Stanford University

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States with a strong emphasis on scientific, technological and social science research. The university is located on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus in northwestern Santa Clara Valley approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose and 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco.

Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, founded the university in 1891 in honor of his son, Leland Stanford, Jr. who died of typhoid at the age of 16. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and 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 become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had transformed itself into a major research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. More than 50 Stanford faculty, staff and alumni have won the Nobel Prize (list of Nobel Laureates by university affiliation). Stanford also boasts the largest number of Turing award winners for a single institution. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many prominent technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!.

The university is organized into seven schools including academic schools of Humanities and Sciences and Earth Sciences as well as professional schools of Business, Education, Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Stanford has a student body of approximately 6,900 undergraduate and 8,400 graduate students. Stanford is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and managed US$1.15 billion in research funding and $15.9 billion in endowment support in 2010. Stanford competes in 34 varsity sports and is one of two private universities in the NCAA Division I-A Pacific-10 Conference. The University of California, Berkeley ("Cal") is Stanford's traditional rival, and the two football teams compete annually in the "Big Game". Stanford's athletic program has won the NACDA Directors' Cup every year since 1995. In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Stanford athletes won 25 medals, including 8 gold medals, more than any other university in the United States.

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. The main campus is adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, and Sand Hill Road. The university also operates the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, in Monterey Bay.

Stanford University owns 8,183 acres (3,312 ha), which makes it the second largest university in the world in terms of contiguous area. Moscow State University is built vertically and has a larger total floor area but occupies a smaller piece of land. Berry College, near Rome, Georgia occupies 28,000 acres (11,000 ha) of contiguous land, and Paul Smith's College occupies 14,200 acres (5,700 ha) of land in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, but neither is a university. Duke University occupies 8,709 acres (3,524 ha), but they are not contiguous. The United States Air Force Academy has a contiguous 18,000 acres (7,300 ha) at its disposal, but it is not a university. Dartmouth College, with a large land grant, owns more than 50,000 acres (20,000 ha), but only 269 acres (109 ha) of those are part of the campus. Sewanee: The University of the South occupies 13,000 acres (5,261 ha) in its "Domain"; however, most of this is unused forest.

In the summer of 1886, when the campus was first being planned, Stanford brought the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker, and prominent Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted westward for consultations. Olmsted worked out the general concept for the campus and its buildings, rejecting a hillside site in favor of the more practical flatlands. Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson, in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches. The original campus was also designed in the Spanish-colonial style common to California known as Mission Revival. The red tile roofs and solid sandstone masonry are distinctly Californian in appearance and famously complementary to the bright blue skies common to the region, and most of the subsequently erected buildings have maintained consistent exteriors.

Much of this first construction was destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but the university retains the Quad, the old Chemistry Building (which is not in use and has been boarded up since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), and Encina Hall (the residence of Herbert Hoover, John Steinbeck, and Anthony Kennedy during their times at Stanford). After the 1989 earthquake inflicted further damage, the university implemented a billion-dollar capital improvement plan to retrofit and renovate older buildings for new, up-to-date uses.

Stanford University is actually its own 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 some land in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), and in adjacent unincorporated areas of San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve). Stanford shares much with the city of Palo Alto, including its school district and fire department, although the police forces are separate.