Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, and is known as 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 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.
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 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 faculty and alumni have founded many companies including Google, Hewlett-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.
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:
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 though males outnumber females at the graduate level. In the same petition they also removed the prohibition of sectarian worship on campus.
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 , and Encina Hall . 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.
World War 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 and he oversaw the rise of Stanford from 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.
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
From 1962 through 1970, negotiations took place between the Cambridge Electron Accelerator Laboratory , the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center , and the US Atomic Energy Commission over the proposed 1970 construction of the Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring . It would be the first US electron-positron colliding beam storage ring. Paris 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.
From 1955 to 1985, 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.
Other uses
Some of the land is managed to provide revenue for the university such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park. Stanford land is also leased for a token rent by the Palo Alto Unified School District for several schools including Palo Alto High School and Gunn High School.El Camino Park, the oldest Palo Alto city park , is also on Stanford land.Landmarks
Contemporary campus landmarks include the Main Quad and Memorial Church, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and art gallery, the Stanford Mausoleum and the Angel of Grief,Hoover Tower, the Rodin sculpture garden, the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the Arizona Cactus Garden, the Stanford University Arboretum, Green Library and the Dish. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1937 Hanna–Honeycomb House and the 1919 Lou Henry Hoover House are both listed on the National Historic Register. Previous landmarks included Meyer Library, which had been built in 1966; as of October 2014, the university intended to demolish it rather than invest money to bring it up to then-current codes and convert the space into a parkReputation and rankings
Stanford is ranked 4th among U.S national universities for 2016 by U.S. News and World Report.Notably, Stanford occupies the number one position in numerous domestic college ranking measures, leading Slate to dub Stanford in 2014 as "the Harvard of the 21st century,and The New York Times in the same year to conclude that "Stanford University has become America’s 'it' school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. From polls done by The Princeton Review in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, the most commonly named "dream college" for students was Stanford; separately, parents, too, most frequently named Stanford as their "dream college. A 2003 Gallup poll had Stanford tied for second as the most prestigious university in the eyes of the general public.Most of the Stanford University campus and other core University owned land is situated within the census-designated place of Stanford though the Stanford University Medical Center, the Stanford Shopping Center, and the Stanford Research Park are officially part of the city of Palo Alto. Its resident population consists of the inhabitants of on-campus housing, including graduate student residences and single-family homes and condominium owned by their faculty inhabitants but located on leased Stanford land. A residential neighborhood adjacent to the Stanford campus, College Terrace, featuring streets named after universities and colleges, including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Princeton, is neither part of the Stanford CDP nor owned by the University but is part of Palo Alto.