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DÉNOUEMENT FOR LAW DEAN Paul Brest, Stanford Law School's $75-million man, will step down as dean and return to teaching in August 1999. Brest, the Richard E. Lang Professor who has served as dean since 1987, revitalized the law school. Under his leadership the number of tenured or tenure-track women rose from five to 10 and the number of minority faculty from four to six, and he recruited legal superstars away from some of the nation's top law schools. "Dean Brest has recruited an outstanding faculty and engaged in what has been, to my knowledge, the most ambitious reassessment of the state of legal education at a single institution," said Stanford President Gerhard Casper. Brest spearheaded the most successful fundraising drive in the law school's history. In 1995, he kicked off the $75-million Campaign for Stanford Law School. With a year to go, the campaign already has raised $72 million.
RANK RANKINGS Stanford has taken issue with the latest college-rankings issue of U.S. News and World Report. Stanford, long dissatisfied with the rankings guide, moved up a space tying Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fourth, behind Harvard, Yale and Princeton this year. Stanford is fighting back with a $30,000 website designed to provide prospective students with statistics it believes convey a more accurate reflection of the Stanford experience. The web data are independently reviewed by the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. If the web page is a success, university officials may refuse to provide data to the U.S. News guide, which Stanford's web page describes as "inherently misleading and inaccurate." The Stanford site is www.stanford.edu/dept/news/statistics/statspage.html. STANFORD MBAS CASHING IN Students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business are a hot ticket among recruiters who are wooing them with lavish banquet-style spreads, T-shirts and trinkets as well as $85,000 starting salaries (up from 1997's $80,000) and $5,000 signing bonuses. Companies have been flocking to Stanford's MBAs due to the school's reputation for academic excellence. The reputation is so strong, companies recruit students despite the school's policy of not issuing rankings until after graduation. Recruiters don't know if they are offering jobs to someone first or last in class standing. They take it on faith that a person smart enough to make the cut is worth hiring. Only 362 of the 6,500 students who applied gained admission to the Class of 1999.
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STANFORD OUT OF RUSSIA The university temporarily has closed its 5-year-old Moscow overseas campus due to political and economic instability in Russia. Banks near the Kremlin, where the program is located, were closed in October, making it impossible to convert dollars to rubles to pay operating overhead. "There's been considerable uncertainty in the Russian economy [that] has led to some political impasses, and given the unresolved nature of the situation, we felt it was better to err on the side of caution,'' said Russell Berman, director of the Overseas Studies Program. Most of the 16 students participating in the Moscow program have transferred to other Stanford overseas campuses in Europe and Latin America, where they can continue Russian studies until the Moscow center reopens, possibly in the fall of 1999.
