The new provost of Stanford University walks the walk, if not talks the talk, when it comes to diversity and multiculturalism, the college buzzwords of the day.
Condoleezza Rice is a young, African-American foreign policy expert who speaks fluent Russian, is a distinguished faculty member, an accomplished pianist, a self-described sports fanatic and a former top White House aide on the National Security Council (NSC) staff.
Rice, 38, also happens to be a Republican who worked under former President George Bush, which may represent more diversity than many on Stanford’s campus have in mind.
“We have jokes in the political science department,” Rice says. “If the only two Republicans in the department aren’t there, is there a quorum?”
Rice is an easygoing woman with a ready laugh. But don’t push her too far. A Secret Service agent learned that to his chagrin in 1990 when he brusquely tried to keep Rice, the only black in her party, off the tarmac with then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at San Francisco International Airport even though she headed the high-level delegation escorting the Soviet leader on his first visit across the United States.
“I didn’t like his attitude. He was right in my face in a confrontational way,” Rice recalled of her encounter with the agent. “And that provokes a confrontational attitude from me.”
She demanded the agent’s name, reported him to his superiors, and thought nothing further of it. But the widely reported incident was seen as an embarassing diplomatic spectacle, a white American security agent rudely trying to keep away from the leader of the Soviet Union the only senior White House official who happened to be black.
Rice now downplays the incident and dismisses any racial overtones, other than to note that she’s “no shrinking violet in those circumstances.”
But then, she couldn’t afford to be as the top woman in Bush’s NSC staff, as a 15-year-old college freshman at Denver University, or as a girl growing up in the tumult of the civil rights era during the early 1960s in Birmingham, Ala.
Precocious is a word that makes her uncomfortable, but Rice concedes there were few role models for her to emulate as a child, just as there would be few for her to follow as an adult. There rarely are for trailblazers such as Rice or her friend Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut.
“I hate the notion,” Rice said when asked about role models. “Because if I’d been waiting to find a black female Soviet specialist, I’d still be waiting.”
Condoleezza Rice, Condee to her friends and colleagues, never has had to wait long for most things to come her way ever since she learned to read music and began piano studies at age 3 in Birmingham. Her mother named her after the Italian musical term “con dolcezza,” sweetness.
In May, new Stanford President Gerhard Casper named Rice, a veteran member of the faculty, to the university’s No. 2 post, responsible for academics and the school’s budget. She becomes provost Sept. 1.
Casper, an ex-University of Chicago provost who took the reins at Stanford last fall, lauded Rice as a person of “tremendous ability and intelligence” who possesses “the maturity of someone far beyond her age.”
There is little quarrel with that assessment at Stanford, where Rice first arrived as an assistant professor in 1981 and since has written three books on the Cold War and won two university awards for distinguished teaching. She has been director of graduate studies of the political science department, and on the search committees for the university’s president, dean of undergraduate admissions, provost and football coach.
That is how she met Casper, as part of the team interviewing him for the university presidency last year.
“I was greatly impressed by her academic values, her intellectual range, her eloquence,” Casper said. “Since then, I have come to admire her judgment and persuasiveness as well.”
Still, some students and faculty members at Stanford and other college campuses have taken issue with Rice’s appointment because of her work for Bush between 1989 and 1991 as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Soviet affairs on the NSC staff.
During that period, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc collapsed, Germany was reunified and the U.S. enlisted Moscow as an ally in the diplomatic maneuvering leading to the Persian Gulf war. Rice accompanied Bush to three U.S.-Soviet summit meetings, and was a delegate to talks on German unification.
She spoke to the Republican National Convention in Houston last year on foreign policy issues, and for a time even considered running for Congress.
Rice’s swift ascension at a prestigious university such as Stanford, where the provost post widely is regarded as a stepping stone to the presidency of a major American university, comes at a time of social and academic tumult on campus and financial belt-tightening.
Like the German-born Casper, Rice is a traditionalist by nature, steeped in the studies of classical European history, music and literature. But they preside over a raucous academic rebellion against an emphasis on the study of “dead white European males” and the civilizations they have wrought.
As Casper has found since moving West from Chicago, Stanford is a cauldron for the growing campus movements championing multiculturalism and diversity, words whose meanings vary according to one’s point of reference.
From where Rice sits, the debate is a healthy one.
“First of all, I’m part of that diversity, so I have a healthy respect for it,” she said.
“I take it as a given that intellectual prowess and academic excellence and teaching talent can, and do come in all races and in both genders.”
At Stanford, as in other universities, she said, a gap exists between the number of enrolled women and minorities and their number in the larger society.
Stanford and other major universities must continue to work harder to recruit talented minorities and women, Rice said, much as they would star football quarterbacks. Then they have to work harder to persuade them to enter careers in academics.
“I have to work harder to convince outstanding minority undergraduates that a career in academics instead of a career in the professions is to their benefit. (I tell them) it’s the greatest job in the world. You do get to get up every day and do what you want to do. That’s different than my job was at the White House. . . . I also tell them that I’ve been to Europe 30 times or so now, and I’ve never paid my own way.”
So what if one of those times, she recalls with a laugh, happened to be 14 hours aboard a windowless Air Force C-135 tanker aircraft accompanying then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III to Moscow for the ceremonial signing of the four-country agreement with Britain, France and the Soviets that set in motion the peaceful unification of Germany.
Those were heady times at the White House, Rice said, that in some ways seem unreal now. She looks back “with a sense of real amazement that it went as smoothly as it did. We’re obviously paying some of the price now for what between ’89 and ’91 was an almost surreally smooth and amiable process of tumultuous change.
Rice is sympathetic to the Clinton administration’s troubles abroad, but fears it could be tempted to neglect foreign policy to the country’s detriment.
“They’ve got a really tough world. Things are going to come apart at the seams in a lot of different places. I think there are a lot of really talented people in this administration, so I’m not concerned on that front,” she said. “I hope the American people give President Clinton wide enough berth to pay the type of attention he needs to pay foreign policy. Because I think it will backfire on us if there is any sense that the United States is withdrawing.”
Growing up in the Deep South and then in Denver, where her father, John, was a Presbyterian minister and assistant chancellor at Denver University and her late mother, Angelena, was a musician and high school teacher, Rice has strong childhood memories of racial segregation, and the struggle around her.
“I remember it as a time when prior to that, my parents had to try to explain why we couldn’t go to the circus, why we had to drive all the way to Washington, D.C., before we could stay in a hotel. And they had to explain why I could not have a hamburger in a restaurant but I could be president anyway, which was the way they chose to handle the situation.”
Rice is reluctant to look beyond her new post. For now, she is glad to be out of government, she said, adding short stints are the best. As for the future, who knows?
“I am not a very good long-term planner. I tend to take things on one at a time and worry about getting that job done and doing a good job at that … I am not a Type-A workaholic at all. I like a lot of things in my life. I absolutely love sports. I play bridge. I play tennis, not very well. I have a lot of interests. … Who knows? I am a really happy academic.”
