Stanford University - Insurance and Universities

Stanford University

Stanford University (officially Leland Stanford Junior University) is a private research university in Stanford, California, and one of the world's most prestigious institutions, with the top position in numerous rankings and measures in the United States.

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 was opened 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 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).

The main campus is located in northern Santa Clara Valley adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Other holdings, such as laboratories, and nature reserves, are located outside the main campus. Its 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus is one of the largest in the United States.[8] The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

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 Pacific-12 Conference. It has gained 107 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 faculty and alumni have founded many companies including Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Sun Microsystems, Instagram and Yahoo!, and companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world. It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 18 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress. The University has affiliated with 59 Nobel laureates and 2 Fields Medalists (when awarded).
Origins and early years (1885–1906)
The university officially opened on October 1, 1891 to 555 students. On the university's opening day, Founding President David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) said to Stanford's Pioneer Class: "[Stanford] is hallowed by no traditions; it is hampered by none. Its finger posts all point forward." However, much preceded the opening and continued for several years until the death of the last Founder, Jane Stanford, in 1905 and the destruction of the 1906 earthquake.

In Spring 1891, the Stanfords offered the presidency of their new university to the president of Cornell University, Andrew White, but he declined and recommended David Starr Jordan, the 40-year-old president of Indiana University Bloomington. Jordan's educational philosophy was a good fit with the Stanfords' vision of a non-sectarian, co-educational school with a liberal arts curriculum, and he accepted the offer. Jordan arrived at Stanford in June 1891 and immediately set about recruiting faculty for the university's planned October opening. With such a short time frame he drew heavily on his own acquaintance in academia; of the fifteen original professors, most came either from Indiana University or his alma mater Cornell. The 1891 founding professors included Robert Allardice in mathematics, Douglas Houghton Campbell in botany, Charles Henry Gilbert in zoology, George Elliott Howard in history, Oliver Peebles Jenkins in physiology and histology, Charles David Marx in civil engineering, Fernando Sanford in physics, and John Maxson Stillman in chemistry. The total initial teaching staff numbered about 35 including instructors and lecturers. For the second (1892–93) school year, Jordan was able to add 29 additional professors including Frank Angell (psychology), Leander M. Hoskins (mechanical engineering), William Henry Hudson (English), Walter Miller (classics), George C. Price (zoology), and Arly B. Show (history). Most of these two founding groups of professors remained at Stanford until their retirement and were referred to as the "Old Guard".

The new Stanford Stadium, site of home football games.

The Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band rallies football fans with arrangements of "All Right Now" and other contemporary music.
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 Pacific-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 has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 107 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, second most behind the UCLA Bruins, and 467 individual National championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked collegiate athletic program — the NACDA Directors' Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup - annually for the past twenty years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 244 Olympic medals total, 129 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Games—12 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze.

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, located 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 by some of the other Christian denominations at Stanford. Weddings happen most Saturdays and the university has for over 20 years allowed blessings of same-gender relationships and now legal weddings.

In addition to the church, the Office for Religious Life has a Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning and Experiences (CIRCLE) located 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, Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islam, Jewish, and Sikh groups, though these groups vary year by year.

The Windhover Contemplation Center is the most recent addition to spiritual and religious life at Stanford. Windhover's purpose is to provide spiritual sanctuary for students and staff in the midst of their demanding course and work schedules. The center displays the "Windhover" paintings by Nathan Olivera, the late Stanford professor and artist. Windhover was dedicated to the campus on October 8, 2014. Some religions have a larger and more formal presence on campus in addition to the student groups; these include the Catholic Community at Stanford and Hillel at Stanford.
Stanford alumni have started many companies and, according to Forbes, has produced the second highest number of billionaires of all universities.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni include Hewlett-Packard (William Hewlett and David Packard), Cisco Systems (Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack), Nvidia (Jen-Hsun Huang), SGI, VMware, MIPS Technologies, Yahoo! (Chih-Yuan Yang and David Filo), Google (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page), Wipro Technologies (Azim Premji), Nike (Phil Knight), Gap (Doris F. Fisher), Palantir Technologies (Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen), PayPal (Peter Thiel and Elon Musk), Logitech, Instagram, Snapchat, and Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla). Other companies and organizations founded or co-founded by Stanford alumni include the Special Olympics, YouTube (Jawed Karim), LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), Netflix (Reed Hastings), Yammer (David O. Sacks), Varian Associates, Pandora Radio, Electronic Arts, Trader Joe's, Dolby Laboratories, Capital One, Renren, TechCrunch, IDEO, Kiva, Acumen, Victoria's Secret, Firefox, Match.com, WhatsApp (Brian Acton) and Participant Media.

Stanford alumni have also founded financial institutions such as the brokerage firm Charles Schwab (Charles R. Schwab), venture capital funds Benchmark, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson), Khosla Ventures (Vinod Khosla), and Formation 8 (Joe Lonsdale), private equity funds TPG Capital (James Coulter), Bain Capital (Mitt Romney), Hellman & Friedman and Friedman Fleischer & Lowe (Tully Friedman), and Crestview Partners, and hedge funds Farallon Capital (Tom Steyer) and D.E. Shaw & Co. (David E. Shaw). Many leading venture capitalists are Stanford alumni, including Jim Breyer, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, Keith Rabois, Roelof Botha, Brook Byers, Jim Goetz, Bob Kagle, and Peter Fenton, as are financiers Sid Bass and Richard Rainwater and hedge fund manager Andreas Halvorsen.

Stanford-educated executives include former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Yahoo CEO and president Marissa Mayer, eBay president Jeffrey Skoll, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, Google CEO Larry Page, Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Carlos Brito, Broadcom president and CEO Scott McGregor, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, CEMEX chairman and CEO Lorenzo Zambrano, Bank of America Merrill Lynch COO Thomas Montag, Morgan Stanley CFO Ruth Porat, Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, Godrej Industries managing director Nadir Godrej, Dan Siroker founder and CEO of Optimizely, and Infosys CEO and managing director Vishal Sikka.

Former Japanese Prime Ministers Yukio Hatoyama and Taro Aso,former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, former President of Guatemala Jorge Serrano Elias, current President of the Maldives Mohammed Waheed Hassan, former Vice President of Iran Mohammad-Reza Aref, former Honduras President Ricardo Maduro, King Philippe of Belgium, former United States Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden, former Arizona governor, supreme court chief justice, and United States Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, and the current U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker are alumni. U.S. President John F. Kennedy attended Stanford without graduating, as did the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. Former Ghanaian President John Atta Mills earned his J.D. as a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford Law School. U.S. Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer and former Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist are also alumni.

Yale Presidents Peter Salovey and Rick Levin and former Harvard President Derek Bok each earned a bachelor's degree at Stanford, and MIT President L. Rafael Reif and former Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau earned their PhDs there. Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber earned his M.D. from Stanford Medical School. Other alumni who became university leaders include former University of California system President Clark Kerr, former Johns Hopkins President William Brody, former Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, former Nanyang Technological University President Su Guaning, National Taiwan University President Lee Si-Chen, Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch, Boston College President William P. Leahy, and SUTD President Thomas L. Magnanti.

Eight Stanford alumni have won the Nobel Prize. As of 2014, 114 Stanford students have been named Rhodes Scholars.