Stanford University Diploma and the Land Its Founders Kept Intact
Stanford University is a private research university in Palo Alto, California. Leland Stanford Junior University is its formal name, after the founders’ only child, who died of typhoid fever at fifteen. There remains in common speech an entirely different name. Students and alumni still refer to the campus as “the Farm,” a reference to the years the Stanford family bred and trained trotting horses on the property. The name behind a Stanford University Diploma, Leland Stanford Junior University, preserves the family connection that gave the institution its start.
The campus sits on land that was once the ancestral homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. When Jane and Leland Stanford established the university in 1885, they attached an unusual condition to their gift. The land which they gave to the institution could never be sold. That clause would matter decades later, when electronics companies started looking for places to put laboratories on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Stanford’s campus, when it opened its doors on October 1, 1891, was largely the Inner Quad, two dormitories, and a few other buildings. The first year, about 555 students enrolled. From the beginning, women and men studied there, and the founders placed the liberal arts alongside engineering and the sciences.
The academic buildings surrounding a central courtyard were designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. Twelve low sandstone buildings were linked by covered walkways so that students could move between classrooms under a continuous line of arches. As enrollment grew, the designers hoped that Stanford would add more quadrangles on either side.
The campus looked different. The earthquake of 1906, just a year after the completion of the Main Quad, destroyed its arcades and leveled a few newer buildings. The other departure from the original plan was in 1919 when the university constructed its main library at the eastern edge of the Quad, thus blocking one of the proposed routes of expansion. For more on the university’s founding and early years, see Stanford University’s official history.
Space for Another Kind of Lab
In 1951 Stanford developed a research park, leasing university land to companies. The first tenant was Varian Associates, a maker of microwave equipment. Leasing allowed the university to retain ownership of the property, while offering a home for industrial researchers, close to Stanford engineers. The deal helped shape the area that became known as Silicon Valley.
On other Stanford land, physicists found space for an instrument that could hardly have been squeezed in among the old courtyards. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which opened in 1966, housed a two-mile-long machine to accelerate electrons. In 1991, the lab played host to something much smaller: the first Web site in North America.