Try, Try Again
Carol Dweck is right (“The Effort Effect,” March/April). I remember the legendary Dr. Margery Bailey saying it’s the B students who succeed in life, because they try harder.
Bill Dillinger, ’47
Sacramento, California
A 21-year-old Hungarian refugee arrived in California from St. Louis in January 1960, full of dreams. He had graduated magna cum laude from his high school in Budapest, and was a first-year student in civil engineering at the Technical University of Budapest when the revolution broke out in 1956. He fought in it, was wounded and eventually escaped to the United States. He spoke no English. Ending up in St. Louis, he worked at various jobs, learning the language and supporting himself and his mother.
He made the long trip to California yearning to continue his interrupted studies. Alas, he had no money. A kindly Stanford adviser suggested that he enroll at Foothill College, get his feet wet and attempt to transfer to Stanford at a later date. This was good advice and our young man took it.
He enrolled in Foothill College as a pre-engineering student. He was good at sciences, and was a gifted and conscientious student. During the spring semester of 1961, he enrolled in an “advanced” physics course. Although it was reputed to be a tough course, he was confident of his abilities. On the first day, the professor gave a test designed to weed out people for whom the course was too advanced. The cut-off score was 40. Our young friend received a 38. He was devastated; he expected to score in the high 80s.
Then the professor called in the underachievers, one by one, to encourage those who had done poorly to drop the class rather than be embarrassed by later flunking it or receiving a low grade. All except our friend obediently dropped out. He knew the course materials were not beyond his capabilities. But he was also scared; he as yet had been untested in American institutions. He told the professor that he would not drop the class, and furthermore he would get an A. The professor looked incredulous, and then he laughed out loud. “Of course,” he said, “I cannot stop you from continuing in the class, but my experience has been that people who do poorly in the ‘weed-out’ exam, do not finish with a passing grade.
But an A . . . you’ve got to be kidding!”
It was a hard course, and our young friend worked hard. Even the professor acknowledged—albeit only surreptitiously—that the boy would probably pass the course. But an A? No way!
It was time for the final exam. It counted for 300 points of the 1,000 the professor assigned to the course. To get an A, 800 points were required. Prior to the final, our friend had 500, so he would need all 300 from the final. It was a four-hour test. There were 24 students. As noon approached, most were beginning to shake their heads at the extreme difficulty of some of the questions. “Pencils down!” came the command at 12 o’clock. It was over.
Our young friend knew that he didn’t get all 30 problems solved correctly. Oh, well. A good effort was made and that was honorable enough.
Two weeks later, a friend called him on the phone. It was mid-June, the school year long over but for the grades. “Have you been down to the school?” he asked. “No, why?” answered our friend. “Go down and look on Professor Sherrill’s office door.” Our friend ran down to the school building; up the steps to the second floor he flew. On Professor Sherrill’s door were the results of the final exam and the course grades. Our friend got the highest grade on the final: 280 points.
There was also a note attached to the posting: “Mr. von Dioszeghy having received the highest grade on the final . . . and the highest cumulative total in the class . . . has earned an A minus in the class. Congratulations! . . . and please accept my sincere apologies.”
As decades went by, this memory sustained me to strive further and harder at times of extreme difficulty. God bless Professor Dweck—and Marina Krakovsky—for so beautifully expounding on this important theme. May others benefit as well. I wish I had her wisdom to guide me through those difficult times.
Adam von Dioszeghy, ’64, JD ’70Budapest, Hungary
Don’t Blame the Tool
I very much enjoyed your article and am an admirer of Edward Tufte’s work (“Intelligent Designs,” March/April). In general, I strongly believe in his approach and general philosophy behind the presentation of information in a concise and clear manner. As some famous person said, “To make the complex seem complex is not hard. To make the complex seem simple is very difficult.”
The one area where I take issue is [that] while major mistakes at NASA were certainly made, I find it a big stretch to say that Microsoft and PowerPoint are to blame for that.
PowerPoint is just a tool and it can be used effectively and ineffectively. In my experience, PowerPoint and the bullet item result from [the time limits] placed on presenters by impatient executives and venture capitalists. Some people can be quick and still deliver a clear message, but most people cannot. If delivering a clear, concise message were so easy, there wouldn’t be such a high demand for those who can actually do it.
Also, the full sentence is not always the most effective way to communicate an idea. Being too verbose is in many ways just as bad as being too terse. As Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have written less.” It really doesn’t matter whether you use a sentence or a bullet point if you are not getting your message across.
I absolutely agree that the information regarding the Challenger accident was presented very poorly. However, to say that PowerPoint “gives short shrift to evidence and encourages cheerleading” is like blaming your hammer for hitting your finger. It is a tool and it does what you tell it to do. No more, no less. It is up to the people wielding the tool to use it properly and realize that if they don’t, people might get hurt.
Ron Ih, MS ’05
Los Altos, California
Artful Doodler
The article on Dennis Hwang (“The Art of the Doodle,” March/April) was right up my alley, not primarily because it solved the insubstantial mystery of the Google doodles, but because it showed the afterlife of the dorm T-shirt designer (some have made works of dazzling whimsy and creeping terror in this medium, generally thought mundane) employing the magic of the electronic tablet and stylus. More than anything, though, his doodles with light—beautiful in a way beyond the diurnally-seen Google logos—show the facility and playfulness of his drawings.
Daniel BoyerHoughton, Michigan
Tension and Talent
[In response to “Think You’re Smart,” First Impressions, March/April]
As a 12-year-old who stood one inch under 6 feet, I could throw much harder than most catchers could catch—from 60 feet 6 inches—and had great success. At 14, I was 6-foot-1 (I stopped there) and competing against 17-year-olds in American Legion ball. At 18, I was pitching against collegians and former pros in a local semipro league. The combination of higher levels of competition and excellent coaches who continually taught me to refine skills led to a short but very interesting professional career, where I found that a lot of dudes could throw as hard as I could, and the higher you went in the pros (I played AAA ball one year) the quicker they caught up with your fastball.
I averaged 17 strikeouts per game in high school. But I always wanted to get better in every way. Somehow I missed the “golden arm” mindset. Largely, the reason had to do with my personal background and the need to excel beyond the limitations implied by a somewhat lower socioeconomic status. This may be one of the reasons we see a majority of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds in our current stars—a tension that is lacking in our broad white middle-class society. I am white, grew up with millionaires’ sons who went to school with me, but we were definitely down the income scale and I had a mom who struggled with alcohol. Sometimes, adversity is necessary for motivation.
I didn’t graduate from the Farm but valued the experience, because I knew immediately I wasn’t the smartest one there.
I became a psychotherapist with an MSW. I worked hard at that, too, and became pretty damn good. Now I teach a lot at the College of Social Work, University of Utah. Preparing the next generation.
Steven Watson, ’60Ogden, Utah
Between the Lines
I was struck by the not-so-subtly racist language used to describe the subjects of Mary Freeman’s photographs: “members of Nevada’s Paiute tribe and local families” (“Something More About Mary,” Red All Over, March/April). Are American Indians members of tribes while white Americans are members of families? And isn’t it problematic to describe settlers as “local” in relation to indigenous inhabitants? I hope this was simply a poorly phrased sentence, but it reeks of the kind of subtle racism of implicit messages that still plagues our outwardly liberal society.
Emerson Sykes, ’05Andover, Massachusetts
The Worm Turns
Alas, if you have read “Campus Caterpillars” and are dutifully thinking “pre-butterfly” as the text suggests, you are zero for three (What You Don’t Know About, March/April). The trio of caterpillars discussed all produce moths, not butterflies. A clue was right there in the narrative on the Western tussock caterpillar that grew up and searched for a place to spin a cocoon. That’s a moth thing. Butterflies as a rule leave their worm-like stage behind by transforming into chrysalises.
Diane Nielen, ’56Fullerton, California
Red Flag for Basques
I was glad to read about the Basque studies courses at Stanford (“Basque Studies Debut,” Farm Report, March/April). I just wanted to point out two corrections. First, one of the colors of the flag is red and not orange. Here is Mark Kurlanksy’s description of a flag from his book The Basque History of the World.
“[Sabino] Arana . . . worked with his brother Luis on designing the flag, the ikurriña, originally for Viscaya and later as the flag of Euzkadi. The flag established the Basque national colors: red, green, and white. . . . According to Arana, the red background symbolized the people, the green x stood for the ancient laws, and the white cross, superimposed over it, symbolized the purity of Christ. But what makes the ikurriña work is that it echoes the colors of Basqueland, recalling a red-trimmed, whitewashed Basque house set against a lush green mountain.”
There are two spellings of the Basque town bombed in 1937: the Basques spell it Gernika and the Spaniards spell it Guernica. They are pronounced the same way. Many Basques are quite sensitive about spelling because it is often used as a subtle indication of one’s political loyalty.
Laura Aboitiz DaherCambridge, Massachusetts
Esther Lederberg
I am greatly saddened over the passing of Dr. Esther Lederberg, MA ’46 (“Farewells,” Class Notes, March/April). I was a doctoral student from 1974 to 1978 in the department of med micro, as it was known back then. Esther welcomed me into the department, and she was a kind and supportive presence during my years of training.
She took an active role in the professional development of students, especially those of us who focused our research efforts and training in the area of bacterial genetics. She was also very concerned about students’ personal welfare. She would go out of her way to arrange an occasional afternoon outing to a Chinese restaurant, or help us celebrate important milestones in our academics. She even joined us once or twice at “Zotts.”
Dr. Lederberg being given only nontenured status, I never thought she was given the respect that was due her by other faculty, especially since she was and always will be the ‘Mother of Bacterial Genetics.’ That’s how I was introduced to her. Back then and even today women are too often dismissed as scientists. If they want to succeed, they have to come up with their own means of doing science and develop their own support.
Esther rarely complained about her difficulties of not being recognized for her contributions that led to a Nobel Prize for her male colleagues. She took those lemons and made lemonade by launching her Plasmid Reference Center and promoting the development of future microbiologists.
I hope she will one day be recognized for who she was: a brilliant scientist and a wonderful human being. I shall miss her. She was my friend.
Bonnie Males, PhD ’79Naches, Washington
Fact vs. Parable
In your March/April issue, you published a letter (“The New Bishop”) from an alumnus who asserts not only that the Biblical account of creation in Genesis is literally true, but that a belief in the literal truth of that account is essential to Christian faith.
There are at least two things about that view that boggle the mind. The first is that a graduate of one of the pre-eminent universities in the world could believe that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited the earth at the same time (for a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis admits of no other possibility). Does he also believe that heavenly creatures mated with human women to produce a race of giants, as Genesis 6:4 states?
The second is even more remarkable: that anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Bible could fail to see that Jesus of Nazareth was the inheritor of a centuries-old tradition of teaching by way of parable and metaphor and symbol. He was an accomplished practitioner of that mode of teaching, but it is absurd to think he invented it. Jesus conveyed truth by way of parable, and so did the men and women of his nation for generations before him. Two of the most beautiful examples appear in the first two chapters of Genesis, where two different and factually inconsistent accounts of creation appear. Those accounts were never intended to be understood as literal, factual accounts, any more than Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan was intended to be understood as the literal, factual account of a real event.
The Rev. Charles F. Hinkle, ’64
Milwaukie, Oregon
Anglican Women
The article by Diane Rogers on the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, contained a widely disseminated piece of wrong information (“Grace Under Pressure,” January/February). The article claimed that only 14 provinces of the Anglican Communion ordained women as priests. There are 38 provinces in the Anglican Communion. Twelve ordain women as priests, but not as bishops. Another eight ordain women and have changed their canons to permit election of a woman as bishop. Still another three not only ordain women, but have actually elected women as bishops. This adds up to 23 of 38.
Joan Gundersen
Aspinwall, Pennsylvania
Editor's Note: The correspondent is a historian who writes about the Episcopal Church; data from the Anglican Communion Office confirm her statements.
Wearing The Pants
As a proud member of the [men’s swimming] team from 1985 to 1988, I was honored to wear The Pants proudly in 1987 and thought I would share some reflections inspired by reading the article (“Master Stroke,” January/February).
I’m not sure if “’Mokin’ Jimmy With The Red Pants, Red Pants On” (Class of ’86) was the first person to wear The Pants or simply the man who made them famous, but he undoubtedly set the bar to which all others have only aspired.
’Mokin’ Jimmy Reynolds wore The Pants every single day. Come rain, come shine. Swim practice or sorority formal; library run or a wedding; on the coldest winter day and the hottest day of summer. Where ’Mokin’ Jimmy went, so went The Pants. I don’t know how often he washed them, but I assure you it wasn’t often. But you gotta hand it to 365 without fail. Had I not seen it myself, I would not have believed it. And this, combined with a Stanford team spirit that ran so deep in his blood, is what I like to believe infused The Pants with their mystical powers forever.
For those who witnessed ’Mokin’ Jimmy’s astounding feat and for those who knew the man and what he stood for, the responsibility of the betrothed was understood and feared. And the mystical powers of The Pants were to be respected and revered.
The Pants stand for commitment beyond what one is asked for. The Pants stand for leadership by example. The Pants stand for a devotion to team over person. To a communal purpose over the self. The Pants stand not only for what is best about Stanford swimming, but what is best about Stanford University as a whole.
And this is why Reynolds, till the day he dies, has been and will always be “‘Mokin’ Jimmy With The Red Pants, Red Pants On.” May all those who have worn and one day will wear the pants, understand the love, spirit and commitment they represent. Long live The Pants!
Rich Roll, ’89
Calabasas, California
One time at the NCAAs after Stanford took the lead, the second-place Texas coach commented: “The only way Texas can win at this point is if I cook for the Stanford team tonight.”
Bill CollinsSan Diego, California
Identity Crisis
David Riggs has undertaken an interesting project with his week-by-week examination of Shakespeare’s life, though he seems to begin with the unproven thesis that the plays and sonnets were written by Will Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon (“The Bard in Bits and Bytes,” Farm Report, March/April). The authorship controversy exists and will probably never be resolved, due in large part to the weakness of the Stratfordian attribution. For me and many others, the orthodox attribution was convincingly refuted in Charleton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984, book one, chapters 3-13) and elsewhere. While there is a prima facie case for the orthodox view, it does not stand up to scrutiny from either literary or historical standpoints.
This is perhaps the single most researched life in literature, yet the verified facts about Shakspere’s life can fit on a single page. There is no record of where Shakspere was born, his ever attending a school, owning a book, having any kind of literary or intellectual interests, even writing so much as a letter. There is nothing in the record inconsistent with his being illiterate, and his documented writing (six surviving signatures) does little to dispel the idea. As with so many aspects of this fascinating topic, we just don’t know.
Regarding Shakspere the actor, there is no record of a dramatic part ever being assigned to him, nor any contemporaneous record of him being listed in the cast of any play. Certainly no citizen of Stratford during this period ever suggested their prodigal son was either a playwright or an actor.
When it comes to the person of author William Shakespeare, the record is almost completely blank. To glimpse the man behind the pen, we must look at the solid ground of internal evidence in the writing itself. A different picture emerges, much more accurate, one of a significant man of letters, highly educated, erudite and well-read, a towering intellect with wide-ranging knowledge, including familiarity with the intricacies and subtleties of court life at the highest levels.
One wonders how Professor Riggs “continues to compile notes for his biography of Shakespeare.” I hope he will not join the long line of orthodox biographers who fill their pages with a mixture of related period facts, extended extrapolation, and the inevitable element of fiction.
Robert Campbell, DMA ’85
New Haven, Connecticut
From Surplus to Deficit
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I heard amazing things about Professor John Taylor. So I began reading the great man’s words with a sense of intrigued respect (“Back to the World of Ideas,” January/February). Alas, this surplus of goodwill slowly evaporated into a deficit. For bragging about setting up Iraqi finance is like bragging about making good coffee for Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Shame on you, Mr. Taylor, for having lost the humanistic perspective. The self-satisfied tone emanating from your article and the “dramatic” recounting of how you had to sleep one night on a dirty floor mocks the thousands of lives lost on both sides in Iraq. Please promote your new book with more sensitivity next time. Better yet, please restrict such interventions into STANFORD magazine to when you have to communicate truly significant “ideas,” perhaps after you have been out of the administration for some time.
Cezar Petriuc, ’02, MS ’03Belmont, California
Tales from the Crypt
STANFORD had a brief about the Mausoleum Party in the January/February issue (“A Party to Die For,” Red All Over) claiming it [“was a Stanford staple for 20 years before being canceled in 2002”]. Not true. There were several parties at the Mausoleum before that, at least two sponsored by Roble in 1976 and 1977 on Leland Stanford Jr.’s birthday (May 14). The first one was informal, dorm sponsored, punctuated by the opiatic excesses of the ’70s and highlighted by a Midnight Wake-Up Call for Leland’s appearance. I still clearly remember the eerie feeling in the darkness as one of the future famous banged the giant knocker on the brass door of the crypt while the crowd chanted a reprise: (Bang-bang) “Leland!” (Bang-bang) “Leland!” It went on way too long to be insincere.
Next year the party was a formal potluck. Rented tuxedos and formal dresses with a dish to pass. This was a few years after streaking was popular, and someone actually showed up naked, only instead of streaking through the party and titillating the crowd, he went through the buffet line and mingled for a couple hours, forcing pretentious overdressed yuppies to deal with a “naked guy.” He even got in a few dances as I recall, although I seem to remember “Stairway to Heaven” being a little problematic. I often wonder what happened to him; whether he had shown us his best side then and just kind of hung out later, a shriveled memory of his youth. Too many cell phones taking pictures for him to grow up and be obscure now.
Yep. Been there, done that, got the pictures. We might not have been first, but that’s not what a party is all about. We were There. Other generations had Woodstock. We had the Mausoleum Party.
Jim Dewey, ’79Hermosa Beach, California
Rules of Entry
Your article in the January-February issue on the new immigration course (“The Ins and Outs of Immigration,” Farm Report) did not directly mention an important subject which I nevertheless hope is central to the curriculum—namely the rules set by nation-states to organize and control immigration into and among their countries.
Although some might wish it otherwise, societies still have a voice in whom they wish admitted to their midst on either a permanent or temporary basis, for whatever defined purpose. Having rules or (dare I say it?) laws on this subject is not racist or demeaning, but merely an administrative necessity in the modern world. Observance—and enforcement—of such rules is critical in any society, but particularly in those open and forgiving ones whose way of life is now a prime target for others.
Without these considerations, any course on immigration would be a fairly academic exercise, so to speak.
John Kimball, ’55, MA ’61Potomac, Maryland
Oil Crisis
The roundtable on oil and politics (“A Crude Awakening, November/December) sheds welcome light into the dim confusion of our public debate on energy policy, but it ignores the seriousness of the oil crisis. It makes useful arguments for government intervention to promote R&D, and to engage in public education. Most importantly, CISAC director Scott Sagan points out the need to negotiate with China and India, to produce cooperative solutions to the energy crunch that are “efficient and secure for many countries working together.” I would go farther and say, cooperate or die.
John Weyant betrays his naïveté when he says, “if we play our cards right, it’s not going to reduce our standard of living much.” On the contrary, the issue is whether we can avert a devastating global population crash. See Richard Heinberg’s convincing book, Powerdown (2004).
Linda Agerbak, ’58
Carmel Valley, California
[There was] never a negative word, in all of my sociable interactions with other Stanford students during my undergraduate years, voicing a superior attitude of America toward other foreign nations, for resources, intelligence or otherwise. But then again we were the “Cented,” the 100th graduating class of Stanford University.
Perhaps the title on the cover, next time, could include mention of the names of the professors issuing the opinions on the current energy crisis (“a trio of management school professors/fellows sounds off on the energy crisis”?); but preferably, highlight work the University is doing on the undergraduate level to assist in this global problem. Otherwise, the cover reads as the collective opinion of University attendees.
Shih-Ming Laura Yeh, ’91
South Orange, New Jersey
The following letters did not appear in the print edition of Stanford.
'PURE STEGNER'
STANFORD did its readers a real service by calling attention to the book about the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia written by Wallace Stegner some 60 years ago (“The Arabian Adventure of Wallace Stegner,” January/February). Your review seems unnecessarily disparaging of the book, however, which is written in the direct and thoughtful Stegneresque style that made him justly famous years later. The fact that an oil company paid him to write it is neither here nor there. You can buy a man’s time, but not his soul, and nothing in the book smacks in the slightest of corporate PR-manship. It is pure Stegner from start to finish.
The book may be consulted by historians long after most of his other volumes are gathering dust on the back shelves of libraries, because it tells one of the most gripping sagas of the past century. How a small entrepreneurial California oil company staffed largely by Stanford and Cal grads did the first strictly commercial oil deal, unburdened by undertones of colonialism, with the government of an independent Arab nation. How its efforts almost singlehandedly made the United States, all unwittingly at first, a major player in the high-stakes oil game of the Middle East. How a handful of shrewd company geologists and engineers worked a global economic revolution by discovering the largest oil province in the world. How those same geologists and technicians, while simply going about their workaday lives, jerked an entire nation into the 20th century from the medieval world, which was the only one its people knew before the oilmen arrived.
The vignettes of mutual culture shock are among the finest of the genre in print. Roads? There were no roads. Transport? Camel caravans, except for the few vehicles brought for oil exploration or imported as prestige goods by the royal family and driven overland across the desert. The marvelous anecdote of the Arab vehicle driver, wholly innocent of motors just a few years earlier, who hiked into a Bedouin camp from his broken-down vehicle and carved a serviceable enough replacement part from a block of hardwood to limp back into exploration headquarters. The time that King Ibn Saud came down from Riyadh to preside at the ceremonial opening of the Ras Tanura oil terminal, in company with 2,000 retainers riding in a dusty caravan of 500 motor vehicles, to make a sprawling encampment of more than 350 traditional Bedouin tents on the flat desert plain just inland from the Persian Gulf (the Arabian Gulf in Saudi parlance). The novice Saudi carpenters copying the skills of their left-handed American tutor so closely that they all learned to saw left-handed!
It is a glorious read, but unfortunately hard to find. Someone should reprint it. Why not the Stanford Press? Sales would be brisk.
William Dickinson, ’52, MS ’56, PhD ’58
Tucson, Arizona
Editor's Note: Selwa Press has announced it will publish the book later this year.
Cynthia Haven’s article was little more than a book review hyping Robert Vitalis’s unfortunately biased America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Vitalis simply dismisses Wallace Stegner’s Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, describing him as “. . . . a booster for Aramco—a mammoth oil exploration and production company. [Stegner] isn’t really doing much more than echoing popular beliefs about American benevolence and then cutting and pasting from the company’s huge stock of public relations materials.”
Vitalis fails to grasp Stegner’s appreciation of the historic significance of the events and developments that he was retained to chronicle. Stegner could hardly have failed to recognize the conflicting forces that underlay this epic drama of a civilization moving on a fast track from a life rooted in traditional Bedouin ways into the 20th century. Aramco’s role was that of a reluctant midwife charged with bringing the Saudis into the modern world and to prepare them, unwittingly be it said, to take control of their immense resources. True, Standard Oil Company of California, and later, the three other Aramco shareholders enjoyed handsome returns on their investments, but this should not be seen as the unbridled exploitation of the Saudis and their resources. Aramco shareholders and the Saudis mutually benefited until Saudi Arabia inevitably assumed control of its heritage without the revolutionary strife and rancor that, for example, accompanied similar takeovers in Iran and Libya.
Stegner’s role was to chronicle the dynamic events of Aramco’s early years and to give his readers a sense of the formidable challenges facing those first geologists when they arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1933 tasked with finding oil—if, indeed, there was any oil to find. There is no better cliff-hanger than that of how, after a series of disappointing dry holes and 15 months of drilling, the crew of Dammam Well No. 7 finally penetrated the prolific oil-bearing Arab Zone at 4,500 feet and bottomed out at 4,727 feet marking the beginning of the Saudi oil empire. This was just as San Francisco management was preparing to abandon the entire venture after five frustrating years of dry holes and no results! Once the geologists had proven the presence of commercial quantities of oil, others arrived to produce, process and ship it. They all came to do a job and were there without political agendas. They consistently cooperated with the host government and worked closely with the Saudis to train and educate them in oil field technologies.
It wasn’t long before skilled medical people joined the early pioneers. They proved their worth many times over in helping the locals rid themselves of longtime health scourges including malaria and trachoma, a prevalent eye disease, an undertaking that earned the enduring gratitude of the Saudis. Water wells were drilled, bringing new life to a parched land.
Yes, there were differences over the years. During the 1960s, a time of $1.80-per-barrel oil, the Saudi government was intent on besting Iran each year in producing and shipping more oil. This imposed enormous pressures on Aramco shareholders to find new markets in a world glutted with oil. On balance, however, the Aramco-Saudi relationship was mutually respectful and certainly rewarding. Aramco’s operating expertise was essential to the Saudis as they learned oil field technology and the functions of international oil markets. It was an example of teamwork from the beginning and established the basis for sound, long-term U.S.-Saudi government-to-government relationships that prevail to this day.
Writer Vitalis would have been well advised to have considered the sweeping implications of Wallace Stegner’s Discovery! rather than convict him of complicity in promoting the Aramco story. Moreover, Vitalis indirectly denigrates the efforts of many thousands of Aramco employees dedicated to advancing Saudi interests (even as they advanced their own) as merely another case of foreign exploitation of a poor and abused native population. Readers of STANFORD should expect better than a thinly veiled effort to promote a poorly conceived, transparently biased book published by the in-house Stanford University Press.
Thomas Wyman, ’49, MS ’51
Palo Alto, California
Editor's Note: The writer is a former representative of Aramco for the Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron).
SHOCKING TRAILER
As a band alum, I wanted to put in my two cents on the current status of the LSJUMB (“Band Update: No Prosecution,” Farm Report, January/February).
I happened to visit Stanford last year just before the band got its new building, and I was pretty shocked to see the trailer this world-class University had supplied as a temporary rehearsal space. It was so small and so flimsy. There were no lockers for instruments. I couldn’t imagine how they rehearsed in there and I’m not surprised it would fall apart at the end of its use.
So before you throw the baby out with the bathwater, consider the following. When I was deciding where to go to college in 1978, I got in everywhere I applied, including some Ivy League places. I decided to go to Stanford because it seemed like it was not a stuffy place. I knew nothing about the band, but when I visited the school, I could tell it had more class than pretentiousness. The band was one area where we showed other schools how it’s done, how to have more intelligent half-time shows and give school sports something more than rah-rah.
P. Rose Maniace, ’82
Astoria, New York
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CORRECTION
In the March/April Grad Notes, the item on Martin Bresnick, MA ’68, DMA ’72, misreported that two concerts were given in his honor at Yale. Yale held a single concert devoted to his works at Zankel Hall, part of Carnegie Hall in New York.
