Ken Auletta

Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next:

“John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”

Profile of new New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. “Abramson put her purse down on a white Formica desk that she occupies in the middle of the third-floor newsroom. Someone had left her a sealed envelope with ‘Congratulations’ written on the front. It contained a cover note from a female editor at the paper along with a laminated letter passed down from that editor’s father. The letter was from a nine-year-old girl named Alexandra Early, who wrote that she got mad when she watched television: ‘That’s because I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.’ The cover note to Abramson said, ‘Wherever Alexandra Early ended up, I hope that she heard about your new job.'”

Several female computer-science majors at Stanford pointed to the depiction of women in films like “The Social Network,” where the boys code and the girls dance around in their underwear. Sandberg says that the impact of popular culture struck her when her son was playing a Star Wars game. “When I grow up, I want to live in space and be a Star Wars person as a job,” he told his mother. “I’d like to come, too,” she responded, “because I always want to live near you.” “You can’t come,” he said. “I’ve already invited my sister, and there’s only one girl in space.”

On Google, its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt. “I learned that Google had an interesting management structure,” Philippe Dauman, the C.E.O. of Viacom, says, describing the negotiations that preceded the YouTube lawsuit. “Every time we thought we came down to a certain point, the Google people changed their minds. And they changed the people in the negotiations.” He explains, “I talked to their C.E.O., and then when Eric went down a certain path he had to have a discussion back in Mountain View with his two associates. Often, there would be a total change in direction.”

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