Stanford University
| Official Seal of Stanford University | |
| Motto | Die Luft der Freiheit weht (German for "The wind of freedom blows") |
|---|---|
| Type | Private |
| Established | 1891[1] |
| Endowment | US$15.2 billion[2] |
| President | John L. Hennessy |
| Undergraduates | 6,705[3] |
| Postgraduates | 8,176[4] |
| Location | , , |
| Campus | Suburban, 8,180 acres (33.1 km²) |
| Athletics | Stanford Cardinal |
| Mascot | None. Unofficially, the Stanford Tree. |
| Website | Stanford.edu |
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 and approximately 20 miles northwest of San Jose in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County. Adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, California, Stanford lies at the heart of the Silicon Valley, both geographically and historically.
Situated on one of the largest university campuses in the nation, the University comprises the 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.
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 child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid just before his 16th birthday. On the morning of their son's death, Leland Sr. is said to have said to his wife, "The children of California shall be our children."
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[5].
The school was established as a coeducational institution although it maintained a cap on female enrollment for many years. This was not due to any anti-female sentiment but rather based on a concern of Jane Stanford, who worried that without such a cap, the school could become an all-girl institution, which she did not feel would be an appropriate memorial for her son.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed parts of the Main Quad (including the original iteration of Memorial Church) as well as the gate that first marked the entrance of the school; rebuilding on a somewhat less grandiose scale began immediately.
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).
Campus
Stanford University owns 8,183 acres (32 km²). The main campus is bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard and Sand Hill Road, in the northwest part 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. The original campus was also designed in the Spanish-colonial style common to California known as Mission Revival. The red tile roofs and solid sandstone masonry hold a distinctly Californian appearance and most of the subsequently erected buildings have maintained consistent exteriors. The red tile roofs and bright blue skies common to the region are a famously complementary combination.
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.
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. The University also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the endangered California Tiger Salamander.
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 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.
Institutions
Stanford University is governed by a board of trustees, in conjunction 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 Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which is dedicated to the more specific study of international relations.
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 vast 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 Miller Marine Biology Library at Hopkins Marine Station, the Music Library, and the University's special collections. There are 19 libraries in all.
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.
Traditions
- Full Moon on the Quad: A student gathering in the Main Quad of the university. Traditionally, seniors exchange kisses with freshmen, although students of all four classes (as well as the occasional graduate student or stranger) have been known to participate.
- Sunday Flicks: Watching a film on Sunday night in Memorial Auditorium. Usually includes paper airplanes.
- Steam-tunnelling: Exploring the steam tunnels under the Stanford campus
- Fountain-hopping: Cavorting in any of Stanford's many fountains (such as the Claw in White Plaza)
- Big Game events: Including Big Game Gaieties (a student-written, composed, and produced musical), which is the week before and including the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley.
- Primal scream: Performed by stressed students at midnight during Dead Week
- Midnight Breakfast: During dead week, Stanford faculty serves breakfast to students in several locations on campus (you might see a vice-provost refilling orange juice, etc.)
- Viennese Ball: a formal ball with waltzes which was started in the 1970s by students returning from the now closed Stanford in Vienna program.[1]
- The Stanford Powwow: Organized by the Stanford American Indian Organization and held every Mother's Day weekend.[2]
- Halloween Party: Party at the Stanford family mausoleum, on hiatus since 2001 due to the fear that the festivities would further deteriorate the conditions of the mausoleum, the event was revived in 2006.
- Senior Pub Night: On most Thursdays during the school year, seniors gather together at a bar in Palo Alto or San Francisco. The location rotates week to week, and chartered buses are organized to take the seniors safely between the bar and campus.
Older, now inactive traditions include the Big Game bonfire on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the autumn).
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 on-campus university housing, with another five percent living in Stanford housing at the overseas campuses. According to the Stanford Housing Assignments Office, undergraduates live in 77 different houses, including dormitories, row houses, fraternities and sororities. Residences are located generally just outside the campus core, within ten minutes (on foot or bike) of most classrooms and libraries. Some residences are for freshmen only; others give priority to sophomores, others to both freshmen and sophomores; some are available for upperclass students only, and some are open to all four classes. All residences are coed except for seven all-male fraternities, three all-female sororities, and one all-female house. In most residences men and women live on the same floor, but a few dorms are configured for men and women to live on separate floors.
Stanford is home to three housed sororities (Pi Beta Phi, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Delta Delta Delta) and seven housed fraternities (Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sigma Chi, Kappa Sigma, Kappa Alpha, Theta Delta Chi, Sigma Nu, Phi Kappa Psi), as well as a number of unhoused Greek organizations, such as Kappa Kappa Gamma, Delta Tau Delta and Sigma Phi Epsilon. 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.
Academics
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., MFA, 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 18 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 business, 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.
Arts
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. There are also a large number of outdoor art installations throughout the campus, primarily sculptures, but some murals as well. The Papau New Guinea Sculpture Garden near Roble Hall features handmade wood carvings and "totem poles."
Stanford has a thriving artistic and musical community, including theater groups such as Ram's Head Theatrical Society, and award-winning a cappella music groups, such as the Stanford Mendicants, Stanford Fleet Street Singers, Stanford Harmonics, Mixed Company, Talisman A Cappella, and Everyday People.
Stanford's dance community is one of the most vibrant in the country, with an active dance division (in the Drama Department) and over 30 different dance-related student groups, including the Stanford Band's Dollie dance troupe.
Perhaps most unique of all is its social and vintage dance community, cultivated by dance historian Richard Powers and enjoyed by hundreds of students and thousands of alumni. Stanford hosts monthly informal dances (called Jammix) and large quarterly dance events, including Ragtime Ball (fall), the Stanford Viennese Ball (winter), and Big Dance (spring). Stanford also boasts a student-run swing performance troupe called Swingtime and several alumni performance groups, including Decadance and the Academy of Danse Libre.
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. Knight Journalism Fellows are invited to spend a year at the campus taking seminars and courses of their choice. There is also an extracurricular writing and performance group called the [[Stanford Spoken Word Collective], which also serves as the school's poetry slam team.
Stanford also hosts various publishing courses for professionals. Stanford Professional Publishing Course, which has been offered on campus since the late 1970s, brings together international publishing professionals to discuss changing business models in magazine and book publishing.
Athletics
Stanford participates in the NCAA's Division I-A and forms part of the Pacific-10 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. Women's field hockey team is part of the NorPac conference. 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 twelve years (the award has been offered the past thirteen years), honoring the first-ranked collegiate athletic program in the United States.
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), in reference to the university's official color since the 19th century (later cardinal and white); 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.
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 (union), 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, the women's Ultimate team in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2006, and the women's rugby team in 2005 and 2006.
NCAA achievements: 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).
Olympic achievements: According to the Stanford Daily, "Stanford has been represented in every summer Olympiad since 1908."[6] As of 2004, Stanford athletes had won 182 Olympic medals at the summer games; "In fact, in every Olympiad since 1912, Stanford athletes have won at least one and as many as 17 gold medals."[7]
People
University Presidents
- David Starr Jordan (1891–1913)
- John Casper Branner (1913–1915)
- Ray Lyman Wilbur (1916–1943)
- Donald Bertrand Tresidder (1943–1948)
- J. E. Wallace Sterling (1949–1968)
- Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer (1968–1970)
- Richard Wall Lyman (1970–1980)
- Donald Kennedy (1980–1992)
- Gerhard Casper (1992–2000)
- John L. Hennessy (2000–present)
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.
- Douglas M. Whitaker (1952–1955)
- Frederick E. Terman (1955–1965)
- Richard Wall Lyman (1967–1970)
- William F. Miller (1971–1978)
- Gerald J. Lieberman (1979–1979)
- Donald Kennedy (1979–1980)
- Albert M. Hastorf (1980–1984)
- James N. Rosse (1984–1992)
- Gerald J. Lieberman (1992–1993)
- Condoleezza Rice (1993–1999)
- John L. Hennessy (1999–2000)
- John W. Etchemendy (2000–present)
Notable alumni, faculty, and staff
Admission and rankings
According to "America's Best Colleges 2007" by U.S. News & World Report, the university's undergraduate program is ranked fourth in the nation (tied with MIT and Caltech) in overall quality.
Stanford is the third-ranked university in the 2006 Academic Ranking of World Universities[8], the sixth-ranked global university in the 2006 Times Higher Education Supplement[9], and the second-ranked global university in the international edition of August 2006 Newsweek magazine [10]. However, Stanford has never been first in any of these general rankings[11][12][13].
In 2006, Stanford's undergraduate admission rate was 10.8 percent, from a pool of 22,223 applicants—the lowest rate of undergraduate admission in the history of the university.[14] The acceptance rates at the university's law school (7.7 percent), medical school (3.3 percent), and business school (10 percent) are also among the lowest in the country.
Trivia
- 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, which, it should be noted, has a home range far distant from the Santa Clara Valley.
- Stanford Research Institute hosted one of the ARPANET's four original nodes.
- Stanford University 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.
- 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)[citation needed].
- The physicist Werner Heisenberg was once asked if he knew where Stanford University was located. "I believe it is on the West Coast of the United States, not far from San Francisco. There is also another school nearby, and they steal each other's axes," he replied, referring to Stanford's rivalry with the University of California, Berkeley.
- In 1910, David Starr Jordan, Stanford's first President, was asked by another professor how many students he knew by name. "Whenever I learn the name of a student," the biologist responded, "I forget the name of a fish."
Myths
- 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.
- One persistent campus legend, spread by tour guides and campus publications alike, is that Stanford University occupies the second-largest university campus in the world, to Moscow State University in Russia. This is easily refutable. Moscow State's campus is only 205.7 hectares (508.3 acres)[15], making it significantly smaller than Stanford's. Meanwhile, Duke University weighs in at 8,610 acres [16], and the United States Air Force Academy has 18,000 acres at its disposal. So, Stanford University is at best the third-largest campus in the United States, and possibly even lower than that.
References
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
See also
External links
- Stanford University Official Website
- Stanford Athletics Official Website
- Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Unofficial Student Guide to Stanford
- Stanford Management Company Official Website
- Wellspring of Innovation: Database of Stanford-affiliated companies
- Photos of Stanford University
- Photo tour of Stanford (extended version)
For the student or prospective student
- Stanford University Prospective Students Site
- Unofficial Guide to Stanford
- Associated Students of Stanford University Official Website
- Stanford University Student Groups Website
- Stanford Student Enterprises
- Chabad at Stanford, Jewish Student Center
- Stanford Polo Club
- Memoirs of a Stanford Student
- Stanford Astronomical Society
- Rate Professors
Stanford publications and other media outlets
- The Stanford Daily (The student newspaper)
- The Cardinal Inquirer
- Stanford Review (The conservative student newspaper)
- Stanford Progressive (The progressive student publication)
- Stanford Report (The official university newspaper)
- KZSU 90.1 FM Stanford Radio
- Stanford Chaparral Official Website (The student humor magazine)
- Stanford Scientific Magazine (The student-run science, ethics, and policy publication)
For the visitor
- Stanford Events Calendar
- Campus Attractions
- Points of Interest on campus (plants)
- Searchable Campus Map
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