In June of 1958, a chartered Air France turboprop punched its way through thunderclouds and landed on a wet runway in Stuttgart, West Germany. Among the passengers were 63 Stanford undergraduates and two faculty advisers, rumpled but elated. For the next six months they would be part of a novel educational experiment, living and learning together at Landgut Burg, a 30-acre estate overlooking the Rems Valley wine country. Their new hilltop campus, Stanford in Germany, would be the first European outpost of any major American university.
To mark the grand opening, Stanford President J.E. Wallace Sterling, PhD '38, held a press conference in the burg's rathskeller and planted a small California redwood on the lawn. The tree didn't survive. But the innovative overseas studies program quickly took root. During the next decade, European branches of the Farm were opened in Italy, France, Austria and England. By the late 1960s, Stanford was sending 55 percent of its undergraduates abroad, more than any other university in the country.
Unlike study-abroad programs geared toward foreign-language majors, Stanford's was designed by its founders, political scientist Robert Walker and German professor Wilhelm Strothmann, to be highly accessible. Virtually any undergraduate with a little language preparation could attend without delaying his or her graduation. And thanks to a favorable exchange rate, it was affordable even for students on financial aid. Normal tuition, room and board covered all costs of attending the early European campuses except for personal spending money and transportation back to the States. The policy essentially persists, minus coverage for airfare, to this day. “It all sounds like old hat now, but this program was little short of revolutionary,” observes Bob Hamrdla, '59, MA '64, an early Stanford in Germany alum and longtime overseas studies staff member.
Today Stanford's study-abroad program looks very different than it did in the late 1950s. Two years ago it was endowed and given a new name: the Bing Overseas Studies Program. Its European centers are in cities now; students lodge with host families, and the program has expanded to include outposts in South America, Asia and Australia. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the elation students feel when they touch down in new lands. After 50 years, in survey after survey, Stanford alumni still describe their overseas study experience as a highlight of their young lives.
STANFORD IN GERMANY
When the founders of Stanford's overseas studies program decided to locate their first campus in Germany, they were taking a gamble. World War II had ended only 13 years earlier. The nation was divided. Its citizens still bore the mental and physical scars of Allied bombing raids. Its economy was barely on the mend. And by the late 1950s, it was on the frigid front lines of the Cold War.
The postwar scene was eye-opening for James Fries. Born in Illinois and schooled in Southern California, he had never been abroad before arriving at Landgut Burg in 1958. Soon the young philosophy major was hearing stories from locals who'd been forced to trade pianos for bushels of wheat. Basics like toilet paper and light bulbs were in short supply. “We noticed everyone was skinny except for the farmers,” says Fries, '60, now professor emeritus of immunology and rheumatology at the Stanford School of Medicine. “I remember visiting a barber in the village. He was talking about canned shaving cream and how it was too expensive for Germans.”
Despite their troubles, the residents of the nearby hamlet of Beutelsbach were more than generous with their time. Late each afternoon, villagers would hike the twisting road up to the vine-covered estate to help the Stanford undergrads practice their halting German—taking care to speak the high version students had been taught, rather than the local Swabish dialect. They welcomed the American kids into their homes and into their taverns. They taught them German drinking songs. And when Oktoberfest rolled around, they made sure the students were invited.
“I remember we participated in a parade with the villagers,” Fries recalls. “We built a Stanford float on top of a Volkswagen bus—a big red and white Indian made out of papier- mâché.” The Stanford women students dressed in dirndls; the young men in lederhosen. They waved to the crowd and the crowd waved back. Stanford in Germany had been a good bet after all.
STANFORD IN ITALY
Growing up in Los Angeles, Sallyanne Payton had seen copies of grand old European buildings. But when she walked into Stanford's elegant Villa San Paolo in the spring of 1962 and laid her eyes on the real thing, she was floored. “I had never been in a place that old,” recalls Payton, '64, JD '68. “I was captivated with being in the villa and the wonderful formal garden. The difference between imitations and the real thing was very deep and very basic.”
Nestled in the Fiesole hills above Florence, Stanford's tile-roofed villa was owned and operated by the Congregation of the Barnabiti, a Catholic teaching order that conducted a school for boys across the street. Even before its grand opening, in the fall of 1960, students were lining up for spaces in the 80-bed building. Ten days into its first quarter, newspapers around the world carried photos of an 80-foot BEAT CAL banner hanging off the nearby Leaning Tower of Pisa. Stanford in Italy had arrived.
Payton adored living in a place where the past was so present. She fondly remembers visiting one of her courtly Italian professors, who lived in a Florentine apartment building dating from the 1400s. She recalls carefree weekends hitchhiking with Stanford friends, and the people she met along the way. At the time, she notes, Italians were not accustomed to seeing Americans who were not wealthy. African-American students like Payton were even more rare. “They were interested in us,” she says. “We weren't the Ugly American tourists.”
Looking back, Payton says the greatest thing about going to Italy was that it finally and completely washed her mind of any internalized sense of white supremacy. The more Europeans she met in Florence and on the road, the more she realized they were not a breed apart, but a collection of individuals. “Some were extremely smart, and some were just trying to get along,” she recalls. “That was the big message. They were just like us.” For Payton, now a professor of law at the University of Michigan, it was a liberating experience.
STANFORD IN FRANCE
When Sally Nosler Jervis agreed to host a 45th-reunion dinner for her fellow Tours alumni in 2006, she was determined to make the menu authentically French. She scoured Bay Area markets for the freshest beef and produce. She picked out fragrant wines from the Loire Valley. For the pièce de résistance, she had a chocolate gâteau inscribed for the guest of honor, Stanford professor emeritus George Knowles. The historian, who'd taught the first group at Tours, was coming up on his 100th birthday.
Simple, delicious food and lifelong friendships were the hallmarks of Stanford in France, which opened in a newly remodeled hotel on the banks of the Loire, about 150 miles southwest of Paris, in September 1960. Stanford planners chose the bucolic region because its residents reportedly spoke the most perfect French anywhere. They also suspected that the locals might be nicer to American students than their Parisian counterparts.
Jervis, '61, was hardly fluent in French when she arrived at Tours. Like many native Californians, she'd taken Spanish in high school. At the same time, few Tours residents understood English. The communication gap led to some minor mishaps, like the time Jervis made an appointment to have a haircut (coupe de cheveux) only to realize later that she'd asked to have her horse gelded (coupe de chevaux). “There were probably other mistakes that we made that we weren't aware of,” she says, laughing. “But on the whole, people were very nice to us.”
One of the kindest people Jervis met in Tours was Madame Cavallier, a widow who had advertised for a female Stanford student with whom to exchange English/French conversation. “I'd walk to her apartment,” the former English major recalls, “and at our meetings she would always cook something, usually some sort of a pudding or a little cake. I'd watch while she baked it, and then we'd enjoy it afterwards.”
To this day, Jervis keeps a well-worn little notebook containing Madame Cavallier's recipes. The booklet, along with Jervis's knowledge of French, came in handy not long after she married, when she and her Raychem executive husband were sent to live two years in England and Belgium. Now a resident of Atherton, the active grandma has been a fan of European languages, culture and cooking ever since. Her next goal is to master Italian.
STANFORD IN AUSTRIA
In the 1950s, if a boy wanted to spend time with a girl in her Stanford dormitory, he had to follow certain etiquette. First he procured a formal dinner invitation. Then he had to dress properly: coat and tie. Once he got to the women's dorm, he went straight to the dining room. Most other areas in the building were strictly off limits.
Stanford in Austria, like all the European campuses, was refreshingly different. Opened in 1965, it had separate men's and women's sleeping quarters, of course. But otherwise its 80 students dined, studied and socialized as one. Even co-ed weekend travel was permitted, as long as students went in groups. These opportunities for casual courting, combined with stunning alpine scenery, made the Austrian campus a particularly fertile place for romance.
Among the first people to fall in love at Stanford in Austria were Keith Hansen and Marjorie Leland. “I knew she had been dating one of my buddies [in Palo Alto],” Hansen recalls, “but things evolved in Austria.” No wonder. The campus was located at the gorgeous Hotel Panhans, a ski resort overlooking the Semmering Pass, about 60 miles from Vienna.
Both Keith, '67, MA '73, MS '88, and Marjorie, '67, loved the outdoors. Before long they were spending every weekend together, hiking and boating with friends in Austria's southern lake district. Then came Viennese Ball season, with whirling dance lessons in the Panhans ballroom, and romantic trips to Salzburg and Switzerland. “It was a unique opportunity, not to live together but live close together,” Hansen explains. “After six months of this kind of intense living, we felt pretty good about our relationship.”
Twelve months after they graduated, Keith and Marjorie were married—one of seven couples from that first group at Stanford in Austria to wed. Keith went on to a career as an arms control specialist at the U.S. State Department and now teaches part time in Stanford's international relations program. Marjorie earned a master's and taught high school history. By the time their son went off to the U.S. Naval Academy and their daughter to the College of William and Mary, co-ed housing everywhere was pretty much the norm.
STANFORD IN BRITAIN
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Yellow Submarine. Miniskirts, Twiggy and Carnaby Street. England in the mid-'60s was a groovy place—unless you were stuck at Harlaxton Manor, the first home of Stanford in Britain.
Sure, the drafty old former seminary was quirky, even loveable. Opened in 1966, it had an impressive driveway, hidden staircases and a room where students could watch Top of the Pops on the telly every Wednesday night. The pubs in nearby Grantham were warm and welcoming. But its location, about 100 miles north of London in rural Lincolnshire, felt remote. “We quickly figured out that Harlaxton Manor was just too far away from our centers of interest in the U.K.,” says Henry Muller, one of its first residents from Stanford.
Fortunately the dollar back then was strong, which meant that Stanford students could escape easily on their regular three-day weekends. The first thing many did when they got to England was to purchase a small automobile. The more adventurous bought British-made Minis. Muller, '68, who'd never owned a car before, found himself a slightly heftier Volkswagen.
During the week, between their classes in British history and literature, Muller and his 79 Harlaxton mates would busy themselves negotiating over where they wanted to go, and in whose car. “Then every Friday morning,” he recalls, “as soon as the sun was up, we would be out of there until Sunday night.” On many weekends they drove down to London and reveled in the museums, theaters and mod '60s atmosphere of Soho. Other times they headed for Scotland, Oxford or the Lake District.
After graduating, Muller became a journalist, ultimately serving as editorial director at Time, Inc. As for Harlaxton Manor, it soon got the axe. Overseas studies planners moved Stanford in Britain to Cliveden House—just 25 miles up the Thames from London—in 1969. The program settled at its current, livelier home, on Oxford's High Street, in 1984.
Palo Alto-based freelance writer THERESA JOHNSTON, '83, is a frequent contributor to Stanford. She attended Stanford in Britain at Cliveden House in the fall of 1982.
