Here is Gerhard Casper, standing before 7,000 people gathered in Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater to hear him deliver his first speech as the university’s president.

It’s 1992, the second day of October. Stanford is embroiled in a federal lawsuit over indirect research costs. It is struggling with campus-wide budget cuts and saddled with $160 million in damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. University officials are wrestling with controversies over affirmative action, sex discrimination, free speech and diversity.

“What was I to say at my inauguration,” Casper asks in “The Winds of Freedom: Challenges to the University,” a newly published book of selected speeches and extended commentary about those addresses.

“What was I not to say? What were my tasks?”

Casper spent months wrestling with those questions, writing and rewriting his inaugural address. Rather than focus on the university’s troubles with a promise to make them disappear, he instead emphasized Stanford’s role as an institution devoted to teaching, learning and research. He grounded his remarks in Stanford’s motto – translated from his native German as “the wind of freedom blows” – and charted the freedoms most important to a university.

There are eight, he tells his audience.

Among them: an unrestrained pursuit of knowledge, an ability to challenge long-held beliefs and new ideas, and the “freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point.”

“The research enterprise can easily be smothered by internal and external politics, pressures, and red tape,” he tells the crowd. “The wind of freedom has been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making our great universities the envy of the world. Without that freedom, that greatness is imperiled.”

Humor and heft

Academic freedom was a recurring theme during his eight years at the helm of Stanford. It was a time in which he navigated the university through turmoil and debates not only faced by Stanford and other American universities, but by the entire country.

With “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper presents seven speeches from his presidency, along with a commencement address he delivered at Yale in 2003. They delve into free expression, campus diversity and affirmative action. They cover the university’s role as a place of research and its relationship to the politics of the day.

A book launch celebration and discussion will be held Feb. 25 at Encina Hall.

The big, weighty ideas often come wrapped in a sense of humor – sometimes self-deprecating – that was the hallmark of a popular and seemingly very accessible president who surely never spoke to the same audience twice.

Casper has done more than merely dust off and repackage his favorite or most important speeches into a book. These are addresses tied together by those notions of academic freedom. And in detailed commentary following the text of each speech, Casper explains what was on his mind when he was writing them.

“I put a lot of effort into my speeches,” Casper says during a conversation in his office at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is a senior fellow and served as director from 2012 to 2013. “But if you take the speeches in isolation, you often end up with an abstract notion of what was happening at time. I wanted to use these speeches as an example of the complexity of issues and questions that I had to deal with as president.”

Diversity, identity and valid arguments

So here is Casper welcoming an incoming class in 1993, one year after delivering his inaugural address. It includes white and black and American Indian students. Some are the American children and grandchildren of Mexican and Asian immigrants. Only 5 percent are foreign students, but they hail from 37 countries.

The president is talking about diversity. He shares his own story about coming to America, telling the students about growing up in Germany in the wake of the Nazi regime and moving to California as a 26-year-old in 1964. He pokes fun at the accent he never lost, but reminds the students that “I have acquired an American `cultural identity.’”

He tells them they will all develop their own sense of cultural identity, adding that diversity makes the university a richer place.

“If we at the university were not committed to interactive pluralism, education would become impossible,” he tells the newcomers.

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“No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes,” he says.

Read out of context today, passages of the speech tuck into the timeless tropes of America as both a mosaic  and a melting pot. It’s OK to assimilate, he tells us. We can still maintain our own identities.

But In Casper’s rearview mirror, the speech becomes a history lesson, a reminder of the American landscape 20 years ago.

“The early 1990s was probably the decade during which multiculturalism and identity politics were most prominent in the United States in general and on American campuses in particular,” he writes in his new book. “When I came to Stanford in 1992, I was ill equipped to deal with some of these issues.”

He goes on to trace the steps Stanford took to address diversity and he shares his thoughts – some scholarly, some personal – on the issues of social and cultural identity. He parses the differences between multiculturalism and diversity.

He discusses the adoption of a new policy on sexual harassment, moves made to increase the number of women on the faculty, and the tensions arising from the university’s struggle to support on-campus ethnic community centers. He revisits the political and ethnically charged student protests that unfolded in the early 1990s.

While he was dealing with the daily fallout of those matters in the president’s office, he was also searching for opportunities to convey his positions and address the issues in his public speeches.

Welcoming the Class of 1997 gave him one of those chances.

“In a university nobody has the right to deny another person’s right to speak his or her mind, to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point,” he tells the incoming students.  “In a university discussion your first question in response to an argument must never be `Does she belong to the right group?’ Instead, the only criterion is `Does she have a valid argument?’”

The lines echo those he used in his inaugural address, and they do so intentionally.

“If you have something you believe in strongly, you must repeat it and repeat it and repeat it,” he says now. “I do that. I plagiarize myself – not because I ran out of things to say, but because it was important to re-emphasize points over and over again.”

Defining academic freedom

So here is Casper in 1998, speaking at Peking University during the school’s centennial celebration. The Chinese government used the occasion to bolster PKU’s standing as a key institution that would lead the country into the 21^st Century, and Casper focused his remarks on the role of research-intensive universities and the integrity they must maintain.

“Academic freedom is the sine qua non of the university,” he tells the audience. “Academic freedom means, above all, freedom from politics.” It also means “freedom from pressures to conform within the university,” he says.

Reflecting on that speech in “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper shares an unsettling irony: as he delivered his remarks, he was unaware that a Stanford research associate from China was being held in a Beijing prison under dubious charges of betraying state secrets.

He learned about the matter several months after the event, and writes now about the university’s unsuccessful appeals for the researcher’s release to then-President Jiang Zemin and his subsequent decision not to pursue a plan for Stanford to open a program at PKU at that time.

“I did not think that it was appropriate for me to enter into an agreement with one of China’s most prominent institutions – continue, as it were, as if nothing had happened – while a Stanford researcher was being held in prison without any explanation,” he writes. “I certainly did not take the step to suspend our discussions lightly, since throughout my life, throughout the many years of the Cold War, I had always favored engagement rather than iron curtains.”

“Germans don’t give funny speeches”

Casper gave his first public address at Stanford when he was 53. But he had already spent a lifetime as a speechmaker.

“I had been viewed in high school to have the ability to talk well and address a large audience,” he says. “And clearly, I liked to do it.”

He was elected president of the student council. His principal and history teacher, Erna Stahl, would call him the school’s festredner, or keynote speaker. He was tapped as valedictorian of the Class of 1957.

He discusses his valedictory address – focused on the dearth of German role models – in the preface to “The Winds of Freedom.” He writes about his relationship with Stahl, how he was impressed by her stories of  confronting the Gestapo, and the impact that growing up in post-Nazi Germany had on him.

“We hadn’t done any intensive study of the Third Reich by eleventh grade,” Casper says. “That was due to the fact that the Erna Stahl believed very strongly that going into the politics of the moment – the aftermath of the Nazi period – would not be the best method to teach us the values she wanted us to have. It would have become too quickly biographical and personal and she was very insistent that there needed to be positive values instilled in us to balance against what the Nazis had perpetrated.”

The preface is as close as the book comes to reading like a memoir, and Casper condenses his childhood, education, academic career and personal acknowledgments into 15 pages.

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Photo Credit: L.A. Cicero

While there are only a few lines devoted to his 26 years at the University of Chicago as a law professor, dean and provost, it was in that city where Casper’s innate ability to connect with an audience meshed with his public persona.

“Germans don’t give funny speeches,” he says. “In Germany, jokes undercut your credibility. My speaking style – the self-deprecation, the humor – that was really honed in Chicago. My friends and colleagues had these characteristics, and those elements were brought into my life.”

He learned that a joke does more than solicit a laugh. It can disarm a critic, humanize a speaker and lighten up an otherwise serious speech.

“After all, you want the audience to keep paying attention if you really do have something important to tell them,” he says.

An era begins

So here again is Casper, new to Stanford on that second day of October in 1992 and about to take on the promises and problems of the university.

He opens with a light touch, addressing “fellow members of the first-year class and fellow transfer students.” He suggests with deadpan delivery that he was hired as Stanford’s president because he could properly pronounce the university’s motto as it appears in German on the president’s seal: Die Luft der Freiheit weht.

“Alas, I have bad news for the board of trustees,” he says, turning to look at the board members seated on the stage behind him. The phrase, he says, was originally written in Latin. Not German.

“If, under these circumstances, the trustees would feel it appropriate to renounce their contract with me, I would understand perfectly,” he says, cracking a wide smile for the first time.

“All I ask for is the opportunity to finish this speech.”

And with his first formal words as Stanford’s ninth president, Casper casts himself as a newcomer – an outsider here to lead, learn and speak his mind.

Iran should move beyond its "false nationalism" and embrace the significant benefits of a peaceful nuclear approach, Stanford scholars say.

In return, professors Siegfried Hecker and Abbas Milani wrote Jan. 21 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the West should neither isolate nor attack Iran  – those approaches would not necessarily stop Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program if it chose to do so.

Interestingly, the Iranian government republished the Hecker-Milani article in Farsi on at least one official website. That could reflect, the scholars say, a "genuine internal debate" in Iran regarding its nuclear future directions.

Hecker is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is also a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He is also an affiliated faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

In an interview, Milani expressed cautious optimism. "Clearly, this is an important fact that they allowed this article to be posted on an official website. They are rethinking their nuclear program. But there are many others who will oppose it as well."

He added that Iranian reformers – who won the last presidential election – understand that the confrontational approach of Iran's hard-liners was not working. Many people are hurting due to the economic sanctions: inflation is at least 35 percent by official measures and may actually be twice that, Milani said.

South Korean model

As Hecker and Milani wrote in the article, South Korea in the last few decades has become one of the world's preeminent peaceful nuclear energy countries by focusing on the profitable parts of the middle nuclear fuel cycle — reactor component fabrication, fuel fabrication and reactor construction.

However, Hecker acknowledged, there has been talk that South Korea may be seeking consent from Washington for enrichment and reprocessing options beyond peaceful uses. He pointed out, however, that South Korea has had a peaceful nuclear program for four decades.

The problem with a weaponized approach is that it steals away the resources and expertise needed for a civilian-minded energy program, the authors stated.

"For Iran, the lesson of the South Korean experience is clear: Tehran should decide to abandon its enrichment efforts because the costs – technological, economic and political – are not worth the price of keeping the nuclear weapon option open," Hecker and Milani wrote.

When Iran's covert nuclear program was discovered in the early 2000s, the West enacted crippling economic sanctions against the country. Despite oil revenue windfalls, Iran has an economy riled by inflation and on the verge of collapse. 

There is hope. An interim nuclear agreement between Iran and the United Nations Security Council plus Germany that went into effect Jan. 20 consists of a short-term freeze of portions of Iran's nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief for Iran. The idea is to give the countries time to work toward a long-term agreement.

Milani said that after the short-term agreement was reached, Iran's inflation rate began to moderate and its currency rate began to stabilize. That small bit of economic relief may bolster the reformers' argument in favor of a civilian nuclear policy.

"There are many people in Iran who want to see this issue resolved peacefully," said Milani, explaining that the hard-liners are associated with the clergy and Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

How close is Iran to a bomb?

Hecker and Milani warned of a "breakout scenario" in which Iran's centrifuge program could make enough highly enriched uranium (90 percent uranium 235) for a nuclear bomb "in a matter of months or even weeks."  The Iranian scientists would still need to craft a bomb and develop the means to deliver a nuclear weapon, which requires a high level of miniaturization.

"Iran would need a number of years of research, development and testing before it could have a reliable, missile-deliverable nuclear warhead," they wrote, noting the periodic missile threats made by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard against the United States and Israel.

In an interview, Hecker said the primary challenge now is no longer how to keep Iran from the capability, but rather "how to convince Iran it is not in its interest to build the bomb."

He noted that Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Mohammad Zarif told him that it was not in Iran's security interest to build the bomb. "In fact, he added, even the appearance of pursuing the bomb was bad for Iran's security."

As Hecker explained, completely getting rid of the Iranian bomb option is not possible through military action or sanctions with political pressure. "The only chance is through diplomatic means. We need to make it clear to the Iranian regime that they are better off without pursuing the bomb."

For now, Hecker and Milani wrote in their article, the interim agreement will temporarily prevent Iran from reaching a breakout scenario. While a delay is good, more must be done to actually stop the Iranians from militarizing their nuclear program. After all, external pressure did not stop Israel, Pakistan, India, South Africa or North Korea from building nukes.

"Such a decision, we believe, must be made internally, not externally driven," the two Stanford experts wrote.

The Iranian elite should take note of the scant returns of the country's nuclear efforts to date. "After 50 years, Iran has very little to show for its nuclear pursuit," they said.

Iran has one commercial reactor, built by the Russians and only partially ready for electricity production. Another reactor, used primarily for medical isotope production, is on its last legs. The new Iranian reactor planned for Arak is not of modern design nor suited for medical production, and presents serious proliferation concerns because it will produce plutonium suitable for bombs.

"Iran's pride and joy, the uranium centrifuge program, can enrich in one year only as much uranium as the European consortium Urenco can produce in about five hours," wrote Hecker and Milani.

Change in government

The timing may be right for a new nuclear approach, Hecker and Milani wrote. In his September 2013 speech at the United Nations, Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, acknowledged that other nations could have "legitimate concerns" about Iran's nuclear program.

"That admission opens up the possibility for objective debate within Iran on the economic and technical costs of its current nuclear trajectory," wrote the Stanford professors. Such a debate would include business leaders, intellectuals and a broad spectrum of civic groups advocating on behalf of the "enormous benefits" of a safe, peaceful nuclear program.

"For this to happen, the international community must of course provide reliable access to uranium and enrichment services," they wrote.

Hecker added that Washington must demonstrate that it is prepared to cooperate with Tehran on a "peaceful nuclear pursuit, and not continue to isolate it."

As for Iran, it would need to operate transparently and implement specific protocols to assure the international community that it would not return to the nuclear weapons option. Both the West and Iran need to save face on such a deal, Milani said.

He noted, "The Iranians need to make a deal that has some real concessions, but they need to sell it at home as a victory."

As Hecker put it, if the Iranians want nuclear energy and relations with the West, they need "nuclear integration, not isolation."

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.