Word: west
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Harvard of the East meets the "Harvard of the West' on the gridiron in Palo Alto, for that is how boastful Westerners refer to Stanford University. West of the Mississippi, Stanford in fact carries all the social and intellectual prestige that Harvard has in the East But at opposite ends of the continent, these universities represent opposite ways of college life. The gay, outdoor, coed, magazine-type collegiate life dominates Stanford. Often called a playboy's school, Stanford presents a happy blend of good comradeship, rural atmosphere, and high scholarship...
Scholarship is skillfully added to this apparently carefree scheme. Stanford stands high on any scholastic ranking of American colleges and is generally regarded the best in the West. Its faculty salaries have always been large enough to attract top men in all fields. Admission is as tough for Californians as Harvard admission is for Easterners...
Apart from the legend, the official story goes that the university was founded soon after the death of young Leland, in memory of the boy who died just before he reached college age. Senator Stanford expressed the desire that the university should bring intellectual life to the West and add to the vigor of the Western experience. He wanted a college that was free from the outworn traditions of older universities, especially one that would, in his words, "qualify its students for personal success and direct usefulness in life." He felt that colleges had become too far removed from American...
...death, in 1885. It was built on the Senator's old horse farm, and the campus has been called "the Farm" ever since. In 1891, David Starr Jordan was appointed its first president, and in October of that year, the College began. From then on, Stanford grew with the West. Jordan quickly made the new school the intellectual center of the West. He led it through the troublesome early years and started its amazingly rapid growth. In 1915, Ray Lyman Wilber became president and completed the job of making Stanford a leading educational institution. He anticipated general education with...
This spirit is perhaps best shown in rooting. Rooting for a team may be a casual act for an Easterner, but Californians take their cheering seriously. The supreme example of this is the West coast's Big Game--Stamford vs. California. These rivals from different sides of San Francisco Bay have been slugging it out with an intensity matched only by the Harvard-Yale tradition. But the Eastern rivalry is merely a contest between teams; out West, the whole school joins in the fray...