First of all, Stanford and its main competitors, even on the basis of worldwide comparisons, are very good indeed in many areas, and it is by no means clear what to cut. When Stanford decided in 1995 to close a department, the Food Research Institute, the faxes poured in telling us that we were betraying Stanford's mission in agricultural economics. Advertisements were taken out, signed by prominent faculty at other universities who should have known better. When we concluded to merge the departments of Operations Research and Engineering Economic Systems, the transaction costs were high, because prominent and important faculty members thought we were redefining Stanford's mission. Thoroughly intertwined with the question of a university's range is the matter of the size of particular disciplines and departments.
Size implicates issues of quality.
Therein lies one of the most difficult challenges in managing a university. While the activities that we are engaged in, as such, are not easily subject to change, the size of a particular department, the number of faculty billets, the slots for graduate students can, to some extent, be increased or decreased. The correlation, to my mind, does not hold regardless of subject matter and is by no means straightforward. It does, however, pose puzzling questions. For instance, Stanford's Classics Department was once a department of world renown.