Today I will write about life at Stanford University. Much of this info comes from the monthly STANFORD for alumni, but I've also visited a bunch of times after graduating.
One of the miracles of my life was that I even went there at all. I was an average student most of my life. Perhaps growing up in Kakaako, a lower-class portion of Honolulu, was partly responsible. Maybe wanting to be like one of my gang was not personally productive. Whatever, by the time I was a sophomore at McKinley High School, I was put in a lower level English-Social Studies group, as our school system placed students by performed capability.
Around that time, Bishop Estate essentially kicked our neighborhood out of our homes to pave the way for all those tall buildings you now see in Ward Village. Kalihi was not much of an improvement, plus I had to catch the bus to get to McKinley High School. In most ways, I was sort of alone for the first time in my life. Yes, there was family, but gone were my lifelong friends.
That one crucial move in my youth, though, inspired me to make at least one extraordinary, but ludicrous, and maybe even laughable, decision. For no good or rational reason, I only applied to Cal Tech and Stanford. Mind you, my older brother was a factor of influence, for he was at that time in graduate school studying civil engineering at the University of Michigan. Plus, my school teachers were particularly motivational.
For most of my life I've been amazingly lucky, in many different ways. For example, I took the practice scholastic aptitude test in my junior year, did well in math, but somewhere in the 200's in verbal, meaning that I was in the bottom 1%. In those days, many of us worked in a pineapple cannery during the summer after our junior year of high school. I was all set to do this when I broke my wrist playing basketball. So I decided to kind of memorize the tutorial book for the SAT. That jumped my verbal score to somewhere above 650, so combined with my math score, the total neared 1450, or in the 95th percentile.
Anyway, in a one year period I was also voted vice president of my senior class (and the luck here was that I was running against three females), made the tennis team, suddenly scored well on standardized tests, got A's in all subjects, and had accepted in national student anthologies an essay and a poem. In a sense I clicked all the right boxes and was subsequently accepted into both Cal Tech and Stanford. I picked the latter because they offered a full ride. On afterthought, though, perhaps pumpkin pie had a lot to do with getting into Stanford.
Studied at Yale UniversityMay 22
Stanford Univ. was founded in 1885 by California Senator Leland Stanford (originally as a memorial to his son, who died very very young)… and — although 1885 is recent by Ivy League standards — it actually turned out to be perfect timing, because in the late 19th Century, the university as great research institution was an idea coming into its own.
Another thing that might have helped was that centuries ago, Harvard and Yale had each started out primarily as institutions to train clergyman, especially in Greek and Latin and Bible study. It took decades for these sometime Bible colleges to evolve into the great non-sectarian, secular universities, that they eventually became. (Even today, Harvard and Yale are thought more as the “mother of leaders”…. US Presidents, Congressmen, and Supreme Court justices, where they still have an edge.)
As important as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all became as research institutions, they may have been influenced by their roots, which was to teach the classics and (in the beginning) to train ministers. Stanford, from the beginning was a truly “modern” university, and although some of its faculty was interested in the social sciences, it was free to devote its considerable resources to math and sciences.
Another factor, which played some importance…. by the early 20th century, the economic and industrial center of the nation was moving out west to California.
WWII was a turning point, as Stanford attracted massive research funds from the government. This in turn helped lead to the rise of Palo Alto and what came to be called Silicon Valley.
Today, Stanford is one of the better schools in the world, as partially described in my posting last month on the 2024 WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS. No question the school is doing well, but what sets it apart is that the sport teams are also outstanding, and the links with the adjacent high tech industry--which the school helped form, Silicon Valley--untouchable.
- In my four years there, all our teams did poorly.
- But something happened to the leadership, for in the latest Wikipedia summary:
Rank School Enrollment Championships
- #1 Stanford 7,083 136
- #2 UCLA 31, 002 123
- #3 USC 21,000 113
- #4 Texas 40,916 57
- #5 Penn State 48,535 54
- #9 LSU 26,159 47
- #10 Florida 34,881 42
- Behavioral scientist Xuan Zhao and and colleagues report that we should all give compliments, for it costs nothing, and can be transformative
- You handled that situation so well.
- I'm really impressed with your ability to work under pressure.
- I love the way you bring out the best in people.
- Hey, great earrings.
- You make even ordinary moments feel extraordinary.
- 25-years ago, chemical engineering assistant professor Chaitan Khosla learned that his 3-year old had celiac disease (reaction to gluten). There was no drug treatment.
- His goal was to develop a pill to cure this problem.
- Today, his son is five years out of college, and there is still no medication for celiac disease.
- But says he is only a year or two away to a solution.
- To quote hime: For every one project that even gets a shot, there are 10 stories at Stanford that are at least as interesting and as potentially transformative at an equivalent stage that don't even write the first chapter.
- We Bring New Ideas With Us, is an article about international students at Stanford.
- There are around 7,000 undergraduates and 10,000 graduate students.
- International students?
- 1940 169
- 1980 1,780
- 2023 4,126
- International students are faced not only with the challenge of getting accepted, but suffer through the red tape of trying to stay in the USA.
- There are 13,000 bikes on campus, more than undergraduate or graduate students, but not both combined.
- There 18 fountains.
- In 1996 Douglas Osheroff, with an office on the first floor of the Varian Building, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1997, Steven Chu, located on the second floor, won the Nobel, and in 1999, third floor mate Robert Laughlin also won this medal. The fourth floor only housed undergraduate laboratories. No winners in 1994.
- From president of Stanford Richard Saller about athletics.
- Bade goodbye to Tara VanDerveer, who just retired with the NCAA record of career wins in women's basketball.
- In 2023, Stanford athletic teams had a graduation rate of 97%, 17 of them at 100%.
- Mentioned about having more NCAA championships (see table above) at 134 than any university.
- More than 170 athletes have had a total of 296 medals from Olympic competition. At the 2020 Tokyo Games, only 10 countries had a higher medal count than Stanford.
- Remember alchemists trying to transform base metals into gold? Well, in 1980 Glenn Seaborg of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory successfully transformed lead into gold using a linear accelerator. Well, Stanford scientists just discovered an easier way to create gold. Just fell out of solution. Read Black Gold.
- There is a Marguerite Campus Shuttle that, for free, takes you all over campus. The main station off campus is near the Caltrain Palo Alto Station. Except today and tomorrow because of necessary maintenance requirements. Even closer is the Sheraton Palo Alto Hotel, a good place to stay if going there.
- The campus has 43,000 trees, with 134 types of eucalyptus and 400 species.
- 89 Disney Parks would fit in the campus, 8,180 acres, with it's own zip code, 94305.
- Herbert Hoover was one of the first students, and only from Stanford graduate to become president of the USA. That is Hoover Tower.
- Like many other organizations, Stanford removed the Indian as its mascot in 1972.
- A move was made to reinstate the Indian in 1972, with the second choice being Robber Barons (in honor of the founder, Leland Stanford, who they say was one). Robber Barons showed the most support. The university ignored this recommendation.
- In 1978, a petition was made for the griffin--a mythological animal with the body and hind legs of a lion, with the head and wings of an eagle. The University actually moved two griffin statues from the Children's Hospital to the athletic area. But the campaign failed.There was no nickname until the school color, Cardinal, not the bird, became unofficial in 1981.
There is still no mascot, but the irrepressible Stanford Band, known for its mischievousness, uses one of their members to look like a tree, trying to make it look as ridiculous as possible. Many Stanford organizations do use the tree in their logo, as to the right
- You can buy the Stanford alphabets to place on cars. However, the use usually gets spelled:
S-N-O-D-F-A-R-T
- After Jane and Leland Stanford lost their only child, Leland, Jr., to typhoid in 1884, they decided to build a university using their farm and wealth. Thus, when I first was driven on campus, I saw Leland Stanford Junior University on the sign. My initial thought was that I was coming to a junior college.
- Leland Stanford passed away in 1893. Jane built Memorial Church as a memorial to her husband, decreeing that the church was to be open to all. When opened in 1903, said the first chaplain the Rev. Charles Gardner: We begin anew today no less an experiment than this: to test whether a non-sectarian church can minister to the spiritual needs of a great university built in love; not to teach a theological system, not to develop a sectarian principle, but to minister to the higher life.
There is an additional chapter, for Jane Stanford was murdered at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki.- Then President David Starr Jordan sailed to Hawaii, supposedly to avoid scandal, and persuaded the authorities to call it a heart attack. However, he was soon to be fired by Jane, and had a motive.
- Kept largely under wraps until 2022 when Stanford historian Richard White concluded that Jane Stanford was likely poisoned by her employee Bertha Berner using strychnine. Jordan's name was not mentioned as a person of interest. Hmmm....
- She is buried alongside her husband and son on the Stanford campus.
- Building names are contracted: Mem Chu for Memorial Church, Hoo Tow for Hoover Tower, etc.
- To close, CoHo, a coffee house, there are caricatures of alumni who became famous.
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