Stanford University history

The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford's previous Palo Alto farm.

When Leland Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was in jeopardy due to a federal lawsuit against his estate, but Jane Stanford insisted the university remain in operation throughout the financial crisis.

The university suffered major damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; most of the damage was repaired, but a new library and gymnasium were demolished, and some original features of Memorial Church and the Quad were never restored.

The Stanford Graduate School of Education grew out of the Department of the History and Art of Education, one of the original 21 departments at Stanford, and became a professional graduate school in 1917.

Since its creation in 1925 as a west coast alternative to eastern business schools, the school has continued to innovate its curriculum, build a legendary faculty known for its cutting-edge research, and establish centers and academic programs to achieve its mission.

Other notable campus locations are the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts (housing the university museum) and its adjacent sculpture garden, containing works by Auguste Rodin, and Hanna House (1937), designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Azim Premji, in full Azim Hasham Premji, (born July 24, 1945, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian business entrepreneur who served as chairman of Wipro Limited, guiding the company through four decades of diversification and growth to emerge as a world leader in the software industry.

Adjacent to the campus is the Stanford Research Park (1951), one of the world’s principal locations for the development of electronics and computer technology.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), established in 1962, is one of the world’s premier laboratories for research in particle physics.

Deep in the foothills beyond the Dish, a much smaller structure yielded epochal discoveries when it became home to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), founded by John McCarthy and Les Earnest in 1965.

In 1966, just before Premji was to complete his degree in engineering at Stanford University, his father died unexpectedly.

The world’s first office desktop computer displays appeared at SAIL in 1971.

The Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve was designated in 1973 to help preserve the green “lungs” of the Peninsula and access to the biological data compiled there that helped establish the field of population genetics.

The multidisciplinary Stanford Humanities Center, first of its kind in the nation and still the largest, opened in 1980 to advance research into the historical, philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural dimensions of the human experience.

In 1985, the B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden opened as the largest collection of Rodin bronzes outside Paris.

A significant physical transformation followed the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which again challenged the university’s resilience and vision.

In 1999 Premji officially completed his degree from Stanford through a distance-learning arrangement.

His next call to Glasgow University met with a warmer reception, and in March 2000 that school received a check for 1.2 million pounds, enough to endow a professorship in Lindsay’s name.”

Snopes.com also says that the 2001 version of the Stanford story, was falsely attributed to Forbes, the founder and publisher of Forbes magazine.

The James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences opened in 2003 as the geographic and intellectual nexus between the schools of Engineering and Medicine and the home of Bio-X, a pioneering interdisciplinary biosciences institute led by Professor Carla Shatz.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford opened in the School of Engineering in 2005, bringing students and faculty from radically different backgrounds together to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges.

In 2015, 85 percent of students received some form of financial assistance and 78 percent of Stanford undergraduates graduated debt-free.