Read Reid’s Blog

A few coworkers this morning were doing a bit of Stanford bashing, talking about the neo-conservative bastion that is the Hoover Institution.  No doubt this is justified, as the Hoover Institution is well-funded and shielded think-tank, which is a complete antithesis of the liberal-minded student body.  What makes the Hoover Institution so conservative?  Well, it starts with the fellows, such as:

Newt Gingrich – I’m sure this is a more laudatory appointment, since this former Speaker of the House continues to preach the conservative agenda with groups like the Defense Policy Board and as general chairman for the American Solutions for Winning the Future, which does awesome things like promote extensive domestic drilling to “solve” our oil dependency/crisis.

Caroline Hoxby – Many probably don’t know her, but she’s well-known in the education-reform circuit for her widespread support of the vouchers system.  When I did high-school debate, her views on school vouchers (aka giving students a voucher to go to whatever school they wanted to) were wide-read.  Vouchers are a pretty divisive subject, but my own views are that they would exacerbate educational inequalities.  Contact me for further details.

Condoleezza Rice – My favorite member of the Bush administration.  I’m very honored to have her affiliated with Stanford…

Alice Miller – I saved the best for last.  Miller is a former analyst for the CIA with expertise in Chinese foreign policy.  I took a class with him in my junior year of college on early Chinese History.  An astute reader would know that I just said him in the previous sentence.  Yes, in between my junior and senior year, H. Lyman Miller got a sex change and became Alice Miller.  You can imagine how hard such a thing might be for a place like the Hoover Institution to digest.  That’s probably why there’s no picture of Alice on their website.  They ignore the issue very tastefully in the final point of Miller’s biography: “Formerly H. Lyman Miller, she transitioned in 2006.”

Oh yes, so now that I’ve more or less hammered in the point about the conservative bent of the Hoover Institution, I want to highlight that the Institution is more than just this stuffy think-tank.  It’s a library and an archive.  The library is impressive, containing about 750,000 publications.  But the archives is where the jaw should drop.  It’s a researcher’s dream – “more than 5,600 collections, including 100,000 political posters, 100,000 audiotapes, 10,000 videotapes, and 5,000 movie reels, filling twenty-five miles of shelving.”

Let me tell you about some of the fascinating things you can find in the archives:

• X-Rays of Hitler’s Head
• One of the first copies of the Communist Manifesto, apparently with many typos
• The military order to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• An Al Qaeda training manual
• The handwritten diaries of Chiang Kai-Shek

The best part is, this collection, first started with the collecting of former President Herbert Hoover, and expanded to collections from around the globe, is free for Stanford affiliated students and faculty to access.  As an undergrad, I had the priviledge of sitting alongside senior researchers in the depths of the archives, looking through memoirs, papers, and photos, trying to piece together a unique artifact or source for my various history papers.  Ahh, good times.