STANFORD UNIVERSITY
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD CALIFORNIA
Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, founded the university in 1891 in honor of his son, Leland Stanford, Jr. who died of typhoid at the age of 16. The university was established as a coeducational and non-denominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford’s 1893 death and much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Future President Herbert C. Hoover founded an eponymous institute for war and peace studies in 1919 following World War I.
Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and major research in solid state electronics. Stanford faculty and alumni founded Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, and Google.
The university is organized into seven schools including academic schools of Humanities and Sciences and Earth Sciences as well as professional schools of Business, Education, Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Stanford enrolls approximately 6,600 undergraduate and 12,000 graduate students annually. Stanford is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and managed US$1.15 billion in research funding and $12.6 billion in endowment support in 2009.
Stanford competes in 34 varsity sports and is one of two private universities in the NCAA Division I-A Pacific-10 Conference. Stanford’s athletic program has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup since 1995. The University of California, Berkeley is Stanford’s traditional rival, and the football teams compete annually in the “Big Game”.
The Hoover Institution (full name: the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace) at Stanford was set up by Herbert C. Hoover, one of Stanford’s first graduates. He had been in charge of American relief efforts in Europe after World War I before his election as president of the United States in 1928. Hoover’s express purpose was to collect the records of contemporary history as it was happening. Hoover’s helpers frequently risked their lives to rescue documentary and rare printed material, especially from countries under Nazi or Communist rule.