2. FREDERICK TERMAN

“Stanford can be a dominating factor in the West”

When McCarthy arrived in 1962, Stanford was fully in the thrall of Frederick Terman, an engineering professor who had been given broad powers as provost to take the university to new heights in higher education. To MIT heights. To Harvard heights. Dragged by the scruff of the neck, if need be. The stakes had always been quite clear to Terman. Two decades earlier, in a letter to a prominent Stanford fund-raiser, he wrote with an engineer’s precision: “We will either . . . create a foundation for a position in the West somewhat analogous to that of Harvard in the East, or we will drop to a level somewhat similar to that of Dartmouth, a well-thought-of institution having about 2 percent as much influence on national life as Harvard. Stanford can be a dominating factor in the West, but it will take years of planning to achieve this.”¹

Terman’s strategy for Stanford’s ascent can be summed up by a single word: entrepreneurism. He wanted the university’s faculty and students to think creatively about how to bring in money to the university. When Stanford was flush with cash, there would be scholarships to attract the best students, higher salaries to poach star faculty members from other schools, investments in top-flight facilities befitting such talented students and faculty members. With enough money, Terman concluded, Stanford could overcome its less-than-elite reputation and become the Harvard of the West. Naturally, the number-crunching engineer had a plan to speed things along. Terman identified the various sources for Stanford to tap—primarily government scientific agencies and private businesses—and then made sure that the university pointed its students and faculty members in the right direction with their research.

The way Terman saw it, the benefits to Stanford could flow in any number of ways. There were the significant payments from the government to cover overhead costs at the research labs; the expensive equipment donated by companies eager to encourage research related to their specific technologies; the experts from industry who, for similar reasons, became visiting professors in Stanford’s science departments, their salaries paid for in part by their employers; and, more broadly, there was the goodwill Stanford earned from alumni and faculty members who had achieved business success and would give back to the school with hefty donations. The happy coalition of academia, government, and private industry that Terman proposed has been called “the military-industrial-academic complex”; he preferred to call it “win-win-win.”²

No doubt, the government held the largest pot of money for a university eager to grow. World War II had demonstrated over and over the importance of scientific research: the early computers helped crack the German codes; radar bolstered the Allies’ air defenses, while radar-jamming devices thwarted the Germans’; the proximity fuse made bombs more accurate and thus more destructive. Above all else was the atomic bomb, which brought the war to a hasty conclusion, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, many of whom later became members of Congress. Scientific research would evermore be at the heart of America’s defenses, organized around university laboratories, and Terman made sure that Stanford was included among the universities destined to receive those grants. During the 1950s, government-sponsored academic research had more than tripled, reaching nearly $1 billion by the end of the decade—more than three-quarters of those funds went to just twenty elite universities, which thanks to Terman now included Stanford. By 1960, 39 percent of Stanford’s operating budget came from federal support, the overwhelming majority directed at physics and engineering.³

But Terman’s innovation was in converting Stanford research into business opportunities for students and faculty members. The marketplace represented a pot of money for Stanford to tap, too, and Terman wasn’t about to ignore it. These ideas first occurred to him in the 1930s in his own engineering lab on campus. Terman’s electronics research had practical applications for devices like radio-wave amplifiers and bomb fuses, and he eagerly worked with businesses—established ones as well as start-ups—to bring these products to market. Famously, in 1939 he helped stake two promising former students, William Hewlett and David Packard, in a start-up run out of a Palo Alto garage. In part, Terman was responding to the Great Depression, when even his best students were having a hard time finding steady work. Being in partnership with businesses, or starting your own, was an excellent way to ensure employment immediately after graduation. But he was also thinking of Stanford. Hewlett, who along with Packard became a lifelong Stanford donor, recalled a long-ago conversation: “We were walking out of the old engineering building, and Terman said he was looking forward to the day when I gave my first million dollars to this laboratory. I remember this, because at the time I thought it was so incredible.”⁴

Later, when Terman became university-wide provost in 1955, he applied this same strategy to build up Stanford’s status through efforts like the Stanford Industrial Park, which brought dozens of new and established high-tech companies into the bosom of the university.⁵ He consciously, and unapologetically, steered Stanford toward academic disciplines like biochemistry, statistics, and aeronautics, which were likely to generate business opportunities or government grants, and away from dead-end fields like taxonomy or geography or classics. A later Stanford president, Richard W. Lyman, marveled at how Terman could display such cool confidence while “downplaying or even eliminating established programs or academic emphases that lacked promise for the future.”⁶ Terman did, however, shed his calm demeanor when challenged over his plans for reinventing Stanford’s academic priorities. His typical response to those who stood in the way was to question their competence, motives, or intelligence.

For example, there was a prominent Stanford naturalist, George Myers, who criticized Terman for shifting the biology department away from its strength in zoology and the environment toward research done in laboratories, which was more likely to be marketable. Myers went over Terman’s head to complain to the university president, J. Wallace Sterling, about his provost’s obvious disdain for scientists “who operate in muddy boots.” Despite Terman’s insinuations, the nature sciences were eminently practical fields, Myers wrote, addressing humanity’s most pressing concern: “The destruction and poisoning of man’s complex biological and physical environment by man himself.”⁷ Sterling backed up Terman, as he always did. Terman never directly engaged with Myers but did privately dismiss his complaints as coming from “a hardworking but not particularly bright biologist . . . who specializes in fish.”⁸

Seemingly less controversial was Terman’s decision to shrink the classics department at Stanford by failing to replace two professors who had retired. Who could dispute that the department failed to pull its weight financially? Not that Terman was blaming the faculty members for their lack of entrepreneurial zeal: business opportunities from the study of Latin and Greek were painfully small. Still, facts are facts. Why would Stanford direct its limited resources toward a field with such a small potential payoff? When the senior member of the department, Hazel Hansen, a specialist in ancient Greek pottery, wrote to object to the unfilled vacancies, Terman was dismissive. He didn’t reply, but again disparaged privately: Hansen, a 1920 Stanford graduate who had risen from lecturer to full professor, was a “single woman—lonely—frustrated.”⁹

Opponents of Terman’s plans never managed to gain any traction. They were isolated, and he had the numbers on his side. He knew more about most departments than the chairmen did, and he proved it with detailed spreadsheets and charts that tracked, say, the number of graduate students supervised per faculty member, or the average number of years a graduate student spent to complete a PhD. Collecting the relevant data became his personal obsession. Faculty members recall graduation ceremonies attended by Terman: there he’d be, sitting quietly on this day of celebration, with a mechanical pencil in hand, “carefully using his program to calculate and compare doctoral production statistics.”¹⁰ His policy was to insist that budget requests arrive on Christmas Eve, “so that while others were celebrating he could get a head start on the next year’s work.”¹¹

For our story, Terman’s role was vital. He laid the groundwork for a new relationship between a university and business, which proved particularly relevant when computer science was later shown to have the potential to extract fortunes from the American economy. Because of Terman’s ideas, improved techniques for indexing the Web (Yahoo), or searching the Web (Google), or sharing photos online (Instagram)—three among thousands of business-ready ideas developed on the Stanford campus—didn’t remain there as part of some free, public trust. (Google, in particular, seemed well on its way to a noncommercial future if not for the pull of Stanford’s entrepreneurism.) Instead, all of these start-ups were aggressively brought to market, where they have become central to our lives and hugely valuable assets.

Fittingly, Stanford itself was an ambitious start-up backed by a wealthy couple, Leland and Jane Stanford. The Stanfords planned to reinvent higher education by investing the millions of dollars they had made by connecting Americans through the new transcontinental railroad. As Leland Stanford explained: “If I thought that the university at Palo Alto was going to be only like the others in our country, I should think I had made a mistake to establish a new one, and that I had better have given the money to some existing institutions.”¹²

The creation of Leland Stanford Jr. University represents the triumph of hope over overwhelming grief. The Stanfords’ son, Leland Jr., was nearly sixteen in March 1884 when he died of typhoid fever during a European tour. The story goes that the father was in such despair at the bedside of his dying boy that he questioned whether he should go on living, and his son appeared in a dream to say: “Father, do not say you have nothing to live for. You have a great deal to live for. Live for humanity.” When Leland Sr. awoke, the boy had passed away, and the Stanfords had a new purpose in life.¹³ They considered building a combined museum and lecture hall in San Francisco, but concluded that their idealistic son who loved learning would have wanted them to create a university to make higher education accessible to the masses, men and women, rich and poor.

Back east, they sought an audience with the formidable president of Harvard University, Charles William Eliot. How much money, they asked, would it take to create a world-class university? Eliot’s response was that they should be prepared to spend at least $5 million, a sum that was significantly more than Harvard’s endowment at the time and perhaps was meant to put a scare into his visitors. Eliot recounted what happened next: “A silence followed, and Mrs. Stanford looked grave; but after an appreciable interval, Mr. Stanford said with a smile, ‘Well, Jane, we could manage that, couldn’t we?’ And Mrs. Stanford nodded.”¹⁴ Clearly Eliot hadn’t a clue about the kinds of fortunes there were out west even then.

Leland Stanford was worth tens of millions of dollars when he met with Eliot. Though the loss of his son changed his perspective radically, Stanford continued robber baron–ing, simultaneously running the Central Pacific Railroad, the western end of the transcontinental railroad, while also holding political office. Decades earlier, Stanford had been California’s governor; during the years the university was being built he was a U.S. senator. Much of Stanford’s fortune was in the form of vast tracts of land he had acquired in the course of expanding his railroads; they were among his first gifts to the university. An 8,180-acre parcel in the Santa Clara Valley, the so-called Farm where Leland Sr. would graze his horses, and where Leland Jr. would take his lunches, was set aside for the campus and according to the founding grant could never be sold.¹⁵

The Stanfords’ plans for a university “created something of a sensation in the insular world of American higher education” when they became public in 1885, both for the huge sums of money involved and the new approach—there would be equality between the sexes, a nondenominational religious life, and free tuition.¹⁶ Stanford University’s pledge in its founding document to provide an education that led to “personal success and direct usefulness in life” was a head-on critique of East Coast schools whose students “acquire a university degree or fashionable educational veneer for the mere ornamentation of idle and purposeless lives.”¹⁷ Leland Stanford promised he would spare no expense to remake education in this way. Pocketbook out, he first searched for a suitable university president. “The man I want is hard to find,” he said. “I want a man of good business and executive ability as well as a scholar. The scholars are plentiful enough, but the executive ability is scarce.”¹⁸

In what would become a familiar pattern, Leland set his eyes on the president of MIT (then known as Boston Technical Institute), Francis A. Walker, a Civil War hero and economist. During visits east, Stanford wooed Walker and promised to increase his salary several times over, but never could persuade him to relocate from Cambridge to the frontiers of California.¹⁹ The Stanfords instead settled on David Starr Jordan, a young nature scientist who was president of Indiana University. Jordan was educated at Cornell, something of a model for the Stanfords in that it was cofounded in 1865 by a successful businessman, Ezra Cornell, with the purpose of expanding access to higher education. Up to that point, there hadn’t been universities supported by a single wealthy patron. The largest donation to an American college was $50,000 given to Harvard by Abbott Lawrence in 1847 to create an engineering school. In rapid succession after Cornell came multimillion-dollar donations to Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Duke, among others.²⁰

“Inevitably, the increase in the size of gifts changed the relations of donor to recipient,” wrote the historians Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger. “Borrowing a term from economic history, one may say that the givers became entrepreneurs in the field of higher education. They took the initiative in providing funds and in deciding their general purposes.”²¹ Even more than other founding donors, the Stanfords made clear that their grant to the university came with strings attached. The authority one would expect to reside in a board of trustees or president would reside in them, including the power to hire and fire faculty members and to make strategic plans. Jordan was expected to go along with this new way of doing business and in return he was promised that the faculty he recruited would have “at least a little more than is paid by any other university in America.”²²

When Stanford opened its doors in 1891, after six years of planning, many feared that no students would show up, even if the tuition was free. Instead, Stanford enrolled 555 men and women, who were taught by a faculty of fifteen that grew to forty-nine by the second year.²³ Among the members of that pioneering class was the future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover. But despite this fast start and fabulously wealthy patron, Stanford endured a hard few years: “That the infant university survived was something of a miracle,” one university historian concluded.²⁴ In 1893, before the first class had graduated, Leland Stanford died, depriving the university of a powerful protector. His estate was tied up in court while the federal government pursued millions of dollars of what it said were unpaid loans. There was an economic panic that year as well, which threatened the economic growth in the west and made the fight over Leland Stanford’s estate even more hard-fought.

Jane Stanford stepped up to keep the school afloat during this period of economic uncertainty, ignoring business managers who recommended that she allow the school to shutter until she could regain her financial footing.²⁵ Instead, she convinced the judge presiding over the claims against her husband’s estate to allow her to maintain the usual household expenses—$10,000 a month to operate three large homes with seventeen servants. She then petitioned the court to consider the Stanford faculty as her “servants.” By reducing her household staff to three, and expenses to just $350 a month, she was then able to direct $9,650 a month toward university salaries. In letters to President Jordan, Stanford made clear the depths of her suffering: “I have curtailed all expenses in the way of household affairs and personal indulgencies. Have given up all luxuries and confined myself to actual necessities.” Her visits to New York City, where the Stanford estate was being litigated, were an ordeal as well: “It is no pleasure to be on the fifth floor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in a small bedroom opening on a court, economizing almost to meanness, when I have a sweet beautiful home to go to.”²⁶

In 1898, when Leland’s estate was freed from its entanglements, Jane Stanford transferred $11 million in assets to the university, out of what would be a total of $20 million in gifts.²⁷ After making such deliberate sacrifices on behalf of her school, which began as a surrogate for her lost only child, Jane Stanford expected unquestioning loyalty from Jordan and the administration. Thus the university was transformed, in the words of Hofstadter and Metzger, from “this unusual oligarchy into a still more unusual matriarchate.”²⁸

Intriguingly, this matriarch’s greatest influence on Stanford came through her insistence that the university cap the number of women who could attend. The trend line quickly grew worrisome to Mrs. Stanford: 25 percent women in the student body when the school opened its doors in 1891, 33 percent four years later, when the first class graduated, and 40 percent in 1898. There were other troubling indicators that year too. Stanford was routed in athletics by its rival, Berkeley, and the student yearbook, weekly newspaper, and debating team were all led by women. Mrs. Stanford asked openly the question that weighed on her mind: How could such a feminine institution, the soon-to-be Vassar of the West, be a fitting final tribute to her son?²⁹

The next year, Jane Stanford decreed that the university could never have more than five hundred women enrolled. It was a draconian step, taking no account of how Stanford’s enrollment might grow, and entirely out of keeping with the progressive founding mission.³⁰ Back in 1885, at the first meeting of the university’s board of trustees, Leland Stanford said an education “equally full and complete” was of the highest importance. In a newspaper interview four years later he went one step beyond equality between the sexes and said, “I am inclined to think that if the education of either is neglected, it had better be that of the man than the woman, because if the mother is well educated she insensibly imports it to the child.”³¹

President Jordan was sympathetic to Mrs. Stanford’s concerns in this matter, particularly the noticeable decline in Stanford’s sporting prowess. “The university must have more men if we expect to make a better showing in athletics,” he said, but he asked that Jane Stanford be reasonable and impose a percentage cap, instead of a fixed number. Mrs. Stanford’s response was clipped and impatient: “To carry out this idea would be violating my instructions and very disappointing to me.”³² In later years, administrators employed various work-arounds to keep talented women in the fold, such as letting them audit classes while they waited for one of the five hundred slots to become available, but only after more than thirty years did the board of trustees relax the limit on women to 40 percent of total enrollment. Not until the 1970s was any limit on women’s enrollment removed from Stanford’s rules.

There were other interventions by Mrs. Stanford. For example, because of her disapproval of automobiles, aka “devil wagons,” there would be no cars on campus during her lifetime.³³ She pushed Jordan to use the university’s funds to complete construction of the campus, rather than add more professors, as he preferred. The most controversial action by Mrs. Stanford in her day was to demand that a radical economics professor and friend of President Jordan, Edward Ross, be fired for extreme anti-immigrant comments he made during the 1900 election. She got her wish, but it came at cost. In 1903, in the wake of the “Ross Affair,” Jane Stanford agreed to give up personal control of the university, allowing the board of trustees to run it. It’s true that she simultaneously joined the board of trustees and was elected its president, but, still, the devolution of power had begun. Jane Stanford was dead within two years, under mysterious circumstances.

Today, historians are confident in saying that Mrs. Stanford was poisoned, the victim, in fact, of two separate attacks barely a month apart, the first in San Francisco, the second in Hawaii, where she traveled to recover from the first poisoning. But because Jordan acted quickly, immediately traveling to Hawaii when he learned she had succumbed there, he convinced the national press that the cause of death was heart failure. Jordan disparaged the Hawaiian doctor who treated Mrs. Stanford as she was dying, Francis Howard Humphris, as “a man without professional or personal standing,” in order to cast doubt on his conclusion that her death was a homicide.³⁴ However, an investigation of the death a century later by a Stanford medical professor, Robert W.P. Cutler, concluded that Humphris offered excellent medical care: he did all he could to save Mrs. Stanford’s life, and his judgment that she was poisoned was spot on too.

Jordan managed to avoid a public relations nightmare, but whose reputation was he protecting, the university’s or his own? “The question need not be skirted,” writes another Stanford professor who has studied the case, W.B. Carnochan, about whether Jordan killed Jane Stanford to free himself from her meddling. “He had the motive . . . but could he have brought it off without help from a pharmacist and a household servant? Even the most vivid conjecture resists the notion of Jordan slipping into Mrs. Stanford’s San Francisco pantry, bath, or bedroom to spike her mineral water or lace her bicarbonate of soda with strychnine.”³⁵ Mrs. Stanford’s personal secretary, Bertha Berner, a beloved long-term employee, “seems to have had ample opportunity but no obvious motive,” Cutler concludes. “Jordan seems to have had motive but no obvious opportunity.”³⁶ There simply isn’t enough evidence, both scholars say, to reach a conclusion.

After Mrs. Stanford’s death, Jordan remained president of Stanford for eight years, free of her second-guessing. He expanded the faculty by recruiting scholars in his mold—young ambitious midwesterners willing to help build up a school that was new on the scene. Among that wave was Lewis Terman, a junior professor of educational psychology born to a large family on a rural Indiana farm and educated at Indiana University. Terman arrived in 1910 to a campus that was still repairing the damage from the earthquake four years earlier; he was joined by his wife, Anna; ten-year-old son, Frederick; and seven-year-old daughter, Helen. As a Stanford professor, Terman planned on continuing his studies of human intelligence: What is it? How do we measure it?

Terman’s friend and colleague, Edwin G. Boring, offered a facetious definition: intelligence was the ability to do well on intelligence tests.³⁷ Obviously, Terman believed a well-constructed test was more significant than that. Building on the work of the French education reformer Alfred Binet, Terman devised the first popular intelligence test in America, what came to be known as the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, a standard tool in education, government, and industry.³⁸ Once he had IQ scores that he believed reflected innate intelligence, Terman could then test his theories. He could, for example, compare fathers to their sons, to study whether intelligence was inherited, or compare members of one race to those of another to determine if one was superior. He could correlate intelligence to other measurable qualities to explore a theory like the smarter you are the more money you earn, or the better grades you get, or the fewer years in prison you serve.

In his long Stanford career, Terman researched every one of these questions, concluding, among other things, that intelligence indeed was inherited and that the white race had more of it than the black race. But it was that last question—what benefits accrue from being intelligent?—that most preoccupied Terman. He wanted his research to reverse the public’s perception of geniuses (male geniuses, actually) as peculiar, even deviant, weak, feminine, socially awkward. He wanted to prove what he knew firsthand, that brilliant children grow up to be highly productive, brilliant adults, if only they are recognized and given opportunities. Clearly, Terman’s own life was a motivation.

Despite his evident talents, Lewis Terman had seemed destined for a life on the farm. Through exceptional hard work, however, and a powerful drive to escape rural life, Terman arrived at a bare-bones teacher’s school before transferring to Indiana University to complete his undergraduate education and then a master’s degree in education. He later earned a doctorate at Clark University in Massachusetts, which had built a reputation as a leader in the relatively new field of psychology. Terman’s feeling of intellectual inadequacy never quite left, and he devoted his professional life to finding all the little Lewis Termans out there and encouraging society to support them while they were still young. Smart kids shouldn’t have it as hard as he did.³⁹

At Clark, Terman first experimented with ways of testing for intelligence, recruiting seven “stupid” children and seven “bright” children as his subjects.⁴⁰ When he arrived at Stanford, he learned of Binet’s intelligence test and realized that he didn’t need to start at the beginning. He paid a token fee of a dollar to the uninterested Binet for the rights to publish a revision, Stanford-Binet.⁴¹ The purpose of Binet’s test, which was created at the behest of the French government, was to identify children who were falling behind so they could receive specialized instruction. Terman in his research projects pointed the test in the other direction, using it to identify brilliant young people, “It is to the highest 25 percent of our population and more especially the top 5 percent that we must look for the production of leaders who will advance science, art, government, education and social welfare generally.”⁴² Terman also saw the business potential in IQ tests, which were sold to schools, governments, and businesses. According to estimates based on sales of the test record forms, about 150,000 persons a year took the Stanford-Binet test from 1916 to 1937, which increased to about 500,000 persons a year from 1937 to 1960.⁴³

Though Binet never spoke up during his lifetime, he apparently disapproved of Terman’s amended test and how it was applied. According to Binet’s close collaborator in France, Theodore Simon, Binet considered attempts like Terman’s to render a verdict on someone’s potential based on a test score to be a betrayal of its purpose. More important than intelligence was judgment, Binet and Simon had written a few years earlier, a quality otherwise known as “good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances.” They concluded: “A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.”⁴⁴

Terman defended his obsession with intelligence in an essay that appeared in 1922 in a popular magazine of the time, World’s Work. “When our intelligence scales have become more accurate and the laws governing IQ changes have been more definitively established,” he wrote, “it will then be possible to say that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals.”⁴⁵ The year before, Terman began work on his ambitious research project, “Genetic Studies of Genius.” His assistants ultimately found more than 1,500 young people in California who scored at least 135 on Terman’s IQ test, where a score of 100 is defined as normal, making them the top 1 percent of the population.⁴⁶ He matched the students, who typically were born in 1910, with a similar number of ordinary young people as a control group; Terman’s team would check in periodically—the first time was five years later—to see how the geniuses were faring as compared to young people of average intelligence.⁴⁷ This research, he suspected, would demonstrate the general superiority of the smartest, not just intellectually, but physically, morally, socially. Terman wanted to reassure the public that the geniuses his test identified were just like them, only more so. And thus most fit to lead.⁴⁸

The years Terman was starting his research were the high-water mark in the United States for eugenics, the movement that applied Darwin’s ideas about inherited traits and “survival of the fittest” to humanity. The elites who promoted eugenics, including President Jordan of Stanford, were reacting to the influx of poor European and Asian immigrants and an inarticulate sense that, as a result, the population was becoming less intelligent and less moral. In crude terms, eugenics was a plan to ensure that the “right” people were reproducing and that the “wrong” people were not. Most eugenicists focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so-called negative eugenics, and used the IQ test to identify the “feeble-minded” who needed to be prevented from having children for the sake of the human gene pool, through increased use of birth control, and, in the most extreme cases, forced sterilization, a practice that was endorsed by the Supreme Court in 1927.⁴⁹

Terman’s research emerged from his belief in “positive” eugenics: if he could prove the overall superiority of brilliant men, they would find it easier to attract the best women and hand down superior genetic material to the next generation. Almost from the start, however, Terman’s methods were controversial. The critic Walter Lippmann, writing in the New Republic in the early 1920s, took aim at a key vulnerability in Terman’s project, his IQ test. “It is not possible, I think, to imagine a more contemptible proceeding than to confront a child with a set of puzzles, and after an hour’s monkeying with them, proclaim to the child, or to his parents that here is a C-individual,” Lippmann wrote. “It would not only be a contemptible thing to do. It would be a crazy thing to do, because there is nothing in these tests to warrant a judgment of this kind.”⁵⁰

In a familiar pattern for the Terman family, Lewis responded harshly and dismissively when crossed. His reply, also in the New Republic, ridiculed Lippmann’s lack of scientific rigor in suggesting that high-quality childcare was the best way to produce smarter and healthier children. If how we raise children really made them smarter, Terman replied, then Lippmann had to immediately share what he knew, for the sake of the nation. “If there is any possibility of identifying, weighing and bringing under control these IQ stimulants and depressors we can well afford to throw up every other kind of scientific research until the job is accomplished,” he wrote less than a month later, imagining how “the rest of the mysteries of the universe would fall easy prey before our made-to-order IQ of 180 to 200.” In a sense, Terman was mocking Lippmann for claiming he could produce an “artificial intelligence.”

Terman couldn’t resist continuing his mockery: think of the entrepreneurial opportunities from a Lippmann-licensed childcare system for improving children’s IQs. “If he could guarantee to raise certified 100s to certified 140s, or even certified 80s to certified 100s, nothing but premature death or the discovery and publication of his secret would keep him out of the Rockefeller-Ford class if he cared to achieve it,” Terman writes, adding cruelly that he knows a rich father who would gladly pay Lippmann “10 or 20 million if he could only raise one particular little girl from about 60 or 70 to a paltry 100 or so.”⁵¹

Terman was much more kindly disposed toward his young geniuses—“my gifted children,” he called them, a phrase he coined. He tracked the young people with high IQs in his study through adolescence into adulthood and beyond, producing four separate volumes during his lifetime. Upon being enrolled in the genius study, the children, who were kept anonymous, provided a raft of information about themselves and their upbringing—their health, family background, family income, home life. This was the data Terman used to demonstrate how well his geniuses fared in life. Indeed, he found that two-thirds of the “Term-ites” earned bachelor’s degrees, ten times the national rate, as well as an unusually high number of doctorates and medical and law degrees. The geniuses’ earning power was higher too: while the median salary for white-collar jobs in 1954 was $5,800, the equivalent in Terman’s group was $10,556.⁵²

The study’s usefulness, it should be said, was quite limited. There were the flaws with the test itself, and how it was applied: the geniuses discovered by the test were a bit more likely to be male than female, but that was less jarring than near total absence of blacks, Japanese Americans, or American Indians. Also, incredibly, Terman’s team individually tested two California boys who grew up to win Nobel Prizes in physics and neither scored high enough to be included in the study. One of those boys who was particularly stung by being passed over was young Billy Shockley of Palo Alto, whose Nobel Prize recognized his role in producing the first transistor; alongside Lewis Terman’s son, Frederick, Shockley would become a central figure in the growth of Silicon Valley.

Beyond the test’s dubious accuracy, there was a flaw in how the study itself was conducted over the years: Terman repeatedly intervened in the lives of his high-IQ subjects, often without their knowledge. He couldn’t help himself. He wrote them recommendations for admission to Stanford, gave small sums of money during tough times, and, in one case, helped a fourteen-year-old be placed in a good foster home rather than returned to his abusive father. (To be clear, Terman didn’t intervene to help any in the control group.) These intrusions by Terman made the study’s conclusions scientifically unreliable, to say the least: readers could rightly question if the geniuses outshone the control group because of their talents or because they had an influential guardian angel. For all its statistical charts and plots of standards of deviation, his work wasn’t science—it was advocacy. His dream was a society led by a hereditary class of super-intelligent beings. A beehive run by a few king bees.

In summing up Lewis Terman’s life, his friend Edwin Boring tried to explain his commitment to the talented 1 percent. “Some persons . . . wonder how such an undemocratic view could be held by this tender-minded, sensitive, ambitious person, but the fact is that Terman thought of the intellectually elite as those who would save civilization for democracy,” Boring wrote in a biography of Terman for the National Academy of Sciences in 1959. “The gifted were given. You do not choose to have them, for there they are, whether you will or no. You can, however, choose to use them, to separate them from the crowd so that they may be trained to devote their special talents to benefit the crowd from which they have been taken.”⁵³ Lewis Terman, patron saint of the Know-It-Alls.

Frederick Terman grew up on the Stanford campus idolizing his father, who in time became the chairman of the psychology department. The feelings between Lewis and Fred were no doubt mutual—the son had pleased his father with his overall academic success. A classmate’s caricature, which appeared in the 1916 Palo Alto High School yearbook, showed Fred in academic dress with a book planted right in front of his face. He had other interests as well. He ran track in high school and at Stanford, and was obsessed with ham radio—the personal computer of its day. When Fred graduated from Stanford, first with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, then an advanced engineer’s degree in 1922, he had nearly perfect grades. Despite the family’s deep Stanford loyalty, both father and son agreed that Fred should head east for the sake of his career. He was accepted at MIT, where he earned a PhD in electrical engineering under the tutelage of influential professor Vannevar Bush. After completing his PhD, Terman was offered a teaching position at MIT and was tempted to stay. A bout of tuberculosis, best treated in the climate back home, was enough to end that flirtation.⁵⁴

With a year of recuperation behind him, Fred Terman accepted a full-time appointment at Stanford, where he taught the science of radio broadcasting. Terman negotiated for the big radio companies to donate equipment to his lab so students could carry out practical scientific work. “Even Terman’s textbook, Radio Engineering, reflected this strong commercial bent,” one historian of the Cold War university wrote, noting, “It became an immediate bestseller because, like his courses, it placed real-world problems at the center with an elegance and simplicity that especially appealed to working engineers.”⁵⁵ Around this time, Terman began courting Sibyl Walcutt, who was a graduate student in Lewis Terman’s psychology lab, where she naturally would have been expected to take an IQ test. Son was no different than father when it came to valuing intelligence. “The young professor went over to the Psychology Department and looked up her IQ scores,” Terman’s biographer writes, “then, according to Sibyl, things heated up.”⁵⁶

During World War II, Fred Terman again traveled east, this time with his family, wife, son, and daughter. He was sent to Harvard by Professor Bush, who supervised the government’s wartime research as the chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Terman’s mission there, as head of the Radio Research Laboratory, was to find countermeasures to Axis radar systems. By 1943, the lab had a staff of more than eight hundred and a budget bigger than all of Stanford University. Terman made sure to include Stanford scientists in his plans—more than thirty graduate students and faculty members crossed the country to work at the lab, learning firsthand the kind of research being conducted back east.⁵⁷

When Terman returned to Stanford for good, as new dean of the engineering school, he was ready to lead, confident in his managerial skills and his ability to bring lucrative military research grants westward.⁵⁸ At the same time, Terman continued the business-friendly policies he began before the war. The success of Hewlett-Packard had great personal meaning for Terman, but more importantly it was proof of concept. In the 1950s, Stanford began a series of programs to formalize the strong ties between businesses and the university. One idea was to recruit visiting professors from the labs of private companies, so that Stanford faculty and students could learn about the latest trends in industrial research, while the university paid at most half the salary. Another, the Industrial Affiliates Program, made sure that the university’s ideas flowed in the other direction by granting prepublication access to Stanford research in exchange for substantial fees. Each policy gave Stanford the resources to keep growing, as Terman insisted, while creating the mutual dependence between the university and nearby companies that he craved.⁵⁹

The construction of an industrial park on university land in the mid-1950s gave these relationships a sense of permanence. Stanford labs and industrial labs would be cheek-by-jowl. Many of the firms at the industrial park had explicit Stanford ties—Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Shockley Semiconductors. Others were branches of industry leaders like Lockheed and General Electric. Truth be told, the industrial park wasn’t devised by Terman, or run by him. Other administrators had promoted an industrial park as a way of extracting revenues from the prized land, the Farm, which couldn’t be sold. The combination of the industrial park and a shopping center with half a million square feet of retail space, both of which operated under ninety-nine-year leases, brought in nearly $1 million a year in revenue to the university.⁶⁰

Stanford’s tight embrace of individual businesses, even as it was subsisting on government research grants, perhaps should have raised more concerns. Tax money was enriching investors, but these were different times. “Cold war rhetoric,” writes the historian Rebecca Lowen, “linked economic prosperity and military might as the two pillars of America’s defense against the Soviet threat. Framed in this way, with the emphasis on the ‘national good,’ the fact that private companies were profiting from the expenditure of public funds could go unremarked.”⁶¹ Thriving industry meant thriving country. And thriving industry required well-trained experts, which is how universities made their contribution to industry, with the help of the federal government. When Fred Terman praised this system for bringing technical skill to big business in a 1956 address to engineers there were clear echoes of Lewis Terman’s ideas about ensuring that the smartest are in charge. “The idealists, the social planners, the do-gooders, the socialists and others of their ilk . . . called for better distribution of wealth,” Frederick Terman said, while engineers, working within the system of free enterprise, simply got it done, “making possible the creation of so much new wealth that redistribution was unnecessary.”⁶²

In 1955, Terman was promoted to university provost by President Sterling and three years later added the title of vice president of academic affairs after the consulting firm McKinsey and Company recommended a reorganization of Stanford’s administration that gave Terman “responsibility for the affairs of each of the university’s schools, libraries and eventually all institutes.”⁶³ The brains of the operation. The engineering school was making gains under Terman, but the university as a whole was in decline. The war years had been harder for Stanford than other universities because of the vestiges of Mrs. Stanford’s quota on women. In 1933, the board of trustees had relaxed Jane Stanford’s strict limit of five hundred women to a 40 percent cap on women, but when war came Stanford was stifled from admitting enough women to fill its classrooms. As a result, Stanford’s salaries were not keeping up with the competition back east—in 1954, 75 percent of full professors there made less than the minimum salary at Princeton.⁶⁴

Terman had a mandate to apply his engineering school ideas more broadly. Not only would Terman pour resources into lucrative research areas, but he would recruit only the top men in those fields. He called this strategy “steeples of excellence.” The same efficiency argument for academic departments—ecology bad, biochemistry good—would apply to individuals. What made this strategy even more compelling was the decision by Vannevar Bush, as the government’s civilian science chief, to automatically include within research grants a percentage to cover “indirect” costs, the university’s overhead.⁶⁵ Professors who could win large research grants weren’t just helping themselves, they were helping Stanford compete with other big-name schools. As to complaints that Stanford was abandoning huge swaths of knowledge under this scheme, Terman replied that such a responsibility fell on schools like Harvard and Yale, which could afford it.⁶⁶

The main challenge for Terman under “steeples of excellence” was how to locate and lure these star professors. First, he evaluated the talent. No matter what the field was, Terman felt empowered to ask, “Is this person smart enough to be a Stanford professor?” In several cases, he discovered that candidates already approved by departmental hiring committees had received poor grades in calculus while in college and declared them unfit. When a candidate had been agreed upon, Terman would look for a way in—whether through a steep raise or speeded-up tenure or by exploiting the internal politics at the candidate’s school. Planning trips to Stanford in the winter for candidates from the Northeast was another tactic.

The hiring of John McCarthy is a case in point. As we’ve seen, McCarthy had reasons to leave MIT, but he was still raw over the earlier rejection by Stanford as a junior mathematics professor, so much so that when the university’s only computer science professor, William Forsythe, first called McCarthy about joining him, McCarthy was dismissive. “I thought to turn him off by saying, ‘I’d been to Stanford before. I’d only come as a full professor,’ and he said, ‘I think I can arrange that,’ which surprised me very much, since MIT had just made me an associate professor.”⁶⁷ Computer science had become important to Terman, as he told his top aide: “We got to do this. I see a field coming up and Stanford’s got to be in that.”⁶⁸

Indeed, in the decades that followed, microprocessing chip makers like Fairchild and later Intel flourished in Silicon Valley, right on Stanford’s doorstep. A thriving community of venture capitalists grew there too, along Sand Hill Road. Thanks to Terman, Stanford would be poised to take advantage of the computer revolution. His market-obsessed thinking is now standard at Stanford: the outgoing president, John Hennessy, was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science who spent a sabbatical year launching a successful chip-manufacturing start-up. Hennessy’s successor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, is a neuroscientist who had been an executive at the biotechnology firm Genentech.⁶⁹ Since 1970, Stanford has licensed 3,500 inventions, across a range of fields, generating about $1.5 billion in revenue.⁷⁰ A large chunk of that total came in 2004, when the university pocketed $336 million for the stake in Google it was given in return for a license of the underlying search technology Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed there.⁷¹

This wealth has flowed back to Stanford in other ways, as Terman predicted, including a crown jewel engineering center built in 1977, which was named in Terman’s honor and funded by Hewlett and Packard at a cost of $9.2 million. In 1982, at age eighty-two, Terman died in campus housing after witnessing this fitting campus tribute, embodying all he preached about Stanford’s path to success. But what came nearly thirty years later, in 2010, was perhaps the truest vindication of Terman’s ideas. In that year, Stanford built a new science and engineering quad, which included a new engineering center, named in honor of a different Stanford figure, Jen-Hsun Huang, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and cofounded the tech company Nvidia. Huang and his wife donated $30 million to the project.⁷²

The next year, the Terman engineering center was demolished, with as much as 99 percent of the building material recycled: Spanish clay roof tiles were carefully removed and incorporated in a new outdoor education and recreation center; the cedar planks in the roof were sold to Stanford students and faculty members for use in school projects.⁷³ Terman is not entirely forgotten: inside the Huang center, on the second floor, is where you’ll find the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Library.⁷⁴