Leland Stanford Junior University

“ LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY.
THE business of the university is to train men to know, to think and to do. To be will take care of itself, if the others are provided for. Wisdom is knowing what one ought to do next. Skill is knowing how to do it. Virtue is doing it. Religion is the working theory of life. It deals with the reasons why one ought to do. To all these ends the university is devoted. It does not make men. It remodels them to bring the powers they have to greater effectiveness. ”

“ David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Junior University, has many times deserved well of his country. As a scientific man he has, we believe, given to the American public and the world a greater number of original monographs on important branches of current investigation than has any of his distinguished contemporaries. ”

“ Courses in household economics have been given in recent years in the state universities of Illinois, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as in the Leland Stanford Junior University, while Columbia University through Teachers College has offered similar work. ”

“ He wanted to be a trustee of the University of California, and when he failed, he decided to start a rival institution. When his only son died in early youth, the heart-broken old man chose this means of perpetuating the boy’s name, and he pledged to Leland Stanford, Jr., University his land, his racehorses, and a part of his railroad stock; also a valuable asset in the form of David Starr Jordan, a scientist and teacher with some real interest in democracy.
Senator Stanford died in the midst of the panic of 1893, and his university was in a predicament ”

“ THE STORY OF STANFORD Thirty miles south of San Francisco, sheltered behind the coast range of mountains, lies the great institution with whose students the “Golden Bear” does its fighting. Stanford University was founded by one of the “Big Four” railroad kings, who for forty years or more plundered the people of California. Like other railroad kings, Leland Stanford amused himself by purchasing racehorses and state legislators, but he differed from the rest in that he had a respect for knowledge. ”

“ One of the chief difficulties in the way of local patronage has been the overshadowing influence of Harvard University. It was scarcely to be expected that an institution planted in such close proximity to that powerful and venerable seat of learning would, in the beginning, attract students from its immediate neighborhood. Many persons have thought that the location of the College is a mistaken one on that account. But colleges are not made in one day nor in one decade. It will take more than Leland Stanford's twenty millions of endowment to give his University a solid and enduring fame. ”

“ The higher education in the State is being put upon a secure basis. Hon. Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, have recently given a great part of their vast fortune for the establishment of a university which bids fair to be the foremost educational institution on the continent. In a letter specifying his views in regard to the management of the university, Governor Stanford says:
We deem it of the first importance that the education of both sexes shall be equally full and complete, varied only as nature dictates. ”

“ As far as its internal efficiency has gone, the thirty million dollars have not meant so much, since the West has to depend on its own students and it has to take them as it finds them. In spite of this, the university accomplishes an excellent work in many directions under the leadership of the zoölogist Jordan, its possibly too energetic president. While its rival, the State University of California, near the Golden Gate of San Francisco, is perhaps the most superbly situated university in the world, Leland Stanford can lay claim to being the more picturesque. ”

“ Few blacker deeds have been committed by American class-greed; but such is the state of our public opinion, that Captain Gregory came home and boasted of it in a series of articles in “World’s Work,” and Mr. 159Hoover stood back of him, and the Stanford trustees elected him to their exclusive board, and made him their secretary!
Such are the men in charge of the Stanford millions. David Starr Jordan has retired, and the great university is governed from the cozy arm-chairs of the Pacific Union Club of San Francisco. As president they have appointed a physician, Dr. ”

“ The glory of it all was that upper-classmen as well as Freshmen put themselves absolutely under the Sophomore's rule when it was a question of an examination. Thus does the elective system level all ranks and give genius opportunity.
On the night that Boggs dropped in on them, Jimmy and Pellams were cramming alone. Two seniors who were usually in the group had gone somewhere to mix up in a complication over Student-Body treasurer. A Junior seldom out of line was a candidate for the Executive Committee ”

“ Our next point after leaving San Francisco was San José. On our flight thither, we stopped off for some four hours at Palo Alto, and took a lovely ride through the gorgeous Leland Stanford estate, and also some others; taking in besides, the wonderful Leland Stanford, Jr., University. It was all, it is true, but a glimpse, but a glorious one. Are not our best impressions often but the result of supreme moments! We see and feel in such moments, with an intenseness, which gives us our best conceptions and our most cherished memories. ”

“ Williamson's vast gift. It surpasses in magnitude the aggregate benefactions of Peabody; it exceeds the magnificent Girard bequest; at its lowest figures it is larger than the entire endowment of Harvard, Yale or Columbia; and at its largest limit it equals the combined wealth of these three great universities. Yet, with characteristic modesty, the donor calls his institution a School. Such figures stagger the imagination. Only two gifts in human history stand in the same rank. One is the application by Senator Leland Stanford of $22,000,000 of his fabulous wealth to found a university ”

“ Man is bounded by the limits of space, but the race once established on this planet of ours, we see no limit of time, no prospect of a twilight of gods in which the darkness shall fall on the world because universities are no longer needed. The center of gravity of Stanford University, of its student body, and of its influence on civilization, is hundreds of years, thousands of years ahead.
To the students of to-day, the professors of to-day, and the trustees of to-day, the university to-day belongs, but not as a personal possession ”

“ Stanford came back from the East and someone over in the Hall proposed that we give them a welcome home. We could get a bigger demonstration there in those days than you can now, I'll bet; you know everybody who was anybody at all lived in Encina then; that was the center of the College life, politics began and grew up there, and it was over there in the old lobby that we started the Stanford spirit. ”

“ After three years spent in teaching and private study, he went abroad and studied literature and history at the universities of Göttingen and Paris, 1875-'77. He was professor of modern languages at Butler university, 1877-'80; professor of English literature at Knox college, Galesburg, Ill., 1881-'86; professor of literature and history at Purdue university, 1886-'87; professor of the English language and literature at the University of Iowa, 1887-'91; and became professor of English literature at Leland Stanford Jr. ”

“ It is for the students to see that no custom of idleness or of dissipation, no fashion of cynicism or of disloyalty ever becomes hardened into a tradition at Stanford University. It is for the professors to strengthen them in this decision, and to point out the best that men have ever thought or done, to lead the way to gentle breeding and the enthusiasm of noble thought. ”

“ Stanford said in his address on the day of opening, "I speak for Mrs. Stanford as well as for myself, for she has been my active and sympathetic coadjutor, and is co-grantor with me in the endowment and establishment of this University."
They had been urged to give their fortune in other directions, as some persons believed that much education would unfit people for labor. "We do not believe," said Mr. Stanford, and the world honors him for his belief, "there can be superfluous education. As man cannot have too much health and intelligence, so he [Pg 224] cannot be too highly educated. ”

“ Stanford has no other purpose in life than that of carrying out every detail of her husband's purposes. Her devotion has shown itself in maintaining the work of the university unimpaired during this period of hard times, while the estates are in probate, and therefore not available for university purposes. ”

“ Fortune could never smile upon Lincoln sufficiently to work any material change in his dress; he had always looked like a pauper; to-day, poverty showed in the journalist rather than in the carefully-dressed physician.
Williamson's heart grew lighter. This Stanford man, rising before him in his hour of desperation, should tide him over his temporary trouble. Of all the men at the University there had been none who had spoken so often and so sincerely of the Stanford spirit as Lincoln. Here was a chance to put it to a test. He knew his man. ”

“ These are stories of the University as it was before the era of new buildings. While the attempt has been made to create, in character, incident and atmosphere, a picture of Stanford life, the stories, as stories, are fiction, with the exception of "Pocahontas, Freshman," and "Boggs' Election Feed," which were suggested by local occurrences, and "One Commencement," which is mainly fact. The original draft of "His Uncle's Will" was printed in The Sequoia with the title "The Fate of Freshman Hatch." ”

“ Considering all the conditions, the quality of Stanford has from the first been astonishingly good both in the faculty and in the student body. Can we not, as we sit here to-day, frame a vision of what it may be a century hence, with the honors of the intervening years all rolled up in its traditions? Not vast, but intense; less a place for teaching youths and maidens than for training scholars; devoted to truth; radiating influence; setting standards; shedding abroad the fruits of learning ”

“ Each Saturday some of the boys came up and brought the campus news. One time, all enlisted Stanford tumbled out [Pg 273] of their tents, every last one of them, to welcome a big, slow-moving, slow-speaking man, who plays first-base at the Commencement Game. A corporal who had never been to college and who had a newspaper idea of students, asked if that was the football captain whom they were crowding around and almost trying to hug, and Marion answered no; that he was a bigger man than even the head coach. ”

“ His first studies were in the university of Cambridge, and when about eighteen years of age he wrote his Court of Love, but of what college he was is uncertain, there being no account of him in the records of the University. From Cambridge he was removed to Oxford in order to compleat his studies, and after a considerable stay there, and a strict application to the public lectures of the university, he became (says Leland) "a ready logician, a smooth rhetorician, a pleasant poet, a great philosopher, an ingenious mathematician, and a holy divine. ”

“ As to the public at large, in time they will judge us by our fruits, if we are allowed to live to bear fruitage. To a loyal friend of Governor Stanford, Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, I wrote this on June 20, 1894:
You will pardon me for writing to you to express my very great pleasure and that of Mrs. Stanford in the stand you have taken in defence of Senator Stanford's memory and in the effort you have made toward the protection of the university from the evil effects of prolonged litigation in which its endowment would be at stake. ”

“ The question is not as to the truth or falsehood of Professor Ross's views, nor as to the desirability of having reformers and even fanatics in the land; it is whether the university, to its own injury, should lend them its authority, whether the professor should have not only the right to investigate and communicate his suits to his peers, but should also be free to involve a university in partisan conflicts. At Stanford the question is complicated by the fact that Mrs. ”

“ The Servian Government has given the land for the school and the building is under construction. Mme. Grouitch has raised a large sum of money from her friends in this country. She is a gifted, cultured and charming woman, one in which America can feel a pride at having her represent her country in the various parts of Europe to which her husband's official positions may call him.
JANE LATHROP STANFORD.
Philanthropist and Social Leader.
Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford was born in Albany, New York, August 25, 1825. Mrs. Stanford is well known as the wife of Leland Stanford, of California. ”

“ For the university must ever be infinitely greater than the sum of all its parts. For its largest part is never present for our measurement, and this part we can not measure is the sum of all its future influence.
This university was founded on love in a sense which is true of no other. Its corner-stone was love—love of a boy extended to the love of the children of humanity. It was continued through love—the love of a noble woman for her husband; the faith of both in love's ideals—and as an embodiment of the power of love Stanford University stands to-day. ”

“ David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University and the leading authority on fishes in the United States, was a farm boy from Gainsville, New York, when he joined the first class that entered Cornell University. He had little money, but he got along comfortably by waiting on table, husking corn, taking care of lawns, digging ditches and tutoring. It was the proper way to work through college, for he says: "A young man is not worth educating who cannot work through college that way." ”