<p>Stanford and Chicago were both founded at about the same time by wealthy men hoping to create a great private university in “the West” that resembled the great universities of the East. They took their inspiration largely (but not entirely) from the institutions we now call “Ivies”. The initial Chicago leadership was almost entirely associated with Yale. Stanford’s first leaders were tied to Cornell, which was really the pre-eminent educational innovator of the mid-late 19th Century in the U.S. (Interestingly, though, Stanford’s initial faculty had a distinctly Midwestern cast, while Chicago largely raided faculties in the East.) </p>
<p>Within a decade of their founding, Chicago and Stanford were both among the 13 charter members of the Association of American Universities, then as now the gold standard for serious research universities in this country. Chicago was actually one of five convening institutions, along with Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. Six of the eight Ivies (not Brown or Dartmouth) were also charter members.</p>
<p>It is true that in 1963 Stanford did not quite have the reputation it has today, but it is ridiculous to suggest that it was anything like a community college then, and the elements that created its meteoric rise in public regard were already in place: a stupendous electrical engineering program that had already spawned Hewlett-Packard and SRI, the work of Lewis Terman in its Psychology Department, its law school enhanced by a wholesale raid on the Columbia faculty, the founding of its business school, the Hoover Institute, the linear accelerator which was then being designed . . . . Four future Supreme Court Justices had already graduated from the college (Rehnquist, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Breyer). That’s pretty impressive – it gives you a sense of the kinds of students it was attracting, even though few would have compared it to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton then. (Princeton currently has three alumni serving. Yale has had lots of law school alumni there, but no college alumni. Chicago has had one college alumnus.)</p>