STANFORD UNIVERSITY

official name Leland Stanford Junior University private coeducational institution of higher learning at Stanford, Calif., U.S. The university was founded in 1885 and opened in 1891 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane (ne Lathrop), and was dedicated to their deceased only child, Leland, Jr. The doors were opened in 1891 to 559 students. The university campus consists largely of Stanford's former Palo Alto farm. The buildings, conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted, are of soft buff sandstone in a style similar to the old California mission architecture, being long and low with wide colonnades, open arches, and red-tiled roofs. Stanford maintains branch campuses in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and England. About half of its undergraduates study overseas at them for six-month periods. Advanced-study centres are maintained in Japan, Taiwan, and several other countries. The departments of the university are organized into schools of law, medicine, education, engineering, business, earth sciences, and humanities and sciences. In 1921 the Food Research Institute of Stanford University was organized. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, founded by Stanford alumnus Herbert Hoover during World War I, contains more than 1,000,000 printed and manuscript items dealing with 20th-century international relations. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was established in 1961 and has become a major centre for research in particle physics. The Stanford Medical Center, completed on the campus in 1959, now has more than 550 beds. The Hopkins Marine Station is maintained by the university at Pacific Grove on the Bay of Monterey.