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Once again the Hoover Institution is in the news, this time as a result of a decision by the board of trustees at Stanford University to require the resignation of the Institution’s director, W. Glenn Campbell, when he turns 65 next year. According to the board’s chairman, Warren Christopher, the action reflects simply the trustees’ belief that “it is generally appropriate that top administrative positions should be relinquished at age 65.” To Mr. Campbell, however—who was handpicked for his job by the Institution’s founder, Herbert Hoover himself, back in 1960—as to conservative observers, the move is clearly a step to bring Hoover more effectively under the university’s control. Now, in Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.; $24.95), George Nash offers an account of Herbert Hoover’s seventy-year relationship with his alma mater that puts these events in perspective. (The monograph is a spinoff of the author’s multi-volume work in progress, The Life of Herbert Hoover, of which Volume One was published in 1983 and Volume Two is scheduled to appear this summer.)

Herbert Hoover was, by virtue of being the first student to be allocated a dormitory room, in a sense the first student to enter Stanford University, in October 1891. For the rest of his life, Hoover thought of Stanford as “the best place in the world,” dedicated to the ideal of “direct usefulness in life.” By his mid thirties, he had made a fortune as a mining engineer, and felt an urge pushing him toward a second career, a career of doing good in addition to doing well: fond memories of his undergraduate days made it inevitable that the object of his beneolence should be Stanford. In 1912 he was elected to the board of trustees, took up residence in San Francisco, and devoted himself to a plan of radical improvement for the university. Then, in 1914, the outbreak of war found Hoover in London, where he created the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a private humanitarian relief agency whose work was delivering food supplies to the conquered Belgians. In the course of operations, Hoover moved regularly around Europe, across the lines separating the belligerents; it occurred to him that he was “in a unique position to collect fugitive literature” pertaining to the subject of war and revolution, and shortly thereafter he was embarked upon “the systematic collecting of contemporary documents on the Great War before they were lost to history.” This was the beginning of that immense collection around which the Hoover Institution was founded in 1919,

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Once again the Hoover Institution is in the news, this time as a result of a decision by the board of trustees at Stanford University to require the resignation of the Institution’s director, W. Glenn Campbell, when he turns 65 next year. According to the board’s chairman, Warren Christopher, the action reflects simply the trustees’ belief that “it is generally appropriate that top administrative positions should be relinquished at age 65.” To Mr. Campbell, however—who was handpicked for his job by the Institution’s founder, Herbert Hoover himself, back in 1960—as to conservative observers, the move is clearly a step to bring Hoover more effectively under the university’s control. Now, in Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.; $24.95), George Nash offers an account of Herbert Hoover’s seventy-year relationship with his alma mater that puts these events in perspective. (The monograph is a spinoff of the author’s multi-volume work in progress, The Life of Herbert Hoover, of which Volume One was published in 1983 and Volume Two is scheduled to appear this summer.)

Herbert Hoover was, by virtue of being the first student to be allocated a dormitory room, in a sense the first student to enter Stanford University, in October 1891. For the rest of his life, Hoover thought of Stanford as “the best place in the world,” dedicated to the ideal of “direct usefulness in life.” By his mid thirties, he had made a fortune as a mining engineer, and felt an urge pushing him toward a second career, a career of doing good in addition to doing well: fond memories of his undergraduate days made it inevitable that the object of his beneolence should be Stanford. In 1912 he was elected to the board of trustees, took up residence in San Francisco, and devoted himself to a plan of radical improvement for the university. Then, in 1914, the outbreak of war found Hoover in London, where he created the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a private humanitarian relief agency whose work was delivering food supplies to the conquered Belgians. In the course of operations, Hoover moved regularly around Europe, across the lines separating the belligerents; it occurred to him that he was “in a unique position to collect fugitive literature” pertaining to the subject of war and revolution, and shortly thereafter he was embarked upon “the systematic collecting of contemporary documents on the Great War before they were lost to history.” This was the beginning of that immense collection around which the Hoover Institution was founded in 1919,