| Leland Stanford Junior University | |
 | |
| Motto | Die Luft der Freiheit weht (German) |
|---|---|
Motto in English
| The wind of freedom blows |
| Type | Private |
| Established | 1891 |
| Endowment | $22.223 billion (2015) |
| President | John L. Hennessy |
| Provost | John Etchemendy |
Academic staff
| 2,118 |
Administrative staff
| 11,128 excluding SHC |
| Students | 15,877 |
| Undergraduates | 6,980 |
| Postgraduates | 8,897 |
| Location | Stanford, California, U.S. |
| Campus | Suburban, 8,180 acres (3,310 ha) |
| Newspaper | The Stanford Daily |
| Colors | Cardinal and white |
| Athletics | NCAA Division I (FBS)Pac-12 |
| Nickname | Cardinal |
| Mascot | Cardinal (official), Stanford Tree (unofficial, mascot of LSJUMB) |
| Website | www |
 | |
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, and one of the world's most prestigious institutions.
Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former Governor of and U.S. Senator from California and leading railroad tycoon, and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford admitted its first students on October 1, 1891 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until 1920. The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet).
The main campus is in northern Santa Clara Valley adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Stanford also has land and facilities elsewhere. Its 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus is one of the largest in the United States. The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Stanford's academic strength is broad with 40 departments in the three academic schools that have undergraduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in theDivision I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 108 NCAA team championships, the second-most for a university, 476 individual championships, the most in Division I, and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, every year since 1994–1995.
Packard, Nike, Sun Microsystems, Instagram,Snapchat, and Yahoo!, and companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world. It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 20 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress. Sixty Nobel laureates andseven Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty or staff.
Contents
History
Origins and early years (1885–1906)
The university officially opened on October 1, 1891 to 555 students. On the university's opening day, Founding President David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) said to Stanford's Pioneer Class: "[Stanford] is hallowed by no traditions; it is hampered by none. Its finger posts all point forward."However, much preceded the opening and continued for several years until the death of the last Founder, Jane Stanford, in 1905 and the destruction of the 1906 earthquake.
Foundation
Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate, U.S. senator, and former California governor, together with his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died in 1884 from typhoid fever just before his 16th birthday. His parents decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford told his wife, "The children of California shall be our children." The Stanfords visited Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, and asked whether he should establish a university, technical school or museum. Eliot replied that he should found a university and an endowment of $5 million would suffice (in 1884 dollars; about $132 million today
The university's Founding Grant of Endowment from the Stanfords was issued in November 1885. Besides defining the operational structure of the university, it made several specific stipulations:
"The Trustees … shall have the power and it shall be their duty:
- To establish and maintain at such University an educational system, which will, if followed, fit the graduate for some useful pursuit, and to this end to cause the pupils, as easily as may be, to declare the particular calling, which, in life, they may desire to pursue; …
- To prohibit sectarian instruction, but to have taught in the University the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.
- To have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation.
- To afford equal facilities and give equal advantages in the University to both sexes.
- To maintain on the Palo Alto estate a farm for instruction in agriculture in all its branches."
Though the trustees are in overall charge of the university, Leland and Jane Stanford as Founders retained great control until their deaths.
Despite the duty to have a co-educational institution in 1899 Jane Stanford, the remaining Founder, added to the Founding Grant the legal requirement that "the number of women attending the University as students shall at no time ever exceed five hundred". She feared the large numbers of women entering would lead the school to become "the Vassar of the West" and felt that would not be an appropriate memorial for her son. In 1933 the requirement was reinterpreted by the trustees to specify an undergraduate male:female ratio of 3:1.The "Stanford ratio" of 3:1 remained in place until the early 1960s. By the late 1960s the "ratio" was about 2:1 for undergraduates, but much more skewed at the graduate level, except in the humanities. In 1973 the University trustees successfully petitioned the courts to have the restriction formally removed. As of 2014 the undergraduate enrollment is split nearly evenly between the sexes (47.2% women, 52.8% men), though males outnumber females (38.2% women, 61.8% men) at the graduate level. In the same petition they also removed the prohibition of sectarian worship on campus (previous only non-denominational Christian worship in Stanford Memorial Church was permitted).
Physical layout
The Stanfords chose their country estate, Palo Alto Stock Farm, in northern Santa Clara County as the site of the university, so that the University is often called "the Farm" to this day.
The campus master plan (1886–1914) was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and later his sons. The Main Quad was designed by Charles Allerton Coolidge and his colleagues, and by Leland Stanford himself. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, which would have been Leland Stanford Junior's nineteenth birthday.
In the summer of 1886, when the campus was first being planned, Stanford brought the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker, and prominent Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted westward for consultations. Olmsted worked out the general concept for the campus and its buildings, rejecting a hillside site in favor of the more practical flatlands. The Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge were hired in the Autumn and Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson. The Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches, was merged with the Californian Mission Revival style desired by the Stanfords. However, by 1889, Leland Stanford severed the connection with Olmsted and Coolidge and their work was continued by others. The red tile roofs and solid sandstone masonry are distinctly Californian in appearance and famously complementary to the bright blue skies common to the region, and most of the more recent campus buildings have followed the Quad's pattern of buff colored walls, red roofs, and arcades, giving Stanford its distinctive "look".
Early faculty and administration
In Spring 1891, the Stanfords offered the presidency of their new university to the president of Cornell University, Andrew White, but he declined and recommended David Starr Jordan, the 40-year-old president of Indiana University Bloomington. Jordan's educational philosophy was a good fit with the Stanfords' vision of a non-sectarian, co-educational school with a liberal arts curriculum, and he accepted the offer.Jordan arrived at Stanford in June 1891 and immediately set about recruiting faculty for the university's planned October opening. With such a short time frame he drew heavily on his own acquaintance in academia; of the fifteen original professors, most came either from Indiana University or his alma mater Cornell. The 1891 founding professors included Robert Allardice in mathematics, Douglas Houghton Campbell in botany, Charles Henry Gilbert in zoology,George Elliott Howard in history, Oliver Peebles Jenkins in physiology and histology, Charles David Marx in civil engineering, Fernando Sanford in physics, and John Maxson Stillman in chemistry. The total initial teaching staff numbered about 35 including instructors and lecturers. For the second (1892–93) school year, Jordan was able to add 29 additional professors including Frank Angell (psychology), Leander M. Hoskins (mechanical engineering), William Henry Hudson (English), Walter Miller (classics), George C. Price (zoology), and Arly B. Show (history). Most of these two founding groups of professors remained at Stanford until their retirement and were referred to as the "Old Guard".
Edward Alsworth Ross gained fame as a founding father of American sociology; in 1900 Jane Stanford fired him for radicalism and racism, unleashing a major academic freedom case.
Early finances
When Leland Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was in jeopardy. A $15 million government lawsuit against Stanford's estate, combined with the Panic of 1893, made it extremely difficult to meet expenses. Most of the Board of Trustees advised that the University be closed temporarily until finances could be sorted out. However, Jane Stanford insisted that the university remain in operation. When the lawsuit was finally dropped in 1895, a university holiday was declared. Stanford alumnus George E. Crothersbecame a close adviser to Jane Stanford following his graduation from Stanford's law school in 1896. Working with his brother Thomas (also a Stanford graduate and a lawyer), Crothers identified and corrected numerous major legal defects in the terms of the university's founding grant and successfully lobbied for an amendment to the California state constitution granting Stanford an exemption from taxation on its educational property—a change which allowed Jane Stanford to donate her stock holdings to the university.
Jane Stanford's actions were sometimes eccentric. In 1897, she directed the board of trustees "that the students be taught that everyone born on earth has a soul germ, and that on its development depends much in life here and everything in Life Eternal". She forbade students from sketching nude models in life-drawing class, banned automobiles from campus, and did not allow a hospital to be constructed so that people would not form an impression that Stanford was unhealthy. Between 1899 and 1905, she spent $3 million on a grand construction scheme building lavish memorials to the Stanford family, while university faculty and self-supporting students were living in poverty.
However, overall, Jane Stanford contributed significantly to the university. Faced with the possibility of financial ruin for the institution, she took charge of financial, administrative, and development matters at the university 1893–1905. For the next several years, she paid salaries out of her personal resources, even pawning her jewelry to keep the university going. In 1901, she transferred $30 million in assets, nearly all her remaining wealth, to the university;upon her death in 1905, she left the university nearly $4 million of her remaining $7 million. In total, the Stanfords donated around $40 million in assets to the university, over $1 billion in 2010 dollars.
Post-founders (1906–1941)
The year after Jane Stanford's death, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake damaged parts of the campus and caused new financial and structural problems, though only two people on campus were killed. Some of the early construction, especially from the second phase between Leland Stanford's death in 1893 and Jane Stanford's death in 1905, was destroyed by the earthquake. The university retains the Quad, part of the Museum, the old Chemistry Building (which is not currently in use, was boarded up in 1986, subsequently damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and is now undergoing an extensive renovation in preparation for reopening), and Encina Hall (then the men's undergraduate dormitory). The earthquake destroyed parts of the Main Quad, including the original iteration of Memorial Church and the gate that first marked the entrance of the school, as well as a partially built main library. Rebuilding on a somewhat less grandiose scale began immediately.
In 1908 the university acquired the already existing Cooper Medical College in San Francisco and it became the Stanford University Department (later School) of Medicine though it remained in San Francisco until the late 1950s. For the full story see History of Stanford Medicine.
Jordan, the first president, stepped down in 1913 and was succeeded for two years by John Casper Branner. Branner was followed byRay Lyman Wilbur, who was president from 1916 until 1943, except when he took leave to serve as Secretary of the Interior under President Herbert Hoover. Hoover along with his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, were among the first graduates of Stanford. Herbert Hoover was also a trustee of the university. The house they had built on campus as their own residence, Lou Henry Hoover House, became the University president's house after the death of Lou Henry Hoover in 1944.
World War II and late 20th century
After Ray Lyman Wilbur retired in 1943 in the midst of World War II, Donald Tresidder, president of the Board of Trustees, took over as president until his unexpected death in early 1948. In 1949 Wallace Sterling became president (1949–1968) and he oversaw the rise of Stanford as a regional university to one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. He was succeeded by Kenneth Pitzer from Rice University who lasted only 19 months having stepped in just as the university entered its most tumultuous period of student protests. Richard Lyman, former provost, was president from 1971 until 1980; Donald Kennedy also a former provost was president from 1980 until 1992 when he resigned during the midst of a controversy over finances with the U.S. Government. The Board of Trustees brought in an outsider, Gerhard Casper, from the University of Chicago who was president until 2000.
High tech
A powerful sense of regional solidarity accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the 1890s, the university's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development. The distinctive regional ethos of the West during the first half of the 20th century is an ingredient of Silicon Valley's already prepared environment, an ingredient that would-be replicators ignore at their peril.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Terman, as dean of engineering and later as provost, encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. He is credited with nurturing Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford campus. Terman is often called "the father of Silicon Valley."] Terman encouraged William B. Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, to return to his hometown of Palo Alto. In 1956 he established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.Unhappy employees from Shockley's company formed Fairchild Semiconductor and other companies eventually spun off from Fairchild.
Biology
The biological sciences department evolved rapidly from 1946 to 1972 as its research focus changed, due to the Cold War and other historically significant conditions external to academia. Stanford science went through three phases of experimental direction during that time. In the early 1950s the department remained fixed in the classical independent and self-directed research mode, shunning interdisciplinary collaboration and excessive government funding. Between the 1950s and mid-1960s biological research shifted focus to the molecular level. Then, from the late 1960s onward, Stanford's goal became applying research and findings toward humanistic ends. Each phase was preempted by larger social issues, such as the escalation of the Cold War, the launch of Sputnik, and public concern over medical abuses.
Physics
In 1962 through 1970, negotiations took place between the Cambridge Electron Accelerator Laboratory (shared by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), theStanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the US Atomic Energy Commission over the proposed 1970 construction of the Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR). It would be the first US electron-positron colliding beam storage ring. Paris (2001) explores the competition and cooperation between the two university laboratories and presents diagrams of the proposed facilities, charts detailing location factors, and the parameters of different project proposals between 1967 and 1970. Several rings were built in Europe during the five years that it took to obtain funding for the project, but the extensive project revisions resulted in a superior design that was quickly constructed and paved the way for Nobel Prizes in 1976 for Burton Richter and in 1995 for Martin Perl. During 1955–85, solid state technology research and development at Stanford University followed three waves of industrial innovation made possible by support from private corporations, mainly Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Xerox PARC. In 1969 the Stanford Research Institute operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.
Civil rights
Though Stanford has never officially prohibited the admission of black students, people of Asian descent, or Native Americans, it did not treat them equally with those considered as White. Discrimination also existed against non-Christians. (The first Black graduate was Ernest Houston Johnson in 1895 who received a degree in economics.)
In 1957 the Board of Trustees adopted a policy stating:
Though this was relatively easy for the housing the university directly controlled, it had to work with the fraternities which invite their own membership (no sororities existed on campus at this time). In 1960, the Alpha Tau Omega chapter had its national charter revoked after refusing to retract the pledging of four Jewish students. And in 1962 Sigma Nu (Beta Chi chapter) seceded from the national organization over the national organization's continuing refusal to drop bans on "Negros and Orientals".As of late 1962 only the Kappa Alpha fraternity still officially discriminated due the national organization's rules. However, in April 1965 the local Sigma Chi chapter pledged Kenneth M. Washington and was suspended allegedly for violating rules on rituals. Though Sigma Chi officially had removed its no whites policy in 1961 it had then instituted requirements that all members had to be approved by a national committee and that pledges be socially acceptable to other members anywhere.President Sterling then sent a letter to the presidents of all universities with Sigma Chi chapters supporting the local chapter and pointing out that University recognition of racially discriminatory groups could violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The suspension continued until Kenneth Washington's poor grades required him to resign anyway from the chapter. In November 1966 the Stanford chapter unanimously severed ties with the national fraternity.
The university started actively recruiting minorities in the 1960s. The minorities started organizing and "in five years, students founded the six major community organizations: the Black Student Union (BSU) in 1967, the Asian American Students’ Association (AASA) and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) in 1969, the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) in 1970, the Gay People’s Union in 1971 and the Women’s Collective in 1972."
Government expenses controversy
In the early 1990s, Stanford was investigated by the U.S. government over allegations that the university had inappropriately billed the government several million dollars for housing, personal expenses, travel, entertainment, fundraising and other activities unrelated to research, including a yacht and an elaborate wedding ceremony. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of Stanford President Donald Kennedy in 1992. In an agreement with the Office of Naval Research, Stanford refunded $1.35 million to the government for billing which occurred in the years 1981 and 1992. Additionally, the government reduced Stanford's annual research budget by $23 million in the year following the settlement.
21st century
John L. Hennessy was appointed the 10th President of the University in October 2000. and under him the university has expanded. In February 2012, Stanford announced the conclusion of the Stanford Challenge. In a period of five years, Stanford raised $6.2 billion, exceeding its initial goal by $2 billion, making it the most successful university fundraising campaign in history. The funds will go towards 103 new endowed faculty appointments, 360 graduate student research fellowships, scholarships and financial aid, and the construction or renovation of 38 campus buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of the world's largest facility dedicated exclusively to stem cell research; an entirely new campus for the business school; a dramatic expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, Stanford opened the Stanford Center at Peking University, an almost 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m2), three-story research center in the Peking University campus. The ceremony featured remarks by U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke and Stanford President John Hennessy. Stanford became the first American university to have its own building on a major Chinese university campus.
Other Stanford programs underwent notable expansion as well, such as the Stanford in Washington Program's creation of the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in Woodley Park, Washington, D.C., and the Stanford in Florence program's move to Palazzo Capponi, a 15th-century Renaissance palace. The university completed the James H. Clark Center for interdisciplinary research in engineering and medicine in 2003, named for benefactor, co-founder of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and WebMD, and former professor of electrical engineering James H. Clark.
In 2011, Stanford created the first PhD program in stem cell science in the United States. The program is housed at Stanford Medical School.
Undergraduate admission also became more selective; the acceptance rate dropped from 13% for the class of 2004 to 4.69% for the class of 2020, the lowest admit rate in University history. Stanford's reputation, competitive admissions, and strong legacy of entrepreneurship have contributed to the East-West rivalry between Stanford and such institutions as Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University.
In June 2015 Hennessy announced he would step down in September 2016 to return to teaching and research. In February 2016 the University announced that its next president will be Marc Tessier-Lavigne, currently president of the Rockefeller University.
Land
Most of Stanford University is on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest ofSan Jose; this is the founding grant. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped. Besides the central campus described below, the university also operates at several more remote locations, some elsewhere on the main campus, some further afield (see below).
Stanford's main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
Central campus
The academic central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, andSand Hill Road. The United States Postal Service has assigned it two ZIP codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P.O. box mail. It lies within area code 650.
The university campus was listed by Travel + Leisure in September 2011 as one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States and by MSN as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world.
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