Alphonse Juilland shatters every stereotype of the university professor. His colleagues at Stanford look at him as a maverick. He discusses them as a historical footnote, and he does so in a French accent that makes his friends on the faculty appear like an amusingly aberrant species discovered by Jacques Cousteau.
    A far-right-winger, founder and current president of the Stanford Conservative Forum, he says of his fellow professors : "I understand why most of them are liberal. As scientists and scholars they must rely heavily on reason, which they then take for a panacea.
    "The first requirement of rationality is understanding its limitations, where it applies and where it doesn't. Reason is a fragile tool when it comes to dealing with values – ethical or aesthetical".
    After praising them for their powerful minds ( "Brilliant people are a dime a dozen at Stanford"), he adds : "There are liberals whose hearts bleed for people in far-off lands but who send their wives and children up the wall."
    Juilland puts his own touch on the pastimes and interests of academics. There are, for example, many runners among the Stanford faculty, including President Donald Kennedy, but Juilland is the only world-class sprinter to win national and Senior Olympic titles.
    There are internationally renowned researchers into language at Stanford, but Juilland is probably the only professor in the land to have taught Romany, the language of the gypsies, and to have pursued his studies in it ( "professionally, of course" ) into a bordello.
    He is the only Stanford professor to have adopted his niece as his daughter.
    There are some well-dressed professors, but Juilland is the only one of the 1,200 faculty who never removes his tailored jacket or loosens his elegant cravat even on the hottest day or would think of rolling up his silk shirtsleeves with gold cufflinks on the French cuffs.
    Teased about his fastidious dressing, he iinsists : "Appearances are misleading. Go ask my wife if you don't believe me. She'd probably tell you that I am the sloppiest Joe in the galaxy. It's all part of the existential game we play with our own public personae.
    "Sartre used to say that we come into this world tabula rasa with no congenital identity to start with. We give ourselves an "essence" by freely choosing our values, unless we accept the identity assigned to us by others. If people look on you as a reactionary bastard, you may assume the role and start doing what a reactionary bastard is supposed to do – at Iast dress like one.
    "A pity l'm not rich enough to really dress the part !"
    Gourmet, connoisseur, arbiter of manners, he has one other distinctive attribute : when he thinks of his youth, the dreams and tumults of his student days, he does so in French ; when he thinks of the present he does so in English.
    He has an imperial-style beard of iron-grey, neatly barbered, and brilliant blue eyes ; his easy-moving athletic body belies his 63 years.
    "An unconsummated love affair" : that is how he allegorizes his relationship to sprinting, how he explains why he did not become an athlete of note until he was middle-aged.
    "When I was a teenager in France I was a very good sprinter, good enough to become an Olympic contender, or so I think. But by the time I was 17, the war had started. By its end I was in my mid-20s, ready to start working toward my doctorats.
    "I never had a real athletic career when I was young. The deep frustration this gave me is probably what keeps me going, forever ready to pursue that youthful dream.
    "At 29 I came to America as a Rockefeller Foundation scholar. I was supposed to stay one year to study American structuralism, but what I really wanted was to improve my English.
    "Toward the end of that year I realized that my English could stand improvement, so I decided to stay another year. More than a quarter of a century has sped by, and l'm still around, still trying to improve my English."

    "I did not do much running until my mid-40s, when I discovered, quite by accident, that I still had good reflexes. I started training, entered the national championships, and later broke all sprint records for men over 50. They stayed on the books for more than a decade, to be broken only recently by an Olympic Gold medalist.
    "But when I became chairman of the French and Italian Department, with administrative duties added to my teaching and writing, I had to drop out again for a decade. Last year I made my second comeback."
    Juilland's political views and his athletic late-flowering fall away into perspective behind his scholarly achievements. He is an internationally renowned linguist who has publisbed extensively in many European languages. He has pioneered in the fields of linguistic sound change, the theory of linguistic units, and the use of quantitative method in the study of linguistic structures.
    Juilland was probably the first scholar to use a computer in the study of natural languages - the first electronic digital computer ever built, in fact, Neumann's ENIAC.
    Juilland's initiatives are behind the theme houses that have prospered on campus. The first two, Casa ltaliana and La Maison Française, were conceived and brought to reality under his guidance.
    He is also largely responsable for the remarkable publications record of the Department of French and ltalian, which publishes four joumals and two scholarly collections. "My own tasks include hustling and begging for money to keep our fragile heads financially above water."
    Juilland was the fastest sprinter in the world among men over 50, and last year, at the age of 63, he trained vigorously for the Senior World Championships Rome. He was injured eight days before the race and had to have a dozen stitches taken in his leg.
    Nevertheless, he ran with the stitches still in his leg, managed to win his heat, but could not overcome the pain enough to make it to the final. lt was a bitter disappointment, especially as he had clocked faster tirnes in training than the winning time.
    Last year, however, he did win the U.S. championship in the 100 and 200 meters for men over 60. His present resolve is to make a try at the VIIth Senior World Games in Australia in 1987. He still hopes to be the first man over 60 to run the 100 meters in less than 12 seconds
    "Like the ancient Greeks, I think that body and mind go best in harness," he says. "But my interest in sports has little to do with health and fitness. When I switched from three packs a day to a pipe 10 years ago, I was not thinking of my lungs.
    "I did it because I thought it might help me to break 11 seconds in the 100 yards. Admirable as it is, the Roman ideal of mens sana in corpore sano is not exactly what accounts for my refusal to act my age. Renaissance versatility is more like it, for I am fascinated by those incredible adventurers of the Rinascimento.
    "They were philosophers and philanderers, artists and crooks, theologians and assassins, preachers and athletes – all jumping from bed to bed, from inasterpiece to masterpiece, from jail to jail, from pulpit to pulpit, and from war to war.
    "Is there a more intriguing character than Benvenuto Cellini?"
    Asked if he fantasizes often, Juilland becomes defensive. "Watch it," he warns, "you are on the verge of hearing indiscretions. But I will tell you a few of my more innocuous fantasias.
    "I dream of writing, one day, three paragraphs of that scented French prose whose heady metaphors burst all over the luxuriant pages of Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit. I'd give my right arm to be able to deliver one single left hook with the sheet artistry of Sugar Ray Robinson.
    "I can imagine nothing more exhilarating than being able to control that stratospheric High C of Nessun dorma with Pavarotti's superhuman virtuosity.
    "Mind you, I must struggle to keep Jingle Bells on key, which tells you the extent of my musical talents. As for my tastes, they're hardly discriminating for they stretch all the way from Couperin and the Brandenburg Concertos to Julio lglesias crooning To all the girls I've loved before."
   "I am more at home with painting, though I seem to have lost interest after Picasso and Braque. In modern sculpture nothing comes close to Brancusi and his Bird of Paradise.
   "Where architecture is concemed, I'd have a hard time choosing between Poggio a Cajano and Azay-le-Rideau for my summer residence. Modern architecture bores me no end. Its brutalizing geometry keeps telling me that l'm an asymmetric freak of nature destined for the dustbins of history.
    "Poetry has gone downhill ever since poets starting writing for one another, for professors and critics, instead of writing for the people. In Russia, Yevtushenko's poetry fills the stadia. But try reciting one of our contemporary first-prize poems to 10,000 people.
    "This deplorable situation could be fixed by a stringent law compelling poets to express themselves in dactylic hexameters. A couple of years at hard labor for every poem written in blank verse would do the trick."
    Juilland rubs his hands in delight when he marshals his views on students : "When they are freshmen they think of themselves as middle-of-the-road or conservative, but by the time they graduate, after four years of ideological brainwashing, they regard themselves as liberal or radical."
    A Gallic shrug accentuates his smile : "I'm not worried. Once they leave the ivory tower and find out what the real world is all about, they soon come back to the fold."

    "On campus, ideas have no consequences. You can say the silliest and most outrageous things and will not be held accountable. Up to a point this is as it should be, because this is what academic freedom is all about.
    "But in the real world, if you mess up you lose your job. Your wife and children may go hungry."
    Juilland becomes avuncular when describing most faculty as liberal in their political views : "Generally speaking, the better the university, the more liberal its professors tend to be. I like to tease them about that.
    "Simple-minded people, I begin, who are neither bright nor educated tend to be conservative ; bright and educated people tend to be liberal. I give them a few moments to relish the concession before I add : "But very bright and very educated people are conservative." If they give me any backtalk I send them straight to Dante – or to St. Augustine".
    He says that conservatives tend to form all sorts of conspiracy theories about the predominance of liberals in colleges and universities. They suspect that liberals deliberately bring other liberals in, keep conservatives out : "I don't believe it. Intellectuals place a heavy premium on reason. That's what their profession is all about. Where they go wrong is in overestimating reason and in mistaking it for a panacea. A major requirement of rationality is to know that reason and science are impotent when it comes to bridging the gap between what is and what ought to be.
    "If liberals are brighter, conservatives know their foundations better. As children of the Enlightenment, liberals believe they stand on fact and reason ; conservatives know they ultimately stand on faith.
    "Hawks and doves bombard each other with rational arguments and reams of empirical data, but these come into the game only after people have chosen sides. Facts and arguments which corroborate our existential commitments, we retain ; those which tend to invalidate them, we sweep under the rug.
    "When it comes to fundamentals, to things that really matter, we choose with our gut, not with our brain or eyes.
    "There is a sharp difference between the liberal and conservative temperaments. Liberals tend to be earnestly militant and activist, conservatives are not. It takes a social upheaval - something like the French Revolution - to get conservatives out of the woodwork. They have to feel threatened to act.
    Juilland has a ready example, and for the first time he loses his detachment. "The charade of the attacks on the Hoover Institution provoked me to stick my neck out again.
    "It was one of the most grotesque spectacles I have witnessed in my long years at Stanford. What bothered me was the hypocrisy of it all. People who never missed an opportunity to inject their political ideology into the life of the University were crying all over the place that Hoover's politics might defile the incandescent purity of Stanford.
    "What worried them was not conservatism as such, they claimed, but politics of any kind, right or left. Even if Hoover were liberal, they insisted, they would still go after it because politics, any politics, is a no-no in academe. " I say that anybody who believes this belongs in Disneyland".

    Juilland concedes that the faculty Senate has taken a more moderate stand on the Hoover issue : "But l'm still bothered by their action. Stanford is an aggregate of dozens of schools, departments, programs, centers, institutes, etc., most of which have no political coloration.
    "Those which have one are uniformly liberal or mildly radical, with one exception, Hoover.
    "That the Senate should single out for investigation the one and only Stanford entity that can be said to be conservative, while ignoring the plethora that are liberal or radical, that is what New Yorkers call chutzpah.
    If our senators were worried about the politics in the University, why didn't they ask the Dornbusch committee to pursue political bias throughout the University, no matter where it raised its ugly head?
    "It is the arrogance of singling out that ought to worry those who value academic freedom".
    "How can anyone investigate the political bias of an institution without investigating the political opinions of its scholar is beyond me. And once they are through with hunting conservative witches in the (Hoover) Tower, what's going to prevent them from hunting them in the Quad ? And here but for the grace of God go I !"
    In matters of individual and social ethics Juilland says he is fairly simple-minded: "My philosophy is, take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. To me, this means if you want t create a better world, you start by being decent to your own, to your family, colleagues, and friends".

    To objections that this would encourage interference in the educational process, Juilland replies : "Of course it does. And so it should. Every citizen should have a say in the ways in which the young are to be taught. Education expresses the ethos of a society, and if people who form it don't care enough to impregnate it with the values they cherish, we might as well close shop.
    Asked whether he would like Joe Blow to tell him how to do his job, Juilland replies : "I see no objection to being told by a taxpayer that he would rather see his money spent on a Nobelist teaching physics than on my teaching French. His interference might be improper only if he insisted on telling me how to teach French historical syntax".*
    Juilland bas been at Stanford for 35 years. Before coming here, he taught at the universities of Washington, Pennsylvania, and Columbia.
    His wife, Ica, is a language teacher who speaks fluently half a dozen tongues. She has taught French and Romanian at Stanford and now teaches French at Foothill College.
    They have no children from their 30 years of marriage but have adopted Marie-Jeanne, who is his niece. "Between them my two brothers have half a dozen children, so I demanded that they give me one, preferably a daughter."
    He describes Marie-Jeanne as an exceedingly bright and handsome young woman who has the misfortune to be a liberal and a feminist : "Small wonder, given that she is a recent political science graduate of Stanford ! That is my cross to bear. Now she works for a business weekly. That is my revenge !
    "I'm lucky that my wife shares my conservative views, because Marie-Jeanne and my mother-in-law, Elizabeth, who is 90 and lives with us, both think I am too reactionary."
    Juilland is in his fourth year as department chairman of French and Italian. "I have committed myself for another three years. After that I intend to concentrate on writing. I need a couple of centuries to publish the results of research I have accumulated over the years.
    "I'd also like to write a book on physical fitness titled "Why Jog When You Can Sprint?" And I may also return to my studies in the Romany language."
    He may be the only professor in America who has taught the language of the gypsies, which he used to speak quite well. While on the faculty of the University of Washington he was told that there was a sizable contingent of gypsies in Portland.
    He drove there and was directed by the police to the area where the gypsies lived. Dragging behind him an antediluvian tape-recorder weighing more than 50 pounds, he was received affectionately in a building that he soon realized was a bordello. He was promptly ejected when he explained what he had in mind ; gypsies consider their language secret and have a tabu against anyone recording it.
    "I always used to think I would go back to spend my old age commuting between Tuscany and the Provence," he says. "Now I am no longer sure. This lovely place grows on you. What I'd like to do is to go back to France while staying here. Unfortunately, ubiquity is not one of my virtues."