Stanford Today
Edition: July/August, 1996
Section: Campus News: Educational Initiatives
WWW: A Tangible Commitment

INITIATIVES BOLSTER TEACHING, RESEARCH
By Diane Manuel and Marisa Cigarroa

President Gerhard Casper has pledged $25 million in two path-breaking initiatives to bring freshmen and sophomores into closer classroom contact with senior faculty and to bolster support for graduate students. To ensure that undergraduates have the opportunity to study with tenure-track faculty from day one, Casper has allocated $15 million donated by alumnus and former trustee Peter Bing to fund 20 new professorships for five years. In a novel arrangement, departments will compete for these new faculty positions by demonstrating how they will redirect senior faculty into teaching small seminars for freshmen and sophomores.

In a step away from dependence on government funding, Casper also has committed $10 million as seed money toward a $200 million endowment that will support up to 300 new graduate fellowships, particularly in the sciences and engineering.

"Together, these two initiatives are intended to put us in position to sustain our strength in teaching and research for the coming decade," Casper told a special session of the Faculty Senate on May 9, in a speech that drew a standing ovation.

The two-pronged proposal will be implemented beginning in the 1997-98 academic year.

On the undergraduate side, Casper outlined a new program of "Stanford Introductory Studies" aimed at the first two years of college. Within three years, Casper said, he would like Stanford to "provide to every entering student the opportunity to work with a faculty member in a small-class setting."

Such a program, he said, "would demonstrate to the best students in the country our unfaltering commitment to taking their college education seriously from its inception.

"Students should be challenged and their minds stretched from their first year onward. The first year sets the tone," Casper said.

The program is designed to expand on successful pilot programs such as Sophomore Seminars, Sophomore Dialogues and Sophomore College, that the university has established over the past few years. Sophomore Seminars generally have had 10 students per class, and Freshman Seminars probably will accommodate 16 students.

With the coming explosion of technology in education, Casper said, "the university will remain attractive . . . to the extent that we make personal and face-to-face learning and research more valuable."

To accomplish this, the university will undertake a three-year planning cycle to redistribute teaching loads and examine existing courses to enable more faculty to teach first- and second-year students.

"We know that courses taken predominantly by freshmen and sophomores are larger and less frequently taught by regular faculty members than are courses aimed at upper-level students," Casper said. The plan is intended to rectify that.

Ramon Saldívar, vice provost for undergraduate education, noted that Sophomore Seminars scheduled for next year will be taught by 87 professors, 60 of whom are senior faculty. He estimated that about 100 professors would be needed to teach Freshman Seminars.

The undergraduate initiative is an outgrowth of the work of the Commission on Undergraduate Education that Casper established in 1993 to review the strengths and weaknesses of the current program for undergraduate studies.

On the graduate side, Casper said fund-raising already has begun, with a $2 million gift from the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust, to build a $200 million endowment for the support of up to 300 three-year fellowships.

The first Stanford Graduate Fellows are scheduled to enter the university in the 1997-98 academic year. Fellows will receive a $12,000 tuition grant and a $16,000 stipend annually. When fully operational, the program will provide funding roughly equal to one-half of Stanford's current federal funding for research assistantships.

Casper said the new fellowships will give graduate students "full freedom to pursue their work at Stanford without worrying about the vagaries of sponsored research or other traditional sources of support." He said students "will be freer to determine their own course of research rather than having to select a project based on available funding."

The program "will enable us to compete effectively for the best graduate students and to maintain the strength of graduate programs, even as we cope with the stresses caused by decreased research support from the federal government," he said.

Casper's announcement of the two initiatives was interpreted by some faculty members as an attempt to create a balance between the quality of undergraduate education and the importance of graduate research at Stanford.

Saldívar said that in his conversations with faculty, there was "a great deal of enthusiasm for the [20 new] billets."

"It's a small number, but within the schools that do the bulk of undergraduate teaching ­ Humanities and Sciences and Engineering ­ many departments are quite small, under 20 or 25 people," Saldívar said. "The addition of one person often makes all the difference."

Susan Stephens, chair of the classics department, said, "I really agree with the notion that if you can set the tone with freshmen in their first quarter, you can affect the entire experience they have as undergraduates. They come in as high school students, and go out after three months as real college students."

Robert Simoni, professor of biological sciences and former chairman of the senate, called the address "the single most tangible commitment to graduate education that the university has made" in the 25 years he has taught at Stanford.

Charles Kruger, vice provost and dean of research and graduate policy, added that "if we can attract the best students, we can attract the best young faculty."

For many faculty, the most intriguing aspect of Casper's proposals is the debate they anticipate it will provoke about Stanford's identity at a time when technology is helping to shape the education venues of the future.

"Casper introduced [the new initiatives] by talking about them as the wave of the future," said Fred Dretske, chair of the philosophy department. "He said, 'You can go to college online, so why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to come to Stanford if you're not going to be in close proximity to professors?'

"He said we had to carve out an identity that makes us worth spending the money that people spend on us."

Wanda Corn, associate chair of the art department, called the plan a "fascinating experiment" in trying to reorient a major research university toward the kind of small-group teaching that colleges have long been famous for offering their students.

"From what I heard the president say, he thinks long-distance learning will, in the long run, force us to be competitive on the small-class level, and we might as well get prepared now," Corn said.

In his speech, Casper said that "in the best universities, teaching, learning and research are all equally important elements of the all- embracing search to know. We are, and will remain, an institution committed to research and graduate education, as well as to undergraduate education." ST