Although Stanford accommodates 57 percent of its graduate students on campus, its aim is to house at least 80 percent. Now that dream is a step closer to reality, thanks to a $43.5 million donation from prominent lawyer and businessman Charles T. Munger and his wife Nancy B. Munger, ’45. The gift, which will support construction of a new campus residential complex for law, business and other graduate students, is believed to be the largest ever given outright to an American law school and the largest earmarked for student housing in Stanford’s history.
Construction of the Munger Graduate Residences is tentatively scheduled to begin next summer. When completed in the spring of 2007, the modern apartment complex will house 600 students, half from the Law School. The three-building cluster will sit on six acres currently occupied by a parking lot adjacent to the Law School and Stern Hall. The first floor of the tallest building will provide a meeting and gathering space open to all Stanford graduate students. The project also will include a 750-space subterranean parking structure. Total cost of the residences and related projects is estimated at just over $100 million.
Praising the gift, President John Hennessy noted that “in recent years there have been few more pressing issues at Stanford than the need to construct student housing, especially for graduate students.” The problem became acute during the Silicon Valley boom of the late 1990s, when off-campus rents soared and some students wound up sleeping in their cars. More recently, University building projects have been stalled by budget cuts and concerns over debt load.
Besides easing the housing shortage, the Munger gift will have important long-term benefits for the University as a whole. Stanford’s General Use Permit with Santa Clara County includes provisions that require housing to be built before construction can proceed on new academic buildings. The graduate student residence will free Stanford to move forward with plans for a replacement of the Terman Engineering Center, modern classroom facilities for business and medical school students, a building to house the new Institute for the Environment and a new facility for the department of art and art history. The gift also will help ease overcrowding in some undergraduate residences by opening rooms in Crothers Hall and Crothers Memorial now used by graduate students.
Munger, 80, is the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and founded the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson. While he did not attend Stanford, Nancy served on the Board of Trustees and several of the couple’s children and grandchildren attended the University. Daughter Wendy, ’72, is a current member of the Board of Trustees.
