I arrived on the Stanford University campus in September of 1958.  The first two years there all engineering students pretty much took the same courses.   According to this historic view  of the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department, in 1960, Professor David Mason got a Ford Foundation grant to begin the program.  Those below have served as department chair: Mason was chairman of the department when in our junior year he rushed into one of our ChE classes and proudly announced that we had gained accreditation.  First, I did not know that I was in the very first class, and second, I always thought we were already accredited.  Same for the rest of my classmates.  Informally, there were 75 or so of us who had selected chemical engineering as their major in our freshman year.  When I graduated in 1962, there were only 8 of us.  Ten years later, Stanford ranked #1 in all the chemical engineering departments of the country.  For the record,  U.S. News and World Report  still has Stanford