100 YEARS AGO
Trustees adopted the Articles of Organization of the Faculty to curb the unlimited powers that Leland and Jane Stanford had conferred on the University president. The articles set forth policies about faculty promotion and retention, and created the Academic Council of assistant, associate and full professors to give the faculty a stronger voice in University governance. The new measures eventually led to Stanford’s tenure system.
Days after she died along with more than 600 other people in the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, Cara Stillman was remembered at a funeral held at her parents’ Alvarado Row home on January 9. The daughter of Professor James M. Stillman, head of the chemistry department, Cara, Class of 1903, had been in the balcony with her sister Minna, also Class of 1903, and an aunt, both of whom escaped.
Construction of the Outer Quad was completed on March 15 when the keystone was placed in the last arch of the arcade near Engineering Corner (Building 260). About 600 students and faculty assembled for speeches and singing to celebrate the six-year project, which began with the laying of the cornerstone for the Thomas Welton Stanford Library (Building 160).
75 YEARS AGO
Recently elected U.S. President Herbert Hoover, Class of 1895, invited Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur, Class of 1896, to join him in Washington as secretary of the interior. Trustees granted Wilbur a one-year leave and named chemistry professor Robert Eckles Swain as acting president. But Swain proved indecisive, referring many decisions to Wilbur in Washington. The Stanford Daily in 1930 called for Wilbur to resign one of his posts. The Chaparral followed with a satire referring to Wilbur as the University’s “president-by-mail.” Hoover refused to release Wilbur, and trustees reluctantly went along with the arrangement for four years.
50 YEARS AGO
The Board of Trustees, with court approval, enlarged its membership from 15 to 23, including three alumni nominated by the Alumni Association. The expansion, the first since the University’s founding, was intended to help the board deal with a dramatically increased workload, take a more active role in fund raising and diversify geographically.
Poet Robert Frost delivered a public lecture at Memorial Auditorium and met informally with students in the English department. Frost was the houseguest of Professor Wallace Stegner, director of the creative writing program.
25 YEARS AGO
After two successful years coaching football at Stanford, Bill Walsh left to become head coach of the lackluster San Francisco 49ers. In a newspaper interview, he defended Stanford’s high academic standards for student-athletes: “It’s a great university with the most honest athletic program in the country today at the major college level. If that’s not enough for the fans, then they should root for USC.”
Four Cannon brothers were attending Stanford, a record unmatched since the early 1940s when Palo Alto’s Dr. Russel V.A. Lee had four sons and a daughter enrolled. The five Lees earned medical degrees, while the Cannons — Fred, then 25, David, 23, and twins Jim and Joe, 20 — were studying engineering. Their father, Professor Robert H. Cannon, was set to return to Stanford later in the year as chairman of aeronautics and astronautics following a stint in government and several years at Caltech.
Enrollment of women in the School of Engineering stood at 25 percent, up from 5 percent in 1974. Women’s surging interest in engineering was a national phenomenon, but Stanford’s increase was larger than most. Undergraduate engineering enrollment had almost doubled in five years, with women accounting for at least half the growth.
KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society (histsoc.stanford.edu).
