John Hennessy Interview (page: 7 / 8) President of Stanford University	Print Interview

Why do you think they came to you? Why did they say, "Hennessy is the guy to do this?"

John Hennessy: That's a good question. I know what they wrote in the description of what they were looking for in a president. I think certainly they were looking for somebody who could work across the entire institution, who could communicate with the wide range of constituencies that a university president has to communicate with. They were certainly looking for somebody who had a strong record of scholarship, and a strong record of both teaching and research contribution. I think they also wanted someone who they felt could deal with the management aspects of the presidency, because after all, we have a $1.7 billion budget. Part of the job is managing that $1.7 billion enterprise. Now of course, a lot of that effort will be distributed down to your staff, but in order to really run that enterprise well, you have to be able to know how to hire people who can make the important decisions across the institution, whether it's managing the endowment, deciding how we finance something, worrying about admissions, or worrying about our faculty appointments. And I think the last criteria they had was honesty and integrity and the ability to be true to your word and keep the commitments you've made. Those were the requirements, and I guess I fit the bill.

Did you consider not taking the job?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Hennessy: I considered, when I was asked, whether or not I wanted to be a candidate, whether or not I should do it. I think probably the big step for me, and this is an interesting story, the big step for me was when I took the provost job, because many provosts become university presidents. If not at their home institutions, at other institutions. It is the second-in-command job. I knew that President Casper was probably not going to stay for more than two or three more years. I didn't expect him to step down in a year, but I probably knew he wasn't going to stay for more than two or three. When I was contemplating the provost's job, I actually went to a talk at a yearly celebration we have called "Founders Day" that celebrates the Stanfords' contributions in founding the university. The talk that year was given by Provost Condi Rice, who was then the outgoing provost, although there had not been a successor named. I had been asked to do the job but hadn't made a final decision. She gave a talk which talked about the role of education in American society and how education had saved her grandfather, who was an African American sharecropper in the South, and how it had set their family off on a different course. And although I always had felt education was important, here was a statement that was very convincing about the role of education in the American system and how it could really improve everyone's lives, and that pushed me over the edge. And I, of course, had to be willing to consider the possibility that I'd take the president's job once I took the provost's job, but after I heard Condi's wonderful speech, very moving speech, and the importance of education and learning, I decided to take the provost's job.

Speaking as an engineer, a computer scientist, what is the role of technology in education? What is it now and what should it be?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Hennessy: Clearly, technology is reshaping lots of disciplines in important ways. It's, of course, affected lots of the traditional disciplines, engineering and the sciences, although the dramatic growth of the use of technology in the biological sciences is simply astounding. The main reason we've been able to do the human genome sequencing so fast is that we brought a combination of computing and robotic technology to the job, and sped the job up by orders of magnitude. And instead of having graduate students and post-docs and lab technicians running around with little test tubes, we were able to put the whole thing under robotic control and speed it up tremendously.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What I find most fascinating is to see the impact that computing is having on the humanities and the arts right now. It's truly astounding. We have one fascinating project where a faculty member is using laser scanning technology and computer technology to reconstruct completely realistic, incredibly detailed models of Michelangelo's sculptures, and this has enabled two things. First of all, it means that we've now got a permanent digital record, so if anything should ever happen to that work of art, we can create it in its full fidelity. And the precision is down to the level of individual chisel marks, so you can actually see the kind of chisel that was used for various parts of the sculpture. But equally importantly, it means that you can now construct a three-dimensional virtual reality replica, and that people who can never get to Florence can actually see the David in fully accurate detail, and art students can now see it at a level of detail that they can't see in the museum, because they can't walk right up next to the statue and see what it looks like at that level of detail. We see this happening across the board. Access to manuscripts, which before required you to travel to an ancient library at Oxford or at the Sorbonne, are now available online. And I think we also see it in teaching. We see lots more information becoming available online. We see people changing their educational patterns.

One of the things that I've been really excited about is to see lots more interesting continuing education as people realize -- and it started with the technology fields and an interest in technology, engineers -- education is a lifelong thing or you become obsolete. So we started to see engineers coming back to take courses. Well, it's hard, once you're in a career, to actually drive over to the campus and to come in the middle of the day, so we saw them taking courses online. And these were students who already had master's degrees, who were already practicing engineers for 10 or 15 or 20 years, coming back and taking a course on networking, because they've just gone to work for Cisco, for example. So I think that's an important change as well. The next stage, I think, will be continuing education, so that people can go back and take that course on Shakespeare that they never got to take, or environmental science if they're interested in it, or archaeology, because they'd be interested in going to Rome and seeing what the Forum really looks like, and I think that will be as exciting as the other things happening.

Is there a downside? Is it possible to become too dependent on technology?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Hennessy: I think the downside of technology is that it can sometimes allow people to interact in a way that isolates them from other people. I've never felt comfortable discussing a really tough decision, a really hard topic, delivering bad news -- or good news for that matter -- using technology to deliver that news. I'd rather sit down and look somebody in the eye and deliver that. I think, as our young people become more and more dependent on technology, what they need to remember is that it's not a substitute for human contact and it simply can't replace it. You cannot communicate nearly as well. Now perhaps 50 years from now, we really will be able to do 3-D reconstructions, and you'll be able to communicate between China and the U.S. as if you were sitting in the same room, but we're a long ways away from that today.

This could lead to some difficult choices.

John Hennessy: I think you see that in various cases. Computing technology is becoming so inexpensive that if you look at the cost of supplying somebody with a computer versus supplying them with the same number of books that they would be able to get access to online, it's not clear how to make that tradeoff anymore.

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