Stanford University

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California, and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr. The university admitted its first students in 1891, opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland died in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry (later Silicon Valley). In 1951, Stanford Research Park was established in Palo Alto and is the world's first university research park. By 2021, the university had 2,288 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows, center fellows, and medical faculty on staff. The university is organized around seven schools of study on an 8,180-acre (3,310-hectare) campus, one of the largest in the nation. It houses the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank, and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of eight private institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Stanford has won 131 NCAA team championships, and was awarded the NACDA Directors' Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994. Students and alumni have won 302 Olympic medals (including 153 gold). The university is associated with 74 living billionaires, 58 Nobel laureates, 33 MacArthur Fellows, 29 Turing Award winners, as well as 7 Wolf Foundation Prize recipients, 2 Supreme Court Justices of the United States, and 4 Pulitzer Prize winners. Additionally, its alumni include many Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Gates Cambridge Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

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