John Hennessy Interview (page: 6 / 8) President of Stanford University	Print Interview

You'd already experienced success in research and teaching, and in business. Did you ever imagine yourself becoming the president of a major American university? Was that a logical next step?

John Hennessy: No, I never imagined it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The years I spent as a regular faculty member working with students, teaching, working with my research, have absolutely been the happiest years of my life. I really enjoyed that, and enjoyed that engagement with students and colleagues. What really helped me make this decision, and agree to take on this job, was the fact that when you've been at an institution for 20 years, your loyalty to the institution, and your devotion to it, really grows, and your willingness to help the institution out. Clearly, for an engineer to jump into the provost's job, let alone the president's job, was a major leap. It meant that I had to be comfortable talking to colleagues across the entire institution, from the law school to the business school to the medical school.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

I began to be engaged doing that when I was the dean of engineering.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the things we did was to build a bridge to the medical school, to engage in a new program we had been building at Stanford called "Bio-X." That's an interdisciplinary program based on the biological sciences but bringing together not only biology, biochemistry, genetics, and the engineering disciplines as well: electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. That gave me the feeling that I could work across those boundaries. I could interact with colleagues on a broader front, across the university, and it gave me some confidence, together with the experience that I had had from the industrial world, that I could really take this leap of faith and try this new challenge, which it certainly is a new challenge. I think I found that every time you rise to a new challenge, if you can bring to that challenge, and think about how all the experiences you've had along the way -- from being a junior faculty member, your first encounter teaching students, and how nervous you are the first time you walk into a classroom, and how you manage to overcome that, to your research, to spending time in industry -- and learn from all those things and bring them all to bear, I think it gives you some confidence that you can deal with a variety of new situations which you encounter in the provost office or the president's office.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

It must have been daunting to wake up one morning and find yourself President of Stanford University.

John Hennessy: Absolutely.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The outgoing president, Gerhard Casper, told me something which was absolutely correct, it turned out. He said, "You won't quite realize what the job is like until you're sitting in that chair being president." And he was absolutely right, despite the fact that I had been provost and had worked very closely with the president. You're in the position where the buck stops here, and whether it's a concern that the students have, a concern that the alumni have, a concern that a faculty member has, or whether it's the challenges of worrying about a university of the size and scope of Stanford, it is a challenge. And I think one of the things that makes universities remarkably different and unique from companies, is that there really is an expectation that people will see the president, and will have the opportunity to interact with the president, and if you're in a big company you very rarely see the CEO. You see these many layers of management. Universities have much flatter management structures, so there is much less distance between the students and the faculty and the university administration, which is exactly how it should be. Exactly how it should be. But I think that also means you're constantly on the spot. You're constantly being asked questions or being asked to make important decisions.

As president of a university, you're sometimes faced with conflicting priorities. There are all kinds of issues and vested interests to deal with, and you have to make decisions that are not going to be popular with everybody.

John Hennessy: Correct.

How do you deal with criticism or controversy over those decisions?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Hennessy: One of the things I do is I look back to the founding of the university. I read the university founding grant. I look at what the Stanfords wrote about the university. I look at what the very first president, David Starr Jordan, wrote about the university. I think about these hard decisions in the context of two things. First of all, "How does this decision affect the core mission of the university, its mission to collect, discover and disseminate knowledge? How does it affect research and teaching?" The second thing I do, which is probably as hard or even harder, is to try to think in terms of a 50- or 100-year context, because as a university president, you have an obligation not only to the current generation of students, but the generations to follow. And so whether it's development, or how you spend the resources of the institution, or how we make important trade-offs about admissions, you have to think in the context of generation after generation after generation. The obligation that I have to future generations of students, future presidents, and the future university community, the faculty will have 100 years from now. That sometimes means that you have to make decisions which will make some people very unhappy and very angry, but which are the right decisions for the long term for the university. So you're a target for a lot of things, and what you have to do is have confidence, and of course, have a council of people who will reinforce that decision and agree that it is the right long-term decision for the institution, so that when you make it, you know you have the faith in yourself that it is the right decision.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

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