When Jane and Leland Stanford founded this university, they were investing in the future. They were visionaries, trying to imagine a world 100 years hence with the intention of building something that would stand the test of time.
The pace of change has quickened since then, and yet the foundation they laid sustains an increasingly complex and sophisticated institution that is able to grow and change with the times. Indeed, our pace is now so rapid we rarely take time to think about how much the world has changed in less than one human life span. We only need to consider the world events of 50 years ago to test that assumption. In January 1958, the European Economic Community began operation, Sputnik 1 re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and Cuban revolutionary forces captured Havana. And that was just in the first eight days of the year!
The changes at Stanford have been equally dramatic. Fifty years ago, Stanford was a small institution. The teaching-focused Medical School was in San Francisco. Research expenditures and graduate programs were tiny, less than $6 million in government-sponsored research and 3,000 graduate students. The entire University budget was less than $16 million, roughly 3 percent (in real dollars) of the 2007-08 budget.
California was a farming economy; the world’s first semiconductor company, Fairchild, had just started in 1957. Hewlett-Packard had recently issued its initial public stock offering. Companies like Intel, Cisco, Google and Yahoo! were not even dreams. And, while World War II had certainly banished the ardor for strict isolationism as a viable U.S. strategy, the United States remained largely decoupled from the rest of the world economically and culturally.
Over the course of the last half century, the world, California and Stanford have been transformed. Stanford has become one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions. The Medical School moved to the core campus, expanded its basic science departments and became one of the great medical schools in the country. The Stanford Linear Accelerator was built and became the tool that explained the role of quarks as the constituents of atomic particles; the seminal research conducted there led to three Nobel Prizes. Research support has grown by more than a factor of 25 in real dollars, and the graduate student population today is double that of 50 years ago. California, whose population more than doubled, is the center of the technological world. And globalization links us with peoples around the world, economically, environmentally and culturally.
One wonders if Wallace Sterling and Frederick Terman—our president and provost in 1958—could have imagined the contours of Stanford in 2008. Could they possibly have known that they were laying the groundwork for a university that would play an important role in transforming the world in the ensuing half century?
That question is impossible to answer. What is more certain is that Sterling, Terman and the faculty in that period held a deep conviction that the research they were doing would matter in the future, that teaching and research would mutually benefit if they were strongly interconnected, and that excellence should be the hallmark of everything Stanford undertook. They also reasoned that Stanford would need to take bold steps to guarantee that it would play a larger role in a vastly changed world. The establishment of SLAC, the movement of the Medical School, the recruitment of Ernie Arbuckle as dean of the Business School and the expansion of the Engineering School were elements in their plan.
Just as Stanford’s founders in the late 19th century and its leaders in the post-World War II period tried to see beyond the confines of their own time, we must strive to look 50—even 100 or 200—years ahead and imagine a world that has not yet come into being. We must provide a foundation that is not constrained by conventional thinking or limited imagination.
Although we cannot predict the future, we still have a deep conviction that our pursuit of knowledge is not a short-term venture. I have no doubt the faculty will continue to work aggressively to expand the boundaries of learning and set a bold agenda for research. Our students will continue to bring a fresh perspective and creative intelligence to the enterprise. And we will continue to rely on our alumni and friends to provide inspiration and support as we chart a course to ensure that the vision of our founders will live for generations to come.
