Stanford University

2006-05-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County. Adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, Stanford lies at the heart of the Silicon Valley, both geographically and historically.

Situated on an expansive campus in suburban California, the University offers, in addition to its undergraduate college, schools of engineering, law, medicine, education, business, earth sciences, and humanities and sciences. Stanford hosts programs and a teaching hospital in addition to various community outreach and volunteer initiatives. Research is conducted in many areas, including anthropology, robotics, geophysics, and entomology.

Campus

Stanford University owns 8,180 acres (32 km²). The main campus is bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard and Sand Hill Road, in the center of the Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula.

In the summer of 1886, when the campus was first being planned, Stanford brought the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker, and prominent Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted westward for consultations. Olmsted worked out the general concept for the campus and its buildings, rejecting a hillside site in favor of the more practical flatlands. Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson, in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches.

Much of this first construction was destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake but the University retains the Quad, the old Chemistry Building and Encina Hall (reportedly the residence of John Steinbeck during his time at Stanford). After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake inflicted further damage, the University implemented a billion-dollar capital improvement plan to retrofit and renovate older buildings for new, up-to-date uses.

Many of the modern buildings were designed in the Spanish-colonial style common to California, with red tile roofs and white stucco exteriors, which gives the campus a uniform yet distinctly Californian lookthe red tile roofs and bright blue skies common to the region are a famously complementary combination. The University has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lagunita), both home to the endangered California Tiger Salamander.

The off-campus Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a nature reserve owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research. Hopkins Marine Station, located in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.

Contemporary campus landmarks include the Main Quad and Memorial Church, the art museum and art gallery, the Stanford Mausoleum and the 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 House, and the 1919 Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House, are both National Historic Landmarks now on university grounds.

The United States Postal Service has assigned two ZIP codes to Stanford: 94305 for campus mail in general and 94309 for student mail. Stanford lies within area code 650 and campus phone numbers start with 723, 724, 725, 736, 497, or 498.

Institutions

Stanford University is governed by a board of trustees, in conjuction with the university president, provosts, faculty senate, and the deans of the various schools. Besides the university, the Stanford trustees oversee Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital), as well as many acres of undeveloped foothills.

Other Stanford-affiliated institutions include the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Stanford Research Institute, a now-independent institution which originated at the University.

Stanford also houses the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a major public policy think tank that attracts visiting scholars from around the world, and the Stanford Institute for International Studies, which is dedicated to the more specific study of international relations.

The Stanford University Libraries hold a collection of more than eight million volumes. The main library in the SU library system is Green Library. Meyer Library holds the East Asia collection and the student-accessible media resources. Other significant collections include the Lane Medical Library, Jackson Business Library, Falconer Biology Library, Cubberley Education Library, Branner Earth Sciences Library, Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, Jonsson Government Documents collection, Crown Law Library, the Stanford Auxiliary Library (SAL), the SLAC Library, the Hoover library, the Marine Biology Library at Hopkins Marine Station, the Music Library, and the University's special collections.

Digital libraries and text services include HighWire Press, the Humanities Digital Information Services group and the Media Microtext Center. Several academic departments and some residences also have their own libraries.

Stanford University student traditions include Full Moon on the Quad, Sunday Flicks, steam-tunnelling, Big Game Gaieties (a student-written, composed, and produced musical put on before Big Game), primal scream (performed by stressed students at night during finals week) and Viennese Ball, which was started in the 1970's by students returning from the now defunct Stanford in Vienna program. Other old traditions include the Big Game bonfire at Lake Lagunita, and the Halloween party at the Stanford family mausoleum (though this has not happened since 2000 due to funding issues).

Community

Stanford has been coeducational since its founding; however, between approximately 1899 and 1933, there was a policy in place limiting female enrollment to 500 students and maintaining a ratio of three males for every one female student. As of 2005, undergraduate enrollment is split nearly evenly between the sexes, but male enrollees outnumber female enrollees about 2:1 at the graduate level.

Stanford places a strong focus on residential education. Approximately 94 percent of undergraduate students live in university housing, with another five percent living in Stanford housing at the overseas campuses. In addition to numerous dorms and residential houses, Stanford is home to three housed sororities and seven housed fraternities. Several residences are considered theme houses, with either an ethnic or academic focus.

At any time, around 50 percent of the graduate population lives on campus. When construction concludes on the new Munger graduate residence this percentage will probably increase.

Academics

The schools of the University include the School of Humanities and Sciences, School of Engineering, School of Earth Sciences, School of Education, Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Stanford awards the following degrees: B.A., B.S., B.A.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D., D.M.A., Ed.D., Ed.S., M.D., M.B.A., J.D., J.S.D., J.S.M., LL.M., M.A.T., M.F.A., M.L.S., M.L.A., and ENG.

The University enrolls approximately 6,700 undergraduates and 8,000 grad students. The University has approximately 1,700 faculty members, including 17 Nobel laureates and 23 MacArthur fellows. The largest part of the faculty (40 percent) are affiliated with the medical school, while a third serve in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Stanford built its international reputation as the pioneering Silicon Valley institution through top programs in engineering and the sciences, spawning such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, VMware,Yahoo!, Google, and Sun Microsystems—indeed, "Sun" originally stood for "Stanford University Network." The university also offers programs in the humanities and social sciences, particularly creative writing, history, government, economics, communication and psychology.

Admission

Admission is highly competitive, and according to America's Best Colleges 2006 by U.S. News & World Report, it is the eighth most selective college in the United States, with the third lowest acceptance rate (13%), ranked fifth in the nation (tied with Duke University) in overall quality. Stanford is the third-ranked university in the Academic Ranking of World Universities [4], and the fifth-ranked American university in the 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement[5], just below Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech. In 2006, Stanford's undergraduate admission rate was 10.8 percent, from a pool of 22,223 applicants - the lowest rate of undergraduate admission in the history of the university[6]. The admission rate at Stanford Law School is 7.7 percent. The acceptance rates at the university's medical school (3.3 percent) and business school (10 percent) are the lowest in the country.

Arts

Stanford has a thriving artistic and musical community, including theater groups such as Ram's Head, and award-winning a cappella music groups, such as the Stanford Harmonics, the Stanford Mendicants, Stanford Fleet Street Singers, Mixed Company, Talisman A Cappella, and Everyday People.

The creative writing program brings young writers to campus via the Stegner Fellowships and other graduate scholarship programs. This Boy's Life author Tobias Wolff teaches writing to undergraduates and graduate students.

Dance aficionados can participate in the school's vintage dance program (a part of the Drama department) or try out for the Stanford Band's Dollie dance troupe.

Stanford University is home to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts museum with 24 galleries, sculpture gardens, terraces, and a courtyard first established in 1891 by Jane and Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child.