Stanford University
Stanford University (officially Leland Stanford Junior University)[11][12] is a private research university in Stanford, California. It was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford—a railroad magnate who served as the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California—and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland.[2] Stanford has an 8,180-acre (3,310-hectare) campus, among the largest in the nation.
"Stanford" redirects here. For other uses, see Stanford (disambiguation).Motto
"The wind of freedom blows"[1]
Leland and Jane Stanford
$36.5 billion (2023)[4]
$8.9 billion (2023–24)[5]
Richard Saller (interim)
Jonathan Levin (designate)
2,323 (Fall 2023)[6]
18,369 (Fall 2023)[7]
17,529 (Fall 2023)[6]
7,841 (Fall 2023)[6]
9,688 (Fall 2023)[6]
Large suburb:[8] 8,180-acre (3,310-hectare)[6]
Red & White[9]
Stanford Tree (unofficial)[10]
The university admitted its first students in 1891,[2][3] opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland's death in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.[13] Following World War II, Frederick Terman, the university's provost, inspired and supported faculty and graduates entrepreneurialism to build a self-sufficient local industry, which would later be known as Silicon Valley.[14]
The university is organized around seven schools on the same campus. It also houses the Hoover Institution, a public policy think-tank. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Pac-12 Conference. Stanford has won 131 NCAA team championships,[15] more than any other university, and was awarded the NACDA Directors' Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994.[16] Stanford students and alumni have won at least 296 Olympic medals (including 150 gold).[17]
Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups.[18][19][20][21][22] Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue.[23][24][25] 58 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates,[note 1] and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as alumni, faculty, or staff.[46]
Stanford is the alma mater of several world leaders, including the 31st President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, and the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The university is also associated with 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts.[47] Stanford is one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Gates Cambridge Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.[48]
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to the memory of Leland Stanford Jr., their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford's previous Palo Alto farm. Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great Eastern universities, specifically Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Stanford was referred to as the "Cornell of the West" in 1891 due to a majority of its faculty being former Cornell affiliates, including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to make higher education accessible, non-sectarian, and open to women as well as men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt that radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.[50]
From an architectural point of view, the Stanfords, particularly Jane, wanted their university to look different from the eastern ones, which had often sought to emulate the style of English university buildings. They specified in the founding grant[51] that the buildings should "be like the old adobe houses of the early Spanish days; they will be one-storied; they will have deep window seats and open fireplaces, and the roofs will be covered with the familiar dark red tiles." This guides the campus buildings to this day. The Stanfords also hired renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who previously designed the Cornell campus, to design the Stanford campus.[52]
When Leland Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was in jeopardy due to a federal lawsuit against his estate, but Jane Stanford insisted the university remain in operation throughout the financial crisis.[53][54] The university suffered major damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; most of the damage was repaired, but a new library and gymnasium were demolished, and some original features of Memorial Church and the Quad were never restored.[55]
During the early-twentieth century, the university added four professional graduate schools. Stanford University School of Medicine was established in 1908 when the university acquired Cooper Medical College in San Francisco;[56] it moved to the Stanford campus in 1959.[57] The university's law department, established as an undergraduate curriculum in 1893, was transitioned into a professional law school starting in 1908 and received accreditation from the American Bar Association in 1923.[58] The Stanford University Graduate School of Education grew out of the Department of the History and Art of Education, one of the original twenty-one departments at Stanford, and became a professional graduate school in 1917.[59] The Stanford Graduate School of Business was founded in 1925 at the urging of then-trustee Herbert Hoover.[60] In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.[61]
In the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Terman, an engineering professor who later became provost, encouraged Stanford engineering graduates to start their own companies and invent products.[62] During the 1950s, he established Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech commercial campus on university land.[63] Also in the 1950s, William Shockley, co-inventor of the silicon transistor, recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics, and later professor of physics at Stanford, moved to the Palo Alto area and founded a company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. The next year, eight of his employees resigned and formed a competing company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The presence of so many high-tech and semiconductor firms helped to establish Stanford and the mid-Peninsula as a hotbed of innovation, eventually named Silicon Valley after the key ingredient in transistors.[64] Shockley and Terman are often described, separately or jointly, as the "fathers of Silicon Valley".[65][66]
In the 1950s, Stanford intentionally reduced and restricted Jewish admissions, and for decades, denied and dismissed claims from students, parents, and alumni that they were doing so.[67] Stanford issued its first institutional apology to the Jewish community in 2022 after an internal task force confirmed that the university deliberately discriminated against Jewish applicants, while also misleading those who expressed concerns, including students, parents, alumni, and the ADL.[68][69]
Wallace Sterling was president 1949 to 1968. He oversaw the growth of Stanford from a financially troubled regional university to a financially sound, internationally recognized academic powerhouse, "the Harvard of the West".[70] Achievements during Sterling's tenure included:
In the 1960s, Stanford rose from a regional university to one of the most prestigious in the United States, "when it appeared on lists of the "top ten" universities in America... This swift rise to performance [was] understood at the time as related directly to the university's defense contracts..."[71] Stanford was once considered a school for "the wealthy",[72] but controversies in later decades damaged its reputation. The 1971 Stanford prison experiment was criticized as unethical,[73] and the misuse of government funds from 1981 resulted in severe penalties for the school's research funding[74][75] and the resignation of Stanford President Donald Kennedy in 1992.[76]
Academic rankings
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