STANFORD UNIVERSITY, PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, LOOKING EASTERLY TOWARD SAN FRANCISCO BAY FROM THE HILLS ABOVE THE LAKE G and the Ideal BY CECIL MORTIMER MARRACK REAT colleges go in pairs. Less than twelve years ago a throng of people gathered at Palo Alto for the exercises at the opening of Leland Stanford Junior University. In less than twelve years the brightest pages in the educational history of California have been written, and she has given to the world another illustration of the value of intellectual emulation. Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, Stanford and the University of Californiaall have responded to the quickening impulse of a noble competition. President Jordan once remarked, "When the university was opened it was the opinion in the east that there was as much room for a new university in California as for an asylum for broken down sea captains in Switzerland." The first entrance examinations at Stanford seemed to bear out this disheartening opinion. Three candidates were present -two men and a woman. It spoke well for the educational standards of the new institution that the two men were turned down. Today the two great universities of California stand in the first rank and their halls are overflowing with enthusiastic young men and women. Every state in the Union has its representation at Berkeley and Palo Alto, and the influence of these two great centers of intellectual activity is unbounded. The sec SECTION OF DESIGN OF ST. GAUDENS, CARVED IN STONE UPON THE AS A DECORATIVE FRIEZE, PORTRAYING ondary schools of the state have felt and responded to it, so that today it is said: "There is more education to the square inch in California than in any other part of the United States." President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University must always be dear to Californians as the man who is most of all typical of the spirit of western education. Rugged and direct, with a touch firm and unwavering, and yet fine enough, his true work was just what he has made it that of a pathfinder for things higher. things higher. His life has been strenuous and he must surely have fallen by the way if he had breathed anything of the spirit of the effete centers of the old learning. As it is, his steps have been unfaltering, and even when he has been the center of storms he has met them with the unswerving poise of our granite boulders. It is he who has interpreted into educational possibilities the unparalleled munificence and devotion of the Stanfords, and at all times it is he who has kept before the students of the uni ENTRANCE TO MAIN DRIVE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, MEMORIAL ARCH AND CHURCH IN THE DISTANCE |
