Stanford University

Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former Governor of and U.S. Senator from California and leading railroad tycoon,and his wife,Jane Lathrop Stanford,in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr.,who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford admitted its first students on October 1,1891 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until 1920.The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet).Stanford's academic strength is broad with 40 departments in the three academic schools that have undergraduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 108 NCAA team championships,the second-most for a university, 476 individual championships, the most in Division I,and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, every year since 1994–1995.

Stanford University is a tax-exempt corporate trust governed by a privately appointed 34-member Board of Trustees.Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.A new trustee is chosen by the remaining Trustees by ballot.The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, 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 and prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, manage financial and business affairs, and appoint nine vice presidents.The Provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report.John Etchemendy was named the 12th Provost in September 2000.

The University is currently organized into seven academic schools.The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (9 departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (4 departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business 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 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

Stanford University is a large, highly residential research university with a slight majority of enrollments coming from graduate and professional students. It follows a quarter system with Autumn quarter usually starting in late September and Spring Quarter ending in early June.The full-time, four-year undergraduate program has an arts and sciences focus with high graduate student coexistence.Stanford University is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.Its most recent undergraduate admit rate (for the class of 2018) further dropped to 5.07%, the lowest in the University's history.Eighty-nine percent of undergraduate students live 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, row houses, and fraternities and sororities.At Manzanita Park, 118 mobile homes were installed as "temporary" housing from 1969 to 1991, but it is now the site of modern dorms Castano, Kimball, Lantana, and the new 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 for freshmen only; others give priority to sophomores, others to both freshmen and sophomores; some are for upperclass students only, and some are open to all four classes. Most residences are co-ed; seven are all-male fraternities, three are all-female 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 a few dorms are configured for men and women to live on separate floors (single-gender floors), including all Wilbur dorms except for Arroyo and Okada.

Stanford currently has 36 varsity sports (18 female, 15 male, one coed), 19 club sports and 37 intramural sports—about 800 students participate in intercollegiate sports with an offer of about 300 athletic scholarships. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the "Stanford Cardinal", which is a "mascot" name adopted in 1972 after the abandonment of the previous "Indians" owing to racial insensitivity complained by Native American students, referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. It is a member of the Pac-12 Conference 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 NCAA's Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual "Big Game" between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe. The first "Big Game", played at Haight Street Park in San Francisco on March 19, 1892, established football on the west coast. Stanford won 14 to 10 in front of 8,000 spectators. Stanford's football team played in the first Rose Bowl in 1902. However, the violence of the sport at the time, coupled with the post-game rioting of drunken spectators, led San Francisco to bar further "Big Games" in the city in 1905. In 1906, David Starr Jordan banned football from Stanford. The 1906–1914 "Big Game" contests featured rugby instead of football. Stanford football was resumed in 1919.

Stanford is ranked 4th (tied with Columbia University and the University of Chicago) among U.S national universities for 2016 by U.S. News and World Report.Notably, Stanford occupies the number one position in numerous domestic college ranking measures, leading Slate to dub Stanford "the Harvard of the 21st century,"and The New York Times to conclude that "Stanford University has become America’s 'it' school, by measures that Harvard once dominated."From polls done by The Princeton Review in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, the most commonly named "dream college" for students was Stanford; separately, parents, too, most frequently named Stanford as their "dream college."Just 12 years ago, a 2003 Gallup poll had Stanford only tied for second as the most prestigious university in the eyes of the general public.