Education: Excellence Under the Palm Trees

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Start with the palm trees -- the king palms, windmill palms and date palms by the hundreds that grace the sprawling 8,200-acre campus. Beneath their gently waving fronds lie beds of fragrant star jasmine and flowering ice plant. Then there are those strapping, clean-cut young men and women, tossing Frisbees in the perpetual sunshine, lounging on the grass in cutoffs and T shirts, cycling along special bike lanes on their way to buy frozen yogurts ("fro-yo," to locals) or to play a few sets of tennis. Finally, there are the buildings, the picturesque, mission-style structures with their red tile roofs and colonnaded sandstone facades. Could anything that looks this much like a country club be a serious academic institution? It could if its name is the Leland Stanford Junior University of Palo Alto, California.

Founded 103 years ago on the grounds of Railroad Magnate Leland Stanford's trotting-horse farm, the university is in the midst of a five-year centennial celebration that marks its rise from a modest regional school to the very top ranks of American higher education. The ascension of this brash Western upstart has come as both a shock and a challenge to such Ivy League powerhouses as 352-year-old Harvard and 242-year-old Princeton, where the notion of academic endeavor is firmly associated with rigorous winters and a stern Puritan work ethic. Reflecting the early contempt heaped on Palo Alto by the Eastern establishment, one 19th century editorialist wrote that "Stanford's great wealth can only be used to erect an empty shell."

Some shell. Today Stanford is home to 1,200 faculty members and 13,300 students. Its faculty and staff include nine Nobel laureates, eleven National Medal of Science recipients, eight MacArthur Foundation Fellows and six Pulitzer prizewinners. Stanford students have won 59 Rhodes Scholarships and 27 Marshall Scholarships. Among the university's illustrious alumni are Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor; Football Stars Jim Plunkett and John Elway; Astronaut Sally Ride; TV Commentator Ted Koppel and -- would you believe? -- Harvard President Derek Bok.

The university's professional schools and research institutions have produced a dazzling string of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Stanford developed the world's first X-ray microscope. The Stanford Medical Center was the site of the nation's first adult heart transplant. Stanford research produced the basic patent on gene splicing and scores of other inventions that will net the university some $6 million in royalties this year.

Add to all that a high-powered athletic department, top-flight business, law and education schools and a respectable, if not quite superlative, humanities program, and you get major headaches for recruiters at rival institutions. Moans a Yale University admissions officer: "Stanford's got everything -- great climate, great physical plant, terrific extracurriculars and, increasingly, world-class academics." No less impressed, Cornell University President Frank Rhodes declares, "Stanford is not simply a great national institution, but one of the world's great institutions." That collegial admiration was reflected last October in a U.S. News & World Report survey in which university presidents were asked to choose the nation's best colleges. Stanford came in first for national universities, ahead of Harvard and Yale.