Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (review)

Frederick Terman is an ideal subject for a biography. Not a particularly interesting person in his own right, Terman merits attention as an exemplar of the post-1945 academic engineer-cum-entrepreneur, a type that had enormous influence on the development of American universities during the cold war and played an important role in blurring the boundaries between the federal government, the academy, and private enterprise. Terman has already received attention in scholarly works that address these issues, notably in Stuart Leslie's The Cold War and American Science (1993), and in my own book, Creating the Cold War University (1997). But there is room for a study of Terman that places in historical context his ideas about the role of the engineer in society, his belief in meritocracy and how he defined it, and his view of the place of the university in the economic life of the nation.

C. Stewart Gillmor's Fred Terman at Stanford is not such a book. Despite Gillmor's assertion on page one that this is not a "lives-of-saints tale," it is, in fact, a paean to Terman and his success, first as dean of engineering and then as provost, in boosting Stanford into the ranks of "great" universities. Gillmor offers the conventional view of Terman that Stanford boosters and Terman acolytes like to expound, repeating Terman's oft-quoted formula for institutional success: attract the "best" students and the "best" faculty. Like Terman, Gillmor seems not to recognize that the definition of "best" differs among people and across historical eras; he also fails to explain what Terman meant by "best." Here one also finds the standard encomiums to William Hewlett and David Packard, former students of Terman, who encouraged their interest in establishing an electronics company. (The David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the William Hewlett Revocable Trust funded Gillmor's work; all proceeds will go to support Hewlett-Packard graduate engineering fellowships at Stanford.)

Unlike some hagiographers, Gillmor did conduct research, making use of archival collections at Stanford and interviewing Terman supporters. But he hews closely to the views offered in Terman's own papers, even to the point of offering as fact Terman's judgments of those with whom he had conflicts, which often suggested that his antagonists lacked intelligence, temperamental fitness, or mental stability. For example, in his discussion of the relationship between Stanford's physics department and Depression-era patron Sperry Gyroscope, Gillmor states that Terman, William Hansen, and Russell and Sigurd Varian had no significant conflicts with Sperry; clashes with the company are attributed to physics chairman David Locke Webster, who is described variously as paranoid and temperamental. This interpretation (which was also Terman's) shows a surprising lack of understanding of the issues regarding professional autonomy and scientific patronage that were at stake in the Sperry-Stanford conflict, which was colored by, but is not reducible to, a clash of personalities.

Gillmor is strangely uninterested in these broader issues. For example, on page two, he dismisses those historians of science who have argued that patronage influenced the shape of academic disciplines during the cold war, writing that "there is no such thing as a free lunch, even at a university." But those who have studied the history of academic patronage do not claim otherwise; rather, they have sought to understand what compromises were made to attract support, who did the compromising, and what the ramifications were—for professors, the academic disciplines, the university, and the larger society. Readers interested in these matters—in which, by the way, Terman himself took considerable interest—should look elsewhere.

Even judged as hagiography, Fred Terman at Stanford is uneven and repetitive. For example, within eleven lines of text on page 313, Gillmor mentions three times that Walter Vincenti joined the Stanford faculty. It also is needlessly detailed, providing, for example, Terman's undergraduate course grades and discussing his overuse of Metamucil in...