Herbert Hoover and Stanford University. - book reviews

National Review, July 8, 1988 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Herbert Hoover and Stanford University

ONCE AGAIN the Hoover Institution is in the news, this time as a result of a decision by the board of trustees at Stanford University to require the resignation of the Institution's director, W. Glenn Campbell, when he turns 65 next year. According to the board's chairman, Warren Christopher, the action reflects simply the trustees' belief that "it is generally appropriate that top administrative positions should be relinquished at age 65." To Mr. Campbell, however -- who was handpicked for his job by the Institution's founder, Herbert Hoover himself, back in 1960 -- as to conservative observers, the move is clearly a step to bring Hoover more effectively under the university's control. Now, in Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Hoover Insititution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.; $24.95), George Nash offers an account of Herbert Hoover's seventy-year relationship with his alma matter that puts these events in perspective. (The monograph is a spinoff of the author's multi-volume work in progress, The Life of Herbert Hoover, of which Volume One was published in 1983 and Volume Two is scheduled to appear this summer.)

Herbert Hoover was, by virtue of being the first student to be allocated a dormitory room, in a sense the first student to enter Stanford Unversity, in October 1891. For the rest of his life, Hoover thought of Stanford as "the best place in the world," dedicated to the ideal of "direct usefulness in life." By his mid thirties, he had made a fourtune as a mining engineer, and felt an urge pushing him toward a second career, a career of doing good in addition to doing well: found memories of his undergraduate days made it inevitable that the object of his benevolence should be Stanford. In 1912 he was elected to the board of trustees, took up residence in San Francisco. and devoted himself to a plan of radical improvement for the university. Then, in 1914, the outbreak of war found Hoover in London, where he created the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a private humanitarian relief agency whose work was delivering food supplies to the conquered Belgians. In the course of operations, Hoover moved regularly around Europe, across the lines separating the belligerents; it occurred to him that he was "in a unique position to collect fugitive literature" pertaining to the subject of war and revolution, and shortly thereafter he was embarked upon "the systematic collecting of contemporary documents on the Great War before they were lost of history." This was the beginning of that immense collection around which the Hoover Institution was founded in 1919.

Over the next 45 years, Herbert Hoover was to be Stanford's most influential trustee; an intimate friend (and maker) of its presidents; a globally famous humanitairan; a U.S. Secretary of Commerce; the 31st President of the United States;; and, as elder statesman, a significant presence on the American Right. Nevertheless, only a few years before his death he described the Hoover Institution as "probably my major contribution to American life." It was a legacy he had to fight hard for many years to preserve intact, however; and it is the story of this protracted battle against what he called "the left-wing faculty at Stanford University" that provides the dramatic element for Mr. Nash's book.

"It might easily be assumed," Mr. Hoover once wrote tartly, "that I know the purposes of the Institution, since I founded it." That purpose, as he elsewhere described it, was "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." Until World War II, the fundamental nature of the Institution went largely unchallenged. But after the war, as the Stanford faculty participated in the leftward migration of American university intellectuals, allegations began to be heard that the Institution's mandate was an infraction of "academic freedom." At the same time, the Institution's own staff came more and more to represent the prevailing left-wing mood in academia. "In later years," Nash observes, "the Institution acquired a reputation for being monolithically conservative. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, nearly the opposite was the case. . . . By 1958 . . . Hoover had begun to state openly that 'the left-wingers' had 'taken over' his library." His response was to attempt to redefine contractually the relationship between the Institution and the university. The appointment of Glenn Campbell seemed to Hoovre and his cohorts to be the capstone of his success.

Today the Stanford leftists insist that what concerns them is not the direction of the Institution's "politicization" but the fact of it. Even a cursory reading of Nash's book gives them the lie. The Left at Stanford was perfectly content with Hoover in the Fifties, when it was in their hands and doing their work. Now, with its founder dead almost a quarter-century and his chosen lieutenant vulnerable to bureaucratic sabotage, they want it back.