Lowen, Rebecca S. "Exploiting a Wonderful Opportunity': The Patronage of Scientific Research at Stanford University, 1937-1965". Minerva, Vol.30, No.3 (1992): 391-421.

Lowen, Rebecca S. "Exploiting a Wonderful Opportunity': The Patronage of Scientific Research at Stanford University, 1937-1965". Minerva, Vol.30, No.3 (1992): 391-421.

• Frederick Terman, Dean of Engineering at Stanford University in 1947, believed that federal financial support for the university presented a wonderful opportunity that could increase research output and raise the reputation of the university (391).
• Universities like Harvard and the University of California had received federal support during the Second World War and benefitted from this opportunity. The success of these universities during WWII led Stanford to consider accepting federal funding in the post-war period (391).
• The general understanding of the impact of government financing on universities has been shaped by the studies of Clark Kerr and Robert Nisbet, who claimed that powerful state actors can press universities to follow their directives and that professors, especially STEM lords, can be directed into different kinds of research through monetary incentives (391-392).
• The example of Stanford University seems to indicate that many of the factors resulting in universities accepting federal funds, and especially projects for the military, have to do with internal university politics and the desire of university administrations to raise the national profile of their schools (392; 419-420).
• In the case of Stanford, this was done primarily by Provost Terman, with the backing of President Wallace Sterling, who overruled previous ideas about departmental autonomy and generally pissed off faculty in his goal of redirecting the university towards the needs of external sponsors (420).
• In the late 1930s, administrators at Stanford University began to worry about the finances and reputation of the school due to pressure from the Great Depression. On 6 December 1941 several administrators, trustees, influential alumni, and professors met and determined that hiring better faculty and providing them with better research facilities would raise the school's reputation, but that they lacked the money required to do this (392-393).
• Although Congress considered a number of bills approving federal funding for academic research in the late 1930s, Stanford rejected seeking or accepting federal funds. President Ray Lyman Wilbur was a staunch Republican, having served as Secretary of the Interior under President Herbert Hoover, as did not want to accept any money linked to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal; he also feared that this funding would be used to bring private universities under state control (393-394).
• Stanford instead sought to get research funding from private industrial firms. This built on the pre-existing relationship between universities and businesses, such as the construction of the high-voltage laboratory at Stanford by power companies in exchange for expert advice on industry issues (394).
• Past experiences differed with working with companies. The electrical engineering department had a healthy partnership, but the physics department's cooperation with the Sperry Gyroscope Company in 1938 to develop the klystron microwave tube was marred by constant conflict between physicists and company representatives over the project (394-395).
• Under President Donald Tresidder, Stanford embraced working relationships with companies, appointing the new Chair of Geology based on the recommendations of petroleum companies with the express intention of the university benefitting monetarily from this relationship (399-400). President Tresidder also bypassed normal faculty consultation during appointments and hiring, taking advantage of the absence of many professors due to the war, to the dissatisfaction of many faculty (400-401).
• With the beginning of WWII, Stanford received a small number of government contracts in physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, medicine, aeronautics, and biology. It also extended brief classes to enlisted soldiers. Around 40 professors also left the university to work in federal research laboratories (395-396).
• Contact with government researchers and access to classified technologies during WWII-era cooperation gave certain professors at Stanford an edge. This demonstrated to faculty the advantages of cooperation with the US government (397).
• Physicists at Stanford felt empowered by their work for the government during WWII, making them more likely to pursue cooperation with other partners, like industrial firms. They also now had a model of cooperation they liked and could impose on other partners (398-399). Opposition to these plans, like Dean of Physics, David Locke Webster, was removed by firing or removal from positions of power (399). 
• It was generally expected that the involvement with the federal government during WWII was temporary. However, administrators hoped that the development and growth of California -- which was bolstered by WWII -- would lead to greater opportunities for Stanford to liaise with industry (396).
• In 1945, a small group of professors, administrators, and graduates again met to discuss the financial situation of Stanford and decided to establish the Stanford Research Institute, modeled off the Armour Research Foundation and other university-affiliated research institutes established in the 1940s, to attract industrial sponsorship of research. It was established in 1946 (401).
• Within a year, it was clear that the Stanford Research Institute was not attract corporate funds and it posted a large deficit in 1947. Many industries, like aeronautics, were reducing their expenditure after WWII and did not have the funds to spend on research (401).
• It was under pressure from Stanford's finances that President Tresidder, prompted by Dean Terman, first sought federal funding for Stanford (402). President Tresidder's views only changed because of a strong personal relationship with Dean Terman, who has his ally during a period of general faculty hostility to the administration (402-403).
• The financial situation at Stanford had only worsened since the 1930s, as the university had operated at a deficit every year since 1944, and was unable to invest in facilitate upgrades request by faculty. It also could not pay competitive salaries, resulting in some professors leaving to other universities or corporate jobs (402).
• President Tresidder allowed professors to start accepting federal funding, initially from the Office of Naval Research in 1946 (402). Dean Terman was responsible for getting these contracts, leveraging connections he had made working in the Radio Research Laboratory for the government (403); personal connections to the government agents responsible for these contracts was critical in many cases to Stanford receiving the funds (405).
• President Tresidder shared many of President Wilbur's concerns regarding private universities accepting federal funding and warned that this could potentially erode their autonomy and give the US government a voice in their affairs. Although accepting federal funds himself at the time, President Tresidder still warned colleagues at the Association of American Universities to avoid taking federal funds and instead seek out alternative funding from private individuals or corporations (402).
• Dean Terman also took the lead in reshaping Stanford's engineering school to attract federal funding, seeking to appoint faculty and prioritize certain fields of research, such as statistics, that he believed would be of future interest to the military. This included hiring faculty from Radio Research Laboratory in expectation that the military would still be interested in their research (403-405).
• Cooperation between the military and Stanford worked so well largely because it was assumed from the start that Stanford's research would be modified to suit military interests. This meant that there was no conflict, as the relationship was clearly understood by both parties (405).
• Government contracts allowed Stanford to entirely cover the costs, both salaries and administrative, of creating entirely new departments and classes geared towards fields of interest to the military. This meant that the expansion of research for the government, including new facilities and equipment, could all be accomplished without costing any money to the university (406).
• The movement toward federal funding had been a massive financial success for the university, particularly for the engineering department, which increased its federal funding from $300,000 in 1947 -- which already outstripped its budget allocation -- to over $1,000,000 in 1950, largely because it had specialized to meet military needs prior to the Korean War (407), and over $1.5 million by 1953 (409).
• Most of the contracts with the military since 1946 had gone to the School of Engineering, with some going to physics and statistics. These departments were able to increase staff numbers, usually on annual contracts in case funding should later be withdrawn, whereas most of the departments in the School of Arts and Sciences had gotten no funding and thus had not received any new funding for salaries, appointments, or facilities (409).
• The departments of the School of Arts and Sciences were generally wary about the affects of outside funding for staff and programs, as they feared this made staff positions tenuous and dependent on outside financing that could then vanish. They also believed that this influx of government contract was causing their own work, which did not receive federal funding, to become undervalued (410-411).
• The involvement of Stanford's engineering school in Korean War contracts changed the academic environment, as discussion of research was now restricted and academic research schedules were set to match planned production schedules (407-408).
• There were objections to these changes, although very limited in the case of secrecy requirements. At least one professor complained about the new scheduling protocols increasing administrative responsibilities and reducing the amount of time spent on actual research (408).
• In 1952, President Sterling attempted to centralize Stanford's administration by creating the office of provost, with broad control over academic affairs. Previous attempts to centralize administration had been made since the 1920s, when Herbert Hoover, a Stanford trustee, had advocated for a move, but they had been unsuccessful -- deans had been ignored, as had the vice president of academic affairs created by President Tresidder in 1944 -- and academic decisions were still made by department chairs and approved directly by the president (411).
• Frederick Terman was appointed provost in 1955 and succeeded in centralizing academic affairs at Stanford under his office. Provost Terman made the same reforms he had as dean, attempting to build up the university's reputation, staff, and facilities by attracting external funding from the military. He took over control of hiring and promotions, which had previously been departmental purviews, in order to prioritize research areas of interest to the military (411-412).
• Whereas the School of Engineering had accept these changes without complaint, the faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences objected, not to the reorientation of research to suit military needs, but with the personal behavior of Provost Terman (412), who was widely considered to be an asshole (412-414).
• One example is Provost Terman's drive to have the School of Political Science focus on behavioralist research, which President Sterling had encountered in 1950 from H. Rowan Gaither, an important figure in the Ford Foundation and Rand Corporation, who claimed that it would allow for 'scientific' studies human behavior and thus the prediction of social, economic, and politics trends. This proposal ran counter to the department's goal of maintaining 'coverage and balance' and its focus on political theory, and resulted in battles over the budget, new staff appointments, and styles of instruction (414-418).
• By the mid-1960s, most departments at Stanford had been reformed by Provost Terman along similar lines to the School of Engineering, focusing on meeting the needs of the US government and attracting external funding. The plan had worked, as Stanford now ranked as one of America's leading schools in both reputation and revenue (419).
• The innovations in the structuring of universities at Stanford during the 1950s and 1960s were replicated elsewhere and presaged the emergence of the modern research university, where connections to department and university are relatively weak, connections with colleagues at other schools and external patrons are strong, and research focuses are largely determined by the likelihood of attracting outside funding (420).