They toured the Quad, met with President Gerhard Casper and heard Stanford officials speak on everything from campus planning to technology systems. No, they weren't prospective students or big-time donors. They were members of the Yale Corporation, that university's board of trustees, and they came to Palo Alto in October on a three-day fact-finding mission.
All 16 board members made the trip, which focused on "areas of common concern" to both schools, Yale President Richard Levin told the Yale Daily News. "We had a fascinating series of discussions," says Linda Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale, "and a wonderful dinner at President Casper's house."
Casper, who has a master's in law from Yale, says the visit was "the next best thing" to a proposal he made in 1993, when Levin, '68, was named Yale president. "Maybe the time has come," he wrote then, "to consider a merger of the two institutions. We could . . . combine elements of both names: you would get to keep 'University' and we would get to keep 'Stanford' so that that the new transnational institution would be known as Stanford University."
