Hoover Institution-Stanford Ties Worsening

STANFORD — After an escalating series of conflicts between trustees and top administrators of Stanford University and W. Glenn Campbell, the combative, conservative director of the Hoover Institution on campus, the Stanford Board of Trustees last week finally moved to force Campbell’s retirement.

A series of interviews with trustees, administrators and faculty leaders on both sides reveals that relations between Stanford and Hoover, never very good, have deteriorated badly in the first few months of 1988.

Most of those interviewed also pointed out that tensions are built into the Hoover-Stanford relationship because of the difficulty of maintaining an independent, policy-oriented research organization of conservative hue within a university that is supposed to be nonpartisan on all issues.

But there was agreement that the problem has been aggravated by Campbell’s pugnacious behavior and by the intense dislike that has developed between Campbell and Stanford University President Donald Kennedy.

According to these sources, many of whom declined to be identified, the recent incidents that prompted the trustees to oust Campbell included:

- A January meeting of the Hoover Board of Overseers in Washington, where a key trustee said, “Campbell talked very extensively about his . . . problems and kept saying things like, ‘They’re never going to get rid of me’ ”

- Public statements by Campbell, upon returning from the overseers’ meeting, that he planned to remain director until 1994, when he would be 70 years old.

On April 26, Campbell spoke to a small group of Stanford Republicans and said: “Now, if they want nationwide notoriety, the university we love, just do that (get rid of Campbell). Because I can assure you that the fellow sitting here comes from a warrior tradition.

“And they would be slapped, one way or another, with a lawsuit, and my lawyer probably would be Edward Bennett Williams or his protegee,” Brendan Sullivan, who represented Lt. Col. Oliver North during the stormy congressional Iran-Contra hearings.

No Sound Basis for Discrimination

(Campbell was apparently referring to a 1978 federal law that raised the mandatory retirement age for private employees from 65 to 70. But Warren Christopher, the Los Angeles attorney who is chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees, said in an interview that the law exempts people in executive positions who receive more than $44,000 a year in retirement benefits, a category in which Campbell would fall.

“Anybody can file a lawsuit,” Christopher said, “but we have looked at this very carefully and we do not think there is a sound basis for an age discrimination” suit.)

- Circulation among the overseers this spring of a petition signed by 63 Hoover Institution scholars that said Campbell was being paid less ($108,000 per year) than directors of similar research organizations and that his job “has been made more difficult by the less than enthusiastic support that he has received from the Stanford administration.)

“The letter boomeranged,” said one Hoover senior fellow, who spoke anonymously. “Most of these guys (the overseers) run their own companies and they know a CEO (chief executive officer) doesn’t show up with letters of praise from his staff or, if he does, it means he’s in real trouble.”

Campbell’s acerbic and combative style has led him to make personal attacks on Stanford President Kennedy and have done him more damage than good, in the opinion of many who have watched the 64-year-old, Canadian-born economist closely.

“He brought it on himself by these aggressive tactics,” a Hoover senior fellow said. “He believes the way you deal with people is to attack and if you don’t, people think you’re weak.”

For example, another source said, Campbell was urged strongly not to say in Hoover’s 1986 annual report that the then-planned construction of the Reagan Presidential Library on the Stanford campus meant that “not only the Hoover Institution . . . can boast of a ‘Reagan connection’ but also the entire university.”

Other Hoover officials knew this statement would antagonize their faculty opponents and make it more difficult to locate the library at Stanford.

They were right. The ensuing faculty clamor was one of the reasons the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation dropped its Stanford plans and decided to build the library in Ventura County instead.

As these incidents piled up, many trustees came to believe, as one put it, “The relationship was more tense and bitter. Something had to be done.”

The Board of Trustees met May 10--ironically, in the 285-foot-high Hoover Tower, the most conspicuous landmark on campus--and voted to ask Campbell to retire next year, at age 65, and to begin the process of selecting his successor.

Christopher relayed this news to Campbell during an hour’s meeting on campus last Tuesday and then released the letter to the overseers, in which the board chairman noted a 1959 agreement between President Herbert Hoover and the trustees calling for appointment of a director who “should be of an age which gives him a substantial period of service before the retirement age of 65 years.”

Christopher said in the letter that most top Stanford administrators retire at 65 but did not mention that the university has named its former president, 64-year-old Richard W. Lyman, as director of a new international relations institute.

Christopher said none of 26 trustees who attended the May 10 meeting opposed the move, nor did the three who missed the meeting but were contacted later.

“The board has been watching this situation for some time,” he said. “There was a full discussion but there were no dissenting votes.”

The trustees voted to offer Campbell an attractive “golden parachute,” including a $125,000 annual salary for five years (more than he earns now), a $100,000 research and travel stipend, a sabbatical and senior fellow emeritus status.

But Campbell has indicated he might forgo this lucrative package and fight to keep his job.

Reached by telephone at his Los Altos Hills home, Campbell declined to discuss the situation, but people who have known him for many years doubt that he will give up the directorship without a fight.

The clouds of acrimony surrounding Campbell have obscured the fundamental problem of Hoover’s independence, a problem that dates back almost 70 years to the decision of Hoover to donate his extensive library of World War I materials to his alma mater.

The dispute began with Hoover’s early insistence that “the collection must be preserved as a separate entity” and not merged with the Stanford University library collections, historian George H. Nash wrote in a recently published monograph.

As the Hoover library grew in size and importance, President Hoover fought to keep it free from what he often called the “left-wing influence” of the Stanford faculty, according to Nash.

In 1959, Stanford trustees acceded to most of Hoover’s demands, declaring the Hoover Institution to be “an independent institution within the frame of Stanford University.”

Since then, the Stanford faculty has played no role in determining Hoover’s program or selecting its scholars.

Hoover’s Choice

In 1960, Herbert Hoover picked Campbell, then 35, a Harvard University-trained economist and director of research at the conservative American Enterprise Assn. (now the American Enterprise Institute) to be the institution’s next director.

Stanford President J.E. Wallace Sterling was unhappy that he and the trustees had been frozen out of the selection process, but he reluctantly accepted Campbell.

Campbell, an effective fund-raiser among conservatives, eliminated the deficit that he inherited and has built an endowment of about $100 million.

Stanford contributed only 27% of Hoover’s 1986-87 budget of $12.7 million and the rest came from gifts and endowment earnings.

Campbell has strengthened the already-excellent library holdings dealing with such subjects as Africa, China, Japan and the Middle East.

He also placed more emphasis on Hoover’s domestic studies program, bringing in, as senior fellows or senior research fellows, such prominent scholars as Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics; sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, and James G. March, an authority on organizational behavior.

Although Hoover is frequently described as a “conservative think tank,” many of its scholars dispute that characterization.

“This is not a right-wing political operation,” said John Ferejohn, a political economist who was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences. “I’m not particularly on the right, and there are a lot of others here who are more or less centrist and even some who lean to the left.”

However, a half-dozen Hoover scholars have served at one time or another in the Reagan Administration, and others have influenced Reagan’s policies through their writings or as consultants.

“It is a source of immense pride to know that the ideas developed by scholars at the Hoover Institution have greatly influenced the new policy agenda,” Campbell wrote in the 1986 annual report.

That is just the trouble, according to John F. Manley, professor of political science and an outspoken Hoover critic.

“The basic problem is that Hoover is a political operation in the midst of what is supposed to be a nonpartisan university,” Manley said. “It must be brought under normal academic governance.”

Manley said that means the 1959 agreement guaranteeing Hoover’s independence “would have to be abrogated” and that Hoover’s activities and personnel selections must be governed by the same procedures that apply to Stanford’s regular academic departments.

“Just because the trustees have dumped Campbell doesn’t mean they’ve gotten rid of the problem,” Manley said. “In fact, it could get worse. If they bring in somebody with a better ‘bedside manner’, he might make Hoover an even more effective political operation.”

Many Stanford professors agree the Hoover-Stanford relationship is what one called a “structural problem” that will not be solved by appointing a new Hoover director.

As long as the present arrangement exists, “there’s going to be friction,” said Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who also holds an appointment at the Hoover Institution.

But Arrow said many faculty members, while they may not like the present arrangement, “think it would be much too much trouble to change it.”

Many hope that a new, less pugnacious director will ease the problems, if not solve them, and toward that end a complex procedure to find Campbell’s successor has begun.

A search committee has been appointed, including four Hoover senior fellows, three members of the Board of Overseers and three people named by Stanford President Kennedy.

That appears to give Hoover a 7-3 majority.

The candidate chosen by this committee must be approved by Kennedy, the Hoover overseers, the Stanford trustees and the Hoover family foundation, headed by Herbert Hoover III of Pasadena.

“I doubt if Christ himself could make it through that process,” a political science professor observed.

Gerald A. Dorfman, a Hoover senior fellow and an expert in British politics, will be chairman of the committee. He said the group will conduct a “national search” but could not say what kind of person they are seeking.

“This is a blank sheet of paper, as far as I’m concerned,” Dorfman said. “I was just totally surprised” by the trustees’ decision to force Campbell’s retirement.

But others think they know the kind of person who will be selected.

“I don’t know his name, but I can tell you the next director will be a conservative with reputable academic credentials and a low political profile,” said one of the senior fellows.

First, Campbell must be persuaded to leave peacefully and not turn his retirement into another epic struggle between Hoover and Stanford. At week’s end Campbell remained silent and several Hoover sources said even his wife, economist Rita Ricardo Campbell, did not know her husband’s plans.

“I hope he (Campbell) will recognize the advantages of this (the trustee offer), the generosity of it,” Christopher said.

But Peter J. Duignan, the African studies specialist who has known Campbell for 30 years, said: “He’s been a battler all his life.. . . . I doubt very much that he’s going to go out quietly.”