Fred Terman

On Character

"David Noble, chairman of the Science Advisory Board for Motorola Corporation wrote to Fred that his contributions had been so varied and so significant "that I consider you one of the great 'Generalists' of our time." Noble specified Fred's systems thinking, his effective leadership, his students, his writing, his anticipation of trends, and finally that "all who know you consider you one 'helluva nice guy.'"

"Fred Terman was a fascinating person, enthusiastic about everything he said or did. His enthusiasm permeated his laboratory and spilled over into the work of his students. At the end of each working day, he appeared in the laboratory, sat on the laboratory bench with his legs dangling, and asked questions or made suggestions or just chatted about life in general."

"Terman did not feel comfortable with the banter of cocktail parties or hosting social gatherings. A shy, often quiet man, he was at his best among small groups of students or in conversation with his peers—be they academics or businessmen."

Sterling said "In 1955, Fred Terman became Provost. Never have I worked more harmoniously with an extremely able colleague. He did take responsibility. He had an extra sense for spotting younger men of real ability. Work was his hobby, and it was after his appointment as Provost that Stanford really began to make headway."

On the Humanities

"In the 1940s, Stanford would come under severe pressure from a national engineering accreditation committee to limit the humanities and social sciences courses taken by the engineering undergraduate, but Terman would help deflect this pressure and keep Stanford's tradition of the broadly educated engineer."

"Terman, as Stanford's academic vice president, "presided over the effort to make Stanford an institution in which excellence in the sciences and engineering was matched in the humanities and arts."

"Terman had encouraged better integration of the General Studies curriculum into the engineering program. A joint committee representing engineering, physics, and mathematics had worked out changes in course sequences beginning in 1957. Engineering undergraduates were required to take one year of history of Western civilization, a year of English literature and composition, a course in public speaking, a selection of courses in the humanities and social sciences, plus general courses in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and introductory courses in all the engineering departments."

"Terman visited the home of Oswald G. Villard Jr. in New York City, in part to assure Villard's father that a Yale honors graduate in English literature could profitably enroll as a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford."

"It was critical to stress creativity, he advised, and not emphasize mere memorization. Go beyond imitation of foreign ideas and products; new, self-initiated ideas and techniques must be valued. One should strive to be a leader, not a follower in technology."

On Talent

"It seems that all of his graduates are good. Now these students don't just accidentally come to Stanford, he goes out and gets them—and he never brings back a bad one. And Terman kept track of them. He seems to know where every student he ever had is, what he's doing, how he's getting along, and how he likes his job."

"The steps in faculty recruiting, Fred said, are simple: conduct an arduous search for potential talent, backed by the fullest information; do not set artificial restrictions on the position; do not be satisfied with the merely good, but keep standards extremely high. Being "tough" later on tenure is no substitute for the most exacting search procedures."

"Terman purposefully sought to make a disproportionate number of appointments of eminent people at high rank. These were not to be persons taking "early retirement" elsewhere to live out their sunset years at Stanford, but rather vigorous individuals with the promise of making significant contributions to their fields and of bringing major changes to their departments."

"If we are to build up a department of the greatest possible strength, the appointments to the lower ranks must be guarded just as carefully and given just as much consideration as appointments to the higher positions."

"Nearly all those Terman would end up recruiting were young (within three years of the labs expansion, about 60 percent of his technical people were younger than thirty years of age)."

"When you formed a track team, he wrote, "you did not go after two men who could jump three feet high; you went for one man who could jump six feet."

"You certainly exploited the basic principle understood by so few that the quality of an educational program depends much more on the person on whom one spends his money, than on how much money is spent, or the gross number of new appointments made!" Terman to Johnson

On Research

"Terman envisioned a Stanford technological research institute centered around faculty and graduate student research interests (similar to the Food Research Institute), not an institute set up to work on behalf of industry."

"Beginning in 1958—59, Terman proposed that no engineering department would allocate more than one-half of an individual faculty member's time to a research project during the school year."

"Fred Terman had always believed that to build a great graduate student body, the university had to have funds to help support the students. His purpose was, in fact, twofold: to recruit better graduate students to Stanford, and to encourage engineering graduate students to advance beyond the master's degree level. He considered this strategy essential to the building of any great research and teaching university Terman also believed Stanford should never engage in mere job-shop contracts, but should maximize the student research experience. That is, graduate students should have meaningful research projects as well as earn wages as research assistants."

The student component was very important to Terman. According to Rambo, "Terman was very rigid about that. He was out counting noses to be sure there was a full complement of graduate students involved and that they were doing useful things, not Mickey Mouse things."

On Teaching

Terman was a great teacher, Packard felt, who had the unique ability to make a very complex problem seem the "essence of simplicity."

"Terman specifically noted that his aim was to exclude unnecessary mathematical equations and use words as far as possible." "It was most important, he believed, to get the student really interested in the material and able to understand the physical concepts, free of "attention-diverting trivial equations."

"The rewards to him as a teacher came not just from successes like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, he said, but with the boys for whom he found jobs in the Depression and others whom he helped get into administration. Helping students is something like placing a deposit in a savings bank, he said, the Savings Bank of Life."

On Fun

"Terman was delighted to report to Judge Crothers that only a month after the students moved into the dormitory, he found a party underway in the building."

"I was particularly pleased," Terman wrote, "because before the time of Crothers Memorial Hall, the graduate engineers at Stanford have never had an opportunity to develop wholesome informal social activity of this type, which can contribute so much to young people."

"The 1950s brought a new sort of college prank to the public eye—a machine gun was fired from one of the Zeta Psi fraternity house windows. Students later stole a fire truck from the campus fire department. The head football cheerleader appeared at games wearing a toilet seat as a collar. Student radio station KZSLT disrupted the annual Spring Sing concert, broadcast shows of questionable taste (including the Stanford "Sadie Show," with its risque topics and the seductive voice of a mystery Stanford coed), "and operated at illegal power levels, thus interfering with other local stations. In 1958, it was banned from the airwaves for two years. The student humor magazine Chaparral produced a "Layboy" issue in 1961, complete with a burlesque of the Virgin Birth. The editor, Bradley Efron, was suspended. (Years later, Efron became professor of statistics and chair of the Stanford Faculty Senate.)"

On The Pursuit of Excellence

Terman began to enunciate his organizational philosophy of "steeples of excellence," which he would lecture about frequently in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing largely on carefully selecting faculty in carefully selected fields."

"Stanford could not, and need not, compete at every point, he added, nor at every level. However, in those fields where Stanford chose to make a serious effort to be good, it must strive to be the best."

He warned, any plan must be built "on an irresistible desire to push to the top, combined "with an understanding of what it is that being at the top represents. The most important measure of success is in terms of student output, which must be both large in number and outstanding in quality."

"Terman believed that he had been encouraging each dean and each department head to work as autonomously as possible."

"Resentments flared up initially, provostial assistant E. Howard Brooks later recalled, when other deans found themselves reporting to Dean Terman, and to a "mere engineer, a mere engineer! It took awhile," Brooks added, "but Fred took over." Remembered one of those deans, Ernie Arbuckle of the Graduate School of Business, "Fred was a challenge. He challenged me to exert my very best efforts."

"Although some joked that Stanford was becoming Terman Tech, he was concerned with all aspects of the University." - Ernest Hilgard

"The expansion of the provost's responsibilities, however, would lead some department faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences to complain about Terman's actions in the years ahead. Often enough the issue was style rather than substance. "Even though you know more about the budget," Glover remembers Wally cautioning Fred, "and know more about the department than the head of the department, let them tell you their story before you jump in first." Fred would jump in early on, nonetheless."

"Fred didn't give a damn what people thought about him or whether he stepped on toes." - Fred Glover

"I got a telephone call from Fred Terman at 11 o'clock one New Year's Eve," remembered Fred Glover. "He wasn't aware it was New Year's Eve." On another occasion, Glover found Terman coming down to the office the day after Christmas with a caddie full of dictating roles. "He'd worked all week. He just worked constantly."

"There is no way of getting action," Terman wrote, "like not being content to let nature take its course."

On Life

"When Sterling asked Fred why he agreed to become provost, Sterling added, "He said he'd enjoyed helping build a stronger School of Engineering, and he thought it'd be fun to help build a stronger University."

"Above and beyond publishing books, receiving awards, and moving up in his career, Terman felt his biggest personal rewards had come from the opportunity granted to him to build things—the Electrical Engineering Department, the School of Engineering at Stanford, the Harvard Radio Research Lab during the war, and, finally, Stanford University itself."

"He was not motivated much by the personal spotlight, he admitted. As director of RRL he was rewarded by seeing his organization "tick." He was not impressed by "mixing with the Great"—he had seen enough of Conant, Bush, Compton, Ray Lyman Wilbur, and the military brass to satisfy his ego. He would have a longer, perhaps happier life, he speculated, certainly a life with fewer crises without taking on Stanford's presidency. His personal ambitions were satisfied by remaining with engineering and related work. He wanted to associate with Stanford all his life. He preferred the "working level" in an organization and looked forward to working under a "bang up good President that one respected and liked and would serve as a real help instead of an impediment and millstone."

Awe

"Dean Terman shared with President Wallace Sterling a deep love for Stanford and an ambition for its future. If Terman began his deanship with Stanford's traditional vision of "Service to the West," he had quickly broadened his view to national, and even international, horizons. The San Francisco Peninsula would grow mightily in the years following World War II, and Terman and Sterling felt certain that Stanford University should not simply grow with the area, but be an engine of growth."

"President Sterling and Provost Fred Terman knew, however, that in 1961 Stanford was trying to do a great deal with much less—less endowment money and lower spending per student—than leading rivals. But their ambitions for Stanford had already caught fire on campus. "Every department which I have contacted wishes to expand," reported Assistant Dean of Humanities and Sciences William McCord."

"Recalling their efforts at comparing Harvard's endowment and spending per student to Stanford's in 1957, Bob Moulton later quipped, "And we wanted to compete at their level? Our hurdle was clear. It was a marvelous atmosphere at Stanford, with optimism, risk-taking, and momentum in all directions—including the possibly world leadership in high-energy physics. Why not?"

"Hard times" are just the time when a great university can move ahead, he added."

Silicon Valley Legacy

"William Hewlett wrote, "The presence of Stanford University was a key factor in the development of the technology enterprise now known as Silicon Valley. More than anything, it was Terman, his students, and the encouragements and opportunities that he gave them that enabled this great enterprise to flourish. The Annex (Building 500, Terman's original lab in the 1930s and 1940s) was an important part in this process."

"It was [Terman's] frustration with the lack of jobs for graduates of the Stanford "electrical engineering department that led him, beginning in 1936, to energetically encourage several of his former pupils to start their own businesses," Gibbons writes, "thus initiating Stanford-related high-tech entrepreneurship in the region. He saw that the growth of these companies could provide agreeable employment for new graduates and consulting opportunities for faculty."

"it is my conviction that you were one of the most outstanding. I regarded your energy, determination, willingness to work to the limit, and constructive analytical ability as among the finest contributions that have been made to the Institute during its history."

Peter Allen, university editor and former director of Stanford's News and Publications Service, remarked, "Fred, although everyone is not aware of this, is one of the country's master planners of the modern university which has evolved since World War II."

Terman's Educational Philosophy

"He recited "Terman's Law"—that is, "the quality of an educational program and its educational productivity are only incidentally related to the money being lavished upon it"—and he gave several examples of university spending on other campuses that had led to nothing. He warned his audience of factors that could influence costs—the organization of curriculum, proliferation of offerings, fragmentation of the core offerings, and exotic specialties of little importance and no student interest."

"Terman described the plan's seven major points: 1. Sponsored research would be a part of the educational operation; it would be performed by students and faculty with a minimum of full-time professional staff, and only projects having substantial academic value would be undertaken. 2. Sponsored research would be built around the competence and interests of the individual faculty members. 3. Under no circumstances would administrators obtain a project, and then assign faculty members to work on it. 4. The faculty member would make his principal contribution to the project as a researcher, not as a manager of others; in particular, no faculty member would serve only as an assistant to another faculty manager. 5. Sponsored research was of central importance to the university; accordingly, a faculty member involved in a research project would be given a reduced teaching load, and would be eligible for a summer salary adequate to serve as an inducement to stay on the campus during the summer. 6. In the interest of academic integrity, no extra salary would be paid to faculty members for service on research projects during the academic year. 7. Graduate students would be recruited to work part-time on research projects, would be paid for this service from research funds, and could use research results for dissertations as appropriate."

All excerpts from C. Stewart Gillmore's Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (2004)

Thank you Fred