Stanford

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Stanford University

Leland Stanford Junior University
Motto	Die Luft der Freiheit weht (German)[1]
Motto in English	The wind of freedom blows[1]
Type	Private
Established	1891[2][3]
Endowment	$22.398 billion (2016)[4]
President	Marc Tessier-Lavigne
Provost	Persis Drell
Academic staff	2,118[5]
Administrative staff	11,128[6] excluding SHC
Students	15,877
Undergraduates	6,980[7]
Postgraduates	8,897[7]
Location	Stanford, California, U.S.
Campus	Suburban, 8,180 acres (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km2)[7]
Colors	Cardinal and white
Nickname	Cardinal
Mascot	none (the Stanford Tree is the mascot of the Band but not the university)
Sporting affiliations	NCAA Division I FBS – Pac-12
Website	www.stanford.edu

Stanford

Location in the United States

Stanford

Location in California

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University,^[8] is a private research university in Stanford, California, adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Its 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km²)^[9] campus is one of the largest in the United States.^{[note 1]} Stanford also has land and facilities elsewhere.^[7][9]
The university was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford was a former Governor of California and U.S. Senator; he made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students 125 years ago on October 1, 1891,^[2][3] as a coeducational and non-denominational institution.
Stanford University struggled financially after Leland Stanford's death in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.^[12] 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.^[13] 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.^[14]
There are three academic schools that have both undergraduate and graduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 112 NCAA team championships,^[15] the second-most for a university, 483 individual championships, the most in Division I,^[16] and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, for 22 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995.^[17]
Stanford faculty and alumni have founded a large number of companies that produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.^[18] It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 20 Turing Award laureates.^{[note 2]} It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress.^[39][40] Sixty Nobel laureates and seven Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty or staff.^[41]

Contents

• 1 History
• 2 Land
  • 2.1 Central campus
  • 2.2 Non-central campus
  • 2.3 Faculty residences
  • 2.4 Other uses
  • 2.5 Landmarks
• 3 Administration and organization
  • 3.1 Endowment and fundraising
• 4 Academics
  • 4.1 Teaching and learning
  • 4.2 Research centers and institutes
  • 4.3 Libraries and digital resources
  • 4.4 Arts
  • 4.5 Reputation and rankings
• 5 Discoveries and innovation
• 6 Student life
  • 6.1 Student body
  • 6.2 Dormitories and student housing
  • 6.3 Athletics
  • 6.4 Traditions
  • 6.5 Religious life
  • 6.6 Greek life
  • 6.7 Student groups
  • 6.8 Safety
• 7 People
  • 7.1 Award laureates and scholars
• 8 See also
• 9 Notes
• 10 References
• 11 Further reading
• 12 External links

History

Center of the campus in 1891.^[42]

Main article: History of Stanford University

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford's previous Palo Alto farm. Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), which was established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.^[43]
Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities and most specifically Cornell University and Harvard University. Stanford opened being called the "Cornell of the West" in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell professors and alumni including its first president, David Starr Jordan. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.^[44]

Land

An aerial photograph of the center of the Stanford University campus in 2008.

Most of Stanford University is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km²)^[9] campus on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose; this is the founding grant. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.^[45] Besides the central campus described below, the university also operates at several more remote locations, some elsewhere on the main campus, some further afield (see below).
Stanford's main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.^[46]

Central campus

The academic central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, and Sand Hill Road. The United States Postal Service has assigned it two ZIP codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P.O. box mail. It lies within area code 650.

View of the main quadrangle of Stanford University with Memorial Church in the center background from across the grass covered Oval.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates or intends to operate in various locations outside of its central campus.
On the founding grant:

• Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.^[47]
• Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.^[48]

Off the founding grant:

• Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
• Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a "mini-Stanford."^[49]
• China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Peking University.^[50][51]

Locations in development:

• Redwood City: in 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession.^[52][53] In 2015 the university announced a development plan.^[54]

Lake Lagunita in early spring; the Dish, a large radio telescope and local landmark, is visible in the Stanford-owned foothills behind the lake and is the high point of a popular campus jogging and walking trail.

Faculty residences

Many Stanford faculty members live in the "Faculty Ghetto", within walking or biking distance of campus.^[55] The Faculty Ghetto is composed of land owned entirely by Stanford. Similar to a condominium, the houses can be bought and sold but the land under the houses is rented on a 99-year lease. Houses in the "Ghetto" appreciate and depreciate, but not as rapidly as overall Silicon Valley values. However, it remains an expensive area in which to own property, and the average price of single-family homes on campus is actually higher than in Palo Alto.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[56] El Camino Park, the oldest Palo Alto city park (established 1914), is also on Stanford land.^[57]

Landmarks

Contemporary campus landmarks include the Main Quad and Memorial Church, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Bing Concert Hall, the Stanford Mausoleum with the nearby 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. The Claw (officially White Memorial Fountain) between the Stanford Bookstore and the Old Union is a popular place to meet and to engage in the Stanford custom of “fountain hopping”; it was installed in 1964 and designed by Aristides Demetrios after a national competition as a memorial for two brothers in the class of 1949, William N. White and John B. White II, one of whom died before graduating and one shortly after in 1952.^{[58][59][60][61]}