Stanford University

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, and one of the world's leading educational institutions, with the top position in numerous rankings and measures in the United States. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former Governor of and U.S. Senator from California and leading railroad tycoon, and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford admitted its first students on October 1, 1891 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until 1920. The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet).

The main campus is located in northern Santa Clara Valley adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Other holdings, such as laboratories, and nature reserves, are located outside the main campus. Its 8,180-acre campus is one of the largest in the United States. The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year. Stanford's academic strength is broad with 40 departments in the three academic schools that have undergraduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pacific-12 Conference. It has gained 108 NCAA team championships, the second-most for a university, 476 individual championships, the most in Division I, and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, every year since 1994-1995.

Main Campus:

Stanford University is located on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped. The main campus is adjacent to Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, and Sand Hill Road. The university also operates at several more remote locations.

Stanford's main campus is a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (including the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley. The United States Postal Service has assigned Stanford two ZIP codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P.O. box mail. It lies within area code 650. The university campus was listed by Travel + Leisure in September 2011 as one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States and by MSN as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world.

Administration and Organization:

Stanford University is a tax-exempt corporate trust governed by a privately appointed 34-member Board of Trustees. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually. A new trustee is chosen by the remaining Trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the 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). The Board appoints a President to serve as the chief executive officer of the university and prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, manage financial and business affairs, and appoint nine vice presidents. John L. Hennessy was appointed the 10th President of the University in October 2000. The Provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. John Etchemendy was named the 12th Provost in September 2000.

The University is currently organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (9 departments), and Earth Sciences (4 departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty. The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford University and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body. Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Research Centers and Institutes:

The Stanford Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research oversees more than eighteen independent laboratories, centers, and institutes. Other Stanford-affiliated institutions include the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), the Stanford Research Institute (a now independent institution which originated at the university), the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (a major public policy think tank that attracts visiting scholars from around the world), and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education). Unable to locate a copy in any of its libraries, the Soviet Union was obliged to ask the Hoover Institution for a microfilm copy of its original edition of the first issue of Pravda (dated March 5, 1917). Stanford is home to the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. It also runs the John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists and the Center for Ocean Solutions, which brings together marine science and policy to address challenges facing the ocean.

Reputation and Rankings:

Stanford is ranked 4th (tied with Columbia University and the University of Chicago) among U.S national universities for 2016 by U.S. News and World Report. Notably, Stanford occupies the number one position in numerous domestic college ranking measures, leading Slate to dub Stanford "the Harvard of the 21st century," and The New York Times to conclude that "Stanford University has become America’s 'it' school, by measures that Harvard once dominated." From polls done by The Princeton Review in 2013, 2014 and 2015, the most commonly named "dream college" for students was Stanford; separately, parents, too, most frequently named Stanford as their "dream college." Just 12 years ago, a 2003 Gallup poll had Stanford only tied for second as the most prestigious university in the eyes of the general public. The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings placed it third in the world in 2015, while the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), has ranked Stanford second in the world for many years.