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The story
Founded by Jane Stanford and Leland Stanford in 1885.1
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford as a tribute to the memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid in 1884 at the age of 15. The university officially opened in 1891 on the Stanfords' former Palo Alto farm. Modeled after the great Eastern universities, specifically Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Stanford was often referred to as the "Cornell of the West" in its early years. This comparison was largely due to a significant portion of its faculty being former Cornell affiliates, including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and its second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to make higher education accessible, non-sectarian, and inclusive of women and men. Cornell is recognized as one of the first American universities to embrace this progressive approach to education, and Stanford quickly followed suit, solidifying its commitment to these ideals.
From an architectural perspective, the Stanfords sought to distinguish their university by emulating the style of English university buildings while also incorporating elements of local Mission Revival architecture and Californian heritage. They specified in the founding grant 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." The Stanfords also hired renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who previously designed the Cornell campus, to design the Stanford campus.
When Leland Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was put in jeopardy due to a federal lawsuit against his estate, but Jane Stanford insisted the university remain in operation throughout the financial crisis. 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. During the early-20th 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; it moved to the Stanford campus in 1959.
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. 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. The Stanford Graduate School of Business was founded in 1925 at the urging of then-trustee Herbert Hoover. 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.
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. During the 1950s, he established Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech commercial campus on university land. 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. Shockley and Terman are both often described as the "fathers of Silicon Valley".
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. 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. Stanford was once considered a school for "the wealthy", but controversies in later decades damaged its reputation. The 1971 Stanford prison experiment was criticized as unethical, and the misuse of government funds from 1981 resulted in severe penalties for the school's research funding, and the resignation of President Donald Kennedy in 1992.
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...". Stanford continues to have a relationship with the defense industry. They currently run a 'Hacking for Defense' class, in which students partner with military companies on national security problems sponsored by the Department of Defense In 2021, they opened the Gordian Knot Centre, a hub for national security problems and defense technology programs. With initial funding of $1.28 million from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, its aim is to, "bridge silos across the Department of Defense (DoD), industry and academia".
Wallace Sterling was the President from 1949 to 1968 and 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". Achievements during Sterling's tenure included:
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Moving the Stanford Medical School from a small, inadequate campus in San Francisco to a new facility on the Stanford campus which was fully integrated into the university to an unusual degree for medical schools.
Establishing the Stanford Industrial Park (now the Stanford Research Park) and the Stanford Shopping Center on leased University land, thus stabilizing the university's finances. The Stanford Industrial Park, together with the university's aggressive pursuit of government research grants, helped to spur the development of Silicon Valley.
Increasing the number of students receiving financial aid from less than 5% when he took office to more than one-third when he retired.
Increasing the size of the student body from 8,300 to 11,300 and the size of the tenured faculty from 322 to 974.
Launching the PACE fundraising program, the largest such program ever undertaken by any university up to that time.
Launching a building boom on campus that included a new bookstore, post office, student union, dormitories, a faculty club, and many academic buildings.
Creating the Overseas Campus program for undergraduates in 1958.
In 2026, the university was declared an undesirable organization in Russia.
From Wikipedia’s article on Stanford University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5