The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto, California, United States. It is situated in the northwestern Silicon Valley, approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose and 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco.[6]
Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, and his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford founded the university in 1891 in honor of their son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid two months before his 16th birthday. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and 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 become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, was one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had transformed itself into a major research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences.
More than 50 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize and Stanford has the largest number of Turing award winners for a single institution. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many prominent technology companies including Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Varian Associates, and Yahoo!.[7]
The university is organized into seven schools including academic schools of Humanities and Sciences and Earth Sciences as well as professional schools of Business, Education, Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Stanford has a student body of approximately 6,988 undergraduate and 8,400 graduate students.[5] Stanford is a founding member of the Association of American Universities. For the 2011-2012 year, the university has a budget of US$4.1 billion,[8] US$1.2 billion in research expenditures,[9] and manages a US$16.5 billion endowment, with $25.1 billion in consolidated net assets.[3]
Stanford competes in 34 varsity sports and is one of two private universities in the Division I FBS Pacific-12 Conference. Stanford's athletic program has won the NACDA Directors' Cup every year since 1995.[10] In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Stanford athletes won 25 medals, including eight gold medals, more than any other university in the United States.[11] Contents[hide] * 1 History * 1.1 Origins * 1.1.1 Coeducation * 1.1.2 Early finances * 1.2 20th century * 1.2.1 Football * 1.2.2 Hoover Institution * 1.3 Post-1945 * 1.3.1 Biology * 1.3.2 High tech * 1.3.3 Physics * 1.4 Recent history * 2 Campus * 2.1 History of campus development * 2.2 Landmarks * 2.3 Faculty residences * 2.4 Non-main campus * 3 Administration and organization * 3.1 Endowment and fundraising * 4 Academics * 4.1 Research centers and institutes * 4.2 Libraries and digital resources * 4.3 Rankings * 4.4 Arts * 5 Student life * 5.1 Student body * 5.2 Dormitories and student housing * 5.3 Traditions * 5.4 Greek life * 5.5 Student groups * 6 Athletics * 7 Notable alumni, faculty, and staff * 8 References * 9 Further reading * 10 External links |
[edit] History
[edit] Origins
Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate, United States Senator, and former California governor, and his wife, Jane Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in 1884 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."

Leland Stanford, the university's founder, as painted by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier in 1881 and now on display at the Cantor Center
The Stanfords visited Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, and asked how much it would cost to duplicate Harvard in California. Eliot replied that he supposed $15 million[clarification needed] would be enough. David Starr Jordan, the president of Indiana University, was their eventual choice to direct Stanford, after several leaders of the Ivy League turned them down.[12] Locals and members of the university community are known to refer to the school as The Farm, a nod to the fact that the university is located on the former site of Leland Stanford's horse farm.
The motto of Stanford University, selected by President Jordan, is "Die Luft der Freiheit weht." Translated from the German, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, "The wind of freedom blows." The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.[13]
The university's founding Grant of Endowment from the Stanfords came in November 1885.[14][15] 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."
The original "inner quad" buildings (1887–91) were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Francis A. Walker, Charles Allerton Coolidge, and Leland Stanford himself. After six years of planning and building, the university officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students and 15 faculty members, seven of them from Cornell.[16] Tuition was free until the 1930s.[17] Herbert Hoover and his future wife Lou Henry Hoover were in the first class; the Hoovers maintained close lifetime ties to the school.
[edit] Coeducation
The school was established as a coeducational institution. However, Jane Stanford soon put a policy in place limiting female enrollment to 500 students because of the large number of women students enrolling. She did not want the school to become "the Vassar of the West" because she felt that would not be an appropriate memorial for her son. In 1933 the policy was modified to specify an undergraduate male:female ratio of 3:1.[18] 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. As of 2005 the school no longer maintains a gender preference policy and undergraduate enrollment is split nearly evenly between the sexes, though males outnumber females about 2:1 at the graduate level, exclusive of Humanities.[19][20]
[edit] Early finances
When Senator Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was in jeopardy. A $15 million government lawsuit against Senator Stanford's estate, combined with the Panic of 1893, made it extremely difficult to meet expenses. Most of the Board of Trustees advised a temporary closing until finances could be sorted out. However, Jane Stanford insisted that the university remain in operation. Faced with the possibility of financial ruin for the University she took charge of financial, administrative, and development matters at the university 1893-1905; from her experience as a mother and housewife, she ran the institution as a household. For the next several years, she paid salaries out of her personal resources, even pawning her jewelry to keep the university going. When the lawsuit was finally dropped in 1895, a university holiday was declared.[21][22]
Stanford alumnus George E. Crothers became a close adviser to Jane Stanford following his graduation from Stanford's law school in 1896.[23] 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.[24]
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.[25]
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".[26] 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.[26] However, in 1901, she transferred $30 million in assets, nearly all her remaining wealth, to the university[27]; 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).[28]