Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: News on Campus: Pitzer, Stanford's Sixth President, Dies WWW: Pitzer, Stanford's Sixth President, Dies
News on Campus
Kenneth Pitzer, a respected chemist and educator who served a brief, turbulent tenure as Stanford president during the late 1960s, died of heart failure on Dec. 26 at the age of 83. He is survived by his wife, Jean, three children and several grandchildren.
He was president of Rice University before being appointed Stanford's sixth president on Dec. 1, 1968. Pitzer sought to act as a mediator between conflicting elements on campus. For his first days as president, campus anti-war radicals held a "Greet Pitzer" week and marched into his office. Such marches, sit-ins and confrontations still were raging when he announced his resignation, effective Sept. 1, 1970.
"A lot of the general community and a great majority of the students felt that the war in Vietnam was a mistake," he told Stanford Magazine in September 1995. "In principle, I agreed with them, and I didn't keep that a secret. But it's one thing to hold that view and it's another to mess up the university as a way to get pressure and publicity for it."
A new interdisciplinary major in African and Afro-American studies, a massive shift of university teaching resources to the freshman year, a substantial loosening of prescribed courses and major revisions in grading practices were achieved during Pitzer's tenure. Also, engineering firms in the Stanford vicinity were linked to campus by a new university-industry television network for advanced instruction; the university stopped accepting grants or contracts for classified research and voted to end academic credit for ROTC programs.
As a scientist, he was nationally known for his work in chemistry, particularly in thermodynamic properties of molecules.
After his resignation from Stanford, Pitzer took a year-long sabbatical, then returned to teaching at UC-Berkeley. He continued in that capacity until his retirement in 1984. ST