Education: Fast PACE at Palo Alto

• Share

Once it was a rich, sleepy school with rich, sleepy students; now it aims to be "the Harvard of the West." In ten years, privately run Stanford University, faced with the example of California's excellent public universities, has risen to the nation's top rank. In the last 18 months alone, for example, it has purloined 125 teachers from campuses all over the U.S., and in the last decade it has acquired five Nobel prizewinners. The best private university in the West is hotly driving for $100 million, spurred by a 1-for-3 matching grant of up to $25 million from the Ford Foundation; the campaign, acronymously called PACE (Plan of Action for a Challenging Era), has already taken in more than $52 million.

All this might seem to be gilding the lily, for Stanford was born rich in 1885, when Railroad Tycoon Leland Stanford launched it with the world's then biggest endowment—$21 million and 8,800 acres 30 miles south of San Francisco. Unhappily, wealth bred sloth at Stanford. It let its lavish Neo-Romanesque premises molder. Deluged with veterans after World War II, it was soon in serious trouble.

Faculty Raiding. What has largely saved Stanford is its fifth president: J. E. Wallace Sterling, 56, a Canadian-born historian who looks like a heavyweight Jimmy Durante, sounds like Edward R. Murrow and thinks like Tycoon Stanford. The son of a United Church of Canada minister, Sterling worked his way through the University of Toronto pitching hay and peddling furniture polish. He got his doctorate at Stanford in 1938, went on to a distinguished teaching career at Caltech, where he also doubled as a CBS news analyst. He was director of the Huntington Library in 1949 when Stanford found him.

As first priority, Sterling set out to rebuild Stanford's faculty with a small cadre of ambitious professors who spread the gospel of Bay area living all over the East and Midwest. Instead of high pay, Stanford offered such lures as 100% loans for building handsome ranch houses on university land. To snag former Harvard Sociologist Sanford M. Dornbusch, Stanford doubled its sociology department with men of his choice. In similar deals Stanford captured American Historian David Potter after 19 years at Yale, German Historian Gordon Craig after 20 years at Princeton, Novelist-Critic Albert J. Guerard after 23 years at Harvard. When the faculty got so good that he had to combat counter-raiders, Sterling set up "The Fighting Fund," an emergency war chest for matching bids of other universities for Stanford professors. Says Sterling: "We used to offer salubrious climate and living conditions. Now we meet the competition with dollars and throw in the sunshine."

"Think Tank." In one sense, Stanford simply hitched its star to West Coast prosperity. The university's vast campus was tailormade for "think tank" operations like those of its off-campus affiliate, the Stanford Research Institute, which serves everyone from the Bank of America to a Nevada gambling casino. Led by Provost Frederick E. Terman, the university's own first-rate engineering school produced such electronic inventions as the klystron tube, which in turn spurred a space-age complex around Palo Alto that now comprises more than 200 companies. Today the campus proper boasts a 500-acre industrial park.