Stanford University

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{{Infobox_University |image = Image:CardSeal-1.gif |name = Leland Stanford Junior University |motto = Die Luft der Freiheit weht
(German for "The wind of freedom blows") |established = 1891 |type = Private |president = John L. Hennessy |city = Stanford |state = CA |country = USA |undergrad = 6,654 |postgrad = 11,421 |staff = 1,750 |campus = Suburban, 8,180 acres (33.1 km²) |mascot = None. Unofficially, the Stanford Tree. Teams referred to as the Stanford Cardinal. |free_label = Athletics |free = Cardinal |endowment = US$13.2 billion |website = Stanford.edu }} Template:Redirect The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco in an <ref>unincorporated part</ref> of Santa Clara County adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, Stanford lies at the heart of the Silicon Valley, both geographically and historically.

Situated on an expansive campus in suburban California, the University offers, in addition to its undergraduate college, schools of engineering, law, medicine, education, business, earth sciences, and humanities and sciences. Stanford hosts programs and a teaching hospital in addition to various community outreach and volunteer initiatives. Research is conducted in many areas, including anthropology, robotics, geophysics, and entomology.

Contents

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History

Stanford was founded by railroad magnate and California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Stanford. It is named in honor of their only son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid as a teenager. Locals and university affiliates 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 University's founding grant was written on November 11, 1885, and accepted by the first Board of Trustees on November 14. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, and the University officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students, with free tuition and 15 faculty members, seven of whom hailed from Cornell University. The school was established as a coeducational institution although it maintained a cap on female enrollment for many years.

The official motto of Stanford University, selected by the Stanfords, is "Die Luft der Freiheit weht." Translated from German, this quotation of Ulrich von Hutten means "The wind of freedom blows." At the time of the school's establishment, German had recently replaced Latin as the dominant language of science and philosophy (a position it would hold until World War II).

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Campus

Image:Stanford campus aerial photo.jpg Stanford University owns 8,180 acres (32 km²). The main campus is bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard and Sand Hill Road, in the center of the Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula.

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. Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson, in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches.

Much of this first construction was destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake but the University retains the Quad, the old Chemistry Building and Encina Hall (reportedly the residence of John Steinbeck during his time at Stanford). After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake inflicted further damage, the University implemented a billion-dollar capital improvement plan to retrofit and renovate older buildings for new, up-to-date uses.

Many of the modern buildings were designed in the Spanish-colonial style common to California, with red tile roofs and white stucco exteriors, which gives the campus a uniform yet distinctly Californian look—the red tile roofs and bright blue skies common to the region are a famously complementary combination. The University has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lagunita), both home to the endangered California Tiger Salamander.

Image:Stanford2.jpg The off-campus Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a nature reserve owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research. Hopkins Marine Station, located in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.

Contemporary campus landmarks include the Stanford Quad and Memorial Church, the art museum 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 House, and the 1919 Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House, are both National Historic Landmarks now on university grounds.

The United States Postal Service has assigned two ZIP codes to Stanford: 94305 for campus mail in general and 94309 for student mail. Stanford lies within area code 650 and campus phone numbers start with 723, 724, 725, 736, 497, or 498.

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Institutions

Image:Stanford University campus from above.jpg Stanford University is governed by a board of trustees, in conjuction with the university president, provosts, faculty senate, and the deans of the various schools. Besides the university, the Stanford trustees oversee Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital), as well as many acres of undeveloped foothills.

Other Stanford-affiliated institutions include the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Stanford Research Institute, a now-independent institution which originated at the University.

Stanford also houses the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a major public policy think tank that attracts visiting scholars from around the world, and the Stanford Institute for International Studies, which is dedicated to the more specific study of international relations. Image:Hoover Tower.JPG The Stanford University Libraries hold a collection of more than eight million volumes. The main library in the SU library system is Green Library. Meyer Library holds the East Asia collection and the student-accessible media resources. Other significant collections include the Lane Medical Library, Jackson Business Library, Falconer Biology Library, Cubberley Education Library, Branner Earth Sciences Library, Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, Jonsson Government Documents collection, Crown Law Library, the Stanford Auxiliary Library (SAL), the SLAC Library, the Hoover library, the Marine Biology Library at Hopkins Marine Station, the Music Library, and the University's special collections.

Digital libraries and text services include HighWire Press, the Humanities Digital Information Services group and the Media Microtext Center. Several academic departments and some residences also have their own libraries.

Stanford University student traditions include Full Moon on the Quad, Sunday Flicks, steam-tunnelling, Big Game Gaieties (a student-written, composed, and produced musical put on before Big Game), primal scream (performed by stressed students at night during finals week) and Viennese Ball, which was started in the 1970's by students returning from the now defunct Stanford in Vienna program. Other old traditions include the Big Game bonfire at Lake Lagunita, and the Halloween party at the Stanford family mausoleum (though this has not happened since 2000 due to funding issues).

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Community

Stanford has been coeducational since its founding; however, between approximately 1899 and 1933, there was a policy in place limiting female enrollment to 500 students and maintaining a ratio of three males for every one female student. As of 2005, undergraduate enrollment is split nearly evenly between the sexes, but male enrollees outnumber female enrollees about 2:1 at the graduate level.

Stanford places a strong focus on residential education. Approximately 94 percent of undergraduate students live in university housing, with another five percent living in Stanford housing at the overseas campuses. In addition to numerous dorms and residential houses, Stanford is home to three housed sororities and seven housed fraternities. Several residences are considered theme houses, with either an ethnic or academic focus.

At any time, around 50 percent of the graduate population lives on campus. When construction concludes on the new Munger graduate residence this percentage will probably increase.

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Academics

Image:Stanford University Walkway Panorama.jpg The schools of the University include the School of Humanities and Sciences, School of Engineering, School of Earth Sciences, School of Education, Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Stanford awards the following degrees: B.A., B.S., B.A.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D., D.M.A., Ed.D., Ed.S., M.D., M.B.A., J.D., J.S.D., J.S.M., LL.M., M.A.T., M.F.A., M.L.S., M.L.A., and ENG.

The University enrolls approximately 6,700 undergraduates and 8,000 grad students. The University has approximately 1,700 faculty members, including 17 Nobel laureates and 23 MacArthur fellows. The largest part of the faculty (40 percent) are affiliated with the medical school, while a third serve in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Stanford built its international reputation as the pioneering Silicon Valley institution through top programs in engineering and the sciences, spawning such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, VMware,Yahoo!, Google, and Sun Microsystems—indeed, "Sun" originally stood for "Stanford University Network." The university also offers programs in the humanities and social sciences, particularly creative writing, history, government, economics, communication and psychology.

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Admission

Admission is extremely competitive, and according to America's Best Colleges 2006 by U.S. News & World Report, it is the fourth-most selective college in the United States (after Princeton, Yale University and Harvard). In 2005 listings produced by U.S. News & World Report, it is currently ranked fifth in the nation (tied with Duke University) in overall quality. Stanford is the third-ranked university in the Academic Ranking of World Universities [1]. In 2005, Stanford's undergraduate admission rate was 11.9 percent, from a pool of 20,194 applicants. The admission rate at Stanford Law School is 7.7 percent. The acceptance rates at the university's medical school (3.3 percent) and business school (10 percent) are the lowest in the country.

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Arts

Stanford has a thriving artistic and musical community, including theater groups such as Ram's Head, and award-winning a cappella music groups, such as the Stanford Harmonics, the Stanford Mendicants, Stanford Fleet Street Singers, Talisman A Cappella, and Everyday People.

The creative writing program brings young writers to campus via the Stegner Fellowships and other graduate scholarship programs. This Boy's Life author Tobias Wolff teaches writing to undergraduates and graduate students.

Dance aficionados can participate in the school's vintage dance program (a part of the Drama department) or try out for the Stanford Band's Dollie dance troupe.

Stanford University is home to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts museum with 24 galleries, sculpture gardens, terraces, and a courtyard first established in 1891 by Jane and Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child.

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Athletics

Image:BlockSwithTree.gif Stanford participates in the NCAA's Division I-A and forms part of the Pacific Ten Conference. It also has membership in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation for indoor track (men and women), water polo (men and women), women's gymnastics, women's lacrosse, men's gymnastics, and men's volleyball. Stanford's traditional sports rival is Cal (UC Berkeley).

Stanford has won the NACDA Director's Cup (formerly known as the Sears Cup) every year for the past eleven years (the award has been offered the past twelve years), honoring the first-ranked collegiate athletic program in the United States. Stanford has earned 91 NCAA National Titles since its establishment (second-most by any university), 74 NCAA National Titles since 1980 (most by any university), and 393 individual NCAA championships (most by any university). Stanford athletes have won 47 Olympic medals since 1990; if Stanford were a country in the 1996 Olympics, it would have placed 7th in medal count. 15 athletes affiliated with Stanford University participated in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, winning a total of 17 medals.

Stanford offers 34 varsity sports (18 female, 15 male, one coed), 19 club sports and 37 intramural sports—about 800 students participate in intercollegiate sports. The University offers about 300 athletic scholarships.

The winner of the annual "Big Game" between the Cal and Stanford football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe. Stanford's football team played in the first Rose Bowl in 1902. Stanford won back-to-back Rose Bowls in 1971 and 1972. Stanford has played in 12 Rose Bowls, most recently in 2000. Stanford's Jim Plunkett won the Heisman Trophy in 1970.

Until 1930, Stanford did not have a "mascot" name for its athletic teams. In that year, the athletic department adopted the name "Indians." In 1972, "Indians" was dropped after a complaint of racial insensitivity was lodged by Native American students at Stanford. The Stanford sports teams are now officially referred to as the Stanford Cardinal (the deep red color, not the bird), but the band's mascot, "The Tree", has become associated with the school in general. Part of Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB), the tree symbol derives from the El Palo Alto redwood tree on the Stanford and City of Palo Alto seals. The exact meaning of Stanford's name is not easily understood, some think of it as a punchline to Harvard's name which is the Crimson.

Stanford hosts an annual U.S. Open Series tennis tournament (Bank of the West Classic) at Taube Stadium. Cobb Track, Angell Field, and Avery Stadium Pool are considered world-class athletic facilities.

Club sports, while not officially a part of Stanford athletics, are numerous at Stanford. Sports include archery, badminton, cricket, cycling, equestrian, ice hockey, judo, kayaking, men's lacrosse, polo, racquetball, rugby, squash, skiing, taekwondo, triathlon and Ultimate, and in some cases the teams have historically performed quite well. For instance, the men's Ultimate team won a national championship in 2002, and the women's team won in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005.

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People

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University Presidents

  1. David Starr Jordan (1891–1913)
  2. John Casper Branner (1913–1915)
  3. Ray Lyman Wilbur (1916–1943)
  4. Donald Bertrand Tresidder (1943–1948)
  5. J. E. Wallace Sterling (1949–1968)
  6. Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer (1968–1970)
  7. Richard Wall Lyman (1970–1980)
  8. Donald Kennedy (1980–1992)
  9. Gerhard Casper (1992–2000)
  10. John L. Hennessy (2000–present)
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Provosts

The position of Provost was created in 1952 during the Presidency of J. E. Wallace Sterling. Many people consider the Stanford Provost to be the "heir apparent" to the President because of the five men who succeeded Sterling as President, three were Provost of Stanford (Lyman, Kennedy, and Hennessy), one was Provost of the University of Chicago (Casper), while the other was President of Rice University (Pitzer). The Provost is the University's chief academic and budget officer. The Provost and the President together conduct Stanford's relationships with the neighboring community and other schools and organizations.

  1. Douglas M. Whitaker (1952–1955)
  2. Frederick E. Terman (1955–1965)
  3. Richard Wall Lyman (1967–1970)
  4. William F. Miller (1971–1978)
  5. Gerald J. Lieberman (1979–1979)
  6. Donald Kennedy (1979–1980)
  7. Albert M. Hastorf (1980–1984)
  8. James N. Rosse (1984–1992)
  9. Gerald J. Lieberman (1992–1993)
  10. Condoleezza Rice (1993–1999)
  11. John L. Hennessy (1999–2000)
  12. John W. Etchemendy (2000–present)
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Notable alumni, faculty, and staff

Template:Main Stanford has many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders Herbert Hoover and Ehud Barak; Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and William Rehnquist; entrepreneur Charles Schwab; Hewlett-Packard co-founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard; Google chairmen Sergey Brin and Larry Page; and athlete John Elway. Others who attended but did not get degrees include John F. Kennedy, actress Jennifer Connelly, author John Steinbeck, and athletes Tiger Woods and John McEnroe. Among its most famous faculty or former faculty members are Condoleeza Rice, Douglas Osheroff and Lawrence Lessig.

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Miscellaneous

  • Many people erroneously think that the plural of "Cardinal" is "Cardinals." The word "Cardinal" is used both singularly and plurally; it refers to the color, not the bird.
  • Stanford is the university behind Folding@home, one of the most widely disseminated distributed computing projects in the life sciences field, allowing hobbyists and enthusiasts to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer processor cycles. It studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases.
  • Stanford Research Institute hosted one of the ARPANET's four original nodes.
  • Apparently because it could not locate a copy in any of its libraries, the Soviet Union was obliged to ask the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University, for a microfilm copy of its original edition of the first issue of Pravda (dated March 5, 1917).
  • The story that a lady in "faded gingham" and a man in a "homespun threadbare suit" went to visit the president of Harvard about making a donation, were rebuffed, and then founded Stanford is untrue. It has been debunked by Stanford.
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Further reading

  • Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, Columbia University Press 1994
  • Rebecca S. Lowen, R. S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford, University of California Press 1997
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See also

Image:Stanford banner.jpg

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External links

For the student or prospective student

Stanford publications and other media outlets

For the visitor

Template:Mapit-US-streetscale Template:Commons
Template:Pacific Ten Conference

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Notes

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