STANFORD TO OFFER MORE CONTACT WITH TOP PROFESSORS.

Byline: Jim Puzzanghera Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Stanford University announced a major initiative Thursday to give often-neglected freshmen and sophomores more contact with top professors, and to assure the university continues to produce ground-breaking doctoral students in an era of federal research cuts.

In its biggest hiring effort in years, Stanford will add 20 new professors to provide all freshmen and sophomores with at least one small class taught by a senior faculty member instead of a teaching assistant or less-experienced professor. And to assure Stanford's elite standing in science and engineering, President Gerhard Casper announced that the university is embarking on a $200 million fund-raising drive to create 300 three-year fellowships for graduate students in those disciplines.

``In the best universities, teaching, learning and research are all equally important elements of the all-embracing search to know,'' Casper said in a speech to the Faculty Senate that was followed by a rare standing ovation. ``Together, these two initiatives are intended to put us in position to sustain our strength in teaching and research for the coming decade.''

The initiative reflects both a growing trend - the re-emphasis by universities on the importance of teaching undergraduates - and a recent development - cuts in federal research money and changes in the way the tuition of graduate research assistants can be charged back to the government.

But while many universities are trying to address undergraduate education, Stanford's $200-million attempt to preserve graduate education and research appears to be trend-setting.

``This is the first I've heard of an effort to specifically raise funds in support of graduate students,'' said Peter Smith, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.

Stanford faculty cheered the attempt to address the two major components of Stanford - teaching and research. The university's 14,000-member student body is almost evenly split between graduate students and undergraduates.

``I'm feeling enormously frustrated. I can't find a single thing to complain about,'' Biology Professor Robert Simoni told the senate and Casper after his speech.

The 20 additional faculty members in the undergraduate program will reverse the shrinking of Stanford's faculty as a result of budget cuts. Since 1992, Stanford's tenure-line faculty have decreased from 1,224 to 1,170. The cost of the new hires will be paid for the first five years by a $15 million donation from former trustee Peter Bing. If the new program is successful, Casper said he was confident there would be money to continue it.

The goal is to give students closer contact with senior faculty in their first two years - just part of several changes the university has made following a report in 1994 by Casper's Commission on Undergraduate Education.

``Students should be challenged and their minds stretched from their first year onward,'' Casper said.

The new faculty members would not necessarily be the ones teaching those seminars, which will have an enrollment of about 15 students, but would free up other faculty to teach them. The program is an outgrowth of the popular sophomore seminars started several years ago, and a two-week summer program called Sophomore College that began last year in which 50 incoming sophomores participated in small classes with top Stanford professors.

An advisory board will hand out the new faculty positions to academic departments that demonstrate their commitment to undergraduate education. The new seminars should begin on a pilot level in the fall of 1997, and combined with other changes Stanford will refer to the first two years at the university as Stanford Introductory Studies.

Casper said part of the motivation is the increased competition among elite universities for the top high school seniors in the country. Last year, the university began giving $1,500 research grants to the top 200 incoming freshmen as a way of luring them to Stanford.

``I want to make very clear to every applicant to Stanford that we will try to provide them with close interaction with faculty from the very beginning,'' he said.