The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States. The university was founded in 1891 by railroad multimillionaire Leland Stanford.
Stanford enrolls about 6,700 undergraduate and about 8,000 graduate students from the United States and around the world every year. The university is divided into a number of schools such as the Stanford Business School, Stanford Law School, Stanford School of Medicine, and Stanford School of Engineering. The university is in Silicon Valley, and its alumni have founded companies including Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics, and Google.
The 2010 edition of U.S. News & World Report ranked Stanford’s undergraduate program fourth in the nation (behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and tied with Caltech, MIT and University of Pennsylvania) and Stanford is consistently ranked high in other college and university rankings. Stanford is one of two private universities that compete in the Pacific-10 Conference. Stanford’s main athletic rival is Cal, and the two schools meet annually in the Big Game, a football game in which the winner is awarded the Stanford Axe. Cal is currently the holder of the Axe, having won the 2009 Big Game.
Origins
Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate, United States Senator, and former California Governor, and his wife, Jane Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in 1884 just before his 16th birthday. His parents decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford told his wife, “The children of California shall be our children.”
Senator and Mrs. Stanford visited Harvard’s President Eliot and asked how much it would cost to duplicate Harvard in Palo Alto. Eliot replied that he supposed $15 million would be enough. However, the Stanfords were gracefully rebuffed in securing A.D. White, the president of Cornell University, as Stanford’s founding president.[7][8] Instead, White recommended David Starr Jordan, White’s former student and the president of Indiana University. He was their eventual choice to direct Stanford, although they had offered leaders of the Ivy League twice his salary.[9]
Locals and members of the university community 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 motto of Stanford University, selected by President Jordan, is “Die Luft der Freiheit weht.” Translated from the German, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.[10]
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 after six years of planning and building, the university officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students and 15 faculty members, seven of them from Cornell[11]. When the school opened, students were not charged for tuition, a program which lasted into the 1930s [12]. Among the first class of students was a young future president Herbert Hoover, who would claim to be the first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.[13]
The original ‘inner quad’ buildings (1887–91) were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Francis A. Walker, Charles Allerton Coolidge, and Leland Stanford himself.
My Blog 