Will the Hoover depression hit Stanford?

AT THE OUTSET of this report on the guerrilla war that was declared against the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace last spring by a Stanford University faculty-student alliance, let me state the obvious:

1. In the last two decades, the attack on academic freedom on the American campus has come primarily, if not exclusively, from the liberal-left sector.

2. This attempt to subvert academic freedom has sometimes succeeded, for two reasons: first, because of the support, overt, covert, or cowardly, of university administrations seeking to avoid "trouble"; and, second, because of the "neutralism" of the rest of the campus.

In the last 15 years, we have seen great American universities shut down for days and weeks on end; we have seen students attempt to veto faculty appointments or promotions on grounds of ideology, sex, color, or surname; we have seen faculty members declare that certain issues can no longer be publicly debated; we have seen duly invited outside lecturers barred from campus appearances by threats of violence and disruption. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a distinguished scholar-diplomat, political scientist, and teacher, was prevented from speaking at Smith, Barnard, and Berkeley last spring, While Soviet delegations of "scholars" are given rein on American campuses.

The most recent target of the American academic Left's campaign to intimidate and dominate great American universities is the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. The target, however, refused to connive in the loss of its own independence. Rather, it exemplified the cynical French saying: Cet animal est mechant; quand on l'attaque, il se defend.

The strategic objective of the anti-Hoover campaign was to pressure the Stanford administration and trustees to snatch from the Hoover Institution its longstanding autonomy, not because the institution had failed in its academic obligations but because it had succeeded all too well. After all, how many academic institutions in the U.S., or anywhere else, can boast in their assembly of associated scholars five Nobel Prize-winners and almost forty fellows or members of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and National Academy of Education?

The attack on Hoover was mounted by the 84 (out of 1,200) faculty members who signed a petition demanding that Stanford University sever its sixty-year-old contractual relationship with the Hoover Institution. The assault was beaten back after almost six months of battle, but not before the institution's scholarly credentials had been sullied by a campaign of slander, ad hominisms, innuendo, and demagoguery, all in the name of academic purity, academic objectivity, and a supposedly insatiable academic hunger after truth.

What was astonishing was that for weeks after the petition was circulated, its sponsors refused to make public the names of the signatories because, they said, they had not told the signatories their names would be made public. The university and the academic senate steering committee nevertheless accepted this "no-name" petition as bona-fide. After weeks of pressure, the sponsors finally made public most of the names, although eight of them still remain secret.

Imagine, if you can, the uproar if a centrist student-faculty organization were to circulate a campus petition demanding that an "Institute of Marxist Studies" (one exists at New York University) be separated from the university on the grounds that it is little more than a propaganda organization with no claim to scholarship. And imagine if the signers of such a petition refused to allow their names to be made public, and if the university's academic senate and board of trustees took up the charges on the basis of anonymous denunciations. Write your own scenario about such an event--if your imagination can conceive the possibility of such an attack on a Marxist institution today.

II.

I can write about the Hoover Institution with personal knowledge. I am now in my second term as a visiting scholar. I have neither experienced myself nor heard of any other Hoover fellow or visiting scholar experiencing pressure of any sort from anybody at Hoover. The institution is what any scholar wants: magnificent research and library facilities, including Stanford's great libraries; support services; afternoon senior-common-room sessions that must be the longest-running seminar in the country. Above all, there is the freedom to write and speak as one pleases; or not to write or speak but just to sit and think; in short, to be left alone--and no classroom responsibilities. The leisure of the theory classes, indeed! Except that the scholarly output of the Hoover fellows is wide-ranging, continuous, and highly influential. And that--for the liberal-left--is the rub: influential.

It was at Hoover that I met and became friends with Mikhail Bernstam, a Russian scholar-dissident exiled from the USSR. It was a providential meeting, because we subsequently collaborated on a political biography of Yuri V. Andropov. Without the incredibly rich Hoover archives the book would have taken a lot longer than four months to write. The book's introduction was by Robert Conquest, a senior research fellow at Hoover.

The publications that flow from Hoover scholars are recognized even by the Left, as being of a high order. Hoover's library and archival holdings are a treasure house. Why then the attempted lynching of Hoover? Why the attempt to have Stanford take over the institution? The answer becomes obvious when you read the anti-Hoover propaganda: President Reagan's admiration for the Hoover Institution and the aura of conservatism around Hoover's corporate identity--not its scholarship or its publications--figure largely in it. Yet the Hoover Institution has never taken a public position on public issues; its scholars have, as individuals, but by no means do the senior fellows have a single political affiliation. As a general policy, Hoover does no contract research for government or any other organized body, although it did do some, more than ten years ago.

Professor Sidney Hook, the philosopher, a lifelong socialist and currently a member of Social-Democrats U.S.A., said in a letter to Stanford President Donald Kennedy that after ten years as a Hoover fellow he had "found a broader spectrum of thought among my colleagues at Hoover than I found among my colleagues at NYU and, from what I have been able to infer from reading and occasional meetings, at Stanford itself.

"It is my considered judgment," he continued, "that my colleagues at Hoover taken as a group, regardless of the character and color of their beliefs, compare favorably with the standards of achievement reached by the faculties of our foremost institutions of higher education."

The Hoover Institution philosophy, in my opinion, is exemplified in the words of the late Fritz Machlup. In opposing the issuance of a political statement by the Princeton University faculty, of which he was a distinguished member, Machlup said: "The point is that the insitution or its faculty as a body has no brain and no heart and should have no mouth either; the members of the institution as individuals have all these organs and have a moral obligation to use them freely in defense of what they consider right."

President Reagan has many friends and admirers at Hoover. So did Jimmy Carter and John Anderson. Professor Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the adornments of both Stanford and Hoover, where he is a senior fellow (Professor Lipset voted for Anderson in the last election), did a political survey a few months ago of the 25 permanent Hoover fellows, the core group. The results: Democrats, 11; Republicans, 10; independents, 3; not a citizen, 1.

Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan, in dealing with the alleged partisanship of Hoover, said: "It is hard to know what standard of balance one should use; but if the general mood of the country is the standard, it is hard to say that the Hoover Institution is more unbalanced to the right than the rest of the university is to the left."

Or as Eric Hoffer once said in a PBS broadcast (Jan. 17, 1977): "It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority; what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

III.

Now for the details of the indictment of the Hoover Institution as drawn up by Professor John Manley, a Stanford political scientist. The bill of particulars contained three points:

1. "The Hoover institution is a political organization ..."

2. "Its ties to the Reagan Administration are extensive ..."

3. "It [therefore] embroils Stanford in partisan politics ..."

After weeks of savage attacks upon Hoover, Stanford President Donald Kennedy finally intervened. Kennedy (appointed by President Carter in 1977 as director of the Food and Drug Administration) concluded that "although a number of things they do [at Hoover] come out as reflecting a conservative political stance, I would say that they are not partisan." Speaking before an alumni association conference, Kennedy said: "Political body-counting, which has become kind of a feature of the present debate, is not a terribly important or useful thing on which to concentrate. Indeed, consideration of those matters is not only improper under our own perceptions of academic freedom but plays its own role in turning the discussion into one that is unnecessarily strident on both sides."

When Stanford's leftists, as represented by Manley and his associate, Professor Ronald Rebholz of the English Department, found it difficult to show that the Hoover scholars were raving right-wingers, they tried another gambit. Sure there are outstanding nonconservative scholars at Hoover, they conceded, such as Lipset, Alex Inkeles, and James March, but--as education professor Henry Levin argued--such faculty were nothing more than "institutional window-dressing," dupes, patsies who were allowing themselves to be used.

The same no-win scenario was set up by the Manley-Rebholz faction in discussing Hoover finances. Hoover last year received $2.6 million from stanford to fund its extraordinary archieves and library. Hoover controls its own $9.3-million budget, 40 per cent of which comes from corporate and individual gifts. The Manley-Rebholtz faction made it appear as it Stanford University were contributing huge sums to Hoover. Professor Lipset replied:

The Hoover Institution does not receive any moneys from Stanford's operating or endowment funds other than the $2.6 million assigned for its library, which is integrated with the other university libraries. All of Hoover's remaining funds for administration and research either come from annual gifts for its ongoing activities or are taken from Hoover's endowment income. The Hoover endowment, moneys donated specifically for Hoover, is administered as part of the Stanford endowment, much like moneys given for chairs or other research organizations.

The confusion about this arises from the fact that since Hoover is part of the university, all of its funds are handled by Stanford, and the allocations appear in the university budget.

After so clear an explanation of Hoover-Stanford budget policies, you'd think, well, that's that. Oh, no. The Manley-Rebholz duumvir had a new bill of particulars. Not, mind you, any facts, any data--just questions. Professor Manley now asked about the "millions of dollars from sources that go to Hoover: Who gives this money, why do they give it, and who decides how it's used?" Since it had been demonstrated that Hoover was not milking Stanford, the Manley-Rebholz team had switched tactics and was raising new suspicions of malefactors of great wealth who needed to be exposed. Professor Manley was really undertaking a "witchhunt by question"--such as:

"... would those who supply this money continue to do so if Hoover were in fact nonpartisan?"

"But what about an institution that receives and dispenses millions of dollars? Just because that institution does not take formal positions on issues, does this make it nonpolitical? Perhaps. But we doubt it."

"Are we to believe that because Hoover contains some Democrats--perhaps even some liberal Democrats--that it is a pluralist institution without any discernible political leanings?"

"Are we to believe that Hoover, with its millions of dollars from outside sources, and its overt political connections, is nothing more than a tall archive? ... do we want to be associated with such an organization?"

Peter Duignan, a senior fellow at Hoover and director of its African Studies program, replied to this smear campaign:

Consider the record of some militant Stanford faculty and student activists during and since the Vietnam War. Riots, sit-ins, demonstrations, occupation of the president's office, storming and firing of Hoover buildings, intimidation of conservatives, refusing to let invited guests speak, periodic calls for the U.S. [to get] out of El Salvador, support of the Sandinistas, a committee to investigate companies doing business in South Africa--but not one demonstration or sit-in over Cambodia, Cuban refugees, boat people, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, no petitions or letters to get the Soviets and Cubans out of Angola.

And he was not the only Stanford figure to raise the question of intellectual honestly among the anti-Hooverites. Professor Alphonse Juilland, chairman of the French and Italian Departments, who circulated a counterpetition that received 145 faculty signatures (as against 84 for the Manley-Rebholz petition), said that the allegations that Hoover is "politicizing the life of the university ... come from the most political people on the campus, who never missed a single opportunity to politicize academic life.

"These are the people," said Juilland, "who 15 years ago tried to rewrite academic programs and requirements along political lines in the name of relevance, of reconstituting the university. They flooded the departments with political motions." (It was noted that a large number of the anti-Hoover petitioners had signed a 1971 petition asking Stanford to reinstate H. Bruce Franklin, a militant Stalinist-Maoist faculty member, after he was suspended not for his political opinions but for committing--and inciting students to commit--acts of terrorism. Legitimacy, clearly, is in the eye of the liberal-left beholder.)

One item adduced as evidence against the institution was something President Hoover wrote in 1959: "The purpose of this institution must be, by its research and publications, to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx--whether Communism, socialism, economic materialism, or atheism--thus to protect the American way of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies, and to reaffirm the validity of the American system." Allegedly that quotation proves the bias of the Hoover Institution. Yet one of the permanent scholars at the institution is the publisher of the Marxist quarterly Politics and Society and a specialist in British Labour Party affairs. President Hoover was expressing a hope, but that's not the way it turned out.

The danger to academic freedom posed by the kind of con-game practiced by left-liberal campus politicians was pointed out by Sidney Hook in a letter to Stanford President Donald Kennedy: "To single out Hoover for investigation because of the presence of some outstanding conservative thinkers among its fellows could very well establish a precedent for investigation of other disciplines and departments at Stanford University because of the absence of conservative thinkers among them. Where the life of the mind is concerned such political epithets are irrelevant."

IV.

On May 26, 1983, the faculty senate voted overwhelmingly for a nonpartisan review of the relationship between Stanford and the Hoover Institution. The senate urged the appointment of a committee "to explore and reasses the relations between the Hoover Institution and the university, including governance and appointment procedures, with the goal of promoting more effective and cooperative relations." So far as I can find out there has never been a hint of scandal about any appointment to the Hoover Institution. Appointments in the past have been approved by the university and the university president, as they must be. But now, for no apparent reason other than the "no name" petition, there is felt to be a need for a five-member committee also sit on Hoover's board of overseers, to be sure--but why a committee in the first place when no valid accusations have been made?

There is nothing wrong per se in organizing a trustees' committee to look over the shoulder of any part of a university, whether a Hoover Institution or a teaching department. But the circumstances under which the present permanent committee was appointed--i.e., following a smear campaign against the institution--have created a public impression that there is something which needs investigating. Imagine if the Stanford trustees were to establish a permanent committee to watch over Stanford's Department of Political Science or its School of Education.

V.

The Hoover-Stanford relationship began early 65 years ago, on June 20, 1919, when the then-Director General of War Relief, Herbert Hoover, offered Stanford $50,000 (later upped by $100,000) to purchase source documents dealing with World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Hoover was devoted to Stanford, having been a member of its first graduating class in 1895. The backbone of the Hoover collection was the purchase between 1920 and 1922 of some 25,000 volumes and sixty thousand documents and newspapers both from the czarist period and from the time of the Revolution and the civil war. Today the Hoover Library contains more than a million and a half volumes and almost 4,500 archival units.

The Russian collection contains the only complete set of czarist secret-police records remaining, since the Bolsheviks, on taking power, destroyed most of these records that were kept in St. Petersburg. A duplicate set used by czarist agents in Paris to keep track of Lenin and other revolutionaries was found and given to Herbert Hoover before it could be claimed by the new Soviet government.

The acquisitions grew so rapidly that they became a library in their own right, which, in 1922, was named the Hoover War Library. At the end of World War II, President Hoover raised funds to continue acquisitions in Europe and Asia. After several name changes, the institution's present name was adopted in 1957.

Two years later, the Stanford Board of Trustees, with the approval of Herbert Hoover himself, then aged 85 (he died in 1964 at the age of ninety), appointed as director the man who helped to make the institution what it is today--Glenn Campbell. Campbell had been research director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. A Harvard graduate in economics and, for a short period, a member of the Harvard faculty, Campbell expanded the horizons of the institution from international and foreign-policy research to include domestic-policy research as well. In doing that, he increased its endowment from $2 million to $70 million. Support for visiting and staff research fellows and the Hoover Press comes from endowment income and unrestricted gifts. The institution has expanded into two new buildings, one of which was built with federal funds appropriated in 1975 as a memorial to President Hoover. Today, the Hoover Institution is the largest of its kind and the country's most influential public-policy establishment with a university connection.

VI.

And now we come to the serious campaign against Hoover. What happened last spring and summer is best described as preliminary skirmishing.

The real battle, and it is ongoing, began when a proposal was made a year ago to establish at Stanford a Ronald Reagan library, museum, and policy-research center, a triad of institutions of Reagan's presidential archives (those dating from his days as governor of California and from the 1980 campaign are already at Hoover) and for scholarly research on matters of public policy. The proposal made by the Hoover Institution had the full support of President Reagan.

When the proposal came before the university last fall, the liberal-left took off the gloves: Gone were the genteel vocabulary of cademe, lofty concerns about university integrity, citations of moral imperatives and ethical laws; there were no more amiable concessions as to the Hoover Institution's scholarly credentials, clause always followed by "but ..."

A faculty committee sent out a round-robin notice asking anybody with a Stanford connection for an opinion about the Reagan complex coming to Stanford. Many faculty replies were favorable, some cautiously so. But among those that were unfavorable were opinions expressed in language that bordered on a level of paranoid hate about Reagan comparable to the rhetoric about John F. Kennedy in pre-assassination Texas.

Here are the words of Denise Levertov, poet and English professor, published in the university's official campus paper: "Since I feel contempt, fear, and rage in respect to President Reagan, I would be sorry to see this collection come to Stanford whatever its historical value.... If Reagan continues in his usual course, it is in fact unlikely that there will be a future in which history can be recalled and studied."

Professor of English Lucio Rutolo said that to bring the Reagan complex to Stanford "would increase our national reputation as a bastion of right-wing politics."

Assistant Professor of Classics John Winkler: "The picture is clearly one of wealthy conservative benefactors spending lavishly to promote the education of schoolchildren in cold-war cowboyism and scholars who are three-piece-suited to the interests of the Hoover Institution."

Professor Barry R. Tharp of the Medical School: "I do not believe that Stanford University should in any way associate itself with an Administration that has such an abysmal record on human rights, women, minorities, and Central America."

Art Professor Albert Elsen: "Stanford is already the repository of the papers of one undistinguished American President. We don't need another, especially one who has done more to harm American education than any other in our history.... Acceptance of the Reagan complex would only be read as our approval of Reagan and what he stands for. We would be betraying all American universities by such an acceptance."

Perhaps the clearest political statement of advanced left-liberal thought came from Lise Giraud, a Stanford librarian: "This complex, as envisioned, would be nothing more than a shrine to a man who history ... will most likely view as a President whose Administration set social progress back by at least a generation, who has against blacks, against women, merciles toward the disadvantaged, benighted toward the environment, and in blatant support of every dirty regime on the globe guilty of oppressing its own people."

Let me be clear. I am citing these comments not because they are necessarily typical. What they tell us is something of the level of debate of Stanford and what the debate about the Hoover and now the Reagan complex is really all about. It is about the refusal to accept the fact that a candidate who rejected the left-liberal agenda that dominated American politics for a score of years was elected President of the United States. Fighting the Reagan complex is a way of getting even. To many thousands of academicians in this country, some of them at Stanford, the 1980 election was simply illegitimate. That a majority of American voters elected Ronald Reagan is no matter. "Unclean! Unclean!" is the cry. If there were some way to expunge from history the existence of Ronald Reagan and the shameful term of his Presidency--if it were possible to burn all the papers, the documents, the news reports about his Presidency--one feels that these academics would welcome it.

The entire construction costs of the Reagan complex would be paid for with privately raised funds. When completed, the library and the museum would become part of the national-archive system. Thus operating costs and staffing would be funded by the Federal government. The center for public-policy research would be funded by endowment, and by Hoover Institution fundraising.

Location of a presidential library at Stanford would make it possible for scholars there to use the national-archive system as well as the resources of other presidential libraries. The related policy center would encourage advanced study in public affairs. There are many advantages for scholars in the proposed complex, but such is the power of the left-liberal fraction of the Stanford faculty that some other California university may obtain this academic treasure trove.

There are genuine matters of dispute between President Reagan and the Hoover Institution, on the one side, and the Stanford trustees, on the other, as to how the Reagan library/museum/policy center should be administered. But the frenzied, bare-knuckle attach by the Stanford liberal-left has so violated the canons of academic discourse that it is hard to believe that any compromise could be reached, even with the best of intentions.