TALENT. HOUSING. TRAFFIC.
John Hennessy discusses challenges the region must overcome to remain a top center of technology
STANFORD >> When John Hennessy first came to teach at Stanford University, the future founders of Google were barely out of diapers, a nice house in the area could be had for less than $150,000, and most people could get to work inside of 20 minutes.
Since 1977, when Hennessy came to teach electrical engineering at the university, commute time has increased by at least 50 percent, home prices have jumped 20-fold, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are in their 40s and the business they built from a search engine called Google has played a pivotal role in transforming the region into the world’s most famous technology center.
“The Valley’s big challenge is it has to solve its housing and its core infrastructure problems, housing and transportation,” said Hennessy, Stanford’s former president. “If it doesn’t solve them, somewhere else in the world is eventually going to rise to be a new center for technology that’s at least going to challenge the Valley for its leadership position.”
Today, after spending more than 40 years as a Stanford professor, engineering school dean, provost, and university president from 2000 to 2016, Hennessy is helping to forge the next generation of leaders who he hopes will address problems close to home and around the world.
He’s now the director of Stanford’s new Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which in February announced its first cohort of students, 49 women and men from 20 countries who are pursuing graduate degrees in 28 academic departments.
“We view this as a community that’s going to learn together how to operate in a world where the problems are so large and so complex that I don’t care what field you’re in, you can’t solve it alone,” said Hennessy, who is also nonexecutive chairman of Google’s parent firm Alphabet, meaning he’s not an employee.
“If you have the brain power, you can do great things,” said Hennessy, who believes gathering the world’s best talent remains key to Silicon Valley’s success. “If you don’t, it’s not going to work.”
This news organization sat down with Hennessy recently to discuss the new program, his time at Stanford, the search engine prototype he saw before “Google” was even a word, and the state of the Valley. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Q Silicon Valley is getting a lot of bad press these days. Has something gone wrong, and if so, what would fix it?
A
Much of what’s happening is a reflection of what’s happening at large in our country — debates over fake news or various other things. Tech
becomes an amplifier of that, because everybody can be a publisher all of a sudden. We have to ask ourselves, “Has technology become maybe too big a part of people’s lives and more an addiction than a tool that gets things done?” When I was growing up, there was no TV watching between Monday and Thursday night. Probably we need to do the same thing. Kids can’t become so addicted to technology that they forget about how to interact with real people, they forget about things other than winning at computer games. The industry’s going to have to take some responsibility as well. All the issues around sexual harassment and things like that, I think what this really underlines is that we’ve had a problem for a long time. Now in the #MeToo movement, it’s certainly coming forward. We owe it to young people
to create an environment where everybody can succeed. This is a country built deeply on the notion of meritocracy and individual merit. We need to ensure that that’s what we really offer young people.
Q At Stanford, diversity has increased to the point where white students
make up only 36 percent of the undergraduate population. How was that accomplished, and why?
A
Our goal was to get the very best students, to have a student body which reflected both the excellence of the applicants but also reflected
what our country looks like. We need to build people who can be successful in all different kinds of leadership roles, but the population they’re going to be leading is not just a group of people that look like them. Whether it’s undergraduates or KnightHennessy, we have many students whose parents didn’t go to college, who couldn’t afford to be here without the financial aid program.
Q At the same time the faculty are 72 percent male and 71 percent white. Why are those numbers so different from the undergraduate numbers?
A
The longevity of an undergraduate student is four years. The longevity of a typical faculty member that we hire is between 30 and 40 years. So the faculty reflects what the disciplines looked like probably 20 or 30 years ago. It’ll change, but it changes very slowly. Women are changing faster than other minority groups. The rate of change for Latinos and African-Americans in the faculty is very slow, and that’s worrisome.
Q What are your recollections of Larry Page and Sergey Brin as Stanford computer science students in the late 1990s? Did they strike you as extraordinary?
A
Yeah, they did. I had met them in the halls in passing as graduate students, but my earliest memory of getting to know them was when they brought me to show me a demo of what was then the Google prototype. When I saw Google, the first Google search, it was this ‘aha’ moment. They had made a big leap forward in terms of quality of results in search, so that the thing I really wanted came back on the top of the list, not buried 100 items down. I was really impressed by their collaboration. They each brought separate knowledge and skills to the problem of making their search algorithm fast.