The Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Mr.Leland Stanford and his wife Mrs. Jane Lathrope Stanford in memory of their only son Leland Stanford Jr., who died in Italy due to typhoid. Mr.Stanford was a wealthy man who held various significant roles namely a leader of the Republican Party, governor of California and later a United States Senator. On the demise of their only son, the Stanford’s decided to take the children of California as their children and donated their farm house in Palo Alto to establish Stanford University. The first President of the University was David Starr Jordan, a Cornell University graduate. The Stanford’s took inputs from famous universities like Harvard to establish a similar university structure in California and started the university with a main aim to produce “cultured and useful citizens” when most of the universities concentrated only on the former aspect. This was the first institution which offered co-educational programs and 559 men and women graduated out of the university during its first year.
Stanford University offers various programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The university also has eight separate schools namely, the School of Medicine, Law School, School of Engineering, Graduate School of Business, School of Earth Sciences, School of Education, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Continuing Studies. The university continuously engages its staff and students in various research activities in independent labs and within the university campus. Several multidisciplinary research initiatives have also been started in recent time by the university.
The current President of the University is Mr.John Hennessy and he lays emphasis on collaboration across disciplines for future advancements and multidisciplinary research. The university has acquired world wide acclaim in various departments both at the undergraduate and graduate level and many departments of the university are ranked among the top five in the world wide rank list. To name a few, the undergraduate program is ranked fourth among national universities and the social science and technology department is ranked third.
The university also gives importance to sports and offers about 300 athletic scholarships every year. Stanford offers 34 varsity sports and its main rival in sports is University of California at Berkeley.
Many notable companies have been started by Stanford alumni namely, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, VMware, Yahoo!, Google, MIPS Technologies, SGI, Sun Microsystems and NVIDIA. The Sun in sun Microsystems stands for ‘Stanford University Network’. Stanford University has also produced sixteen Nobel laureates and four Pulitzer Prize winners. Thus Stanford University is the most prestigious university where one can study and pursue research and bring about major changes in our ever changing times.