[13] Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry (later Silicon Valley).

[6] It houses the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank, and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".

Stanford has won 131 NCAA team championships,[18] and was awarded the NACDA Directors' Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994.

Cornell is recognized as one of the first American universities to embrace this progressive approach to education, and Stanford quickly followed suit, solidifying its commitment to these ideals.

They specified in the founding grant that the buildings should "be like the old adobe houses of the early Spanish days; they will be one-storied; they will have deep window seats and open fireplaces, and the roofs will be covered with the familiar dark red tiles.

The presence of so many high-tech and semiconductor firms helped to establish Stanford and the mid-Peninsula as a hotbed of innovation, eventually named Silicon Valley after the key ingredient in transistors.

[59][60] In the 1950s, Stanford intentionally reduced and restricted Jewish admissions, and for decades, denied and dismissed claims from students, parents, and alumni that they were doing so.

The central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto,[79] bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Blvd, and Sand Hill Road, off State Route 82.

Stanford is the largest landowner in the Silicon Valley[128] Payouts from the endowment covered approximately 22% of university expenses in the 2023 fiscal year.

[130] The university's pioneering of technology intellectual property transfer created both direct investments and enabled a unique pipeline of mega-donors[131] including from alumni-founded companies with Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page), Nike (Phil Knight),[132] Hewlett-Packard (David Packard and Bill Hewlett),[133] and Sun Microsystems (Vinod Kohsla)[134] as examples.

Further, the university's global reputation[135] and continued leadership in technology[136] has attracted large donations from prominent figures such as the co-founder of Netscape (Jim Clark),[137] founder of SAP SE (Hasso Plattner),[138] co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (Marc Andreessen and Laura Arillaga-Andreessen),[139] chairman of Kleiner Perkins (John Doerr and his wife Ann).

Admissions officials consider a student's grade point average to be an important academic factor, with emphasis on an applicant's high school class rank and letters of recommendation.

Kathryn Ann Moler is the key person for leading those research centers for choosing problems, faculty members, and students.

It today consists of twenty-four galleries, sculpture gardens, terraces, and a courtyard first established in 1891 by Jane and Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child.

These include an original bronze cast of The Thinker granted residence at Stanford by Cantor in 1988, with the university expected to attain full ownership sometime in the future.

The Stanford Thinker has been loaned for viewing around the world and features across the university's iconography and culture,[167][168] including the logo of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[257] Several residences are considered "theme" houses; predating the current classification system are Columbae (Social Change Through Nonviolence, since 1970),[258] and Synergy (Exploring Alternatives, since 1972).

[263] Stanford also subsidizes off-campus apartments in nearby Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Mountain View for graduate students who are guaranteed on-campus housing but are unable to live on campus due to a lack of space.

[277] From 1930 until 1972, Stanford's sports teams had been known as the Indians and during the period from 1951 to 1972, Prince Lightfoot (portrayed by Timm Williams, a member of the Yurok tribe) was the official mascot.

But in 1972, Native American students and staff members successfully lobbied University President Richard Lyman to abolish the "Indian" name along with what they had come to perceive as an offensive and demeaning mascot.

The 1975 vote included new suggestions, many alluding to the industry of the school's founder, tycoon Leland Stanford: the Robber Barons, the Sequoias, the Trees, the Cardinals, the Railroaders, the Spikes, and the Huns.

[281] Stanford have won 25 consecutive NACDA Directors' Cups, from 1994–1995 through to 2018–19, awarded annually to the most successful overall college sports program in the nation.

[307] In addition to the church, the Office for Religious Life has a Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning, and Experiences (CIRCLE) on the third floor of Old Union.

[309] Some religions have a larger and more formal presence on campus in addition to the student groups; these include the Catholic and Hillel communities at Stanford.

Groups span athletics and recreation, careers/pre-professional, community service, ethnic/cultural, fraternities and sororities, health and counseling, media and publications, the arts, political and social awareness, and religious and philosophical organizations.

[324] The Fountain Hopper (FoHo) is a financially independent, anonymous student-run campus rag publication, notable for having broken the Brock Turner story.

Close to 70 percent of students who reported an experience of sexual misconduct involving nonconsensual penetration and/or oral sex indicated the same.

[351] On the night of January 17–18, 2015, 22-year-old Chanel Miller, who was visiting the campus to attend a party at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Order, was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old freshman student-athlete from Ohio.

Two Stanford graduate students witnessed the attack and intervened; when Turner attempted to flee the two held him down on the ground until police arrived.

[353] Stanford immediately referred the case to prosecutors and offered Miller counseling, and within two weeks had barred Turner from campus after conducting an investigation.