Stanford’s Hoover Institution Attracts a Leading Economic Historian

From Harvard to Stanford

After more than a decade of visiting the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as an adjunct senior fellow, the prominent historian Niall Ferguson will leave Harvard University to work full time at Hoover next July. “I have always loved that it straddles what can sometimes seem like a chasm between academic research and policy debate,” he wrote via email.

Mr. Ferguson, born and raised in Scotland, sent his message while on a tour promoting his latest book, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist. A professor of business and then of history at Harvard since 2005, Mr. Ferguson has published 14 books on such subjects as empires and global banking. His “midlife passion,” he wrote in his email, is for applied history, “the study of the past not just for its own sake but to improve our grasp of the present.”

The new post will provide his first break from teaching since 1990, making him hopeful that Volume 2 of his biography of Kissinger should take far less than the 10 years the first did.

Stanford’s stature persuaded him to make the shift, said Mr. Ferguson. “A key point is that there is nothing like the Hoover Institution at Harvard,” he wrote.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Ferguson, who once said of himself, “I was a punk out of frustration. But I became a Tory out of hope,” wrote that he was attracted, in part, by Stanford’s proximity to Silicon Valley.

Hoover’s director, Thomas W. Gilligan, described Mr. Ferguson as “a first-rate scholar of history and economic history, and a great fit for our mission.” Hoover courted Mr. Ferguson for several years: “It’s like young people dating these days — you never know when you’re going to pull the trigger and marry,” Mr. Gilligan said. The institution has attracted such government figures as George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice, and economists like Milton Friedman and John H. Cochrane.

Mr. Ferguson said: “The initiative came from Tom Gilligan’s predecessor, John Raisian,” who directed Hoover for more than 25 years, and was backed by John L. Hennessy, Stanford’s president. “There was also quite a group of Stanford-based friends, notably Condi Rice and Michael J. Boskin, who were encouraging me to make the move.”

“Sometimes I wish there were Hoover Institutions in all the Ivy League schools,” Mr. Ferguson wrote. At Harvard he has good friends across the political spectrum, he said, and the move to Hoover was not about politics. “The notion that it is a conservative institution is misleading. Think of Barry Weingast or Larry Diamond, two Hoover fellows I very much admire. It only looks conservative because it is a broad church located in a wider academic diocese that is, in some respects, rather narrow.”— Peter Monaghan

Entranced With CUNY

After nearly a decade as dean of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, Ann G. Kirschner is moving to a position that she says takes best advantage of what she has to offer — namely, that she is “bilingual in both business and academia.”

Ms. Kirschner became dean in 2006, after a career that included running an online-education start-up, working in the cable-television industry, and opening a satellite-television company. In her new role as special adviser to CUNY’s chancellor, James B. Milliken, she will return to “the world I come from” and will develop partnerships and employment opportunities between the university and the city’s businesses.

“Despite the fact that CUNY is so baked into the fabric of New York life, the business community in particular could have a fuller appreciation for the talent here,” says Ms. Kirschner, who is credited with building the reputation of the honors college, established in 2001, and increasing applications and enrollment.

She will start by focusing on the fast-growing technology sector and making sure that prospective employers know about CUNY’s computer-science students instead of recruiting mainly from institutions like Columbia and New York Universities. Ms. Kirschner, who begins her new role in February, says she plans to develop a communications plan and then start working with specific companies.

It’s especially important for employers to recognize that CUNY’s diversity extends beyond traditional ethnic and cultural lines, she says. The campuses have “enormous intellectual breadth” in both education level and field, including community-college students and doctoral candidates in astrophysics. That diversity is one reasons she wanted to stay at the university.

“I love the pace and the sense of accountability and energy and change that you get in the business community, but I didn’t want to leave CUNY,” says Ms. Kirschner. “When CUNY gets in your blood, you get heady with the mission.” — Angela Chen

A Global Chancellor

Jose V. Sartarelli spent three decades working in global industry before deciding he wanted to make better use of his Ph.D. and return to academe. Now, as the new chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, he is drawing from his international business background as he pushes the university to think more expansively.

Originally from Brazil, Mr. Sartarelli, who is known as Zito, has a Ph.D. in business administration from Michigan State University. He has worked for such companies as Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Eli Lilly in Latin America and Asia. Most recently he was chief global officer and dean of the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University.

“The first thing,” he says, “is globalization.” During the last half of the 19th century, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina and, as a port city, is “naturally connected to the world.” Mr. Sartarelli is pushing study-abroad opportunities for the campus’s students while strengthening connections with university partners overseas and with State Department programs that bring in exchange students from abroad.

The strategy, he says, is to focus on G-20 countries, which have the strongest economies, and also countries in the Middle East that have exchange programs that the university can tap into.

Mr. Sartarelli’s second big goal is to work at the very local level.

He hopes to make the university a bigger part of the city of Wilmington by expanding its adult-education offerings. He also supports expanding efforts like Feast Down East, an economic-development program that began in the sociology department. It works to support a sustainable local-food culture. Mr. Sartarelli hopes to recruit more military students — several bases are nearby — and transfer students from the state’s community colleges.

“Location is destiny,” he says. “I want UNC to be a place that people want to come to from around the world, but also one that the people who live here already can access.” — Angela Chen

Honored Historians

Two senior historians will receive Awards for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association for lifetime achievement. They are Ira Berlin, of the University of Maryland at College Park, who has written extensively on slavery and emancipation, and Asuncion Lavrin, of Arizona State University, who has written on women’s and social issues in Latin America.

The association announced the names of the winners of its 2015 awards, given in numerous categories, this month.

Among other recipients are Emily J. Levine, of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in European history for her book Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School; and Libby Garland, of the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College, who won the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of the Jewish diaspora, for her book After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921—1965.

The awards will be presented on January 7 at the association’s annual meeting, in Atlanta.

OBITUARY: Nobel Laureate Dies

Richard F. Heck, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Delaware and a Nobel laureate in chemistry, died on October 9 in Manila. He was 84.

Mr. Heck joined the university’s faculty in 1971 after working at a chemical plant in Wilmington, Del., where he developed a process to connect organic molecules that are different in structure. He discovered that carbon atoms in the molecules could be linked by using palladium as a catalyst, a process that became known as the Mizoroki-Heck reaction. Mr. Heck published his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1968.

While at the University of Delaware, Mr. Heck refined his work on the reaction. He and two other chemists, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University, in Japan, were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the development of palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis,” which has proved useful in the development of drugs and electronics as well as DNA sequencing.

Mr. Heck, who published more than 200 scientific papers, retired from the university in 1989. — Anais Strickland

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