Stanford in the Modern Era

I want to explore indepth how Stanford has grown from a small college into the prestigious university it is now today in mid land California.

I have put together some excerpts and pictures from the Stanford University website to illustrate this.

The Rise of Silicon Valley

In 1939, with the encouragement of their professor and mentor, Frederick Terman, Stanford alumni David Packard and William Hewlett established a little electronics company in a Palo Alto garage. That garage would later be dubbed "the Birthplace of Silicon Valley."

Over the following years, Stanford would be a wellspring of innovation, producing advances in research and the formation of many companies that have made Silicon Valley one of the most innovative and productive high-tech regions in the world.
In 1947, professor William W. Hansen unveiled an electron linear accelerator prototype, and the following year construction began on a new Microwave Laboratory. In 1951 Varian Associates built a research and development lab on the edge of campus that would become the famed Stanford Industrial Park, now known as Stanford Research Park. In 1952, Stanford won its first Nobel Prize, which went to physics Professor Felix Bloch; three years later his colleague Willis Lamb, Jr. also won a Nobel.
Under the leadership of Terman, a professor of electrical engineering who served as provost from 1955 to 1965, the university embarked upon a campaign to build “steeples of excellence,” clusters of outstanding science and engineering researchers who would attract the best students. His role in fostering close ties between Stanford students and the emerging technology industries has led some to consider him the father of Silicon Valley. He created an entrepreneurial spirit that today extends to every academic discipline at Stanford.
Two of the university’s most iconic scientific institutions were built in the 1960s: the 2-mile-long linear accelerator (SLAC National Laboratory); and “the Dish,” a 150-foot diameter radio antenna in the foothills built as a joint venture between the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the Air Force. Also in the 1960s, Professor John Chowning developed FM sound synthesis to digitally generate sounds, leading to the invention of the music synthesizer.
In the early 1970s, professor Vinton Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet,” developed with a colleague the TCP/IP protocols which would become the standard for Internet communication between computers. In the 1980s, John Cioffi and his students realized that traditional phone lines could be used for high-speed data transmission, leading to the development of digital subscriber lines (DSL). In 1991, SLAC physicist Paul Kunz set up the first web server in the U.S. after visiting Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Internet, of course, is central to the story of Silicon Valley. Google, the web’s most popular search engine and one of the world’s most influential companies, got its start at Stanford when Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their page rank algorithm as graduate students in the 1990s. Before them, alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo founded Yahoo. Other legendary Silicon Valley companies with strong ties to Stanford include Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard Company, Intuit, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems.

Changing Times & Campus

The post-war years were a time of tremendous growth and change as Stanford expanded its national reputation as a leading university. A record 8,223 students showed up for class in Fall 1947, including many former soldiers taking advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights.

As all great universities, Stanford both reflected and acted upon the larger world. Stanford students and faculty were actively involved in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. They participated in the voter registration drives in the South, and in April 1964, the campus welcomed Martin Luther King Jr., who addressed an overflow crowd at Memorial Auditorium. The university became home in 1965 to the earliest known student group advocating civil rights for gays and lesbians.
Stanford also shared with other universities the political tensions and activities that came about as the result of the Vietnam War. The first antiwar rally took place in February 1965. The years 1968-1971 were marked by turmoil, including strikes and sit-ins; students and faculty were particularly concerned about ROTC training, CIA recruitment and Stanford’s role as a defense researcher.
Racial politics also rose to prominence during those years. In the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, students successfully demanded that more non-white students be recruited and admitted. The Program in African and African American Studies, established in 1969, was the first ethnic studies program at Stanford, and the first such program at a private institution in the U.S. Stanford also undertook an effort to attract Native Americans to the campus, which coincided with the discontinuation of the “Indian” as Stanford’s mascot. As at other universities, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa mobilized students over a period of a decade or more. The university eventually would divest many of its holdings in companies that did business in South Africa. In 1985, in a singular honor, Stanford was chosen to house the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Women had formed part of Stanford’s student body from the very start, but neither they nor the female faculty had attained anything close to parity during the university's first decades. In fact, Jane Stanford had specified that no more than 500 female students ever be enrolled at one time. That was changed in the 1930s, when the Board of Trustees decided that the number could increase but that the proportion of men to women should remain constant. All limitations were removed in 1973. Feminist Studies was established as an interdisciplinary major in 1981, and the Center for Research on Women, today the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, opened in 1986.
As at other schools, traditional Western Civilization requirements came under fire in the 1980s in the so-called “culture wars.” At Stanford, the course was replaced in 1988 by a Cultures, Ideas and Values requirement, which set off a nationwide debate on the humanities canon. The discussion eventually led to the establishment of Introduction to the Humanities, a yearlong interdisciplinary course for freshmen which was offered until 2012. Other measures taken to ensure that Stanford undergraduates would have an educational experience akin to that of far smaller liberal arts schools included the establishment of Introductory Seminars, Sophomore College and a Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Tumultous times

Students took action in the 1960s and 70s. This demonstration rally took place in Old Union Courtyard in 1968.