Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (24 page)

In 1995, Condi joined another financial company, J. P. Morgan, the 140-year-old investment banking institution whose clients included 30 million individuals as well as corporations, institutions, and governments. She became a member of the International Advisory Council, a group of business and government leaders—chaired by Shultz—that met every eight months to advise the corporation. This post introduced her to many international figures, from a senior Singapore government official to a former Saudi finance minister and chief executives of corporations from South Africa, Brazil, Japan, and Mexico.

The Hewlett-Packard Corporation, headquartered next door to Stanford in Palo Alto and founded by two Stanford engineering graduates, was part of the Silicon Valley explosion of new technology. Condi joined the Board of Directors in 1991 and served for two years, becoming an insider in this very Stanford-friendly corporation.

In addition to corporate boards, Condi obtained director positions in large foundations and research policy research groups. From 1994 to 1997, she was a trustee at the Carnegie Corporation, one of the country’s oldest philanthropic organizations that focuses on education and international security among other areas. During her term at Carnegie, she served on an advisory council for its Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, joining a list of world leaders including Jimmy Carter, Robert S. McNamara, Desmond Tutu, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Commission itself consisted of sixteen members whose tasks included studying methods for obtaining full disclosure of nuclear weapons. Their report, “Comprehensive Disclosure of Fissionable Materials: A Suggested Initiative,” was released in 1995. As a member of the advisory council, Condi offered her expertise on the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union.

This was not her first experience with the Carnegie organization. In 1988 and 1989, she had served on the board of trustees at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the research organization that describes itself as “the oldest international affairs think tank in the country.” The Endowment studies “relations among governments, business, international organizations and civil society,” and, through its Carnegie Moscow Center, focuses on relations between Russia and the United States.

From 1992 to 1997, Condi served on the Board of Directors of the RAND Corporation, the research association where she had served as a summer intern as a college student. The first organization in the country to be called a “think tank,” RAND has expanded its original focus on military technology to include education, health care, international economics, and other issues. Brent Scowcroft was also on the board at RAND during Condi’s term.

In 1997, she joined the board of directors of the Hewlett Foundation, a separate entity from the Hewlett-Packard Corporation she had worked for previously. The foundation gives $120 million in grants to organizations that, according to its mission, “make positive contributions to society.” As a member of the board, Condi helped set the budget, made investment decisions, and reviewed the work of many of the institutions receiving financial support from the foundation. Another task of the board during her term was selecting a president, and Paul Brest was the candidate chosen by the selection committee. As both the dean of the Stanford Law School and the president of the Hewlett Foundation, Paul Brest became one of Condi’s close friends and colleagues. “Condi’s greatest expertise was on the international side of the foundation,” said Paul. “She was particularly interested and helpful to the foundation in those areas, but like other directors she had to deal with all the issues. The board meets four times a year.”

At the National Endowment for the Humanities, the federal agency that provides grants to cultural institutions and scholars, Condi served on the Board of Trustees from 1991 to 1993. She also became part of San Francisco’s cultural leadership as a member of the San Francisco Symphony’s Board of Governors.

Starting in 1994, Condi returned to Notre Dame three times a year to serve on the Board of Trustees, the primary administrative arm of the university. She was elected to the fifty-three-person board after having served on the advisory council for the university’s College of Arts and Letters. A survey by the
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
published in 2000 found that Notre Dame had more black trustees than any major university in its study, with seven black members, including Condi, on the board. In 1995, the university recognized her prominence as an educator by giving her an honorary doctorate and inviting her to give the commencement address to that year’s graduating class. Two years later, she was honored by Notre Dame once again, named a National Exemplar of service to education in America. This recognition was given during a major fund-raising campaign in which the university produced a film,
Generations: A Celebration of Notre Dame
, that was broadcast to alumni groups throughout the country. The film highlighted four Notre Dame graduates who had contributed to education, the church, and society.

In addition to the honorary doctorate from Notre Dame, Condi was named an honorary doctor of laws at Morehouse College in 1991 and a doctor of humane letters at the University of Alabama in 1994. Morehouse, founded in Atlanta two years after the Civil War, is the nation’s oldest black, all-male college with alumni including Martin Luther King, Jr., Olympic track champion Edwin Moses, film director Spike Lee, and actor Samuel L. Jackson. Recognition from the University of Alabama must have served as a personal measure of how far the nation had come, for the university was segregated when John and Angelena Rice wanted to pursue graduate work in the early 1960s.

Condi’s prominence in academia was further recognized in the spring of 1997 when she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This honor is given to those who have made “distinguished contributions to science, scholarship, public affairs and the arts,” and she was among eleven professors named to the Academy that year. The following year she was named one of forty Young Leaders of American Academia by
Change
magazine, the journal of the American Association for Higher Education. At Stanford, she re-entered the Hoover Institution with a three-year research fellowship that supported new research projects while she continued teaching classes in political science.

From the boardrooms of multinational corporations and policy centers to the academic lecture circuit, Condi grew in stature in the business, academic, and cultural worlds upon her return from the Bush Senior White House. She was promoted to full professor at Stanford in May 1993 at age thirty-eight. Unknown to her, a committee was meeting at the same time to discuss an important new opening at the university, one of the top jobs that traditionally led to the presidency at any number of major universities.

One month after her upgrade to full professor she received a call from Gerhard Casper, president of Stanford. Over the years they had talked frequently about the development of the university and shared a common interest in the political science department, as Gerhard’s career included two years as an assistant professor of political science before becoming dean of the University of Chicago Law School. They had met the previous year when Condi traveled to Chicago with the presidential search committee to meet him as a candidate for the position. At that time he was provost of the University of Chicago, the second most powerful position at the institution. As provost, he was the principal budget and academic officer, reporting directly to the president. At that first meeting, Gerhard found Condi to be one of the most exceptional academics he had ever met. “I was greatly impressed by her academic values, her intellectual range, her eloquence,” he recalled.

That June day in 1993, just over a year after they first met, Condi had no reason to think Gerhard’s invitation to meet him in his office was anything more than another chance to talk about a committee decision or some other administrative matter. The meeting turned out to be anything but routine, however.

“I did not beat around the bush,” said Gerhard. “I said to her, ‘Condi, I want you to be the next provost.’ And there was really silence. You know, Condi is not someone who’s easily stunned by anything, but there was absolute silence on the other side of the table.”

It was a lot to take in. As provost, she would be the first black person, first woman, and youngest individual ever to hold the job. At thirty-eight, she was more than twenty years younger than all of her predecessors had been when they took the office, and she would go into the number-two power spot, leapfrogging the usual positions of chair and subsequently dean of a department. Without previous experience in managing a department’s finances she would be responsible for the university’s entire $1.5 billion annual budget. She would also be the chief academic officer, making policy decisions that affected the 1,400-person faculty. But Gerhard was convinced she would perform well in the job. “I knew it would be somewhat controversial because universities have a strong civil service expectation,” he said. “If you are to be provost, you should have been dean, you should at least have been a department chair . . . but I was absolutely convinced that she was competent.”

Casper also remarked that most of the controversy that followed the announcement revolved not around Condi’s race, gender, or lack of experience, but over the fact “that Condi was a Republican and most American universities are primarily made up of Democrats.” Some members of the faculty and student body were concerned that Condi’s conservative political views would sway the decision-making levels of the university toward the right, but Condi responded to those concerns by stating that her politics would not come into play in her job.

Condi entered the job at a difficult time as Stanford, like other universities, was facing budget cuts in the slowing economy. In addition to the recession, they also had enormous repair costs from the earthquake that rocked the Bay area in October 1989 and caused damage to 200 buildings. The repair bill reached $200 million. When Condi became provost, the university’s deficit stood at $20 million. “Stanford—like all universities—is in a maelstrom of change,” she said after accepting the position as provost. “Just as I was fortunate to be given a chance to help shape America’s response to the extraordinary events that ended the Cold War, I am honored that President Casper has placed faith in my judgment and ability to meet Stanford’s challenges.” She also described the source of her commitment—a deep admiration for the university that had grown stronger over the years. “When I decided to return to the university two years ago, I did so with even greater commitment to, and appreciation of, the freedom of thought, exploration and expression that the academy allows,” she said. “There is no other environment that can match the energy of a place like this.”

With her new appointment, Condi changed her plans for the summer. She had scheduled a four-week trip to the oil fields in Kazhakstan, where she would do research for a book, as she told
The New York Times
. As a Chevron director working on a deal in that country, however, her academic and corporate schedules were clearly going to overlap. She cancelled the trip and crammed on the university budgeting process instead. She had never faced a billion-dollar budget, and reducing the deficit would surely entail firings and cutbacks that would make her unpopular on many levels of the university. But winning a popularity contest had never been on her itinerary, and she knew that conflict would be an unpleasant yet necessary part of getting the university’s finances on track. She wasn’t afraid of the problems that would undoubtedly arise should she have to trim departments and initiate staff layoffs. “I tell my students, ‘If you find yourself in the company of people who agree with you, you’re in the wrong company,’” she said.

To some people at the university, erasing the budget deficit was a pipe dream that could not be accomplished. But Condi spent the next few months constructing a strategy that she outlined in a memo to deans and administrators in November 1993. The plan called for reductions in department budgets and student services, possible layoffs and the consolidation of support staffs. In an interview with the campus paper, she assured students that the university was not reeling from a crisis but working productively toward solutions like the rest of the nation. “I actually don’t think of this as a budgetary crisis,” she said. “This is just managing in the ’90s. Every American institution out there is going through the same questions.”

“There was a sort of conventional wisdom that said it couldn’t be done . . . that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to live with it,” said Condi’s fellow professor, Coit Blacker. “She said, ‘No, we’re going to balance the budget in two years.’ It involved painful decisions but it worked, and communicated to funders that Stanford could balance its own books and had the effect of generating additional sources of income for the university.” Many of those painful decisions involved firing people, a process that Condi dreaded but that she considered absolutely necessary to turn the budget around. “I always feel bad for the dislocation it causes in people’s lives,” she said. “When I had to lay people off, I eased the transition for them in any way I could. But sometimes you have to make difficult decisions, and you have to make them stick.”

Her job was not easy, and often not pleasant. “In the first couple of years, there was very little to which I could say yes,” she said. “Also, we had to restructure the administrative units of a lot of departments. That was hard, laying off people. That’s not fun.” But she felt that making clear decisions and staying on course was more productive than letting issues simmer for months or years. She prided herself on being able to make tough decisions. “I think that you have to have a certain decisiveness about things,” she said. “People would rather have an answer of ‘no’ than have no answer.”

In addition to the shadow of the deficit, another dark cloud hung over Stanford’s finances when Condi became provost. The university was embroiled in an investigation over alleged overbilling for indirect costs, part of the monies used to perform the thousands of federally supported research projects at the university. Federal research projects are funded with grants that cover two types of expenses, direct and indirect costs. The first are easily identifiable, such as laboratory equipment, supplies, and professors’ salaries for a specific project. Indirect costs, however, cover the utilities, library materials, building maintenance, use of support staff, and other items that are not easily attributed to specific projects. The university and the government agree on an overall percentage of those goods and services to be billed as indirect costs. In Stanford’s case, the percentage billed for indirect costs were the highest of any university in the nation at 74 percent. This meant that a professor who budgeted $100,000 for a research project would receive an additional $74,000 to cover indirect costs for a total grant of $174,000.