Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a
private
Private or privates may refer to:
Music
* "In Private", by Dusty Springfield from the 1990 album ''Reputation''
* Private (band), a Denmark-based band
* "Private" (Ryōko Hirosue song), from the 1999 album ''Private'', written and also recorded ...
research university
A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are "the key sites of Knowledge production modes, knowledge production", along with "intergenerational ...
in
Stanford, California
Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is the home of Stanford University, after which it was named. The CDP's population was 21,150 at the United States Census, ...
, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate
Leland Stanford
Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824June 21, 1893) was an American attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, and Republican Party (United States), Republican Party politician from Watervliet, New York. He served as the eighth governor of Calif ...
(the eighth
governor
A governor is an politician, administrative leader and head of a polity or Region#Political regions, political region, in some cases, such as governor-general, governors-general, as the head of a state's official representative. Depending on the ...
of and then-incumbent
United States senator representing California) and his wife,
Jane, in memory of their only child,
Leland Jr.
The university admitted its first students in 1891,
opening as a
coeducational
Mixed-sex education, also known as mixed-gender education, co-education, or coeducation (abbreviated to co-ed or coed), is a system of education where males and females are educated together. Whereas single-sex education was more common up to ...
and
non-denominational
A non-denominational person or organization is one that does not follow (or is not restricted to) any particular or specific religious denomination.
The term has been used in the context of various faiths, including Jainism, Baháʼí Faith, Zoro ...
institution. It struggled financially after Leland died in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the
1906 San Francisco earthquake
At 05:12 AM Pacific Time Zone, Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated Moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli inte ...
. Following
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, university
provost Frederick Terman
Frederick Emmons Terman (; June 7, 1900 – December 19, 1982) was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely ...
inspired an
entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry (later
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
). In 1951,
Stanford Research Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Palo Alto, California, City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 com ...
was established in
Palo Alto
Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
Th ...
as the world's first university research park.
By 2021, the university had 2,288 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows, center fellows, and medical faculty on staff.
The university is organized around seven schools of study on an campus, one of the largest in the nation.
It houses the
Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace and formerly The Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace) is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic ...
, a public policy
think tank
A think tank, or public policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governme ...
, and is
classified
Classified may refer to:
General
*Classified information, material that a government body deems to be sensitive
*Classified advertising or "classifieds"
Music
*Classified (rapper) (born 1977), Canadian rapper
* The Classified, a 1980s American ro ...
among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".
Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of eight private institutions in the
Atlantic Coast Conference
The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is a collegiate List of NCAA conferences, athletic conference in the United States. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, the ACC's eighteen member universities compete in the National Collegiate Athlet ...
(ACC). Stanford has won 136
NCAA
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates College athletics in the United States, student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, and Simon Fraser University, 1 in Canada. ...
team championships,
and was awarded the
NACDA Directors' Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994. Students and alumni have won
302 Olympic medals (including 153 gold).
The university is associated with 94 billionaires, 58
Nobel laureates
The Nobel Prizes (, ) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in th ...
,
33
MacArthur Fellow
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and 30 individuals workin ...
s,
29
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...
winners, as well as 7
Wolf Foundation Prize recipients, 2 Supreme Court Justices of the United States, and 4
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...
winners.
Additionally, its alumni include many
Fulbright Scholars
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States cultural exchange programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
,
Marshall Scholars
The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans ndtheir country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is considered among the most prestigious scholarsh ...
,
Gates Cambridge Scholars,
Rhodes Scholars, and members of the
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature, legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. It is a Bicameralism, bicameral legislature, including a Lower house, lower body, the United States House of Representatives, ...
.
History

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by
Leland and
Jane Stanford
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891), along with her husband, Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland S ...
as a tribute to the memory of their only child,
Leland Stanford Jr. The university officially opened in 1891 on the Stanfords' former Palo Alto farm. Modeled after the great Eastern universities, specifically
Cornell University
Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
in
Ithaca, New York
Ithaca () is a city in and the county seat of Tompkins County, New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York (state), New York, Ithaca is the largest community in the Ithaca metrop ...
, Stanford was often referred to as the "Cornell of the West" in its early years. This comparison was largely due to a significant portion of its faculty being former Cornell affiliates, including its first president,
David Starr Jordan
David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851 – September 19, 1931) was the founding president of Stanford University, serving from 1891 to 1913. He was an ichthyologist during his research career. Prior to serving as president of Stanford Universi ...
, and its second president,
John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to make higher education accessible, non-sectarian, and inclusive of women and men. Cornell is recognized as one of the first American universities to embrace this progressive approach to education, and Stanford quickly followed suit, solidifying its commitment to these ideals.

From an architectural perspective, the Stanfords sought to distinguish their university by emulating the style of English university buildings while also incorporating elements of local California heritage. They specified in the founding grant that the buildings should "be like the old adobe houses of the early Spanish days; they will be one-storied; they will have deep window seats and open fireplaces, and the roofs will be covered with the familiar dark red tiles." The Stanfords also hired renowned landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, Social criticism, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the U ...
, who previously designed the Cornell campus, to design the Stanford campus.
When
Leland Stanford
Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824June 21, 1893) was an American attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, and Republican Party (United States), Republican Party politician from Watervliet, New York. He served as the eighth governor of Calif ...
died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was put in jeopardy due to a federal lawsuit against his estate, but
Jane Stanford
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891), along with her husband, Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland S ...
insisted the university remain in operation throughout the financial crisis.
The university suffered major damage from the
1906 San Francisco earthquake
At 05:12 AM Pacific Time Zone, Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated Moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli inte ...
; most of the damage was repaired, but a new library and gymnasium were demolished, and some original features of
Memorial Church and the
Quad
QUaD, an acronym for QUEST at DASI, was a ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiment at the South Pole. QUEST (Q and U Extragalactic Sub-mm Telescope) was the original name attributed to the bolometer detector instrume ...
were never restored. During the early-20th century, the university added four professional graduate schools.
Stanford University School of Medicine
The Stanford University School of Medicine is the medical school of Stanford University and is located in Stanford, California, United States. It traces its roots to the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, founded in San Fra ...
was established in 1908 when the university acquired
Cooper Medical College in San Francisco; it moved to the Stanford campus in 1959.
The university's law department, established as an undergraduate curriculum in 1893, was transitioned into a professional
law school
A law school (also known as a law centre/center, college of law, or faculty of law) is an institution, professional school, or department of a college or university specializing in legal education, usually involved as part of a process for b ...
starting in 1908 and received accreditation from the
American Bar Association
The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary association, voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students in the United States; national in scope, it is not specific to any single jurisdiction. Founded in 1878, the ABA's stated acti ...
in 1923. The
Stanford University Graduate School of Education grew out of the Department of the History and Art of Education, one of the original twenty-one departments at Stanford, and became a professional graduate school in 1917. The
Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Graduate School of Business is the Postgraduate education, graduate business school of Stanford University, a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective ...
was founded in 1925 at the urging of then-trustee
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
. In 1919,
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
to preserve artifacts related to
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
. The
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...
, established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
In the 1940s and 1950s,
Frederick Terman
Frederick Emmons Terman (; June 7, 1900 – December 19, 1982) was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely ...
, an engineering professor who later became provost, encouraged Stanford engineering graduates to start their own companies and invent products.
During the 1950s, he established
Stanford Industrial Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 companies, including Hew ...
, a high-tech commercial campus on university land.
Also in the 1950s,
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley ( ; February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American solid-state physicist, electrical engineer, and inventor. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brat ...
, co-inventor of the silicon transistor, recipient of the 1956
Nobel Prize for Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prize, Nobel Prizes establi ...
, and later professor of physics at Stanford, moved to the Palo Alto area and founded a company,
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, later known as Shockley Transistor Corporation, was a pioneering semiconductor developer founded by William Shockley, and funded by Beckman Instruments, Inc., in 1955. It was the first high technology compan ...
. The next year,
eight of his employees resigned and formed a competing company,
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument by the " traitorous eight" who defected from Shockley Semi ...
. The presence of so many high-tech and semiconductor firms helped to establish Stanford and the mid-
Peninsula
A peninsula is a landform that extends from a mainland and is only connected to land on one side. Peninsulas exist on each continent. The largest peninsula in the world is the Arabian Peninsula.
Etymology
The word ''peninsula'' derives , . T ...
as a hotbed of innovation, eventually named
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
after the key ingredient in transistors. Shockley and Terman are both often described as the "fathers of Silicon Valley".
In the 1950s,
Stanford intentionally reduced and restricted Jewish admissions, and for decades, denied and dismissed claims from students, parents, and alumni that they were doing so. Stanford issued its first institutional apology to the Jewish community in 2022 after an internal task force confirmed that the university deliberately discriminated against Jewish applicants, while also misleading those who expressed concerns, including students, parents, alumni, and the
ADL. Stanford was once considered a school for "the wealthy", but controversies in later decades damaged its reputation. The 1971
Stanford prison experiment
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE), also referred to as the Zimbardo prison experiment (ZPE), was a controversial psychological experiment performed in August 1971 at Stanford University. It was designed to be a two-week simulation of a p ...
was criticized as unethical, and the misuse of government funds from 1981 resulted in severe penalties for the school's research funding,
and the resignation of President
Donald Kennedy in 1992.
In the 1960s, Stanford rose from a regional university to one of the most prestigious in the United States, "when it appeared on lists of the "top ten" universities in America... This swift rise to performance
asunderstood at the time as related directly to the university's defense contracts..."
Wallace Sterling was the President from 1949 to 1968 and he oversaw the growth of Stanford from a financially troubled regional university to a financially sound, internationally recognized academic powerhouse, "the Harvard of the West".
[Roxanne L. Nilan, and Cassius L. Kirk Jr., '' Stanford's Wallace Sterling: Portrait of a Presidency 1949–1968'' (Stanford Up, 2023),] Achievements during Sterling's tenure included:
*Moving the
Stanford Medical School
The Stanford University School of Medicine is the medical school of Stanford University and is located in Stanford, California, United States. It traces its roots to the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, founded in San Fra ...
from a small, inadequate campus in San Francisco to a new facility on the Stanford campus which was fully integrated into the university to an unusual degree for medical schools.
*Establishing the Stanford Industrial Park (now the
Stanford Research Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Palo Alto, California, City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 com ...
) and the Stanford Shopping Center on leased University land, thus stabilizing the university's finances. The Stanford Industrial Park, together with the university's aggressive pursuit of government research grants, helped to spur the development of
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
.
*Increasing the number of students receiving financial aid from less than 5% when he took office to more than one-third when he retired.
*Increasing the size of the student body from 8,300 to 11,300 and the size of the tenured faculty from 322 to 974.
*Launching the PACE fundraising program, the largest such program ever undertaken by any university up to that time.
*Launching a building boom on campus that included a new bookstore, post office, student union, dormitories, a faculty club, and many academic buildings.
*Creating the Overseas Campus program for undergraduates in 1958.
Land

Most of Stanford is on an
campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is on the
San Francisco Peninsula
The San Francisco Peninsula is a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area that separates San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. On its northern tip is the City and County of San Francisco. Its southern base is Los Altos and Mountain View, ...
, in the northwest part of the
Santa Clara Valley
The Santa Clara Valley (Spanish language, Spanish: ''Valle de Santa Clara'') is a geologic trough in Northern California that extends south–southeast from San Francisco to Hollister, California, Hollister. The longitudinal valley is bordered ...
(
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
) approximately southeast of
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
and approximately northwest of
San Jose. Stanford received $4.5 billion in 2006 and spent more than $2.1 billion in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.
Stanford's main campus includes a
census-designated place
A census-designated place (CDP) is a Place (United States Census Bureau), concentration of population defined by the United States Census Bureau for statistical purposes only.
CDPs have been used in each decennial census since 1980 as the counte ...
within
unincorporated Santa Clara County
Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259 as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County form the ...
, although some of the university land (such as the
Stanford Shopping Center and the
Stanford Research Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Palo Alto, California, City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 com ...
) is within the city limits of
Palo Alto
Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
Th ...
. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated
San Mateo County
San Mateo County ( ), officially the County of San Mateo, is a county (United States), county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 764,442. Redwood City, California, Redwood City is th ...
(including the
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...
and the
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of
Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood),
Woodside, and
Portola Valley.
The central campus includes a seasonal lake (
Lake Lagunita
Lake Lagunita, informally referred to as Lake Lag, is an artificial dry lake in Stanford University, California, located on the western side of the Stanford campus near the Lagunita residences. It was created in to provide irrigation for Palo Alt ...
, an irrigation reservoir), home to the vulnerable
California tiger salamander
The California tiger salamander (''Ambystoma californiense'') is a vulnerable amphibian native to California. It is a mole salamander. Previously considered to be a subspecies of the tiger salamander (''A. tigrinum)'', the California tiger sala ...
. As of 2012,
Lake Lagunita
Lake Lagunita, informally referred to as Lake Lag, is an artificial dry lake in Stanford University, California, located on the western side of the Stanford campus near the Lagunita residences. It was created in to provide irrigation for Palo Alt ...
was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it. Heavy rains in January 2023 refilled Lake Lagunita to up to 8 feet of depth. Two other reservoirs,
Searsville Lake on
San Francisquito Creek and Felt Lake, are on more remote sections of the founding grant.
Central campus
The central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto,
bounded by
El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Blvd, and
Sand Hill Road, off
State Route 82. The
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the executive branch of the federal governmen ...
has assigned it two
ZIP Codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for
P.O. box mail. It lies within
area code 650
Area code 650 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It was split from area code 415 on August 2, 1997, and includes most of San Mateo County (except ...
.
Non-central campus
On the founding grant:
*
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a natural reserve west of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research. Researchers and students are involved in biological research. Professors can teach the importance of biological research to the biological community. The primary goal is to understand the system of the natural Earth.
*
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...
is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest
linear particle accelerator
A linear particle accelerator (often shortened to linac) is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of Oscillation, oscillating electric potentials along ...
in the world, on a area of land.
Off the founding grant:
*
Hopkins Marine Station
Hopkins Marine Station is the marine laboratory of Stanford University. It is located south of the university's main campus, in Pacific Grove, California (United States) on the Monterey Peninsula, adjacent to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It is h ...
, in
Pacific Grove, California, is a
marine biology
Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms that inhabit the sea. Given that in biology many scientific classification, phyla, family (biology), families and genera have some species that live in the sea and ...
research center owned by the university since 1892. Based on US Pacific Coast, it is one of the oldest marine laboratories. It includes 10
research laboratories
A research institute, research centre, or research organization is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often implies natural ...
and is also used for archaeological exploration purposes. A graduate student of the anthropology department discovered evidence that the location was home to a Chinese American fishing village in the early 1900s.
*Study abroad locations: unlike typical
study abroad
International students or exchange students, also known as foreign students, are students who undertake all or part of their secondary or tertiary education in a country other than their own.
In 2022, there were over 6.9 million international ...
programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a "mini-Stanford."
*Redwood City campus for many of the university's administrative offices in
Redwood City, California
Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose, California, San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 accor ...
, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by the
Great Recession
The Great Recession was a period of market decline in economies around the world that occurred from late 2007 to mid-2009. . In 2015, the university announced a development plan,
and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.
*The Bass Center in
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.
*China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with
Peking University
Peking University (PKU) is a Public university, public Types of universities and colleges in China#By designated academic emphasis, university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of the Peop ...
.
Faculty residences
Many Stanford faculty members live in the "Faculty Ghetto", within walking or biking distance of campus. The Faculty Ghetto is composed of land owned by Stanford. Similar to a
condominium
A condominium (or condo for short) is an ownership regime in which a building (or group of buildings) is divided into multiple units that are either each separately owned, or owned in common with exclusive rights of occupation by individual own ...
, the houses can be bought and sold to other Stanford faculty but the land under the houses is leased for 51 years with the possibility of extensions. Houses in the "Ghetto" appreciate and depreciate, but not as rapidly as overall
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
values.
Other uses
Some of the land is managed to provide revenue for the university such as the
Stanford Shopping Center and the
Stanford Research Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Palo Alto, California, City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 com ...
. Stanford land is also leased for a token rent by the
Palo Alto Unified School District for several schools including
Palo Alto High School
Palo Alto Senior High School (commonly referred to locally as "Paly") is a comprehensive public high school in Palo Alto, California. Operated by the Palo Alto Unified School District, the school is one of two high schools in the district, the ...
and
Gunn High School. El Camino Park, the oldest Palo Alto city park, is also on Stanford land. Stanford also has the Stanford Golf Course, and Stanford Red Barn Equestrian Center, used by Stanford athletics though the golf course can also be used by the general public.
Landmarks
Contemporary campus landmarks include the
Main Quad and
Memorial Church, the
Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the
Bing Concert Hall, the
Stanford Mausoleum with the nearby
Angel of Grief,
Hoover Tower
Hoover Tower is a structure on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States. The tower houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an archive collection founded by Herbert Hoover before he became president of ...
, the
Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (; ; 12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a u ...
Sculpture Garden, the
Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the
Arizona Cactus Garden, the
Stanford University Arboretum
The Stanford University Arboretum is an arboretum located on the grounds of Stanford University in Stanford, California. It is open to the public daily without charge.
Background
The arboretum began with the indigenous live oaks on Leland Stan ...
,
Green Library
The Cecil H. Green Library (commonly known as Green Library) is the main library on the Stanford University campus and is part of the SUL system. It is named for Cecil H. Green.
Green Library houses 4 million volumes, most of which are relat ...
and
the Dish
''The Dish'' is a 2000 Australian historical drama, historical comedy-drama film that tells the story of the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying live television of humanity's first steps on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. It wa ...
.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed List of Frank Lloyd Wright works, more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key ...
's 1937
Hanna–Honeycomb House
The Hanna–Honeycomb House, also known as simply the Hanna House, located on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California, United States, was Frank Lloyd Wright's first work in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area and his first work w ...
and the 1919
Lou Henry Hoover House are both listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...
.
White Memorial Fountain (also known as "The Claw") between the Stanford Bookstore and the Old Union is a popular place to meet and to engage in the Stanford custom of "fountain hopping"; it was installed in 1964 and designed by
Aristides Demetrios after a national competition as a memorial for two brothers in the class of 1949, William White and John White II, one of whom died before graduating and one shortly after in 1952.
[ Has information on the White brothers that slightly corrects some of the facts in other articles.]
File:Stanford Memorial Church Interior 2.jpg, Interior of the Stanford Memorial Church at the center of the Main Quad
File:Stanford University Hoover Tower.JPG, Hoover Tower
Hoover Tower is a structure on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States. The tower houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an archive collection founded by Herbert Hoover before he became president of ...
, at , the tallest building on campus
File:Stanstadium view.jpg, The new Stanford Stadium, site of home football games
File:Stanford University Arches with Memorial Church in the background.jpg, Stanford Quad with Memorial Church in the background
File:The Dish, Stanford University.jpg, The Dish
''The Dish'' is a 2000 Australian historical drama, historical comedy-drama film that tells the story of the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying live television of humanity's first steps on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. It wa ...
, a diameter radio telescope on the Stanford foothills overlooking the main campus
File:Claw Fountain at Stanford Univerisity.JPG, White Memorial Fountain (The Claw)
Administration and organization
Stanford is a private, non-profit university administered as a
corporate trust governed by a privately appointed
board of trustees
A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency.
The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...
with a maximum membership of 38.
Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually. A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot.
The Stanford trustees also oversee the
Stanford Research Park
Stanford Research Park (SRP) is a technology park established in 1951 as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Palo Alto, California, City of Palo Alto. It was the world's first university research park. It has more than 150 com ...
, the
Stanford Shopping Center, the
Cantor Center for Visual Arts,
Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital).
The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents.
Richard Saller became the interim president in September 2023. On April 4, 2024, the board of trustees announced that
Jonathan Levin would become the thirteenth president on August 1, 2024. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report.
Jenny Martinez became the fourteenth provost in October 2023. The university is organized into seven academic schools.
The schools of
Humanities and Sciences (twenty-seven departments),
Engineering
Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...
(nine departments),
and
Sustainability
Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long period of time. Definitions of this term are disputed and have varied with literature, context, and time. Sustainability usually has three dimensions (or pillars): env ...
(nine departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of
Law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...
,
Medicine
Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...
,
Education
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...
, and
Business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for ...
have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators.
But most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 54 elected representatives of the faculty for 2021.
The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a
ticket
Ticket or tickets may refer to:
Slips of paper
* Lottery ticket
* Parking ticket, a ticket confirming that the parking fee was paid (and the time of the parking start)
* Toll ticket, a slip of paper used to indicate where vehicles entered a to ...
by the entire student body. Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the
California Constitution
The Constitution of California () is the primary organizing law for the U.S. state of California, describing the duties, powers, structures and functions of the government of California. California's constitution was drafted in both English ...
, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.
Endowment, assets, and donations
Stanford's endowment includes real estate and other investments valued at $36.5 billion as of August 2023, and is one of the four
largest academic endowments in the United States. The endowment consists of $29.9 billion in a merged pool of assets and $6.6 billion of real estate near the main campus. Stanford is the largest landowner in the Silicon Valley Payouts from the endowment covered approximately 22% of university expenses in the 2023 fiscal year.
[As of August 31, 2023. ]
Since inception, the university has been the beneficiary of large donations. The endowment began in 1885, six years before the opening of the university, when Leland Stanford and his wife Jane conveyed approximately $20 million to the university. The university's pioneering of technology intellectual property transfer created both direct investments and enabled a unique pipeline of mega-donors including from alumni-founded companies with
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
(
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...
and
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
),
Nike (
Phil Knight
Philip Hampson Knight (born February 24, 1938) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist who is the co-founder and chairman ''emeritus'' of Nike, Inc., a global sports equipment and apparel company. He was previously its chai ...
),
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...
(
David Packard and
Bill Hewlett
William Redington Hewlett ( ; May 20, 1913 – January 12, 2001) was an American engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP).
Early life and education
Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Mic ...
), and
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
(
Vinod Kohsla) as examples. Further, the university's global reputation and continued leadership in technology has attracted large donations from prominent figures such as the co-founder of
Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...
(
Jim Clark
James Clark (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British racing driver from Scotland, who competed in Formula One from to . Clark won two Formula One World Drivers' Championship titles with Lotus, and—at the time of his death—held the ...
), founder of
SAP SE
Sap is a fluid transported in the xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant.
Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a s ...
(
Hasso Plattner), co-founder of
Andreessen Horowitz
AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...
(
Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and ...
and
Laura Arillaga-Andreessen), chairman of
Kleiner Perkins
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneur ...
(
John Doerr
L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the ...
and his wife Ann).
Academics
Admissions
Stanford is considered by ''
US News
''U.S. News & World Report'' (''USNWR'', ''US NEWS'') is an American media company publishing news, consumer advice, rankings, and analysis. The company was launched in 1948 as the merger of domestic-focused weekly newspaper ''U.S. News'' and ...
'' to be 'most selective' with an acceptance rate of 4%, one of the lowest
among US universities. Half of the applicants accepted to Stanford have an
SAT
The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and Test score, scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test ...
score between 1440 and 1570 or an
ACT score between 32 and 35, typically with a GPA of 3.94 or higher. Admissions officials consider a student's
grade point average
Grading in education is the application of standardized Measurement, measurements to evaluate different levels of student achievement in a course. Grades can be expressed as letters (usually A to F), as a range (for example, 1 to 6), percentage ...
to be an important academic factor, with emphasis on an applicant's high school class rank and letters of recommendation. In terms of non-academic materials as of 2019, Stanford ranks extracurricular activities, talent/ability and character/personal qualities as 'very important' in making first-time, first-year admission decisions, while ranking the interview, whether the applicant is a first-generation university applicant,
legacy preferences, volunteer work and work experience as 'considered'.
Of those students accepted to Stanford's Class of 2026, 1,736 chose to attend, of which 21% were first-generation college students.
Stanford's admission process is
need-blind
Need-blind admission in the United States refers to a college admission policy that does not take into account an applicant's financial status when deciding whether to accept them. This approach typically results in a higher percentage of accepted ...
for U.S. citizens and permanent residents; while it is not need-blind for international students, 64% are on need-based aid, with an average aid package of $31,411.
In 2012, the university awarded $126 million in need-based financial aid to 3,485 students, with an average aid package of $40,460.
Eighty percent of students receive some form of financial aid.
Stanford has a no-loan policy.
For undergraduates admitted starting in 2015, Stanford waives tuition, room, and board for most families with incomes below $65,000, and most families with incomes below $125,000 are not required to pay tuition; those with incomes up to $150,000 may have tuition significantly reduced.
Seventeen percent of students receive
Pell Grants,
a common measure of low-income students at a college. In 2022, Stanford started its first dual-enrollment computer science program for high school students from low-income communities,
as a pilot project which then inspired the founding of the Qualia Global Scholars Program. Stanford plans to expand the program to include courses in Structured Liberal Education and writing.
Teaching and learning
Stanford follows a quarter system with the autumn quarter usually beginning in late September and the spring quarter ending in mid-June.
The full-time, four-year undergraduate program has arts and sciences focus with high graduate student coexistence.
Stanford is accredited by the
Western Association of Schools and Colleges
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC ( )) provided accreditation of public and private universities, colleges, secondary and elementary schools in California and Hawaii, the territories of Guam, American Samoa and Northern ...
with the latest review in 2023.
Research centers and institutes
Stanford is
classified
Classified may refer to:
General
*Classified information, material that a government body deems to be sensitive
*Classified advertising or "classifieds"
Music
*Classified (rapper) (born 1977), Canadian rapper
* The Classified, a 1980s American ro ...
among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity."
The university's research expenditure in fiscal years of 2021/22 was $1.82 billion and the total number of sponsored projects was 7,900. By 2016, the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research oversaw
eighteen independent laboratories, centers, and institutes.
Kathryn Ann Moler is the key person for leading those research centers for choosing problems, faculty members, and students. Funding is also provided for undergraduate and graduate students by those labs, centers, and institutes for collaborative research. Other Stanford-affiliated institutions include the
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...
(originally the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), the
Stanford Research Institute
SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...
(an independent institution which originated at the university), the
Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace and formerly The Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace) is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic ...
(a conservative
think tank
A think tank, or public policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governme ...
), and the
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the
Hasso Plattner Institute of
University of Potsdam
The University of Potsdam is a public university in Potsdam, capital of the state of Brandenburg, northeastern Germany.
The university is mainly situated across three campuses in the city. Some faculty buildings are part of the New Palace o ...
that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).

Stanford is home to the
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil and political rights, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights move ...
Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, a collaboration with the
King Center to publish the King papers held by the King Center. It also runs the
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists and the Center for Ocean Solutions, which brings together marine science and policy to address challenges facing the ocean. It focuses on five points: climate change, overfishing, coastal development, pollution, and plastics. Together with
UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...
and
UC San Francisco, Stanford is part of the
Biohub
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), or simply Biohub, is a nonprofit research organization. In addition to supporting and conducting original research, CZ Biohub acts as a hub and fosters science collaboration between UC Berkeley, UC San Francis ...
, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...
and pediatrician
Priscilla Chan. This medical research center is working for designing advanced-level health care units.
Libraries and digital resources

By 2014,
Stanford University Libraries
The Stanford University Libraries (SUL), formerly known as "Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources" ("SULAIR"), is the library system of Stanford University in California. It encompasses more than 24 libraries in all. S ...
(SUL) had twenty-four libraries in total. The
Hoover Institution Library and Archives is a research center based on history of 20th-century.
Stanford University Libraries
The Stanford University Libraries (SUL), formerly known as "Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources" ("SULAIR"), is the library system of Stanford University in California. It encompasses more than 24 libraries in all. S ...
(SUL) held a collection of more than 9.3 million volumes, nearly 300,000 rare or special books, 1.5 million e-books, 2.5 million audiovisual materials, 77,000 serials, nearly 6 million microform holdings, and thousands of other digital resources.
The main library in the SU library system is the
Green Library
The Cecil H. Green Library (commonly known as Green Library) is the main library on the Stanford University campus and is part of the SUL system. It is named for Cecil H. Green.
Green Library houses 4 million volumes, most of which are relat ...
, which also contains various meeting and conference rooms, study spaces, and reading rooms.
Lathrop Library (previously
Meyer Library, demolished in 2015), holds various student-accessible media resources and houses one of the largest
East Asia
East Asia is a geocultural region of Asia. It includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, plus two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. The economies of Economy of China, China, Economy of Ja ...
collections with 540,000 volumes.
Stanford University Press
Stanford University Press (SUP) is the publishing house of Stanford University. It is one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and the first university press to be established on the West Coast. It is currently a member of the Ass ...
, founded in 1892, published about 130 books per year has printed more than 3,000 books. It also has fifteen subject areas.
Online encyclopedia
The ''
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') is a freely available online philosophy resource published and maintained by Stanford University, encompassing both an online encyclopedia of philosophy and peer-reviewed original publication ...
'' is a leading
online encyclopedia
An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, is a digital encyclopedia accessible through the Internet. Some examples include pre-World Wide Web services that offered the '' Academic American Encyclopedia'' beginning in 1980, Enc ...
and academic resource on the subject of
philosophy
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, published and maintained by the university. The encyclopedia was founded by Stanford senior researcher
Edward Zalta
Edward Nouri Zalta (; born March 16, 1952) is an American philosopher who is a senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received his Bachelor of Arts, BA from Rice University in 1 ...
in 1995.
Arts

Stanford is home to the
Cantor Center for Visual Arts, a museum established with the help of art collector
B. Gerald Cantor. It today consists of twenty-four galleries, sculpture gardens, terraces, and a courtyard first established in 1891 by Jane and Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child. The university's collection of works by
Auguste Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (; ; 12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a u ...
is among the largest in the world, with as many as 200 sculptures at the Cantor Center alone. These include an original bronze cast of ''
The Thinker
''The Thinker'' (), by Auguste Rodin, is a bronze sculpture depicting a Heroic nudity, nude male figure of heroic size, seated on a large rock, leaning forward, right elbow placed upon the left thigh, back of the right hand supporting the chin ...
'' granted residence at Stanford by Cantor in 1988, with the university expected to attain full ownership sometime in the future. The Stanford ''Thinker'' has been loaned for viewing around the world and features across the university's iconography and culture, including the logo of the ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy.''
The
Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery, which was built in 1917, serves as a teaching resource for the Department of Art & Art History as well as an exhibition venue. In 2014, Stanford opened the Anderson Collection, a new museum focused on postwar American art and founded by the donation of 121 works by food service moguls Mary and
Harry Anderson. There are outdoor art installations throughout the campus, primarily sculptures, but some murals as well. The Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden near Roble Hall features wood carvings and "
totem pole
Totem poles () are monumental carvings found in western Canada and the northwestern United States. They are a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually made from large t ...
s".
The Stanford music department sponsors many ensembles, including five choirs, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra,
Stanford Taiko, and the Stanford Wind Ensemble. Extracurricular activities include theater groups such as Ram's Head Theatrical Society, the Stanford Improvisors, the Stanford Shakespeare Company, and the Stanford Savoyards, a group dedicated to performing the works of
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) and to the works they jointly created. The two men collaborated on fourteen com ...
. Stanford is also host to
ten ''a cappella'' groups, including the
Mendicants
A mendicant (from , "begging") is one who practices mendicancy, relying chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive. In principle, mendicant religious orders own little property, either individually or collectively, and in many instances members ...
(Stanford's first),
Counterpoint
In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin ...
(the first all-female group on the
West Coast),
the Harmonics, the
Stanford Fleet Street Singers,
Talisman
A talisman is any object ascribed with religious or magical powers intended to protect, heal, or harm individuals for whom they are made. Talismans are often portable objects carried on someone in a variety of ways, but can also be installed perm ...
,
Everyday People,
and Raagapella.
Reputation and rankings
Stanford is highly ranked by ''
U.S. News & World Report'', ''
Times Higher Education
''Times Higher Education'' (''THE''), formerly ''The Times Higher Education Supplement'' (''The THES''), is a British magazine reporting specifically on news and issues related to higher education.
Ownership
TPG Capital acquired TSL Education ...
'', and ''
QS World University Rankings
The ''QS World University Rankings'' is a portfolio of comparative college and university rankings compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds, a higher education analytics firm. Its first and earliest edition was published in collaboration with '' Times ...
''. As noted in
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
's 2024 rankings, "the usual players are almost always going to come out on top: The Princetons, the Stanfords, the Yales, the Harvards. They will jockey for those first few spots on whatever ranking you happen to be looking."
Standings in rankings
In 2022, ''
Washington Monthly
''Washington Monthly'' is a bimonthly, nonprofit magazine primarily covering United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C. The magazine also publishes an annual ranking of American colleges and universities, which ser ...
'' ranked Stanford at 1st position in their annual list of top universities in the United States. In 2019, Stanford University took 1st place on Reuters' list of the ''World's Most Innovative Universities'' for the fifth consecutive year.
Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Graduate School of Business is the Postgraduate education, graduate business school of Stanford University, a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective ...
has consistently been both the most selective business school in the world and consistently ranked 1st in the list of best
business school
A business school is a higher education institution or professional school that teaches courses leading to degrees in business administration or management. A business school may also be referred to as school of management, management school, s ...
s year-over-year consecutively by various reputed studies including ''
Bloomberg Businessweek
''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'' (and before that ''Business Week'' and ''The Business Week''), is an American monthly business magazine published 12 times a year. The magazine debuted in New York City in Septembe ...
'' and ''
U.S. News & World Report'' for 2024.
Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School (SLS) is the Law school in the United States, law school of Stanford University, a Private university, private research university near Palo Alto, California. Established in 1893, Stanford Law had an acceptance rate of 6.28% i ...
is also consistently been amongst the two most selective law schools in the world and consistently ranked 1st in the list of best law schools year-over-year consecutively for 2024 in ''U.S. News & World Report''.
In a 2022 survey by ''
The Princeton Review
The Princeton Review is an education services company providing tutoring, test preparation and admission resources for students. It was founded in 1981, and since that time has worked with over 400 million students. Services are delivered by 4, ...
'', Stanford was ranked 1st among the top ten "dream colleges" of America, and was considered to be the ultimate "dream college" of both students and parents. From polls of college applicants done by ''The Princeton Review'', every year from 2013 to 2020 the most commonly named "dream college" for students was Stanford; separately, parents, too, most frequently named Stanford their ultimate "dream college".
The ''
Academic Ranking of World Universities
The ''Academic Ranking of World Universities'' (''ARWU''), also known as the Shanghai Ranking, is one of the annual publications of world university rankings. The league table was originally compiled and issued by Shanghai Jiao Tong Universi ...
(ARWU)'' ranked Stanford second in the world (after Harvard) most years from 2003 to 2024. ''
Times Higher Education
''Times Higher Education'' (''THE''), formerly ''The Times Higher Education Supplement'' (''The THES''), is a British magazine reporting specifically on news and issues related to higher education.
Ownership
TPG Capital acquired TSL Education ...
'' recognizes Stanford as one of the world's "six super brands" on its ''World Reputation Rankings'', along with
Berkeley,
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...
,
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
,
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
, and
Oxford
Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town.
The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...
.
Discoveries and innovation
Natural sciences

*
Biological synthesis of
deoxyribonucleic acid
Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of a ...
(DNA) –
Arthur Kornberg discovered the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of
ribonucleic acid
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself (non-coding RNA) or by forming a template for the production of proteins ( messenger RNA). RNA and deoxyr ...
and
deoxyribonucleic acid
Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of a ...
, and won the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine () is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, acco ...
in 1959 for his work at Stanford. By studying bacteria, Kornberg succeeded in isolating DNA polymerase in 1956–an enzyme that is active in the formation of DNA.
*First
Transgenic organism –
Stanley Cohen and
Herbert Boyer
Herbert Wayne "Herb" Boyer (born July 10, 1936) is an American biotechnologist, researcher and entrepreneur in biotechnology. Along with Stanley N. Cohen and Paul Berg, he discovered recombinant DNA, a method to coax bacteria into producing for ...
were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering.
Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including
human growth hormone
Growth hormone (GH) or somatotropin, also known as human growth hormone (hGH or HGH) in its human form, is a peptide hormone that stimulates growth, cell reproduction, and cell regeneration in humans and other animals. It is thus important in ...
and
hepatitis B vaccine
Hepatitis B vaccine is a vaccine that prevents hepatitis B. The first dose is recommended within 24 hours of birth with either two or three more doses given after that. This includes those with poor immune function such as from HIV/AIDS and ...
.
*
Laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word ''laser'' originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radi ...
–
Arthur Leonard Schawlow
Arthur Leonard Schawlow (May 5, 1921 – April 28, 1999) was an American physicist who, along with Charles Townes, developed the theoretical basis for laser science. His central insight was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take m ...
shared the 1981
Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...
with
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen (March 11, 1920 – September 5, 2017) was a Dutch- American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a ...
and
Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
*
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are disturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...
–
Felix Bloch
Felix Bloch (; ; 23 October 1905 – 10 September 1983) was a Swiss-American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics with Edward Mills Purcell "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and di ...
developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of
MRI
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to generate pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes inside the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and rad ...
.
Computer and applied sciences

*
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...
–
Stanford Research Institute
SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...
, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.
In the early 1970s, Bob Kahn & Vint Cerf's research project about Internetworking, later DARPA formulated it to the TCP (Transmission Control Program).
*Internet – Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.
*Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.
*
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
– Google began in January 1996 as a research project by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...
, when they were both PhD students at Stanford.
They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP) which is started in 1999. The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library", and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies. Today, Google stands as one of the most valuable brands in the world.
*Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.
*RISC – DARPA, ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California, Berkeley, UC Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM's efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, router (computing), routers and similar products.
*SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation, for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal Computer-aided design, CAD workstation, which led to
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
.
*MIMO - Arogyaswami Paulraj and Thomas Kailath invented multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radio communications, which involves simultaneously using multiple antennas on receivers and transmitters. Invented in 1992, MIMO is an essential element in many modern wireless technologies today.
Businesses and entrepreneurship
Stanford is one of the most successful universities worldwide in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies, and it is often considered the model for technology transfer.
[Nigel Page. . Chapter 17.13 in Sharing the Art of IP Management. Globe White Page Ltd, London, U.K. 2007][Timothy Lenoir. Inventing the entrepreneurial university: Stanford and the co-evolution of Silicon Valley pp. 88–128 in Building Technology Transfer within Research Universities: An Entrepreneurial Approach Edited by Thomas J. Allen and Rory P. O'Shea. Cambridge University Press, 2014. ] Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects. The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often venture capital, funded, to launch their own companies.
Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created some 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s. When combined, these companies would form the tenth-largest economy in the world.
Some notable companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:
*
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...
, 1939: co-founders William Redington Hewlett, William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and
David Packard (M.S)
*Silicon Graphics, 1981: co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his graduate students
*
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
, 1982: co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A)
*Cisco Systems, Cisco, 1984: co-founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) were in charge of the Stanford Computer Science and the Graduate School of Business computer operations groups, respectively, when the hardware was developed
*Nvidia, 1993: co-founder Jensen Huang (M.S)
*Yahoo!, 1994: co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S)
*Netflix, 1997: co-founder Reed Hastings (M.S)
*
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
, 1998: co-founders
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
(M.S) and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...
(M.S)
*PayPal, 1998: co-founders Ken Howery (B.A), Peter Thiel (B.A, J.D), Elon Musk (Accepted into graduate program although never enrolled)
*VMware, 1998: co-founders Mendel Rosenblum (Professor) and Edouard Bugnion (M.S)
*LinkedIn, 2002: co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S)
*YouTube, 2005: co-founder Jawed Karim (M.S)
*Instagram, 2010: co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S)
*Snapchat, 2011: co-founders Evan Spiegel (B.S), Reggie Brown (B.S) and Bobby Murphy (businessman), Bobby Murphy (B.S)
*Coursera, 2012: co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD)
*DoorDash, 2013: co-founders Tony Xu (M.B.A) and Evan Moore (M.B.A)
Student life
Student body
Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students in the 2019–2020 school year. Women made up 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students.
In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%. Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master's degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year.
The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%.
The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university's coterminal degree (or "coterm") program, which allows students to earn a master's degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program. In 2010, 15% of undergraduates were first-generation students.
Dormitories and student housing
By 2013, 89% of undergraduate students lived in on-campus university housing. First-year undergraduates are required to live on campus, and all undergraduates are guaranteed housing for all four undergraduate years.
Undergraduates live in 80 different houses, including dormitories, co-ops, Stanford Row House Program, row houses, and #Greek life, fraternities and sororities.
At Manzanita Park, 118 mobile homes were installed as "temporary" housing from 1969 to 1991, but have become the site of newer dorms Castano, Kimball, Lantana, and the Humanities House, completed in 2015. Most student residences are just outside the campus core, within ten minutes (on foot or bike) of most classrooms and libraries. Some are reserved for freshmen, sophomores, or upper-class students and some are open to all four classes. Most residences are co-ed; seven are all-male fraternity, fraternities, three are all-female sorority, sororities, and there is also one all-female non-sorority house, Roth House. In most residences, men and women live on the same floor, but some have single-gender floors.
Several residences are considered "theme" houses; predating the current classification system are Columbae (Social Change Through Nonviolence, since 1970), and Synergy (Exploring Alternatives, since 1972). The Academic, Language, and Culture Houses include EAST (Education and Society Themed House), Hammarskjöld (International Themed House), Haus Mitteleuropa (Central European Themed House), La Casa Italiana (Italian Language and Culture), La Maison Française (French Language and Culture House), Slavianskii Dom (Slavic/East European Themed House), Storey (Human Biology Themed House), and Yost (Spanish Language and Culture). Cross-Cultural Themed Houses include Casa Zapata (Chicano/Latino Theme in Stern Hall), Muwekma-tah-ruk (American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Themed House), Okada (Asian-American Themed House in Wilbur Hall), and Ujamaa (Black/African-American Themed House in Lagunita Court). Focus Houses include Freshman-Sophomore College (Academic Focus), Branner Hall (Community Service), Kimball (Arts & Performing Arts), Crothers (Global Citizenship), and Toyon Hall, Toyon (Sophomore Priority).

housing cooperative, Co-ops or "Self-Ops" are another housing option. These houses feature cooperative living, where residents and eating associates each contribute work to keep the house running, such as cooking meals or cleaning shared spaces. These houses have unique themes around which their community is centered. Many co-ops are hubs of music, art and philosophy. The co-ops on campus are 576 Alvarado Row (formerly Chi Theta Chi), Columbae, Enchanted Broccoli Forest (EBF), Hammarskjöld, Kairos, Terra (the unofficial LGBT house), and Synergy. Phi Sigma, at 1018 Campus Drive was formerly Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, but in 1973 became a Self-Op. By 2015, 55 percent of the graduate student population lived on campus. Stanford also subsidizes off-campus apartments in nearby
Palo Alto
Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
Th ...
,
Menlo Park, and Mountain View, California, Mountain View for graduate students who are guaranteed on-campus housing but are unable to live on campus due to a lack of space.
Athletics

In 2016, Stanford had sixteen male varsity sports and twenty female varsity sports, nineteen club sports, and about 27 intramural sports. The Stanford Tree is the Stanford Band's mascot and the unofficial mascot of Stanford University. Stanford's team name is the "Stanford Cardinal, Cardinal", referring to the vivid Stanford Cardinal Red color (not the Northern cardinal, common songbird as at several other schools); the university does not have an official mascot. The Tree has been called one of America's most bizarre and controversial college mascots; it regularly appears at the top of Internet "worst mascot" lists, but has also appeared on at least one list of top mascots. The Tree is a member of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB) and appears at American football, football games, basketball games, and other events where the band performs.
In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the executive committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted a new mascot (Indian). The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Wall Lyman, Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native Americans in the United States, Native American students and a vote by the student senate.
Stanford is a member of the
Atlantic Coast Conference
The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is a collegiate List of NCAA conferences, athletic conference in the United States. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, the ACC's eighteen member universities compete in the National Collegiate Athlet ...
in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCAA's NCAA Division I, Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, FBS. The two official colors of the university are Stanford Cardinal Red and Palo Alto Green.
From 1930 until 1972, Stanford's sports teams had been known as the Indians and during the period from 1951 to 1972, Prince Lightfoot (portrayed by Timm Williams, a member of the Yurok tribe) was the official mascot. But in 1972, Native Americans in the United States, Native American students and staff members successfully lobbied University President Richard Wall Lyman, Richard Lyman to abolish the "Native American name controversy, Indian" name along with what they had come to perceive as an offensive and demeaning mascot. Stanford's teams reverted unofficially to the name "Cardinal", the color that had represented the school before 1930.
From 1972 until 1981, Stanford’s official nickname was the Cardinal, but, during this time, there was debate among students and administrators concerning what the mascot and team name should be. A 1972 student referendum on the issue was in favor of restoring the Indian, while a second 1975 referendum was against. The 1975 vote included new suggestions, many alluding to the industry of the school's founder, tycoon
Leland Stanford
Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824June 21, 1893) was an American attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, and Republican Party (United States), Republican Party politician from Watervliet, New York. He served as the eighth governor of Calif ...
: the Robber baron (industrialist), Robber Barons, the Sequoias, the Trees, the Cardinals, the Railroaders, the Spikes, and the Huns.
Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley. The winner of the annual "Big Game (American football), Big Game" between the California Golden Bears football, Cal and Stanford Cardinal football, Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.
As of May 23, 2024, Stanford has won 136 NCAA team championships, more than any other school. Stanford has won at least one NCAA team championship each academic year for 48 consecutive years, from 1976–77 through to 2023–24.
As of January 1, 2022, Stanford athletes have also won 529 NCAA individual championships. No other Division I school is within 100 of Stanford's total. Stanford have won 25 consecutive NACDA Directors' Cups, from 1994–1995 through to 2018–19, awarded annually to the most successful overall college sports program in the nation.
[ 177 Stanford-affiliated athletes have won a total of 296 Summer Olympic medals (150 gold, 79 silver, 67 bronze), including 26 medals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 27 medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.][ In the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Stanford-affiliated athletes won 26 medals, more than any other university.
]
Traditions
*"Hail, Stanford, Hail!" is the Stanford hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various university singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in economics and later became associate professor of sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
*Big Game (American football), Big Game: The central football rivalry between Stanford and California Golden Bears football, UC Berkeley. First played in 1892, and for a time played by the universities' rugby teams, it is one of the oldest college rivalries in the United States.
*The Stanford Axe: A trophy earned by the winner of Big Game, exchanged only as necessary. The axe originated in 1899 when Stanford yell leader Billy Erb wielded a lumberman's axe to inspire the team. Stanford lost, and the Axe was stolen by Berkeley students following the game. In 1930, Stanford students staged an elaborate heist to recover the Axe. In 1933, the schools agreed to exchange it as a prize for winning Big Game. As of 2021, a restaurant centrally located on Stanford's campus is named "The Axe and Palm" in reference to the Axe.
*Big Game Gaieties: In the week ahead of Big Game, a 90-minute original musical (written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram's Head Theatrical Society) is performed in Memorial Auditorium.
*Full Moon on the Quad: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
*The Stanford Marriage Pact: An annual matchmaking event where thousands of students complete a questionnaire about their values and are subsequently matched with the best person for them to make a "marriage pact" with.
*Fountain Hopping: At any time of year, students tour Stanford's main campus fountains to dip their feet or swim in some of the university's 25 fountains.
*Mausoleum Party: An annual Halloween party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the Mausoleum party was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
*Wacky Walk: At commencement, graduates forgo a more traditional entrance and instead stride into Stanford Stadium in a large procession wearing wacky costumes.
*Steam Tunneling: Stanford has a network of underground brick-lined tunnels that conduct central heating to more than 200 buildings via steam pipes. Students sometimes navigate the corridors, rooms, and locked gates, carrying flashlights and water bottles. ''Stanford Magazine'' named steam tunneling one of the "101 things you must do" before graduating from the Farm in 2000.
*Band Run: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
*Viennese Ball: A formal Ball (dance), ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed (since 1987) Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
*The long-unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is "''Die Luft der Freiheit weht.''" Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, "The wind of freedom blows." The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official. It was made official by way of incorporation into an official seal by the board of trustees in December 2002.
*Degree of Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the "degree of Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman" was created by Stanford Associates, part of the Stanford alumni organization, to recognize alumni who give rare and extraordinary service to the university. It is awarded not at prescribed intervals, but instead only when the president of the university deems it appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
, Bill Hewlett
William Redington Hewlett ( ; May 20, 1913 – January 12, 2001) was an American engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP).
Early life and education
Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Mic ...
, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health#Lucile Packard, Lucile Packard, and John W. Gardner, John Gardner.
*Former campus traditions include the Big Game bonfire on Lake Lagunita
Lake Lagunita, informally referred to as Lake Lag, is an artificial dry lake in Stanford University, California, located on the western side of the Stanford campus near the Lagunita residences. It was created in to provide irrigation for Palo Alt ...
(a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.
Religious life
Students and staff at Stanford are of many different religions. The Stanford Office for Religious Life's mission is "to guide, nurture and enhance spiritual, religious and ethical life within the Stanford University community" by promoting enriching dialogue, meaningful ritual, and enduring friendships among people of all religious backgrounds. It is headed by a dean with the assistance of a senior associate dean and an associate dean.
Stanford Memorial Church, in the center of campus, has a Sunday University Public Worship service (UPW) usually in the "Protestant Ecumenical Christian" tradition where the Memorial Church Choir sings and a sermon is preached usually by one of the Stanford deans for Religious Life. UPW sometimes has multifaith services. In addition, the church is used by the Catholic community and the other Christian denominations at Stanford. Weddings happen most Saturdays and the university has allowed blessings of same-gender relationships and legal weddings.
In addition to the church, the Office for Religious Life has a Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning, and Experiences (CIRCLE) on the third floor of Old Union. It offers a common room, an interfaith sanctuary, a seminar room, a student lounge area, and a reading room, as well as offices housing a number of Stanford Associated Religions (SAR) member groups and the Senior Associate Dean and Associate Dean for Religious Life. Most though not all religious student groups belong to SAR. The SAR directory includes organizations that serve atheist, Bahá’í, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh groups, though these groups vary year by year. The Windhover Contemplation Center was dedicated in October 2014, and was intended to provide spiritual sanctuary for students and staff in the midst of their course and work schedules; the center displays the "Windhover" paintings by Nathan Oliveira, the late Stanford professor and artist. Some religions have a larger and more formal presence on campus in addition to the student groups; these include the Catholic and Hillel communities at Stanford.
Greek life
Fraternities and sororities have been active on the Stanford campus since 1891 when the university first opened. In 1944, University President Donald Tresidder banned all Stanford sororities due to extreme competition. However, following Title IX, the Board of Trustees lifted the 33-year ban on sororities in 1977. Students are not permitted to join a fraternity or sorority until spring quarter of their freshman year. Stanford has thirty-one Greek organizations, including fourteen sororities and sixteen fraternities. Nine of the Greek organizations were housed (eight in University-owned houses and one, Sigma Chi, in their own house, although the land is owned by the university). Five chapters were members of the African American Fraternal and Sororal Association, eleven chapters were members of the Interfraternity Council, seven chapters belonged to the Intersorority Council, and six chapters belonged to the Multicultural Greek Council.
Student groups
Stanford has more than 600 student organizations. Groups are often, though not always, partially funded by the university via allocations directed by the student government organization, the ASSU. These funds include "special fees," which are decided by a Spring Quarter vote by the student body. Groups span athletics and recreation, careers/pre-professional, community service, ethnic/cultural, fraternities and sororities, health and counseling, media and publications, the arts, political and social awareness, and religious and philosophical organizations. In contrast to many other selective universities, Stanford policy mandates that all recognized student clubs be "broadly open" for all interested students to join.
''The Stanford Daily'' is a student-run daily newspaper and has been published since the university was founded in 1892. The student-run radio station, KZSU Stanford 90.1 FM, features freeform music programming, sports commentary, and news segments; it started in 1947 as an AM radio station. The Stanford Review is a conservative student newspaper founded in 1987. ''The Fountain Hopper'' (''FoHo'') is a financially independent, anonymous student-run campus Tabloid journalism, rag publication, notable for having broken the People v. Turner, Brock Turner story. Stanford hosts numerous environmental and sustainability-oriented student groups, including Students for a Sustainable Stanford, Students for Environmental and Racial Justice, and Stanford Energy Club. Stanford is a member of the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium, through which it has committed to best-practice sharing and the ongoing exchange of campus sustainability solutions along with other member institutions.
Stanford is also home to a large number of pre-professional student organizations, organized around missions from startup incubation to paid consulting. The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) is one of the largest professional organizations in Silicon Valley, with over 5,000 members. Its goal is to support the next generation of entrepreneurs. StartX is a non-profit startup accelerator for student and faculty-led Startup company, startups. It is staffed primarily by students. Stanford Women In Business (SWIB) is an on-campus business organization, aimed at helping Stanford women find paths to success in the generally male-dominated technology industry. Stanford Marketing is a student group that provides students hands-on training through research and strategy consulting projects with Fortune 500 clients, as well as workshops led by people from industry and professors in the Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Graduate School of Business is the Postgraduate education, graduate business school of Stanford University, a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective ...
. Stanford Finance provides mentoring and internships for students who want to enter a career in finance. Stanford Pre Business Association is intended to build connections among industry, alumni, and student communities.
Stanford is also home to several academic groups focused on government and politics, includin
Stanford in Government
an
Stanford Women in Politics
Th
Stanford Society for Latin American Politics
is Stanford's first student organization focused on the region's political, economic, and social developments, working to increase the representation and study of Latin America on campus. Former guest speakers include José Mujica and Gustavo Petro. Other groups include:
*The Stanford Axe Committee is the official guardian of the Stanford Axe and the rest of the time assists the Stanford Band as a supplementary spirit group. It has existed since 1982.
*Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) which hosts the annual Stanford Powwow started in 1971. This is the largest student-run event on campus and the largest student-run powwow in the country.
*The Stanford Improvisors (SImps for short) teach and perform improvisational theatre on campus and in the surrounding community. In 2014 the group finished second in the Golden Gate Regional College Improv tournament, and they have since been invited twice to perform at the annual San Francisco Improv Festival.
*Asha for Education is a national student group founded in 1991. It focuses mainly on education in India and supporting nonprofit organizations that work mainly in the education sector. Asha's Stanford chapter organizes events like Holi as well as lectures by prominent leaders from India on the university campus.
Safety
Stanford's Department of Public Safety is responsible for law enforcement and safety on the main campus. Its deputy sheriffs are peace officers by arrangement with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office. The department is also responsible for publishing an annual crime report covering the previous three years as required by the Clery Act. Fire protection has been provided by contract with the Palo Alto Fire Department since 1976. Murder is rare on the campus, although a few cases have been notorious, including the 1974 murder of Arlis Perry in Stanford Memorial Church, which was not solved until 2018. Also infamous was Theodore Streleski's murder of his faculty advisor in 1978.
Campus sexual misconduct
In 2014, Stanford was the tenth highest in the nation in "total of reports of rape" on their main campus, with 26 reports of rape. In Stanford's 2015 Campus Climate Survey, 4.7 percent of female undergraduates reported experiencing sexual assault as defined by the university, and 32.9 percent reported experiencing sexual misconduct. According to the survey, 85% of perpetrators of misconduct were Stanford students and 80% were men. Perpetrators of sexual misconduct were frequently aided by alcohol or drugs, according to the survey: "Nearly three-fourths of the students whose responses were categorized as sexual assault indicated that the act was accomplished by a person or persons taking advantage of them when they were drunk or high, according to the survey. Close to 70 percent of students who reported an experience of sexual misconduct involving nonconsensual penetration and/or oral sex indicated the same."
Associated Students of Stanford and student and alumni activists with the anti-rape group Stand with Leah criticized the survey methodology for downgrading incidents involving alcohol if students did not check two separate boxes indicating they were both intoxicated and incapacity while sexually assaulted. Reporting on the Brock Turner rape case, a reporter from ''The Washington Post'' analyzed campus rape reports submitted by universities to the U.S. Department of Education, and found that Stanford was one of the top ten universities in campus rapes in 2014, with 26 reported that year, but when analyzed by rapes per 1000 students, Stanford was not among the top ten.
''People v. Turner''
On the night of January 17–18, 2015, 22-year-old Chanel Miller, who was visiting the campus to attend a party at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Order, was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old freshman student-athlete from Ohio. Two Stanford graduate students witnessed the attack and intervened; when Turner attempted to flee the two held him down on the ground until police arrived.[Liam Stack for ''The New York Times''. June 6, 201]
Light Sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford Rape Case Draws Outrage
/ref> Stanford immediately referred the case to prosecutors and offered Miller counseling, and within two weeks had barred Turner from campus after conducting an investigation. Turner was convicted on three felony charges in March 2016 and in June 2016 he received a jail sentence of six months and was declared a sex offender, requiring him to register as such for the rest of his life; prosecutors had sought a six-year prison sentence out of the maximum 14 years that was possible. The case and the relatively lenient sentence drew nationwide attention. Two years later, the judge in the case, Stanford graduate Aaron Persky, was recalled by the voters.
Joe Lonsdale
In February 2015, Elise Clougherty filed a sexual assault and harassment lawsuit against venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale.[Katie Benner for Bloomberg News. February 2, 201]
Benner on Tech: Parsing a Sexual Assault Suit
/ref>[Emily Bazelon for ''The New York Times''. February 11, 201]
/ref> Lonsdale and Clougherty entered into a relationship in the spring of 2012 when she was a junior and he was her mentor in a Stanford entrepreneurship course. By the spring of 2013 Clougherty had broken off the relationship and filed charges at Stanford that Lonsdale had broken the Stanford policy against consensual relationships between students and faculty and that he had sexually assaulted and harassed her, which resulted in Lonsdale being banned from Stanford for 10 years. Lonsdale challenged Stanford's finding that he had sexually assaulted and harassed her and Stanford rescinded that finding and the campus ban in the fall of 2015. Clougherty withdrew her suit that fall as well.
Notable people
Award laureates and scholars
Stanford's current community of scholars includes:
*2 Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners;
*3 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners;
*3 recipients of the National Medal of Technology;
*4 Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...
winners;
*6 recipients of the National Humanities Medal;
*6 Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...
winners;
*7 Wolf Foundation Prize winners;
*10 recipients of the National Medal of Science;
*14 AAAI fellows;
*22 Nobel Prize laureates (as of 2022, 58 affiliates in total);
*33 MacArthur Fellow
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and 30 individuals workin ...
s;
*47 members of American Philosophical Society;
*56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995);
*90 members of National Academy of Medicine;
*113 members of National Academy of Engineering;
*174 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences;
*303 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stanford's current and former faculty includes 58 Nobel laureates, as well as 29 winners of the Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...
, the so-called "Nobel Prize in computer science", comprising one-third of the List of Stanford University people#Computer science, awards given in its 44-year history. The university also has 27 ACM Fellows and is affiliated with four Gödel Prize winners, four Knuth Prize recipients, ten IJCAI Computers and Thought Award winners, and fifteen Grace Murray Hopper Award winners for their work in the foundations of computer science. Stanford alumni have started many companies and, according to ''Forbes'', Stanford has produced the second highest number of billionaires of all universities. By 2022, 128 Stanford students or alumni have also been named Rhodes Scholars.
File:Herbert Hoover.jpg, Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
(BS 1895), President of the United States, founder of Hoover Institution at Stanford. Trustee of Stanford for nearly 50 years.
File:CJ_Rehnquist.tif, William Rehnquist (BA 1948, MA 1948, LLB 1952) 16th Chief Justice of the United States
File:Sandra_Day_O'Connor.jpg, Sandra Day O'Connor (BA 1950, LLB 1952), Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
File:Official Portrait of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (cropped).jpg, Rishi Sunak (MBA 2006), Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
File:Yukio Hatoyama 20070824.jpg, Yukio Hatoyama (PhD 1976), Former Prime Minister of Japan
File:Stephen_Breyer,_SCOTUS_photo_portrait.jpg, Stephen Breyer (BA 1959), Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
File:Larry_Page_in_the_European_Parliament,_17.06.2009_(cropped).jpg, Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
(MS 1998), founder of Alphabet Inc.
File:Sergey_Brin_Ted_2010.jpg, Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...
(MS 1995), founder of Alphabet Inc.
File:Re_publica_2015_-_Tag_1_(17195424118).jpg, Reed Hastings (MS 1988), founder of Netflix Inc.
File:Philknightfootball.jpg, Phil Knight
Philip Hampson Knight (born February 24, 1938) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist who is the co-founder and chairman ''emeritus'' of Nike, Inc., a global sports equipment and apparel company. He was previously its chai ...
(MBA 1962), founder of Nike Inc.
File:Reid_Hoffman_in_SF_2011.jpg, Reid Hoffman (BS 1990), founder of LinkedIn Corporation
File:Philip_Zimbardo_(cropped).jpg, Philip Zimbardo
File:TobiasWolff.jpg, Tobias Wolff
File:Condoleezza_Rice_cropped.jpg, Condoleezza Rice
See also
*List of universities by number of billionaire alumni
*List of colleges and universities in California
*S* – a collaboration between seven universities and the Karolinska Institute for training in bioinformatics and genomics
*Stanford School
Explanatory notes
References
Further reading
* Mirrielees, Edith R. ''Stanford: the Story of a University'' (1959), popular history.
* Mohr, James C. "Academic turmoil and public opinion: The Ross case at Stanford." ''Pacific Historical Review'' 39.1 (1970): 39–61. Economist was fired in 1900 for his liberalism
online
* Medeiros, Frank Alfred. "The Sterling Years at Stanford: A study in the dynamics of institutional change" (PhD Dissertation. Stanford University; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 1979. 7917259)
* Leslie, Stuart W. "Playing the education game to win: The military and interdisciplinary research at Stanford." ''Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences'' 18.1 (1987): 55–88
online
* Davis, Margo Baumgartner, and Roxanne Nilan. ''The Stanford album: a photographic history, 1885–1945'' (Stanford University Press, 1989).
* Altenberg, Lee
''Beyond Capitalism: Leland Stanford's Forgotten Vision''
(Stanford Historical Society, 1990).
* Lowen, Rebecca S. "Transforming the university: Administrators, physicists, and industrial and federal patronage at Stanford, 1935–49." ''History of Education Quarterly'' 31.3 (1991): 365–388.
* Lowen, Rebecca S. " 'Exploiting a Wonderful Opportunity': The Patronage of Scientific Research at Stanford University, 1937–1965." ''Minerva'' (1992): 391–421
online
* Kargon, Robert, and Stuart Leslie. "Imagined geographies: Princeton, Stanford and the boundaries of useful knowledge in postwar America." ''Minerva'' (1994): 121–143.
* Leslie, Stuart W. ''The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford'', (Columbia University Press, 1994).
* Lowen, Rebecca S., and R. S. Lowen, ''Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford'', (University of California Press, 1997).
* Cuban, Larry. "Change without reform: the case of Stanford University School of Medicine, 1908–1990." ''American Educational Research Journal'' 34.1 (1997): 83–122.
* Fetter Jean. ''Questions and Admissions: Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford'' (1997),
* Fenyo, Ken, ''The Stanford Daily 100 Years of Headlines'' (2003),
* Gillmor, C. Stewart. ''Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a discipline, a university, and Silicon Valley'' (Stanford UP, 2004
online
* Adams, Stephen B. "Stanford and Silicon Valley: Lessons on becoming a high-tech region." ''California management review'' 48.1 (2005): 29–51.
* Joncas, Ricard, David Neumann, and Paul V. Turner. ''The Campus Guide: Stanford University''. Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. . (print); (online).
* Lyman, Richard W. ''Stanford in turmoil: Campus unrest, 1966–1972'' (Stanford University Press, 2009
online
* George H. Nash, Nash, George H. ''Herbert Hoover and Stanford University'' (Hoover Press, 2015
online
* Kennedy, Donald. ''A Place in the Sun: A Memoir'' (2018).
* Nilan, Roxanne L., and Cassius L. Kirk Jr. ''Stanford's Wallace Sterling: Portrait of a Presidency 1949–1968'' (Stanford Up, 2023), a major scholarly history
see description
* Tarnoff, Ben. "Better, Faster, Stronger" (review of John Tinnell, ''The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weisner, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things'', University of Chicago Press, 347 pp.; and Malcolm Harris, ''Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World'', Little, Brown, 708 pp.), ''The New York Review of Books'', vol. LXX, no. 14 (21 September 2023), pp. 38–40. "[Palo Alto is] a place where the [United States'] contradictions are sharpened to their finest points, above all the defining and enduring contradictions between democratic principle and antidemocratic practice. There is nothing as American as celebrating equality while subverting it. Or as Californian." (p. 40.)
External links
*
Stanford Athletics website
*
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Stanford University,
1891 establishments in California
Universities and colleges established in 1891
Private universities and colleges in California
Romanesque Revival architecture in California
Schools accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Universities and colleges in Santa Clara County, California
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