Fast PACE at Palo Alto

Friday, Nov. 09, 1962

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In 1959, having raised $17 million for the purpose. Sterling moved Stanford's dusty medical school from San Francisco to Palo Alto, gave it a bright young faculty as well as a major research center. Typical of the center's current work is Nobel Prizewinning Exobiologist Joshua Lederberg's effort to build a TV-microscope to land on Mars and sample possible life there. Even more conducive to Big Science at Palo Alto is Sterling's most audacious 1962 coup: a $114 million AEC contract to build a two-mile linear accelerator, which eventually will be the world's most powerful atom smasher.

"Fresher than Princeton." Once a purely Western preserve, Stanford now ranks third behind Harvard and M.I.T. and just ahead of Caltech as the first-choice college of National Merit scholars. The graduate business school's students are 25% Ivy Leaguers. The university is getting so international-minded that it now has 503 students at branch campuses in Florence, Stuttgart, Tours, Tokyo and Taipei.

Stanford still has plenty of problems. The 5,580 undergraduates are a delight to such faculty newcomers as Historian Gordon Craig, who calls them "a lot fresher than Princeton students." But the brains behind the tanned, healthy faces are getting sharper than the curriculum, which needs revision to fit them. The untaxing overseas courses, for example, are often labeled "inane." Humanities need to be put on a par with science. Stanford's new boys and girls also chafe at Stanford's quaint old ways. Liquor is banned and so is "partisan politics," which means that Nixon and Brown can speak on campus, but their supporters cannot.

More pressing to President Sterling, who stays close to the 9,827 students despite endless road trips for money, is the inadequacy of physical facilities. The library, says Dornbusch, "is the worst I have ever seen in a major university." Such needs are the point of PACE, and Sterling will not rest until they are met. Even in public-educating California, he tells PACE dinners across the country, "There is still room for a demonstration of what can be done by private aspiration, initiative and enterprise."