John Hennessy, president of Stanford University; The well-connected engineer is looking beyond Silicon Valley

February 2, 2014 2:07 pm

John Hennessy, president of Stanford University

By Andrew Hill and Richard Waters

Last year a professor at Stanford University was looking for new speakers for a lecture series entitled “How I Think About Literature”. Some undergraduates proposed Stanford’s president, John Hennessy – better known as an award-winning engineer and computer scientist, co-author of two widely used textbooks and board member atCisco Systems and Google.

Even though it was outside his usual domain, Prof Hennessy was up for the challenge. Quoting extensively from his favourite sprawling 19th century classics – Victor Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky – he extolled the pleasures of reading.

The enthusiasm was sincere. But the ad hoc appearance as a humanities lecturer also supported his strong commitment to cross-disciplinary work and his defence of the virtues of a broad liberal arts education.

“Just as we wouldn’t want a student in engineering to graduate never having read a Shakespeare play . . . .we also don’t want a student graduating in history or English literature who doesn’t know something about technology,” he says, in his office in a corner of Stanford’s Main Quad.

The book-lined room is itself a small shrine to the university’s scope: his scientific medals sit near a wig given to him by US Supreme Court justice (and alumna) Sandra Day O’Connor; a low-cost infant-warmerdeveloped by the university’s social entrepreneurs; and a pair of sneakers decorated with pictures of Stanford.

From outside, though, the fight to maintain Stanford’s breadth may look like an uphill battle, led by the wrong person. Many students see Stanford as a springboard into Silicon Valley and Prof Hennessy, himself a founder of two technology companies, is an example of precisely the sort of success to which they aspire.

Yet Stanford’s president is adamant that his students do not have one-track minds leading only to business billions. Faculty members and staff bristled at the “Get Rich U” headline on a 2012 New Yorker article about the links between the university and the tech sector, feeling it understated the devotion of students and faculty to wider concerns, including non-profit organisations. Prof Hennessy himself says he worries about “the overall shift that’s occurred in society, where the focus is increasingly on ‘this is about my job, my career’”.

His own experience as a director of Cisco and Google has taught him much about operational excellence and innovation

He is also concerned about the short-termism of the business world, and sees the university as a sanctuary for patient, long-term research in areas such as energy technology. “The difficulty is you build the next social media widget – Snapchat [the instant photo-messaging application, founded by Stanford students]. . . .you test it out, a year later you’ve got a million users,” he says. Developing new battery technology “that changes everything” could take more than five years and cost up to $100m, against “a few million” for Snapchat.

“In the Valley, everyone talks about your IPO. . . .but in the sciences, they talk about going to Stockholm [as Nobel laureates], and you only go to Stockholm if you make a fundamental breakthrough [that] really reshaped the field,” says Prof Hennessy. “That’s the kind of impact we really look for in our research.”

Prof Hennessy’s friendly determination is evident in the way he talks about keeping Stanford true to this ambition. Since becoming president in 2000, he has succeeded largely in preserving a multidisciplinary balance despite the inevitable gravitational pull of Silicon Valley and the fact that, as president, he has substantially less power than a company chief executive or chairman.

The best parallel, he says, is with the mayor of a large city. To do anything bold or different requires “a process of gathering support, working very much bottom up and. . . .getting the faculty to engage in the planning and thinking process”.

The CV

Age: 62

Education: BE, electrical engineering, Villanova University; MS and PhD, computer science, SUNY Stony Brook
Career:
1977-86 Assistant, then associate, professor of electrical engineering, Stanford University
1981 Led research into Risc technology to increase computer performance and reduce costs
1984 Founded MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies
1986- Professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Stanford
1999-2000 Provost, Stanford
2000- President, Stanford
2002- Board member, Cisco Systems
2004- Board member, Google; lead independent director since 2007
2012 Received Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Medal of Honor, its highest award
Family: Married to Andrea Berti; two grown sons
Interests: Reading, golf

Since 2000 Prof Hennessy has managed both acute crises and larger strategic changes. Between 2008 and 2009, in the teeth of the financial storm, the value of Stanford’s $17bn endowment dropped sharply. It forced Prof Hennessy and his provost to marshal the collective will of academics to take salary reductions and absorb job cuts. Separately, he has led the faculty in identifying large, long-term global challenges that Stanford could help meet, by concentrating on human health; the environment and sustainability; and international affairs. A fourth arts initiative was added later.

To persuade academics to work together, he helped establish a central fund for research, based on competitive three-page proposals for financial backing. Collaborating, even on an unsuccessful pitch, increased the probability that the team would work together in future by a factor of two, he says, which helped them win funding from external sources later.

The cross-disciplinary effort also helps the university’s budding entrepreneurs. In the business school, for instance, graduates studying for MBAs link up with engineers, lawyers and the occasional arts student to try out start-up ideas. Prof Hennessy, who studied at the universities of Stony Brook, New York, and Villanova, Pennsylvania, says he missed this real-world training when he was a computer scientist starting out in business: “The company I started basically wasted one round of funding and lost a year because the founders were all engineers. They didn’t really understand [business].”

Stanford’s heirs to that generation of engineers certainly do. Prof Hennessy sits at the centre of a powerful Silicon Valley network, close-knit enough to draw occasional criticism for potential conflicts of interest. His own experience as a director of Cisco and Google has taught him much about operational excellence, human resources, succession planning and innovation. “Google is the innovation machine and certainly that’s what universities want to be,” he says.

Naturally, he sees technology as part of the challenge to modern universities, but also part of the solution. Stanford and its academics have helped develop massive online open courses (Moocs) offered to tens of thousands of students via the internet. But Prof Hennessy now says: “There are two words wrong in ‘Mooc’: massive and open.”

The university’s experience with courses offered via the internet is that “the range of student capability. . . .simply becomes so large” as to make the course unmanageable and ineffective. Instead, Prof Hennessy says Stanford is focusing on building “something that is more compelling, more effective, [where] more students actually learn more”.

Jeffrey Koseff, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, one of the interdisciplinary centres set up as a result of the president’s quest to tackle 21st century challenges, says Prof Hennessy is pushing all members of the faculty to think about what they can do best and how to keep the university at the cutting edge. “He understands fully that not everything we try will succeed, but we need to try,” says Prof Koseff. Appropriately enough, it is the kind of compliment that could just as easily be paid to a successful entrepreneur or engineer.