Biography | Craig Barrett — The Leave of Absence That Did Not Bring Him Back

People treat the jump from tenured faculty to Intel as a conversion on the road to Santa Clara.

The first move was a one-year leave from this department.

In 1973 Barrett took time away from Stanford to work at Intel, then a young memory-chip company.

Contemporary profiles record that he found the pace unsettling and came back to the Farm.

In 1974 he joined Intel for good as a technology-development manager.

Stanford's own materials-science profile dates the departure to that year, from the rank of associate professor.

He was thirty-five. The company was six years old.

His brief was reliability and process, not a founder chair.

The Robert Noyce Building on Mission College Boulevard is the later public face of the firm he entered.

The decision itself was made on this side of the Bay, in the department that had kept him since 1965.

A Fulbright year at the Technical University of Denmark in 1972 had already shown him how far a materials career could travel.

The Intel leave showed him the other direction: into a factory that had to ship.

He did not return to the classroom as a job.

The 1973 textbook stayed in print. The author went to Santa Clara.

Photo: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Campus view: Tobias Kleinlercher, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.