Stanford University

• 1. Introduction

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  Stanford University sits on 8,180 acres of the San Francisco Peninsula, and it was born from grief. Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate who served as California's eighth governor and then as a United States senator, lost his only child, Leland Junior, and resolved to build a university in the boy's memory. The result, founded in 1885 and opened in 1891, would become one of the most consequential institutions of higher learning on earth.

  Yet its early years were precarious. A federal lawsuit threatened to shut it down before it found its footing. An earthquake destroyed much of its campus. And for decades it remained, at best, a regional university with an inferiority complex, calling itself the "Cornell of the West" partly because so many of its founding faculty had come from Ithaca.

  What changed? How did a financially struggling farm-turned-campus in an agricultural valley become the institution whose alumni would help create Google, Hewlett-Packard, Netflix, Instagram, and more than a dozen other companies that now shape daily life across the planet? And what happens when an institution this powerful also carries a history of discrimination, ethical failures, and campus violence? Those are the questions this documentary will work through.

• 2. A Memorial Built on a Farm

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  Leland and Jane Stanford conveyed approximately $20 million to the new university's endowment in 1885, six years before a single student arrived. The campus itself was their former Palo Alto farm, and the Stanfords were specific about what they wanted it to look like. Their founding grant described buildings that should resemble "the old adobe houses of the early Spanish days," single-storied, with deep window seats, open fireplaces, and roofs covered with dark red tiles.

  To design the grounds, they hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who had previously designed the Cornell campus. The architectural blend of English university style and California Mission Revival gave Stanford a visual identity unlike anything else in American higher education at the time.

  The university's first president, David Starr Jordan, was a Cornell affiliate, as was its second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first institutions to offer coeducational, non-sectarian higher education, and that shared commitment helped explain the comparisons between the two schools in those early years.

  When Leland Stanford died in 1893, a federal lawsuit against his estate put the university's survival in immediate doubt. Jane Stanford refused to close it. She kept the institution running through the financial crisis entirely through her insistence that it remain open, establishing a pattern of the university surviving through individual will as much as institutional structure. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake then inflicted major damage on the campus. A new library and gymnasium were demolished outright, and some original features of Memorial Church and the Quad were never restored.

• 3. Frederick Terman and the Valley

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  In the 1940s and 1950s, an engineering professor named Frederick Terman began encouraging Stanford graduates to start their own companies rather than leave the region for established firms on the East Coast. Terman later became provost, and his influence extended well beyond the classroom.

  In the 1950s, he established Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech commercial campus built on university land. Around the same time, William Shockley arrived in the Palo Alto area. Shockley had co-invented the silicon transistor and won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics; he would later join Stanford as a professor of physics. He founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, and the following year eight of his employees resigned and formed Fairchild Semiconductor.

  The concentration of firms in the mid-Peninsula area that grew from those departures eventually acquired a name: Silicon Valley, drawn from the key ingredient in transistors. Both Terman and Shockley are regularly described as "fathers of Silicon Valley" in accounts of that period.

  Wallace Sterling's presidency, which ran from 1949 to 1968, is when the institutional transformation became undeniable. Sterling oversaw the growth of Stanford from a financially troubled regional university into what observers began calling "the Harvard of the West." During his tenure, the student body grew from 8,300 to 11,300, and the tenured faculty expanded from 322 to 974. The share of undergraduates receiving financial aid rose from less than 5 percent when he took office to more than one-third when he retired. He launched the PACE fundraising program, described at the time as the largest such program ever undertaken by any university. The Stanford Research Park and the Stanford Shopping Center, both on leased university land, stabilized university finances while helping spur Silicon Valley's growth.

  In 1951, Stanford Research Park was established in Palo Alto as what the university describes as the world's first university research park. That designation, combined with Stanford's aggressive pursuit of government research grants, positioned the institution at the center of the postwar technology economy.

• 4. Discoveries That Reshaped Science

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  Arthur Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for work he conducted at Stanford. Studying bacteria, he succeeded in isolating DNA polymerase in 1956, an enzyme central to the formation of DNA, and in doing so uncovered the mechanisms underlying the biological synthesis of both ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.

  Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer went further. They were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products trace back to their work, including human growth hormone and the hepatitis B vaccine.

  John Chowning of the Stanford music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967. Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation, connecting a university music experiment to the sound of synthesizers heard in popular music for decades afterward.

  The brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian invented the klystron tube at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated on the 30th of August, 1937, and upon publication in 1939, news of the invention immediately influenced researchers working on radar equipment in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

  Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both were PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project, a federally funded effort whose stated goal was to develop technologies for a single, integrated, universal digital library. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, established in 1962 and operated by Stanford for the Department of Energy, contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, stretching two miles across a 426-acre area west of the central campus.

• 5. The Entrepreneurial Pipeline

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  Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created roughly 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s. If those companies were a single economy, they would rank as the tenth largest in the world.

  Hewlett-Packard was co-founded in 1939 by William R. Hewlett and David Packard, both Stanford graduates. Sun Microsystems followed in 1982, with co-founders Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford alumni. Cisco was co-founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, who were in charge of the Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the underlying hardware was developed.

  Nvidia was co-founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who earned his master's degree at Stanford. Yahoo was co-founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, both Stanford graduates. Netflix was co-founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings, who also holds a Stanford master's degree.

  Google was formally incorporated in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of whom earned master's degrees at Stanford. That same year, PayPal was co-founded by Ken Howery, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, who had been accepted into a Stanford graduate program but never enrolled. LinkedIn was co-founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and three other Stanford alumni. Instagram was co-founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, both Stanford graduates.

  The university's endowment reached $36.5 billion as of August 2023, making it one of the four largest academic endowments in the United States. Stanford is the largest landowner in Silicon Valley. Payouts from the endowment covered approximately 22 percent of university expenses in the 2023 fiscal year, and the endowment itself breaks into $29.9 billion in a merged pool of assets and $6.6 billion in real estate near the main campus.

• 6. Shadows and Controversies

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  Stanford's rise to national prestige carried serious failures alongside it. In the 1950s, the university deliberately reduced and restricted Jewish admissions, and for decades denied and dismissed claims from students, parents, and alumni that it was doing so. Stanford did not issue its first institutional apology to the Jewish community until 2022, after an internal task force confirmed both the deliberate discrimination and the years of misleading those who expressed concerns, including the Anti-Defamation League.

  The 1971 Stanford prison experiment drew lasting criticism as unethical. Misuse of government funds beginning in 1981 resulted in severe penalties for the school's research funding and in the resignation of President Donald Kennedy in 1992.

  The Brock Turner case brought national scrutiny in 2016. On the night of the 17th and the 18th of January, 2015, Chanel Miller, who was visiting campus to attend a fraternity party, was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old freshman student-athlete from Ohio. Two Stanford graduate students witnessed the attack and intervened; when Turner attempted to flee, the two held him until police arrived. Turner was convicted on three felony charges and in June 2016 received a jail sentence of six months, far below the six-year sentence prosecutors had sought out of a possible maximum of fourteen years. Two years after sentencing, the judge in the case, Stanford graduate Aaron Persky, was recalled by voters.

  Stanford's 2015 Campus Climate Survey found that 4.7 percent of female undergraduates reported experiencing sexual assault as defined by the university, and 32.9 percent reported experiencing sexual misconduct. According to that survey, 85 percent of perpetrators were Stanford students and 80 percent were men. In 2026, the university was declared an undesirable organization in Russia.

• 7. Athletics, Traditions, and Campus Life

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  Stanford has won more NCAA team championships than any other school in Division I, with the total reaching 137 as of the 20th of November, 2025. The university has won at least one NCAA team championship in each academic year for 49 consecutive years, running from 1976-77 through 2024-25. Stanford athletes have also won 529 NCAA individual championships, and no other Division I school is within 100 of that total.

  The university's official color is Stanford Cardinal Red, and its teams are known simply as the Cardinal, referring to the color rather than the bird. From 1930 until 1972, the teams had been known as the Indians. In 1972, Native American students and staff successfully lobbied University President Richard Lyman to abolish the Indian name and mascot. The team reverted to the Cardinal, a name the school had used before 1930.

  The Stanford Axe has a stranger origin. In 1899, Stanford yell leader Billy Erb wielded a lumberman's axe to inspire his team. Stanford lost, and Berkeley students took the axe. In 1930, Stanford students staged a heist to recover it. By 1933, the two schools had agreed to exchange it as the prize for winning the annual Big Game, one of the oldest college football rivalries in the United States, first played in 1892.

  On campus, the Stanford hymn "Hail, Stanford, Hail!" was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith, who in 1896 earned the first Stanford doctorate in economics. The hymn was not officially adopted until after a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on campus in March 1902. The university's long-unofficial motto, selected by its first president David Starr Jordan, is a quotation from Ulrich von Hutten: "Die Luft der Freiheit weht," meaning "The wind of freedom blows." The phrase was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect. It was made official by way of incorporation into an official seal by the board of trustees in December 2002.