Stanford University

On Oct. 1, 1891, Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and building. In the early morning hours, construction workers were still preparing the Inner Quadrangle for the ceremonies. The great arch at the western end had been backed with panels of red and white cloth to form an alcove where dignitaries would sit.

The 2,000 seats set up in the three-acre Quad soon proved insufficient for the growing crowd. By midmorning, people were streaming across fields on foot. At half past 10, the special train from San Francisco arrived on the temporary spur that had been used during construction. As a faculty member recalled, “Hope was in every heart, and the presiding spirit of freedom prompted us to dare greatly.”

Jane and Leland Stanford established the university in memory of their only child, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid fever at 15. Within weeks of his 1884 death, the Stanfords determined that, because they no longer could do anything for their own child, they would use their wealth to do something for “other people’s” children.

They settled on creating a great university, one that, from the outset, was untraditional: coeducational in a time when most private universities were all-male; nondenominational when most were associated with a religious organization; and avowedly practical, producing “cultured and useful citizens” when most were concerned only with the former.

Leland Stanford devoted to the university the fortune he had amassed, first by supplying provisions to the ’49ers mining for California gold and later as one of the “Big Four,” whose Central Pacific Railroad laid tracks eastward to meet the Union Pacific and complete the transcontinental railway. Included in the grant to the new university was the Stanfords’ more than 8,000-acre Palo Alto Stock Farm for the breeding and training of trotting horses and thoroughbred stock, 35 miles south of the family’s San Francisco residence. The campus still carries the nickname “the Farm.”

Under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who created New York’s Central Park, and Charles Allerton Coolidge, a 28-year-old who designed the buildings, the farm’s open fields became the site of arcades and quadrangles. In a 1913 letter, Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, wrote: “The yellow sandstone arches and cloisters, the ‘red-tiled roofs against the azure sky,’ make a picture that can never be forgotten, itself an integral part of a Stanford education.”

On the university’s opening day, Jordan said to Stanford’s Pioneer Class: “It is for us as teachers and students in the university’s first year to lay the foundations of a school which may last as long as human civilization. ... It is hallowed by no traditions; it is hampered by none. Its finger posts all point forward.”

Thank you for your interest in Stanford University. As its 10th president and a faculty member since 1977, I think Stanford is a very special place.

Stanford is recognized as one of the world’s leading universities. Our renowned professors offer students a remarkable range of academic courses that are paired with an extraordinary breadth of extracurricular activities and opportunities for research, independent study and public service.

In the Founding Grant, Jane and Leland Stanford stated the university’s mission: to prepare students “for personal success and direct usefulness in life” and “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” More than a century later, Stanford University remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world.

In recent years, we have launched university-wide initiatives on human health, the environment and sustainability, international affairs and the arts. We believe that collaboration across disciplines will be key to future advances, and multidisciplinary research and teaching are at the heart of these new initiatives.

Our undergraduate students are an important part of these efforts. Over the past decade, innovations in undergraduate education at Stanford include opportunities for students to work with faculty in small classes from their first days on campus, the chance to study abroad or in Washington, D.C. and a variety of opportunities for working on research projects. For many students, there is no greater thrill than being at the edge of a field and advancing the frontier of knowledge.

The pioneering spirit that inspired Jane and Leland Stanford to start this university more than a century ago and that helped build Silicon Valley at the doorstep of the campus encourages boldness in everything we do — whether those efforts occur in the library, in the classroom, in a laboratory, in a theater or on an athletic field.

We hope that you, too, find your place at Stanford.

• Feb 19

  

   

  Category: Career

  I'm looking to connect with other Stanford alum in NYC who also work in the financial district. Are there any groups that are already meeting on this? Please advise. Thanks.

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• Feb 12

  

   

  Category: Education

  I am in commercial real estate and looking for some help on the market in Midwestern Commercial Development. If anyone lives in the midwest and could give me a global picture of the market out there, I'd love to network and use your help in extending my companies operations...

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