Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States.
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Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States.
Stanford was founded in 1885 by former California governor and senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, as a memorial to their son Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid in Europe a few weeks before his 16th birthday. The Stanfords used their farm lands to establish the university hoping to create a large institution in California.
Stanford enrolls about 6,700 undergraduate and about 8,000 graduate students from the United States and around the world every year. The university is divided into a number of schools such as the Stanford Business School, Stanford Law School, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford School of Engineering, etc.
The university is in Silicon Valley, and its alumni have founded companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics and Google.
History
There exists a popular story that a lady in "faded gingham" and a man in a "homespun threadbare suit" went to visit the president of Harvard about making a donation, were rebuffed, and then founded Stanford. This story is untrue. The historical account is that the Senator and Mrs. Stanford visited Harvard's President Eliot and asked how much it would cost to duplicate Harvard in Palo Alto. Eliot replied that he supposed $15 million would be enough. However, the Stanfords were gracefully rebuffed in securing A.D. White the president of Cornell University as Stanford's founding president. Instead, White recommended David Starr Jordan, White's former student. They eventually settled on David Starr Jordan, president of Indiana University, although they had offered leaders of the Ivy League twice his salary to direct Stanford.
Locals and members of the university community are known to refer to the school as The Farm, a nod to the fact that the university is located on the former site of Leland Stanford's horse farm.
The University's founding grant was written on November 11, 1885, and accepted by the first Board of Trustees on November 14. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, and the University officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students and 15 faculty members, seven of whom hailed from Cornell UniversityCornell/Stanford Connection. At the opening of the school there was no tuition for students, a program which lasted into the 1930s . Among the first class of students was a young future president Herbert Hoover, who would claim to be first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.
