Excellence Under the Palm Trees

By Thomas A. Sancton

Start with the palm trees -- the king palms, windmill palms and date palms by the hundreds that grace the sprawling 8,200-acre campus. Beneath their gently waving fronds lie beds of fragrant star jasmine and flowering ice plant. Then there are those strapping, clean-cut young men and women, tossing Frisbees in the perpetual sunshine, lounging on the grass in cutoffs and T shirts, cycling along special bike lanes on their way to buy frozen yogurts ("fro-yo," to locals) or to play a few sets of tennis. Finally, there are the buildings, the picturesque, mission-style structures with their red tile roofs and colonnaded sandstone facades. Could anything that looks this much like a country club be a serious academic institution? It could if its name is the Leland Stanford Junior University of Palo Alto, California.

Founded 103 years ago on the grounds of Railroad Magnate Leland Stanford's trotting-horse farm, the university is in the midst of a five-year centennial celebration that marks its rise from a modest regional school to the very top ranks of American higher education. The ascension of this brash Western upstart has come as both a shock and a challenge to such Ivy League powerhouses as 352-year-old Harvard and 242-year-old Princeton, where the notion of academic endeavor is firmly associated with rigorous winters and a stern Puritan work ethic. Reflecting the early contempt heaped on Palo Alto by the Eastern establishment, one 19th century editorialist wrote that "Stanford's great wealth can only be used to erect an empty shell."

Some shell. Today Stanford is home to 1,200 faculty members and 13,300 students. Its faculty and staff include nine Nobel laureates, eleven National Medal of Science recipients, eight MacArthur Foundation Fellows and six Pulitzer prizewinners. Stanford students have won 59 Rhodes Scholarships and 27 Marshall Scholarships. Among the university's illustrious alumni are Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor; Football Stars Jim Plunkett and John Elway; Astronaut Sally Ride; TV Commentator Ted Koppel and -- would you believe? -- Harvard President Derek Bok.

The university's professional schools and research institutions have produced a dazzling string of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Stanford developed the world's first X-ray microscope. The Stanford Medical Center was the site of the nation's first adult heart transplant. Stanford research produced the basic patent on gene splicing and scores of other inventions that will net the university some $6 million in royalties this year.

Add to all that a high-powered athletic department, top-flight business, law and education schools and a respectable, if not quite superlative, humanities program, and you get major headaches for recruiters at rival institutions. Moans a Yale University admissions officer: "Stanford's got everything -- great climate, great physical plant, terrific extracurriculars and, increasingly, world-class academics." No less impressed, Cornell University President Frank Rhodes declares, "Stanford is not simply a great national institution, but one of the world's great institutions." That collegial admiration was reflected last October in a U.S. News & World Report survey in which university presidents were asked to choose the nation's best colleges. Stanford came in first for national universities, ahead of Harvard and Yale.

The Stanfords founded the university in 1885 in memory of their son (hence the "Junior" in the university's name). They modeled it not on Harvard or Yale but on Cornell. In particular, they admired Cornell's democratic, coeducational, nonsectarian admissions policy and its broad, practical curriculum. Cornell also provided Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, and seven of the school's first 20 faculty members. From the very beginning, the university had a unique sense of mission, thoughtfully articulated by Leland's widow Jane in a 1904 speech: "Let us not be afraid to outgrow old thoughts and ways and dare to think on new lines as to the future of the work under our care. Let us not be poor copies of other universities."

It was not until the end of World War II that Stanford began to live up to that ideal. Much of the credit for pulling the university out of its comfortable mediocrity belongs to Historian J.E. Wallace Sterling, who began a 19-year tenure as president in 1949, and his provost, Engineer Frederick Terman. Sterling and Terman embodied the sort of risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit that has become one of Stanford's hallmarks. Under their guidance, Stanford began leasing some of its extensive land holdings to fledgling electronics companies. The move not only boosted the university's revenues but also helped spawn the high-tech juggernaut that later became known as Silicon Valley, which has retained close ties to Stanford. Engineering Students William Hewlett and David Packard, who met at Stanford during the Sterling years, parlayed a $538 grant into the multibillion-dollar electronics empire that bears their names. Today they are major benefactors of the university, having pledged a total of $120 million to their alma mater last year.

Those megadonations were part of a five-year, $1.1 billion funding drive launched 15 months ago by Stanford's highly regarded, high-profile president, Donald Kennedy, 56. The most ambitious fund-raising campaign in the history of higher education, it has already reached the halfway mark, with some $536 million in pledges. The money will be used to build new science and engineering facilities, improve humanities programs, provide more student aid and establish 100 additional endowed professorships. Some $20 million will go toward the university's already muscular athletic budget. (Unlike the Ivies, Stanford offers full athletic scholarships and competes in the big leagues -- the Pacific Ten Conference -- where it does extraordinarily well.)

For all Stanford's successes, Kennedy faces a number of problems. Federal grants are drying up. Public universities have begun to compete in the private fund-raising game. The price of admission continues to rise, making Stanford ($80,000 for four years) less attractive to many students than top state schools like Berkeley ($37,000). There is a serious shortage of housing for junior faculty members and of dormitory space for undergraduates. Nettlesome neighbors are putting up roadblocks to expansion.

None of that has hampered Stanford's ability to attract a disproportionate share of the nation's top students. Of the 15,826 high school seniors who applied for admission to next fall's freshman class, only 2,521 were accepted. Of those accepted, Stanford expects 1,600 to come to Palo Alto, giving Stanford a 63% yield, second only to Harvard's 70% among major colleges and universities. Increasingly, top students are choosing Stanford over the Ivies. Noel Maurer, 18, a senior at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, who has SAT scores of 1,510 (out of a possible 1,600), typifies the trend. Accepted by Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and Duke, he choose Stanford after a quick visit to Palo Alto. "It seems a lot more relaxed than Princeton," he explains.

It is perhaps the life-style and mood of the student body that most distinguish Stanford from its rivals across the Rockies. "In the East, students seem to be working harder than they are; here the kids are working harder than they seem to be," observes Kennedy. Western students, he adds, "have a less passionate concern for politics and high culture. There is a natural antipathy to what they see as an elitist dimension to high culture."

Attractive as it is to many students, Stanford's laid-back style is not universally admired. "They don't have a beach, but they ought to," snipes Neil Smelser, a sociologist at Berkeley, Stanford's archrival across the bay. "It's a snootsie private institution where rich white people send their kids to school." (In fact, 33.5% of the current freshman class is black, Chicano, American Indian or Asian American -- more than three times the average at other major private universities.) Even from within the Stanford community, there are those who feel that the place is perhaps a little "too California," as one faculty member puts it. Senior Andrew Patzman points to an intellectual schizophrenia: "There is a certain pressure to be relaxed and to make your work appear effortless."

Such comments go to the heart of the question of what Stanford really is or should be. Some observers feel that it lacks the basic sense of identity that marks the older universities of the East. "I don't know what it stands for," says the president of an elite Eastern university. Adds Berkeley's Smelser: "Stanford is an institution in search of an image. They are forever looking over their shoulders at Harvard and Berkeley."

Others argue that the absence of a deep-rooted tradition is liberating. Says former Admissions Director Fred Hargadon: "Stanford's greatest strength is being relatively young, which means that the university has considerably fewer traditions and obstacles to overcome in order to make changes." That sort of openness, notes Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (B.A. 1958), encourages individuality: "The university is very careful to insist that its students remain themselves and not conform and that they develop their own special talents."

As at most universities, there is rivalry between scientific and liberal- arts communities for influence and funding. At Stanford the contest between "techies" and "fuzzies" has been lopsidedly dominated by the former. "The reality now is that it's much more like Stanford Tech than a college," says Stanford Grad Mary Munter, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School. "There's far less interest in the humanities." As a result, the liberal arts are the one area where Stanford clearly lags behind its Eastern rivals.

Not that the humanities do not arouse passions at Stanford. A battle erupted % two years ago when several faculty members proposed to amend the required freshman reading list of 15 classics in order to include works by minority and female authors. The issue escalated into a national debate when Education Secretary William Bennett jumped into the fray to accuse the reformers of "trashing Plato and Shakespeare." Six weeks ago, in a deft compromise, Stanford's faculty senate voted to pare the required list to six classics plus at least one non-European work chosen by the individual professor with "substantial attention to issues of race, gender and class."

Another debate that has embroiled the campus in recent years focuses on the role of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Founded in 1919 with a $50,000 grant from Herbert Hoover, the semi-independent research center is officially dedicated to demonstrating the "evils of the doctrine of Karl Marx," and has long functioned as a conservative think tank. Its close ties to the Reagan Administration have prompted protests from faculty members who wish either to bring the institution under tighter academic governance or to obtain a divorce. Tensions between the Stanford faculty and Hoover flared last year over a proposal to locate the Reagan presidential library on campus. When the faculty senate asked that the planned structure be scaled back, Hoover Director W. Glenn Campbell angrily withdrew the project and announced it would be built in Southern California.

There will surely be other controversies at Palo Alto, but as the university embarks on its second century, Donald Kennedy is striving to focus its vital energies not on institutional power struggles and polemics but on "preparing new leadership for this society." Stanford trains talented students, he recently told an alumni group, "out of faith that their capacity for wise and compassionate leadership is the best possible guarantee of the survival of everything we think is important." It is an ambitious, perhaps even a utopian, undertaking. But it is exactly what Leland Stanford had in mind.

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York and Paul A. Witteman/Palo Alto