of getting them to do something or refrain
from doing something. That’s Jing; that’s
not me.”
She could occasionally bring even him
up short—once, he admitted, by admonish-
ing him to “stop making such a Dick
Lyman of yourself.”
Lyman entered Harvard as a graduate
student in history, with an emphasis on mod-
ern British history; his PhD thesis examined
the fate of the U.K.’s first, short-lived Labour
government. For a while, though, academia
had a rival in journalism—a fact that might
have surprised later generations of Stanford
student journalists with whom he had testy
relations. While a Fulbright Scholar at the
London School of Economics, he
met Geoffrey Crowther, the leg-
endary editor of the Economist,
and contributed pieces to the
magazine upon his return to the
United States. Crowther valued
him enough to offer him a job as
a Washington correspondent,
and Lyman thought hard about
it, but eventually “decided I’d
committed so much to aca-
The Stanford at which he
arrived in 1958, after teaching
stints at Swarthmore and
Washington University in St.
Louis, bore little resemblance to
today’s world-class institution.
The University was just begin-
ning its rise to national promi-
nence under President J.E. Wal-
lace Sterling and Provost Fred
Terman. By most accounts, it
had earned its reputation as a
conservative bastion for affluent students
less than fully engaged in the pursuit of
academic excellence. “One of my col-
“Well, that was not true for very long,
but it was true then.”
By 1967, he was provost, the Universi-
ty’s No. 2 post, at a time when Vietnam
protests and radical politics were roiling
campuses nationwide. With President
Sterling in ill health and approaching
retirement, more and more responsibility
for formulating the University response
fell to Lyman.
HERE’S HOW IT IS: In meetings with students and regular interviews on KZSU, Lyman articulated the University’s positions, and what it could and could not accept.
then housed administrative and student
services offices. In a tumultuous meeting,
the faculty Academic Council overruled the
suspensions, which had the support of the
University administration. It was a stinging
vote of no confidence in Lyman and Packer.
“Herb and I both, each separately without the knowledge of the other, wrote letters of resignation that night,” Lyman
recalled. “And then we each tore our letters
up when we realized that Wally [Sterling]
STANFORD 51
