intellectually gifted but morally retarded apparatchiks who would never dream of opposing the likes of Rubin or Greenspan, or doing anything else that might threaten their princely partner shares or bonuses.
One hopes that your story of Born’s foresight and courage will inspire more to follow her example. One fears that it will only reinforce in many the cynical, but empirically valid, supposition that threatening the established order is not the way to get ahead.
Mark E. Brennan, JD ’83
Centennial, Colorado
Editor’s note: Brooksley Born is a recipient of this year’s Profile in Courage Award, given by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to public servants exhibiting political courage without regard to personal or professional consequences.
It is simplistic to suppose that any one individual could have saved us from the current crisis. Brooksley Born’s was not the lone “vox clamantis in deserto”: there were many other voices that warned us, in vain, about the numerous decisions and policies that led us to the present predicament.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers mentions that plane crashes no longer have a single cause; several relatively minor problems have to coincide to produce a crash. Similarly, lots of things need to go wrong at the same time for a global crisis to occur. The crisis that afflicts us was not created merely by excessive growth in the market for credit-default swaps, though this is a significant component. Several other factors were important. Here is my list, probably an incomplete one, of additional contributors to our travails:
—corruption of mortgage lending standards by government entities seeking increased access to credit by people of lesser means via the invention of sub-prime lending;
—excessive monetary creation by the Fed in an attempt to prop up the economy after the 9-11 attacks;
—nonexistent oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their implicit U.S. government guarantee;
—poor supervision by regulators and auditors of the financing of structured investment vehicles by banks;
—overly aggressive income recognition by managers of collateralized debt obligations, creating perverse incentives that led to obviously flawed products;
—too many financial firms competing for too few profitable deals;
—lax regulation of investment banks that permitted insanely high leverage;
—inconsistent rules about the valuation of assets on the books of financial institutions (one asset, two possible valuations, and three ways of accounting for it); and
—failure by credit rating agencies to exercise independent judgment.
Reviewing this expanded list of causes greatly complicates the morality play proposed by the article, i.e. good regulators vs. evil deregulators. It makes evident a more complex story of failure by regulators, professions and markets. Perhaps it points to the implausibility
of other tales with titles such as “Soft Landing” and “Great Moderation” that we have all heard a hundred times. Maybe it means that the economic cycle ultimately cannot be tamed and that attempts to do so through fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies only set the stage for deeper and longer recessions.
The ineffability of markets recommends greater humility among all the characters in our economic drama.
Saleh Daher, MS ’77, MS ’79
Boston, Massachusetts
Thank you for the excellent article on Brooksley Born. Part of what made this compelling was, of course, the relation to the current economic crisis. However, her descriptions of everyday gender discrimination rampant in the 1950s and ’60s at Stanford brought back memories.
Speaking from my own experience in the same period, I refused to be deterred by a Stanford professor who refused me a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship because I “would only get married, quit graduate school and waste the fellowship.” In fact, within six years after Stanford graduation I had a PhD (from the University of Chicago), and in another 10 years I was a full professor of psychology. I have either been in graduate school or working full time in an academic institution for the past 50 years. In the past five years I have won two major national prizes.
My career was damaged, however, by the belief on the part of science and math teachers in high school and professors at Stanford that mathematics “wasn’t for girls” or that “girls should let boys get the good grades in science.” Unfortunately, I took this to heart and never took an advanced math course, which hampered my professional skills. In case someone thinks this is a thing of the distant past, my granddaughter was recently told that only boys would be tested for admission to the advanced math classes in her school.
I have a suggestion. My 50th reunion is coming in October. Get a team of your writers to interview women in my class who went into full-time jobs in the federal government or into the academic world. We have stories to tell about our time at Stanford and afterwards which will be as compelling as the one in your article. Given the low proportion of women currently in the upper ranks of the professoriate at Stanford, recognizing what alumnae have achieved is overdue.
Judith Vollmar Torney-Purta, ’59
College Park, Maryland
The article would have us believe if Alan Greenspan, and others, simply had acted on Ms. Born’s regulatory recommendations on the credit derivatives market, the current financial crisis would have been averted. What about the health of the underlying credit market on which the credit derivatives market is based? Newer and better regulation of derivatives would not have immunized the credit market, for example, from Fannie Mae’s massive involvement in the U.S. housing mortgage market and the resulting toxic waste, or from too much debt in the economy. To Greenspan’s credit, he recognized the fundamental problems. He warned the banking committees in both houses of Congress of these risks. If these warnings had been heeded, perhaps the current crisis would have been averted.
A good definition of regulation is government involvement in markets. Recent history suggests unprecedented levels of regulation via government-sponsored enterprises triggered the global economic crisis. As gifted a regulator as Born may be, her regulations should be expected to fare no better at avoiding financial crisis than regulations by other public servants.
Lee Kraus, ’77
Greenwich, Connecticut
I was pleased to read about Brooksley Born’s failed attempt to regulate derivative trading as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s. Rick Schmitt’s article seems evenhanded, except for his gratuitous identification of Born’s antiregulatory predecessor as a Republican—the only political affiliation named in the article—although Democrats Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers were certainly united with Alan Greenspan in quashing her initiatives, according to Schmitt’s own account. The catastrophe is bipartisan: it is about money, not ideology. As [the article] puts it, “the outsized influence of Wall Street lobbyists on the process” derailed her reforms. Follow the money!
Jennifer Larson, ’75
Rochester, New York
Enhancing Addiction
What about addiction, which Hank Greely didn’t address at all in regards to “mind-enhancing drugs” (“Brain Boosters,” Farm Report, March/April)? These drugs are used just like all types of speed, and not only do they enhance eating disorders, they are highly addictive. To support their use without talking about [that] is irresponsible. I am a therapist who works with all kinds of patients from the area, including Stanford students referred by Stanford psychiatrists, and the effects of these drugs is a scourge. I agree that they are here and we have to deal with them, but to simply say the FDA has to be stricter is rather laughable, as we all know the FDA is under the spell (and checkbook) of big pharma.
I can understand wanting to have the conversation about these drugs, as all of them are here to stay, but it seems slightly naive to just say, essentially, “what’s so wrong?” There are plenty of problems. I wonder about a discussion of why we are pushing our children so hard. Why do we think cognitive development at the cost of emotional development is so superior? We could widen this to wonder why we push young women not only to be brilliant but skinny as well—we all know they are taking these “mind-enhancing” drugs primarily because they feel high and they don’t eat. Bonus! I just ask that the discussion be truthful and enlightening.
JoAnn Loulan
Portola Valley, California
Don’t Forget Arts
Regarding “What Good Are the Humanities?” by J. Martin Evans (Farm Report, March/April), I would like to add arts to the discussion of philosophy, history and literature.
Arts encourage imagination and invention, nurture the ability to express ideas and feelings, build confidence in the use of tools, develop awareness and concern for nature and for manmade products, tell stories, record histories, call attention to the great and small moments in life, decorate our world, help us share pain, joy, death, love, loneliness, community, brutality and absurdity. How can we not support arts in education?
Dorothy Manes Pierce, ’52
Santa Rosa, California
Typographical Malpractice
Your review of Brian Eule’s book Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors (Showcase, March/April) states there are “more than 150,000 graduating medical students.” The Association of American Medical Colleges gives different statistics: about 15,000 graduating senior students and about 18,000 entering students this year. I well remember how nerve-racking Match Day was when I was graduating from the University of Michigan Medical School. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if there were really
10 times more new physicians competing for the limited number of U.S. residency spaces.
Diane K. Donley, MD
Traverse City, Michigan
Blowing Their Cover
I was shocked when I received the January/February issue. There I was on the cover—the skinny kid in the middle—being grabbed by a cop in 1971.
Unfortunately, a number of my friends recognized me in the photo, causing them to wryly suggest that I must have undergone a political metamorphosis in my later years.
It is not so. If memory serves, I was there with a group of counterdemonstrators, protesting the radicals’ various illegal activities on campus. I just happened to be in the wrong place when the police advanced.
I’d be very grateful if you would allow this letter to clear up any misunderstanding, particularly among some of my more obnoxious prosecutorial colleagues who went to Cal.
Edward R. Jagels, ’71
District Attorney
Bakersfield, California
Imagine my surprise when I looked at the cover and saw myself. I am the woman in the foreground, looking surprised as the police move past me to clear White Plaza. I was not a student in 1971, although my husband was. I had just arrived on campus from my job to participate in the demonstration. It was an amazing time of political awakening and participation.
Nancy Stone, MA ’91
Davis, California
’60s Motives and Methods
I am amazed at how Richard Lyman’s memoir encapsulates the experience of those who lived through the ’60s and hated it with a strong passion, enough to create the conservative movement in this country (“‘At the Hands of the Radicals,’” January/February).
I really sympathize with Lyman; his house and family were attacked. However, I don’t believe it was anyone’s intention to “maim, if not kill” his family. It was one of the unfortunate ways that radicals used to ask for attention.
The goal of these people, and of ’60s politics in general, in my opinion, was increased participation and transparency in government of any kind, including university government. Lyman thinks the goal was to end debate and make an end-run around politics. I think the opposite is true, despite the showboating tactics.
I also got a sense of a “why me?” incredulity in the memoir. Lyman was obviously one of the many fair-minded and well-intentioned people who got blamed and demonized for reacting in a paternalistic way to a completely unforeseen development on his turf. The ground rules changed under his feet and he did the best he could.
Demonizing your political opponents is a lot older than the ’60s and is still with us on the left and right. U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions from Texas suggested the Republican Party act like the Taliban in trying to destroy the Democrats (especially Nancy Pelosi). This should disqualify him from being a congressman.
For me, today’s Stanford SRI weapons-type embarrassment is the Hoover
Institution’s getting those Iraqi papers. It smells bad. I’m sure any campus
protests about this would be a lot more sophisticated than those of the ’60s,
as would be the reaction from those in charge.
Patty Maniace, ’82
Astoria, New York
In the 1960s and 1970s, Stanford students put their careers, family relationships and freedom at risk to build an effective, persistent and militant campus movement against the Vietnam War. In dismissing the motives of those students, Richard Lyman fails to ask: why did many of the best and brightest of our generation rebel against the great universities where we studied?
Universities like Stanford were bound to erupt in rebellion because they served contradictory roles. They embodied the highest ideals of free thought and intellectual discourse while simultaneously acting as agents of U.S. militarism and the associated economic empire.
As students, we learned that Stanford’s scientific prowess was dependent on Defense Department contracts. Stanford, wholly owned SRI, and companies on Stanford land played a key role throughout Southeast Asia. The University’s trustees were not an idealistic group of philanthropists, but a wealthy interlocking directorate that undemocratically ran Stanford and a good share of the military-industrial complex. Conflict between increasingly antiwar students and the University was inevitable.
Over a period of years, a group of us spent a great deal of time documenting Stanford’s participation in the war, and we challenged the trustees to demilitarize. We demanded that they hold a public meeting, and on March 11, 1969, five trustees were confronted by a student-staff panel before a full house in Memorial Auditorium.
An undergraduate at that meeting asked trustee Bill Hewlett, ’34, Engr. ’39, if FMC, a company on whose board Hewlett sat, made nerve gas. At first Hewlett denied it, but soon he admitted that FMC had sold the plant to the government six months earlier. This was the turning point for the Stanford Movement. Students with no radical past backed the activists, leading to a remarkable sit-in by hundreds of students, faculty and staff in the Applied Electronics Laboratory, site of Stanford secret military research.
We occupied AEL for nine days, washing the floors, baking bread, printing hundreds of thousands of pages of fliers and reports, showing movies, singing and debating. The sit-in drew overwhelming support from students, faculty and staff. We left only when we were convinced that Stanford would eliminate secret research.
The militant yet educational campus struggle against the war continued for several years. The protesters gave primacy to their opposition to an immoral war. Lyman and his colleagues were entrenched in their defense of the status quo with its attendant power relationships. That’s what the “turmoil” was really about.
Lenny Siegel, ’70
Mountain View, California
I read the article and then I bought the book, Stanford in Turmoil. It was fascinating to read Richard Lyman’s account. I began Stanford as a Barry Goldwater Republican in the fall of 1964, went through a kind of selective radicalism, mostly in my head, and by the time I graduated I inclined toward the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin from discussions at the home of [former law professor] Harry Rathbun, ’16, Engr. ’20, JD ’29. The quest continues. But can we consider further the issues of the time (1966 to 1974) and also include the first five months of 1975? Those next five months are rather telling.
The United States signed the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, as did North Vietnam and eventually 11 other governments. The Soviets and the Chinese, in violation of these accords, continued to send massive amounts of additional weapons to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. When the U.S. Congress voted to cut off all funding of the South in April 1975, despite President Ford’s plea, the deluge began. Between 2.5 and 3 million people were killed in Indochina with the fall of South Vietnam. Many have unmarked graves in the South China Sea, as they desperately tried to escape in makeshift rafts. The United States took in about 800,000 refugees.
Whatever wrongs were committed by the United States pale compared to the monstrous carnage the Communist North inflicted first on its own people and then on the South and beyond. I conclude the United States should have at the very least continued to support South Vietnam as much as the Soviets and the Chinese supported the North. Or am I being unreasonable to look at the actual consequences of our pullout and failure to support?
And what might happen if we grow weary in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can these things be discussed, or must reason and fact give way to shouting and violence in this, a free country?
Michael Warder, ’68
Malibu, California
Our Correspondence
An interesting contrast: juxtaposing the letter of Tim Haight, ’66, PhD ’79, with that of John C. Hughes, ’68 (“Remembering Troubled Times,” March/April). While Haight inflates the importance of his Vietnam War protest mission occupying Encina Hall, Hughes points out there were probably “at most 500 students” involved, with 10 ringleaders whipping them up. The unmentioned protagonist of this drama was the media, lead by Walter Cronkite, the liberal sage, who had turned against our country and sided with campus ideologues.
Hughes’s 500 looked like 5,000 on TV; the bank burning at UCSB looked like anarchy beyond any acceptable proportions; Kent State was presented as a crackdown akin to (more recent) Tiananmen Square; and the Democratic Convention round-up was worse than Stalin’s purges, complete with trials. Neil Young’s songs romanticized this mindless hedonism; the Yippies and Chicago 7 were made to be martyrs; Jane Fonda was a noble Joan of Arc collaborating with the enemy—all in the four-sided small screen and myopic reporting of the liberal media.
Neither Haight nor most of his liberal Waterworld ever consider the damage they and their protestations caused. He justifiably complains that 60,000 American soldiers died in that conflict. Does he complain about the millions who were slaughtered as a result of our Democratic Congress pulling the plug on (funding) the South Vietnamese Army or the “killing fields” in Cambodia? Does he not stop to think that those 60,000 soldiers would not have died in vain had we stayed and finished the job? Is he proud of our soldiers being spit on? Has he ever seen tapes of North Vietnamese/Viet Cong generals saying “All was lost until the protests started”?
Haight laments, “At what point is it appropriate to turn from discussion to protest?” Discussion? Liberals are renowned for shouting down any opposing point of view. Their bullhorns are for one purpose only: to drag our country through the mud and celebrate our defeat.
Haight’s cause was no more gallant than Haight-Ashbury, or getting loaded and laid at Woodstock, or bra burnings, or Women’s Liberation, all of which were also going on at the time. This was the time of paisley and pubic hair.
The problem is, the fields of Woodstock have long ago grown back into wheat and chaff. The bras have disintegrated. A half-world away, the fields of Cambodia and South Vietnam are still seeded with the bones of the dead, thanks to the actions of our aging antiwar hippies who, like Haight (and Nancy Pelosi), grace the halls of our schools and our government.
There’s a bigger, badder world out there than on a college campus (or in Congress) with a sympathetic media. Daniel Pearl, ’85, had his head chopped off on camera. Of course, this grisly scene fused with an attempt by the media to show the coffins of American soldiers unloading from transport planes, to show bombings rather than new schools, despair rather than happiness over what we have tried to do. Never mind the bloodthirsty enemies we face.
Mark Collins, ’71
Altadena, California
The following letters did not appear in the print edition of Stanford.
March/April Roundup
Congratulations on another great issue. I was at Stanford getting an MA in English lit. from 1960 to 1963. The free speech issue on the Quad included even religious groups like Intervarsity and Campus Ministry because Jane Stanford’s will blocked controversial issues being discussed, as I remember, in MemChu and perhaps on the Quad. You would be well advised to do an article on this period. The free speech issues preceded the late ’60s issues so well responded to by alumni (“Remembering Troubled Times,” Letters).
The article on Brooksley Born (“Prophet and Loss”) captures my own experience as one of the first clergywomen in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and is heartening. To believe one is speaking truth to power and to be silenced by the majority as a “troublemaker,” “abrasive” and “strident” minority of one has often been the order of the day for my generation. It is the other side of trying to be faithful in the corridors of power while the student and populist movements tried to raise the issues on the ground. Both are still needed.
Finally, “Late Expectations” (the fiction contest winner) is touching and poignant to all those who reach old age. My mother, when she was in assisted living, finally confessed to me that she could see why some older people did not marry again, because it would threaten their Social Security. But she did enjoy the compliments and more of a dashing Scot living on her floor. Humanity goes on.
Thank you for the work you do.
The Rev. Joyce L. Manson, MA ’63
Seattle, Washington
Financial Wizardry
Rick Schmitt’s excellent article called to mind a vision (“Prophet and Loss,” March/April). In the Emerald City, Dorothy encountered an enormous head, which proclaimed, “I am the Great Oz.” Dorothy pulled aside the curtain and found a foolish little man, a pretender. Born has done the same with Alan Greenspan. For a generation, Greenspan was the Great Oz, the financial genius. Now events have shown that he was a fraud, who has brought far more destruction upon the world than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed of.
Thomas P. Lowry, ’54, MD ’57
Woodbridge, Virginia
Kudos to you and to writer Rich Schmitt for the excellent article. I have emailed the online version to my feminist list.
It is frightening that, as the article indicates, while the Obama administration has pledged an overhaul of the financial system, including the way derivates are regulated, his economic team includes some former Treasury officials, like Larry Summers, who opposed Born a decade ago—and won.
Sonia Pressman Fuentes
Co-founder, NOW
Sarasota, Florida
When will legislators and politicians learn what every engineer knows? Machines and systems all need controls and regulators to keep them from running out of control and damaging themselves.
I recently read Robert F. Kennedy’s book Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the things RFK stresses is how JFK went to great lengths to get varied expert opinion. I hope President Obama has gotten opinions beyond those of Summers, Rubin and Levitt. Presidents Clinton and Bush surely did not get opinions like Born’s.
Carl E. Schoder, ’49
Medford, Oregon
I find it quite disappointing that in enormous letters on the cover you declare “The Woman Who Tried to Save Our Money” (great beginning, important topic) and then follow with “And the People Who Stopped Her.” Sounds good until you read the article and find the “people” are all men. Why is it so important that she is a woman if it is not equally important that she was opposed by men? If the distinction is important, then carry it through, because in the end it is true and very discouraging. It is as if the article is a mirror of her early years of discrimination, and your broken title fails to carry that message. Of course that is not all that was going on in Washington—I prefer to think this was not just about sexism and being pushy with a woman; it was more about hubris, perhaps—but I do think you owe the readers and Born the nasty truth right up front when publishing such a dramatic cover.
Leslie Kruth
Incline Village, Nevada
Fiction Found Wanting
I found the fiction selection, “Late Expectations” (March/April) to be both shallow and demeaning. Having an 85-year-old woman influenced by her less-than-mature grandchild implied a lack of respect for the ability of older adults to resolve their moral conflicts based on the objectivity that, hopefully, increases with age and experience. I would hope that the grandmother, upon reflection, would find other ways to “feel alive” than by depending on someone else’s husband.
Myrna Graves Fleckles, ’50
San Jose, California
Stanford’s War Role
As one of the ’60s radicals at Stanford, I found Richard Lyman’s assessment interesting (“At the Hands of the Radicals,” January/February). But as he himself says, history is not a precise science. It comes to us through the lens of the writer or observer. In this case Lyman presents many useful facts (and, for some of us, reminiscences) of those turbulent days. I won’t have enough space to seriously debate his conclusions—I do disagree with them—but I will say that each of us would choose to record different facts in our histories of those times.
To me the most important events are, first, the successful though quite small nonviolent sit-in we launched against the CIA recruiters, who were driven off campus. I think Wallace Sterling was still president then, and under the notion of “in loco parentis,” the student body’s views of the event were of no concern to the administration or faculty judicial body. The prosecution of those students caused immense campus upheaval for years and was a key reason that three different more-or-less radicals succeeded to the undergrad student body presidency. According to Lyman’s vision of what a university is and ought to be, do we agree today that the CIA recruiting spies from the student body might not be an appropriate function for a university to collaborate in? To us it was evidence that even the private universities were tied to the government’s agenda bent on domination of other nations. The CIA had recently overthrown governments in Iran and Guatemala, and the United States had invaded Vietnam, for example.
Another key event was the 1965 Stanford Vietnam Teach-In, which gained the endorsement of 144 faculty members in a very short time. The result of that faculty support was that the State Department decided to send their “Truth Team” to Stanford to debate the war. Their utter failure to justify the U.S. aggression against Vietnam and the exposure they faced was a pivotal event in transforming Stanford into one of the nation’s most strongly united and best-organized campuses against the war effort.
I also think that the way Lyman casts the tension between the radicals and his administration dilutes one point that needs to be emphasized. The intellectual struggle going on in those days was whether the war was an aberration due to political leadership errors (as the Iraq war has come to be seen) or the result of a capitalist system fundamentally intent upon dominating the political economy of the world by whatever means necessary and claiming it was fending off Communist aggression. We won that intellectual and ideological battle on campus, even if our victory was to be transitory, because we had the evidence and Lyman was, and remains, wrong. Thousands saw that the University, and its trustees in particular, were dedicated fundamentally to the supremacy of U.S. capitalism/imperialism (not U.S. democracy and world enlightenment) and that this system provided benefits for Americans at great loss of freedom to other nations. It also benefited privileged university grads at the expense of lower classes of Americans, many of whom were drafted and destroyed by the war.
Finally, Lyman’s excerpt doesn’t include the fact that the campus (students and faculty) ultimately voted overwhelmingly to support our demand that the University control SRI’s research. By that point in the struggle, the trustees were badly exposed and had little choice. Saying that the University’s ties to SRI were not of great importance is, to my thinking, a way of denying that SRI showed the role of the University in subservience to the capitalist market and its needs for intellectual power, leadership and technical-military superiority. Younger generations are now learning the market’s behavior is not necessarily the best arbitrator of the public good.
The University’s subservience was both exposed and repudiated by a huge proportion of the community for a period of time. And in that moment the idea of a university based upon reason (not chaos) did flourish. The retrenchment followed, but it is not a permanent retrenchment, as the current world political-economic crisis is likely to demonstrate. As we used to say, “Oppression breeds resistance.”
Marc Sapir, MD ’70
Berkeley, California
Having been at Stanford in the period former provost Lyman describes, I can well imagine the frustration he felt. While many of us deplored violence of all kinds on campus, it is also true that killings at Kent State exemplified the perceived relations between college students and “authority”—it being Lyman’s unfortunate fate to embody such authority at Stanford, along with the police and National Guard.
Lyman states the objective of the “New Left” at the time “was to make deploring ... classified research at Stanford the spearhead of a more general attack on the University’s involvement in Southeast Asia.” He also remarks that the Stanford Research Institute “presented a hugely tempting target.”
To me, this (along with the military lingo) misses the entire point of the movement to stop the Vietnam War. There was no need to search for “tempting targets.” The overwhelming view among students, even those who were not burning offices and espousing violence, was that any lever for stopping the war must be pulled—including available levers at one’s own university.
Our parents, veterans of World War II, described the waste and horror of war to our generation. Imagine the growing disconnect between this message and the growing militarism of our government, and it is easy to see why many Stanford students were mad as hell. They were reacting to the power and destruction of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, as exemplified in Stanford’s relations with the Department of Defense and industry.
Could it be that the forces against which students railed in that period are the same forces that have, over time, brought our nation to a standstill? I believe so. The failure of society to embrace a green agenda, a more peaceful road to prosperity and a less authoritarian government has now produced global warming, dependence on military action to secure global trade advantage, and surveillance programs that make cointelpro (the 1970s illegal spy program) look like a tea party.
The trap of “blaming the 1960s for every thing that has gone wrong since” should be re-examined: what would have happened if colleges had severely limited participation in military-industrial research and joined the movement to stop the war instead? This is the question, posed by many a dewy-eyed 1970s student, college provosts must ask themselves. Perhaps university research policies over the past 40 years could have influenced our economic patterns positively—to lead us away from war profiteering and toward more appropriate technology research in the energy field.
Margaret Draper, ’75
Bayside, California
Richard Lyman still does not recognize that Stanford University was a major military contractor helping to wage the Vietnam War. He seems to be able to recognize individual aspects of this engagement, but is not able to see its importance.
In the excerpt, Lyman quotes a 1966 Committee on University Policy memo: “It is clear that research carried out under the restrictions of security classification runs counter to the traditional principle of open inquiry.” But he then goes on to argue that the antiwar movement was responsible for the end of civil discourse on campus. He points out that in 1968, almost 35 percent of the research funding in electronics was for classified work, but dismisses this as relatively unimportant. He describes a meeting in which students confronted five trustees and criticized them for subordinating the true educational aims of the University to the economic interests of the corporate world. Clearly Lyman heard this criticism and yet he still does not seem to understand the University he presided over.
In the late 1960s, Stanford was an active war contractor helping to wage the Vietnam War by doing military research and development work. And it was doing that work at the Applied Electronics Laboratory (AEL), at the computer center, and at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) on Hanover Street. Through these contracts, the University had brought the Vietnam War to campus. The debate was over whether this activity should continue on campus or whether it should be stopped. Stanford had taken a side, and it was the side of the U.S. government in waging war on Vietnam. The Stanford trustees were not trying to keep the University open to wide, nonviolent debate, they were trying to continue the University’s role as an active war contractor.
Without this understanding, the harsh rhetoric of 19-year-old students and the occupation of campus buildings seems irrational and frighteningly coercive to Lyman. But to students, who learned about Stanford's role in the military-industrial complex and its direct connection to waging the immoral and extremely destructive war in Vietnam, their actions were quite mild. Lyman decries the coercion of the students but still seems blithely oblivious to the University’s support of a war that killed several million people.
Randy Schutt, BS ’76, MS ’77
Cleveland, Ohio
Moral Gestures
An unfailing stream of affluent self-righteousness flows from your Letters pages every issue, and never more so than when the subject is U.S. policy in Southeast Asia during the JFK-to-Ford years (“Remembering Troubled Times,” March/April). In this connection I offer three observations:
1. The question of whether delaying a communist takeover of South Vietnam for more than a decade contributed to the dissolution of communist tyranny worldwide and led to the liberation of 400 million Europeans is the subject of lively academic debate in universities all over the planet, suggesting that responsible opinion differs on this matter.
2. It is no coincidence that the young men who protested our “immoral” policy were also feathering their own nests by avoiding military service—spitting on the largely working-class draftees who bore the burdens of citizenship these young men felt far too moral to bear. Equally shameless were the peace groupies who engaged in political prostitution under the banner “Girls Say ‘Yes’ to Boys Who Say ‘No.’”
3. During the 1930s, George Orwell was vilified by the affluent Left for daring to point out that the Spanish Republican cause had been taken over by Stalinists far more interested in murdering their allies than in fighting the fascists. In the face of the concentrated sanctimony these ever-chic radicals later brought to bear to advance the cause of appeasing Hitler, Orwell observed, “War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.”
The self-serving male hypocrites and equally hypocritical females-for-sale who dominated campus discourse during the ’60s and ’70s are now enjoying the comfortable lifestyles that enabled them to attend Stanford and capitalize on their degrees. To them I offer another of Orwell’s on-target perceptions: “The cheapest thrill is a moral gesture. The costliest thrill is a moral gesture for which others must pay.”
Robert H. Pilpel, ’63
White Plains, New York
On Patriotism
I’m still reeling over the 1,000 Words caption (“Banner Moment”) in the January/February issue. Are Stanford students really so shallow as to only be “truly proud to be Americans” when their candidate of choice is elected president? Worse yet, is Stanford equally shallow by publishing such an inane sentiment?
Patrick M. Walsh, ’80
Jefferson, South Dakota
Patriotism is not “My country right or wrong” or we could find ourselves in something like the docks at Nuremberg. Patriotism has to be intelligent. It has to bear in mind the spirit and the freedoms for which our country was founded and protect those values. McCarthyism, the Iran-Contra affair, Watergate and now the trashing of Iraq are just a few instances that contravened the spirit of our Constitution and sometimes the laws of government we cherish. Slavery followed by racism was perhaps the worst of the offenses, so I found myself thinking, before Michelle Obama said it, It’s the first time in a very long time I feel proud to be American.
Most, if not all, Americans were confronting an old injustice and trying to wipe out the stain it left on our honor. It wasn’t about political parties, greed or jockeying for power. We’d cast off narrow views and prejudice, become color-blind to see Obama the Man clearly. The consensus was that probably he’d be the best man for the job. The U.S. government has been trying to convey for decades how fair-minded, open and egalitarian we are, how preferable democracy is to forms of dictatorship. Sometimes it has been a hard sell. But it’s the American people who just made their case for them, improved our tarnished reputation in our own hearts and minds, and made friends around the world. As for Obama, despite the global economic crisis, climate change, discredited policies and leaders, he’s managing to inspire hope where there was none. His best idea, as far as I’m concerned, is to bump up diplomacy while bumping down military hardware and a “rush to war” mentality.
Elisabeth Anne Guss, ’61
London, England
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