The New Kid on the Block

According to the legend, Harvard could have prevented the rise of one of its closest competitors.

A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, walked timidly into the Harvard president’s outer office.

The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwood country hicks had no business at Harvard. She frowned.

“We want to see the president,” the man said softly.

“He’ll be busy all day,” the secretary snapped back.

“We’ll wait,” the lady replied.

For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would just go away.

They didn’t.

In exasperation University President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1868, agreed to see them. Someone of his importance obviously didn’t have the time to spend with them.

The lady told him, “We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus.”

Untouched, Eliot barked back, “Madam, we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery.”

“Oh, no,” the lady explained quickly. “We don’t want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.”

The president rolled his eyes. “A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven-and-a-half-million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard.”

For a moment the lady was silent, then she turned to her husband and said quietly, “Is that all it costs to start a university? Why don’t we just start our own?” Her husband nodded.

Eliot’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment.

Governor and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, back to Palo Alto, California, where they established the university that bears their name.

The story is nice, contrasting elitist Brahmin Harvard with the egalitarian upstart Stanford—which in a little more than a century has risen to be one of the most esteemed universities in the country, and is now commonly considered an Ivy of the West.

The story is also false.

In fact, Harvard has set up a page on its website that recounts the legend—specifically to debunk it. Eliot did meet with the Stanfords, but only to encourage them on their quest to start a West Coast academic institution and to help them draw up a list of what would be needed.

Now, the relatively new Stanford, with its sunny weather and laid-back atmosphere, ranks among the top three institutions—alongside Yale and Princeton—that draws accepted students away from Harvard, according to Director of the Office of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73.

“It’s a different kind of choice from Harvard and it’s a very attractive choice for many of the best students,” Lewis says.

Though Harvard is consistently placed ahead of Stanford in national college rankings, Stanford’s weather, academic reputation, impressive sports offerings, land and proximity to Silicon Valley have poised it to become an increasingly appealing option for prospective undergraduates.

“We are very different places starting from the weather and location right down to the culture,” Lewis says.

The All-American College

From the beginning, the liberal arts education offered by Stanford has been different from its peers in its conception—it was inaugurated in 1891 as a co-educational, nonsectarian university in an era when most schools were neither.

Stanford is not steeped in history in the way that Harvard and Yale are—it celebrated its founding five years after Harvard’s 250th anniversary.

Beyond that, there are the obvious physical differences—cream-colored sandstone walls instead of ivy-covered brick; year-long sunshine and tall palms instead of gray skies, cold sleet and cramped urban environs.

Edward Fiske, author of the annual Fiske Guide to Colleges, says fundamental differences between Stanford and Harvard manifest themselves in the architecture and campuses of these universities.

Harvard and other revered eastern institutions are modeled on English universities—contained, intellectual settings. But Stanford’s open campus that “looks out,” its fascination with science and technology and relative lack of respect for tradition reflects distinctly American values, Fiske says.

“I think the point that I make about Stanford is that it is the first great American university,” he says.

After their only son—who never attended Harvard—died at 15 of typhoid fever, former California Gov. Stanford famously remarked one morning to his wife, Jane: “The children of California shall be our children.”

At the suggestion of Eliot, the Stanfords established a university—eventually donating over $21 million, not including buildings and land.

Though established in the late nineteenth century, Stanford’s rise as a “national” university has taken place within the last few decades, Fiske says.

“Stanford until the ’60s, and even until the ’70s, was very much a regional university in terms of reputation,” he says. “In the ’70s and into the ’80s, it moved from being a regional into a national university.”

Fiske says Stanford worked informally with UC-Berkeley to attract talent to the Bay Area, striking a “gentlemen’s agreement” with the state college that they would not directly compete with each other.

“[Stanford] would invest hugely in a department and they would get it up to national standards,” Fiske says.

He says that the way the university handled its public relations—by issuing press releases that associated Stanford with Harvard, Yale and Princeton—also helped raise Stanford’s national profile and build an esteemed academic reputation.

“I would say at least certainly for the last decade or so it’s been well-established as one of the top half-dozen universities of the country,” Fiske says.

Though both Stanford and Harvard provide an education of similar caliber, Fiske says Stanford’s strengths lies in the sciences and technology—a function of being founded during a time when science was becoming increasingly important and other colleges were adding it to their curriculums.

“Across the board, Stanford is strong in everything it does, but they don’t have the tradition or the depth the older eastern schools would have in humanities,” Fiske says.

But the primary differences between Stanford and Harvard stem from the environments of the schools, Fiske says.

California Dreamin’

Stanford’s admissions viewbooks loudly trumpet perhaps the most important difference between it and the northeast Ivies: sun.

James P. Conroy, head counselor at New Trier Township High School outside Chicago, stresses the importance of weather and location in the college choice.

“The funniest thing after doing this for 30 years is the weather situation,” he says. “There are more kids who come in here, who live in surburban Chicago, who say, ‘Get me out of this weather!’”

Despite the sun, Harvard still attracts students who prefer a more urban atmosphere, says Stephen D. Singer, director of college counseling at New York City’s Horace Mann High School.

“Yields from kids at this school [to Harvard] are unusually high,” Singer says. “The biggest reason I think is that it is urban and these kids thrive in that and it affords the students a degree of independence that they like. The kids are self-starters—the idea of a close-knit campus that doesn’t have many outside opportunities is not very appealing to them.”

Out of graduating classes of about 200, Horace Mann usually sends nearly 10 students each year to Harvard and a couple to Stanford.

While weather has prompted many of Conroy’s students to go south and west, he says Harvard remains a huge draw. He says typically seven seniors go to Harvard while five go to Stanford.

“The academics are very similar in how demanding they are. It’s the fit,” Conroy says. “The typical Stanford student is a little more mellow, a little more laid-back. I think the Harvard student is a little more proactive, a little more aggressive—and I don’t use the word negatively—academically.”

Fiske offers a slightly different evaluation of the Stanford student, citing a quotation from his book.

“At Stanford people work very hard, but it isn’t very cool to admit you do that,” Fiske says.

Stanford admissions officer Christina M. Wire says Stanford also benefits from a reputation that it is both intensely academic and highly competitive in sports.

Conroy says that, along with high graduation rates, success in sports add to Stanford’s appeal—he says students want to go to school with winners.

Some students say they are better attuned with the California lifestyle.

“Some of the other schools don’t strike me having that laid-back attitude Stanford has,” says Mohan K. Mallipeddi, a first-year at Stanford from San Jose, Calif., who also applied to Harvard.

Though nearly half of this year’s admitted class still hails from California, Wire says more high school seniors from the East Coast are also applying to Stanford because of a “self-perpetuating phenomenon.”

As an increasing number of East Coast students choose to attend Stanford, others are more willingly to consider it and then their friends follow suit, she explains.

Harvard’s Lewis says that it is “increasingly a reality and likely that students will think that they can go anywhere among the great institutions of the country.”

A Western Education

Stanford benefited enormously in the 1990s from being close to Silicon Valley—just as Silicon Valley benefited from being close to Stanford. The dot-com boom made Palo Alto one of the most attractive workplaces in the country and made many local fortunes.

Lewis recognizes that other institutions of higher learning are becoming better.

“The world is changing,” she says. “Stanford is a formidable competitor.”

Part of that change includes the rise of the Valley—a few miles south of Stanford—as well as California cities like San Francisco that now offer similar job opportunities to the East Coast.

Additionally, unlike Harvard, its physical surroundings do not limit the possibility of expansion.

“Stanford has a great advantage in the size of campus,” says Clare M. Cotton, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

In addition to the original Stanford “farm,” the campus now totals continuous 8,180 acres—whereas Harvard’s campuses in Boston and Cambridge equal less than 600 acres.

Stanford currently uses about a third of its available land and over the next 10 years plans to build up to 3,000 housing units and new academic facilities on a fraction of the land.

The sprawling campus does raise a unique problem for Stanford undergraduates—transportation. Bikes are common among the undergraduates as car use is restricted to sophomores and above. Those who do not have cars rely on the public transit system, which some say needs improvement.

“It takes an hour-and-a-half to get to San Francisco if you want to get to the nearest actual city,” says Nickolas C. Rodriguez, vice president of Stanford’s student government, the undergraduate senate of the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU).

In the last few years, Stanford has also pushed to improve its undergraduate education and humanities programs—and some of its greatest strengths come in areas where Harvard is most lacking.

Stanford not only runs 18 interdisciplinary majors and programs like “Science, Technology and Society,” but gives $3,000 research grants to its most promising incoming first-years and has nine overseas study abroad programs.

“I think the idea behind [the study abroad programs] is that nothing can substitute actually being in another culture when it comes to understanding that culture,” says John C. Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate education.

Stanford’s academic year follows the quarter system, rather than the traditional semester system, in which students take three sets of classes in a single academic year.

Graduating seniors must accrue at least 180 units—generally averaging 15 units each quarter—fulfill writing and foreign language requirements and take courses in four major areas: introduction to humanities; sciences, technology, and mathematics; humanities and social studies; and world cultures, American cultures and gender studies.

Stanford also offers up to eight units for “activity courses” which allow students to count music or physical education classes—even golf—to be counted toward the minimum 180 units.

Laid-Back Undergrads

Junior Bo L. Cowgill, who describes the Stanford campus as sunny and beautiful, says students who attend the school are glad to be receiving a high quality education without going to the northeast.

“There’s a laid-back lifestyle and people like to party,” he says.

Cowgill says the “norm” is against working.

“You would think [Stanford] is a very low stress environment just from walking around—I happen to know that’s not true,” says Cowgill, who is also the ASSU senate chair.

Sophomore Rodriguez, vice-president of the student government, says students rely on the “medium-size” Greek system for its social life.

“Generally what you do on a Friday or Saturday night here—if you aren’t going to Palo Alto—is to go to a party and they are usually held be a sorority or a frat,” he says.

Cowgill says neighboring Palo Alto is not a college town—catering to the young dot-com entrepreneurs and access is limited unless you have a car.

For other extracurricular activities, undergraduates can choose among the list of more than 400 student organizations on campus.

The different way Stanford houses its undergraduates also adds to a different social climate. Its lottery system, or the “draw,” allows blocking groups to list their preferences for houses.

Harvard’s Lewis says Stanford’s upperclassmen housing system often results in a more homogeneous house life than the average Harvard student who encounters more daily diversity.

But Rodriguez says Stanford’s residential system works well, fostering a sense community within the houses. He does lament the lack of a central-gathering point on campus—similar to the student center for which Harvard students have longed.

Two Peas in a Pod

Besides the lack of a student center, Stanford is eerily similar to Harvard in other respects.

Students complain about their general education requirements—Stanford’s equivalent to the Core—especially the Introduction to Humanities, or “IHUM,” which requires a three-quarter sequence of courses beginning in the first year.

Students often get the impression that first-years are “farmed” out to these classes, Rodriguez says.

He says the shortcomings of this program are evident in the number of revisions it has undergone in past years.

Bravman says the school’s fundraising efforts are geared toward improving “IHUM”—intended to impart a basic understanding of the humanities and a shared experience of the first college year—and to funding first-year and sophomore seminars.

In recent years, Stanford’s fundraising has been specifically tied to improving undergraduate education. At his installation in October 2000, President John Hennessy launched a billion-dollar Campaign for Undergraduate Education.

Since then Stanford has secured $400 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that will primarily build the arts and humanities departments.

The Hewlett donation came after an already record year for the school, which raised $581 million during Fiscal Year 2000—displacing Harvard, which had been the top private college fundraiser for four of the preceding five years.

But Harvard’s endowment of $18.3 billion is still more than double that of Stanford.

The Choice

While there is overlap between Harvard’s and Stanford’s accepted applicants, Lewis says it is reduced by Stanford’s binding early decision program—and still Harvard surpasses Stanford in its ability in getting those commonly accepted to enroll.

“We continue to take far more students from the commonly admitted students than they take for us, but we don’t take that for granted,” Lewis said. “We work very hard at this.”

Stanford sophomore Rodriguez says that as a high school senior he was also considering Harvard and Princeton as possible colleges. He says his perceptions of colleges has since changed—at the time he thought going East would make him “more competitive.”

“I thought Stanford would make me a better person,” Rodriguez says. “Plus, I wanted to go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale for graduate school.”

“So much of a decision between two or three places is based on the fit,” says Wire, the Stanford admissions officer. “They know they are going to get a fabulous education at any of them. It’s more of a question of where they will feel comfortable.”

—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.