Supporting Stanford’s Faculty

Stanford University’s initial contact with philanthropic foundations involved a longstanding concern: the financial well-being of its faculty. Indeed, the issue of faculty salaries preceded the 1891 opening of Stanford’s doors. Higher salaries were President David Starr Jordan’s initial bait when trying to attract the fifteen or so best and brightest faculty members (Woodrow Wilson and William James turned him down) to his West Coast startup. When “the risen men of the time” did not respond to Jordan’s offers of higher salaries, he populated Stanford’s initial faculty with up-and-comers.Footnote ³¹ Faculty salaries remained a potential source of competitive advantage (or disadvantage) for private universities. By contrast, faculty pensions became a systemic concern.

When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) was founded in November 1905, its initial mission was to establish pensions for college professors. Stanford’s Jordan was one of the twenty-five men (mainly college presidents) present at the creation. As with much of the early higher education granting by large foundations, the focus was on the needs of private colleges because of the widely held assumption that the states would adequately meet the needs of public higher education. Not all states did so with respect to pension needs of professors. This raised the possibility in some states of an exodus of professors from public colleges to privates. Therefore, CFAT added funds for public colleges thanks to an additional subsidy from Andrew Carnegie in 1908.Footnote ³²

With the pension issue addressed, Stanford revisited salaries. More than twenty years after the university’s founding, President Jordan still recognized the potential value (or harm) of salary structure to the institution’s competitiveness. He wrote Stanford trustee Herbert Hoover in December 1912 that “the general standing of the University is falling behind.” Referring to Stanford’s “veteran” professors, Jordan suggested that “not one of these could be replaced at the salaries we pay.”Footnote ³³ Jordan’s letter had the desired effect. Hoover (class of 1895) was Stanford’s most illustrious alumnus. His success and wealth from mining investments and his ongoing interest in the university attracted an invitation to join Stanford’s Board of Trustees. Jordan wrote to Hoover only five days after Hoover joined the board. Writing to his peers on the board a month later, Hoover complained that several junior faculty at Stanford were paid less than “mechanics in San Francisco.” Low salaries combined with an increasing cost of living meant, Hoover wrote, that most of the faculty could not afford to hire a servant. Therefore, some faculty wives did all the household “domestic work.”Footnote ³⁴ If this situation continued, faculty members might take better offers at other universities.

After extensive correspondence among Hoover, Jordan, and board president Timothy Hopkins, Stanford submitted a funding request (over Hopkins’s name) to the General Education Board in February 1913. Reflecting Stanford’s inexperience in the new world of foundation/university relationships, the proposal lacked specificity. Missing was a key element: how much money the organization sought. Instead, the ask was for “such financial assistance as may be possible in enabling the University to increase its plans for undergraduate education.”Footnote ³⁵ Not surprisingly, in May 1913, the GEB turned down Stanford’s request.Footnote ³⁶ Stanford would make a stronger case for faculty funding as a more experienced grant seeker in a few years, a story we will pick up later.

Medical Education at Stanford

The other issue on which Stanford initially dealt with foundations was medical education. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was involved here as well as with pensions. CFAT’s second charter, from March 1906, mentioned its mission to “do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of teacher and the cause of higher education” in the United States and Canada.Footnote ³⁷ This led CFAT to sponsor independent assessments of professional schools, the first category of which was medical.

In 1908, CFAT president Henry Pritchett asked Abraham Flexner to conduct a study of medical education in the United States and Canada.Footnote ³⁸ Flexner was a graduate of Johns Hopkins and a professional educator but had no medical training. He visited 155 medical schools in the two countries. The Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada, published in 1910, concluded that all but thirty-one of the medical schools should be abolished—including Stanford’s newly acquired Cooper Medical School.Footnote ³⁹

Medical education had been prescribed in Stanford University’s 1885 founding grant. Instead of building a medical school from scratch, Stanford followed the path of many other universities by acquiring an existing institution. President Jordan had a series of discussions with Levi Cooper Lane, president of San Francisco’s Cooper Medical College, the first medical college on the West Coast, about a possible relationship between the two institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰ After Lane’s death, Cooper’s directors offered to sell the struggling College’s fifty-year-old property to Stanford. Jordan and Stanford’s trustees agreed to buy it in 1907.Footnote ⁴¹ Stanford took over all of Cooper’s assets by the spring of 1909—just in time for a visit from Abraham Flexner.Footnote ⁴²

In his report, Flexner’s comments about individual institutions, including the description of Stanford Medical School, pulled no punches.Footnote ⁴³ Flexner was especially critical of Stanford’s clinical work, which was conducted at the Lane Hospital in San Francisco. He found it “seriously defective” for teaching purposes. Flexner concluded that the “catalog statement that the hospital is a teaching hospital is hardly sustained by the facts.”Footnote ⁴⁴ His overall assessment essentially took issue with Stanford’s entire medical enterprise. “With one university medical school [the University of California’s] already on the ground” in San Francisco, he wrote, “a second—and a divided one at that [first-year Stanford medical students took courses both in San Francisco and, more than thirty miles south, in Palo Alto] is therefore a decidedly questionable undertaking. There is no need of it from the standpoint of the public.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Flexner’s impression of Stanford Medical School would have remained largely confined to one publication (albeit an influential one), except that in fall 1913 he joined the General Education Board (GEB) as assistant secretary and in January 1914 became a trustee. This was important because the GEB became the primary funder of American medical education, and Flexner had veto power over such grants. Dealing with Flexner on behalf of Stanford was Ray Lyman Wilbur. Wilbur (A.B. 1896, M.A. 1897 from Stanford, with an M.D. degree from Cooper Medical School) already had practiced medicine in both hospital and private practice; he also had served as an assistant professor of physiology at Stanford, as university physician, and as a clinical professor before becoming professor of medicine and head of the transitioning Stanford Medical Department, in 1909. (He was the new school’s first dean, 1913–1916.)Footnote ⁴⁶

In May 1913, Stanford’s Board of Trustees encouraged President Jordan to step down and to take the largely ceremonial position of chancellor. The new president, geologist John Branner, one of the university’s original faculty members, had been a college classmate of Jordan’s at Cornell and was a faculty member at Indiana University during Jordan’s presidency there.Footnote ⁴⁷ Branner fretted about the university’s finances. During 1913 and 1914, Branner clashed with the trustees (including Hoover) about the future of Stanford Medical School. Branner saw it as a drain on scarce resources (“by far the most expensive part of the university”). He concluded that the biggest step he could take toward a balanced budget would be to eliminate the medical school.Footnote ⁴⁸ Chancellor Jordan, medical school dean Wilbur, and key trustees (including Hoover) disagreed. In May 1914, Stanford’s Board of Trustees voted to keep the medical school.Footnote ⁴⁹

Branner’s final gambit against the medical school was inviting Victor Vaughan, longtime dean of the University of Michigan’s Medical School, to assess Stanford’s medical program. Although Vaughan’s visit came after the Board’s decision to retain the school, the report he wrote was sufficiently positive to embolden Stanford officials to seek foundation funding.Footnote ⁵⁰ Vaughan suggested that rather than have the Stanford Medical School fold up its tent, “I strongly urge that the medical school should be not only continued but be developed.”Footnote ⁵¹ With Vaughan’s endorsement in hand, Wilbur reported to Jordan that he had learned “that the General Education board had decided to devote a large portion of its income to the development of medical education.”Footnote ⁵²

Having acknowledged the financial challenges Branner identified, Dean Wilbur took the lead in obtaining funds for the Stanford Medical School. Wilbur led with a regional argument regarding Stanford’s distinctive position in medicine on the Pacific Coast.Footnote ⁵³ He emphasized that “[the GEB had] done nothing on the Pacific Coast [regarding medical education]. Here is their chance and ours.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Wilbur submitted a proposal to the General Education Board in September 1914 indicating how additional funds could improve the Medical School.Footnote ⁵⁵

Two days after the GEB’s October 22 board meeting, Flexner notified Wilbur that the GEB had declined Stanford’s request.Footnote ⁵⁶ In November, Wilbur involved Jordan, who convinced Flexner and Wallace Buttrick (General Education Board Secretary) to have the Board review a modified proposal from Stanford at its January meeting. Jordan informed Wilbur that in a November 16 meeting with Flexner and Buttrick, he had also played the geography card: “I have tried to show them that in the half of this country which lies west of St. Louis there is no adequate [private] Medical School excepting our own.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In December 1914, Stanford submitted a proposal for $750,000 to fund its medical school. The next month, Wilbur met with Flexner and Buttrick in New York. Wilbur took advantage of this opportunity to, as he wrote Jordan, correct “some misconceptions based upon [Flexner’s 1909 visit to the Medical School] which I think I was able to clear up.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In any case, all the Stanford people recognized that, as Jordan wrote, “Flexner will lay down the conditions.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Flexner did, and the Stanford proposal was turned down.Footnote ⁶⁰

Abraham Flexner never granted Stanford Medical School the legitimacy Wilbur felt it deserved. Despite submitting multiple proposals, Stanford received no medical-related grants from the General Education Board before 1928, when Flexner resigned and ceased to be the GEB’s medical expert. Unfortunately for Stanford, from 1928 until closing its doors in 1960, the General Education Board provided no medical education grants to universities that had not previously received them—a major barrier for universities from the West. Decades later, however, Stanford University officials would use geography to their advantage.

Herbert Hoover and Reputational Access

In the early 1920s, when resuming its efforts to obtain foundation funding, Stanford University did so with a stronger hand. Two individuals led the way with various foundations: Herbert Hoover with Carnegie and Ray Lyman Wilbur with Rockefeller. Each had been affiliated with the university when Stanford failed to attract foundation funding in 1913–1915: Hoover as a trustee, and Wilbur as dean of the Medical School. By 1920, the world viewed both men differently. Each had occupied a new position in the interim and, as a result, became known for greater administrative expertise. That expertise earned both greater access and influence than they had in 1914, enhanced their legitimacy with foundations, and brought much-needed money to Stanford University.

Stanford’s external funding success was accelerated by its most prominent alumnus. Herbert Hoover became an international hero thanks to his humanitarian efforts during World War I. In 1914, he established the Commission for Relief of Belgium, an operation he ran to feed civilians, with the help of an extensive network of Stanford alumni and faculty, until 1917. Soon after the April 1917 entry of the United States into the war, armed with the expertise he gained in Europe, Hoover became head of the U.S. Food Administration, aimed at increasing food production, stabilizing food prices, and decreasing food waste. Hoover had at his side Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur, and Wilbur’s medical colleague and friend, Dr. Alonzo E. Taylor.Footnote ⁶¹ Hoover also coordinated postwar relief efforts in Europe through the American Relief Administration. Hoover’s wartime experiences led him to create, in 1919, the Hoover War Library in the Stanford University library. They also led him, a year later, to propose the establishment of a Food Research Institute at Stanford. Footnote ⁶²

Hoover identified a patron with deep pockets: the Carnegie Corporation of New York, established in 1911 “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States,” endowed with $125 million, making it the largest foundation.Footnote ⁶³ Chemistry professor Alonzo Taylor from the University of Pennsylvania, who had briefly served on the University of California’s medical faculty and had been Hoover’s primary advisor on food matters during the war, outlined the proposed institute in a memorandum that Hoover forwarded to Carnegie Corporation president James Angell in June 1920.Footnote ⁶⁴ In early July, Angell wrote to Hoover that “I have been greatly interested in” the project. He promised to share the details with the Corporation Board in the fall.

Hoover’s timing was good. As Ellen Lagemann notes, the Carnegie Corporation had shifted from a broad scope of grant making (which had characterized the Corporation since its inception) to “large institution-building grants.” Fewer but larger grants characterized the Corporation’s giving from 1919 to 1923.Footnote ⁶⁵

For Hoover, who had been a candidate for the 1920 Republican nomination for the presidency, this was the right organization to approach for another reason. Lagemann emphasizes that for those wishing to shape public policy, the extent of their “access to knowledge-producing elites” could derive from “personal acquaintance” and to “political views.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Not only were most of the Carnegie Corporation trustees Republicans, but “most admired Herbert Hoover.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, the trustees of the Corporation had wanted Hoover to join their board.Footnote ⁶⁸ Responding to Hoover’s June 1920 inquiry, Corporation President Angell conveyed that he was interested not just in the message about the project but also in the messenger: “May I add that I was one of the many thousand who regret that you are not likely to be in the White House after March 4^th next.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Later in July, another form of access came into play: Northern California’s Bohemian Grove, which has been called a site of “ruling-class cohesiveness” based on the “social, economic, and political connections” of attendees.Footnote ⁷⁰ CFAT President Henry Pritchett, a Carnegie Corporation trustee, was a regular attendee.Footnote ⁷¹ Stanford’s geographic disadvantage compared to eastern universities was slightly ameliorated in the case of the Carnegie Corporation. Pritchett’s health required him to spend summers in Santa Barbara—within striking distance of Stanford University and the Bohemian Grove.Footnote ⁷² Both Hoover and Wilbur were members of the Bohemian Club. Acting on behalf of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Hoover used the connection at the July 1920 Bohemian encampment to pitch the Food Research Institute to Pritchett.Footnote ⁷³

Hoover followed up with additional information in November, and Angell continued to provide support (“Trusting the project may come to full fruition”).Footnote ⁷⁴ In January 1921, Angell asked for a meeting to consider “a possible line of march.” The main point he made was “if it can be arranged, I should be glad to start the machinery moving in order that the program may be launched not later than the beginning of the coming academic year.”Footnote ⁷⁵

On January 27, the Carnegie Board approved a $704,000 grant ($11.87 million in 2023 dollars) to Stanford for the Food Research Institute.Footnote ⁷⁶ With Alonzo Taylor as director, the institute opened its doors on July 1.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nobody was happier with the outcome than President Wilbur, who wrote that the Food Research Institute “constitutes one of the most notable opportunities for research of a wider scope that has come to any university within recent years.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Ultimately, the Institute would receive more than $1.5 million from the Carnegie Corporation.Footnote ⁷⁹

The process through which Stanford received its first major foundation grant is revealing. The initiative came from an influential Stanford board member, Herbert Hoover, whose expertise was in administration rather than research. Academic leadership of the Food Research Institute came from Alonzo Taylor, who was recruited away from the University of Pennsylvania. Stanford had little prior track record in this area to build on. In sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to Stanford University, the Carnegie Corporation was investing in the proven administrative capabilities of Herbert Hoover.

Ray Lyman Wilbur’s Positive Impression

When Herbert Hoover returned from Europe in September 1919, the issue of faculty salaries at Stanford remained unresolved. Hoover did not mince words, announcing that the laborers building his home made more money than 150 assistant professors and instructors at Stanford. Because of competition from both within and outside of academia, Stanford was in danger of losing its most valuable professors.Footnote ⁸⁰ Stanford was not alone. Recognizing a widespread problem, in December 1919, John D. Rockefeller provided $50 million to the General Education Board (GEB) for faculty salaries.Footnote ⁸¹

Stanford’s point man with the GEB in the 1920s and 1930s was Ray Lyman Wilbur. When Stanford University first submitted proposals to the GEB in 1913 and 1914, Wilbur was dean of the Medical School. By 1921, he had served as Stanford’s president for five years. Wilbur was an astute administrator who already had national recognition in both higher education circles and regarding public health issues. When it came to fundraising, however, in political parlance, Wilbur was good at retail but not so good at wholesale. Although an articulate and prolific author, he was not known as a spell-binding orator yet was gifted in dealing with individuals or small groups. That was precisely what was needed to effectively deal with leaders of foundations. The university benefitted from his ability to transform acquaintance into friendship with four successive presidents of GEB, as well as with John D. Rockefeller Jr., the family’s primary representative on the Board. Indeed, upon Rockefeller’s 1940 retirement from the Rockefeller Foundation Board, President Raymond Fosdick invited Wilbur to “prepare a resolution to express the sentiment of the trustees… [Y]ou are perhaps closer to Mr. Rockefeller’s affections than any of the other trustees.”Footnote ⁸²

In April 1921, as part of the due diligence regarding the university’s proposal for a grant to increase faculty salaries, GEB president Wallace Buttrick and secretary Trevor Arnett visited the Stanford campus. Arnett’s impression of Stanford’s president was very positive: “Dr Wilbur shows a grasp of the situation of the institution, and a determination to conduct it efficiently which impressed Dr. Buttrick and me most favorably.” Wilbur also succeeded in the task at hand, making the case, as Arnett noted, that “assistance from the General Education Board now would be of great benefit to the University in helping it to raise the first million of endowment and showing to the public that it needs financial assistance.”Footnote ⁸³

Five days after the visit from Buttrick and Arnett, Wilbur submitted a proposal for a $300,000 grant ($5.06 million today). Stanford’s proposal sustained a theme that was present in its 1914 medical school proposal and would recur in subsequent dealings with the General Education Board: geography. Salaries of professors in Letters and Sciences, the proposal read, “have not reached a point where we have been able, for members of our staff, to overcome the handicap of distance from intellectual centers.”Footnote ⁸⁴

The next month, GEB appropriated the $300,000 to increase faculty salaries in the arts and sciences at Stanford. The GEB grant was conditional: the university needed to raise an additional $700,000 from other sources by October 1, 1926.Footnote ⁸⁵

Instead of immediately sending an enthusiastic acceptance, Stanford officials hesitated.Footnote ⁸⁶ Both Wilbur and Hoover thought that, for a university only thirty years old, raising money from alumni would be difficult.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1921, the notion of “mobilizing alumni in a highly organized campaign” was relatively new. The first such campaign, at the University of Michigan, began in 1914.Footnote ⁸⁸ With the GEB’s blessing, Stanford took four months to determine if they could raise $700,000.Footnote ⁸⁹ After discussions among board members and administrators, Stanford accepted the gift and GEB’s terms in October 1921.Footnote ⁹⁰

The 1921 GEB grant’s matching requirement catalyzed “The First Million for Stanford,” the university’s initial campaign to solicit funds from alumni. Accepting a grant from a relatively new type of institution led Stanford to enlist the assistance of an even newer one. As part of its 1918 capital campaign, Harvard had become the first university to engage a professional fund raiser (alumnus John Price Jones).Footnote ⁹¹ Stanford had the same idea.

Rather than being guided by New York-based consultants, Stanford preferred known California men. Wilbur chose San Francisco financier Lyman L. Pierce, a Hoover associate who had had notable success raising money for the American Red Cross and YMCA during World War I and who had worked with Hoover and Wilbur on Food Administration efforts. (Pierce lived in Palo Alto, and his daughters were currently Stanford students.)Footnote ⁹²

In late 1921, Wilbur thanked Buttrick and Arnett for GEB’s “great service to the University” in catalyzing Stanford’s first capital campaign. He also acknowledged the degree of difficulty in doing so “since the past history of Stanford has not been conducive to financial support by its former members [alumni].”Footnote ⁹³

Indeed, concerns Hoover and Wilbur had harbored about a capital campaign based on alumni donations proved justified. As predicted, it became a grueling march, with multiple delays and extensions. The First Million finally met the grant’s conditions with a final hail-Mary from football related funding in 1929—after the GEB granted requests from Wilbur to extend the deadline beginning in 1926.Footnote ⁹⁴ Pierce, distracted by his leadership of the national campaign for Relief in Ireland, had lasted only two years, failing to collect on pledges after a stirring start. He was replaced by French instructor John Sellards (who also ran the university’s summer quarter) who had no fundraising experience and made little headway. Wilbur intervened more than once and was finally rescued, in 1929 by his Board of Athletic Control, whose donation from football stadium receipts helped Stanford reach its $700,000 goal. Fortunately for Stanford University, Ray Lyman Wilbur was well enough known by then to key people in Rockefeller’s foundations that they were willing to bet that his institution would eventually meet the commitment.

Influence and Expertise

Nearly a year after the 1921 visit by Wallace Buttrick and Trevor Arnett, Ray Lyman Wilbur’s stature at the General Education Board had grown. GEB president Buttrick wrote a fellow board member:

Word about Wilbur’s capabilities spread elsewhere in Rockefeller circles. This is not surprising, given that the Rockefeller foundations had overlapping directorates. Therefore, what Buttrick said about Wilbur at the General Education Board became common knowledge to officials at the Rockefeller Foundation. As of 1922, five individuals served simultaneously on boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board.Footnote ⁹⁶ One such individual was Raymond Fosdick, who later served simultaneously as president of both the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board from 1936 to 1948. In December 1922, Fosdick invited Wilbur to join the Rockefeller Foundation board. At the time, the Rockefeller Foundation’s board included businessmen, attorneys, and ministers. Yet there was no better way to demonstrate a foundation’s commitment to the advancement of knowledge than through the imprimatur of a university professor—and the board had five. There were two university presidents on the board: the president of the University of Chicago (historian Henry Pratt Judson) and the president of the University of Minnesota (sociologist George E. Vincent, whose previous academic career had also been at the University of Chicago, reflecting the ongoing special relationship between the Foundation and the university cofounded by John D. Rockefeller).

For a foundation with an interest in funding medical research, adding Ray Lyman Wilbur to its board would be a coup. Wilbur was the only medical doctor among the presidents of the American Association of Universities, and he had just been elected head of the American Medical Association.Footnote ⁹⁷ This was significant because the Rockefeller Foundation and GEB became responsible for more than half of all foundation support to medical education.Footnote ⁹⁸

Wilbur agreed to accept Fosdick’s invitation under one condition: that doing so would not “stop me from presenting to the other Trustees on behalf of certain institutions and organizations in which I am most interested.”Footnote ⁹⁹ After receiving assurances that he could advocate on behalf of his institution, Wilbur joined the Rockefeller Foundation Board in February 1923. Four months later, Stanford Medical School received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation involving the dissemination of insulin. One of the two investigators was Dr. Albion Hewlett, whose son William would cofound Hewlett-Packard. Wilbur was able “as a physician” to thank John D. Rockefeller Jr. for the grant.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Wilbur served on the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1922 to 1940 and of the General Education Board from 1930 to 1940.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In his Memoirs, he recalled, “I can think of nothing that has given me more satisfaction than the association with the Rockefeller foundations.”Footnote ¹⁰² Wilbur demonstrated this through the invitations he made to certain individuals to join him in fishing, his favorite form of relaxation. Here his lighter side was evident, as is seen in a 1916 letter to longtime Stanford trustee Timothy Hopkins:

In the early 1920s, Wilbur, his sons, and a few friends found an ideal fishing spot in the Siskiyou Mountains and purchased a ranch nearby. Visitors in the 1920s included Wickliffe Rose (three summers during his term as General Education Board president, 1923–1928), and Raymond Fosdick (prior to his service as GEB and Rockefeller Foundation president).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Wilbur and Rose, who had been the first director of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, shared a keen interest in public health. Known for the expression “make the peaks higher,” as GEB president Rose preferred funding organizations that would last, especially those with leaders he trusted.

Wilbur’s relationship with Rose mattered to a particular Stanford initiative in support of biology, chemistry, and physics. H. J. Thorkelson, the General Education Board’s director of college and university education, visited Stanford on this matter in October 1926. Three months later, Wilbur requested $750,000 (excluding buildings) for budgetary assistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ After making another visit to Stanford in March 1927, Thorkelson recommended a “first step” of $125,000 grant to Stanford—a fraction of Wilbur’s request.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Wilbur was bitterly disappointed. His April 28 response reflected not just a perceived slight to his institution but also to his region:

Wilbur not only elevated the stakes but also played his highest card. He copied his friend Rose, who was Thorkelson’s boss, on the April 28 letter and followed up with him on June 27 with a more extensive proposal, which totaled $750,000 ($13 million today). The gambit worked: In November, the GEB board approved the higher amount, conditioned on Stanford raising an equal amount.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

GEB’s approval capped a successful period for Stanford grant seeking across various disciplines. In March 1927, the university received a $250,000 matching grant ($4.34 million today) for the social sciences from the Laura Spelman Memorial.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The previous year, the university had received an outright gift of nearly $200,000 from the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aviation.

1927 proved to be the high-water mark for Stanford foundation grants until the 1950s. In March 1929, Ray Lyman Wilbur became secretary of the interior under President Hoover, diminishing Stanford’s relationship-building capabilities. Upon Wilbur’s return to campus in 1933, funding possibilities had dried up. The Great Depression further harmed the university’s capacity to match grants, which cost millions.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In anticipation of retirement, Wilbur stepped off the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board in 1940. Stanford continued to receive funding from the Rockefeller Foundations, but the university’s postwar growth was enabled by, more than any other institution, the Ford Foundation.

The Geography of Granting

During the first few decades of relationships between major foundations and research universities, travel constraints hindered geographic equity. Transcontinental travel required a week’s commitment, which limited foundations’ governance primarily to administrators and board members in or near the Northeast. The requirement of face-to-face meetings for most major grants harmed the prospects of distant grant applicants.

In 1909, Abraham Flexner visited 155 medical schools as part of his research for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He was an independent contractor at the time, however, and a motivated one. Once he had a staff position with the General Education Board, where any initial grant in medical education required his approval, Flexner was less willing to travel such great distances.Footnote ¹¹¹ Not coincidentally, during GEB’s entire existence it granted a total of less than $1 million (out of more than $94 million distributed nationwide) to medical schools in the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Pacific Coast combined—and to none in California.Footnote ¹¹²

When Raymond Fosdick invited Wilbur to join the Rockefeller Foundation in 1922, he acknowledged the geographic challenges confronting someone from the West Coast serving on the board of an East Coast foundation:

Even though Wilbur agreed to join, the Board remained geographically insular.

In 1935, Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick wrote to journalist William Allen White, who was stepping down from the Foundation’s board. Fosdick was concerned that the departure of White, who was from Kansas, would exacerbate an ongoing Foundation problem. “Here in the East,” he wrote, “I get the impression that we are rather out of touch with the country as a whole, and we need some elements on our Board of Trustees who will help interpret to us the United States that lies west of the Allegheny Mountains.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Five years later, Ray Lyman Wilbur announced that he was stepping down, a further threat to the board’s geographic scope.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In September 1940, newspaperman Douglas Southall Freeman, as head of the nominating committee, solicited nominations to replace Wilbur, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and A. N. Richards on the Rockefeller Foundation’s board.

Wilbur’s departure did not change the board’s already limited geographic balance because in 1940, Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California, joined the board.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The fact that officials of the Rockefeller Foundation were thinking about geography by 1940 is significant, not only for the Foundation’s future but for that of what became an even larger foundation. In December 1946, William P. Fiske, representing the Ford Foundation, visited with the Rockefeller Foundation’s director of the Division of Natural Sciences, Warren Weaver. “Over the next several months,” notes Eric Abrahamson, “Fiske frequently returned to the Rockefeller Foundation to pick the brains of its top officers.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In these discussions and others, the Rockefeller Foundation’s geographic concerns registered with the Ford Foundation.

Such concerns were reflected in the 1949 Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation of Policy and Program, which outlined five program areas to develop. The Report recommended seeking “to avoid too great a concentration of grants in any institution or in any region.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ A means to that end would be to get out from headquarters “by travel and personal contacts, to get firsthand impression of the validity of proposals made to the Foundation.” If they did not do so and focused entirely on written submissions, warned the report, “the Foundation will be making grants not on their merits but on the literary salesmanship of applicants.” Just three years after Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Missouri, the report concluded that “the remedy here is to get behind the paper curtain—to look beyond written applications into the merits of each case.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Ultimately, this perspective worked to the advantage of Stanford University.

From Regional Disadvantage to Regional Advantage

Stanford’s first major grant from a philanthropic foundation (Carnegie Corporation) followed a 1920 meeting with leading officials of the university at the Bohemian Grove, California’s foremost retreat for movers and shakers, with a leavening of influential California academic figures. Three decades later, a meeting at the Bohemian Grove preceded Stanford’s first major grant from the Ford Foundation. In January 1950, Stanford president J. E. Wallace Sterling met privately with H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., head of the team that produced the Ford Foundation Report of the Study, to discuss the Ford Foundation’s priorities.Footnote ¹²¹ By the following year, Gaither had become an associate director of the Ford Foundation.Footnote ¹²² As such, he became a leading advocate for Program Area Five, the behavioral sciences, and took charge of its administration.Footnote ¹²³

The son of a San Francisco banker, Gaither was born in Mississippi but grew up on the West Coast. He earned his bachelor’s and law degrees at UC Berkeley and then became a partner of a San Francisco law firm. During World War II, Gaither served as assistant director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Radiation Laboratory. (Stanford’s soon-to-be engineering dean Frederick Terman was next door as director of Harvard’s Radio Research Lab.) After the war, thanks to Ford Foundation funding, Gaither helped establish the RAND Corporation as a think tank for the Air Force. Ford Foundation board member Karl Compton, who had been Gaither’s boss at MIT, suggested having him assess the Ford Foundation.Footnote ¹²⁴ The 1949 Study Report became a blueprint for the Foundation’s future.Footnote ¹²⁵

Three of the eight members of the study committee for Gaither’s 1949 report were from California.Footnote ¹²⁶ This mattered in terms of dissemination of information, as indicated by a February 1949 meeting at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. The subject was “the general place of legal research and education in the over-all plans of the Ford Foundation.” Present at the meeting were individuals exclusively from the San Francisco Bay Area: committee member Peter Odegard (political science professor from UC Berkeley), William Prosser (dean of UC Berkeley’s Law School), Carl Spaeth (dean of Stanford’s Law School), Roger Traynor (justice of the California Supreme Court), committee member Dyke Brown, and Rowan Gaither.Footnote ¹²⁷

Spaeth’s inclusion in such discussions presented the sort of opportunity that Stanford’s new president, Wallace Sterling, ran with. Born in Ontario, Canada, Sterling earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta, respectively. He began the doctoral program in history at Stanford at the age of 26 and spent the rest of his academic career in California. After earning his Ph.D. in 1938, he taught at the California Institute of Technology and then briefly headed the Huntington Library before returning to Stanford as its fifth president in April 1949. Sterling was a gifted fundraiser. Like Ray Lyman Wilbur, Sterling would also take advantage of networking opportunities at the Bohemian Grove. But where Wilbur’s preferred mode of cultivating friendship was while hunting and fishing, Sterling was an outgoing personality who interacted easily with others, whether at a faculty get-together, a trustee board room, or a national conference.Footnote ¹²⁸

On September 6, five months into his Stanford presidency, Sterling convened a meeting (including Spaeth) at his home “to discuss what Stanford might do to attract any possible support that would be forthcoming from the Ford Foundation.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Clearly, the best thing would be to have Sterling meet with Gaither, who had general ideas about what the foundation should do for higher education but was not an academic himself. Hence, their January meeting at the Bohemian Grove, where Gaither sought Sterling’s advice. Sterling provided detailed comments about how to approach the five programs specified in the 1949 Study Report. Footnote ¹³⁰

Decades later, it was said in Silicon Valley that if individuals sought money, they might receive advice. If they sought advice, they might receive money. In the 1950s, if the Ford Foundation sought Sterling’s advice, Stanford often received money.

In June 1950, the Ford Foundation Board approved an appropriation of $3 million for the behavioral sciences at thirteen universities (including Stanford) and the Social Sciences Research Council.Footnote ¹³¹ In late July, the foundation alerted leaders of the universities (who had been chosen rather than having applied for the grants) about what was “contemplated.”Footnote ¹³²

The Foundation’s goal with the initial grant was explained in an eight-page program description sent to these select thirteen universities: “The purpose of the grant is not the support of research projects as such,” but instead “development of the resources” to do so. In short, “‘machine tooling’ for research.”Footnote ¹³³

The beginning of Stanford’s relationship with the Ford Foundation took place in rarified air. In this initial grant sequence, the foundation intentionally vested “final authority for the approval or disapproval of all particular applications of funds to reside in the Office of the University President.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In late September 1950, Sterling had received a formal offer of $100,000 “subject only to your agreement.”Footnote ¹³⁵ By the end of October, Stanford had the cash in hand.Footnote ¹³⁶

The foundation made clear that having secured the funds, “the university president is expected to allocate the funds …”Footnote ¹³⁷ The foundation recommended that recipient universities establish an “advisory committee” including individuals who sought a portion of the pie and others who did not.Footnote ¹³⁸ In Stanford’s case, Sterling, who would become known for drawing on faculty advisory committees, created a Committee for Research in the Social Sciences, in spring 1951, that included a dozen faculty members representing twelve fields of study.Footnote ¹³⁹ A subsequent self-study of departmental needs in the behavioral sciences was led by Stanford’s first provost, biologist Douglas M. Whitaker.

In essence, nearly a year and a half elapsed from the Bohemian Grove meeting of Gaither and Sterling in January 1950 to late spring 1951 before the Stanford faculty committee was involved. That is the way the Ford Foundation wanted it. In August 1950, foundation associate director William McPeak explained to Sterling how Stanford came to be included among the initial thirteen grantees:

Stanford’s faculty, at least in the behavioral sciences, did not complain about their initial exclusion from the process. This is because they agreed with McPeak’s assessment. A September 1951 report by the faculty committee acknowledged:

In short, the behavioral sciences did not yet represent a “steeple of excellence” for Stanford.Footnote ¹⁴²

The Behavioral Sciences grant represented a breakthrough for Stanford, given the Ford Foundation’s recent history. In its early years of ambitious funding, the Foundation favored Harvard University, and to a lesser extent MIT. Two key academics on the board were MIT’s president Karl Compton and Donald David, dean of the Harvard Business School.Footnote ¹⁴³ Compton, who joined the Ford Foundation board in 1946, had been on the Rockefeller Foundation Board since 1941. David joined Ford’s board in 1948, and Harvard made effective use of his insider status.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Stanford Business School dean J. Hugh Jackson, who had been a classmate of David’s at the Harvard Business School, was recommended as a Ford Foundation board member by a prominent businessman. As Jackson told Sterling, “Mr. Ford apparently did not see fit to include anyone from academic institutions on his board except Harvard and M.I.T.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Having Jackson on the board might have proven useful to Stanford. From 1950 to 1955, David’s Harvard received $5.5 million (about 17 percent of the Foundation’s total higher education grants), about twice what second-place Columbia University received; Compton’s MIT was third.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Although Jackson was not appointed, Stanford at least had a foot in the door through Sterling.

A change in leadership at the Ford Foundation helped the prospects of Stanford University and the entire western region. Westerner Gaither became the Foundation’s president in 1953.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As president, Gaither wanted the Ford Foundation to concentrate most of its funding on only a few targets—including higher education. From 1950 to 1954, the Foundation provided a total of $32 million in grants to colleges and universities. More than half of that total went to ten well-established research universities. Yet while Gaither may have been comfortable with the American higher education oligopoly, he did not like the idea of a player as dominant as Harvard. Therefore, he expressed a desire to avoid appointing new trustees “with a Harvard connection.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Although Rowan Gaither’s connection to Stanford was as an alumnus of its long-standing rival in Berkeley, his commitment to the West Coast proved as valuable to Stanford as if he had earned his degrees there. In March 1953, less than a month after Gaither replaced Paul Hoffman as Ford Foundation president, the announcement of a “Self-Study Program” in the behavioral sciences (the area Gaither had headed as foundation vice president) emphasized that grants would be awarded “upon consideration of such factors as the quality of the plan for self-study and proper geographical distribution.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Geographic distribution in the Behavioral Sciences was enhanced in 1954, when the Ford Foundation established a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the foothills above the Stanford campus.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

During his first year as Ford Foundation president, Gaither suggested that a change in board composition could lead to increased geographic diversity in the Foundation’s higher education grants. His discussions with trustees arrived at a unanimous conclusion that “it would be desirable to have at least one [board member] from the South and one from the Far West.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Aligned with this change in emphasis, Wallace Sterling highlighted Stanford’s geographic position at key times in the coming years.

Stanford Medical School Revisited

When Wallace Sterling took over as Stanford’s president in 1949, the university had been led by presidents with medical degrees for fifty-four of its first fifty-eight years. Of the three, only Ray Lyman Wilbur had practiced and taught medicine. Two of Sterling’s predecessors, Wilbur and Donald Tresidder, had considered moving the Stanford Medical School from San Francisco to the university’s main campus. It was the historian Sterling, however, who finally did so. His primary focus was on the research environment and curriculum, which meant upgrading the faculty and facilities, and to enhance interdepartmental activity—which had previously been a geographic challenge.Footnote ¹⁵²

Demographics worked in Sterling’s favor. A teaching hospital affiliated with a medical school requires a critical mass of the local population to serve. That is why in the early twentieth century, prior to the takeoff of suburbanization in the United States, most major medical schools were in big cities. That was not a problem for universities with urban sites for their main campus. For Stanford, located more than 30 miles south of San Francisco, this posed a problem. In 1909, when Stanford’s newly acquired Medical School (the aging Cooper Medical College, founded in 1858), was not one of the thirty-one medical schools Abraham Flexner thought deserved to survive, one of the main reasons was the multi-locational feature.Footnote ¹⁵³ In 1927, Stanford Medical School dean William Ophuls wrote

Thanks to the attractiveness of the San Francisco Bay Area and a post-war economic boom, however, population of the suburbs on the Peninsula grew rapidly. As of 1920, San Francisco’s population was 507,000, served by hospitals affiliated with Stanford University and the University of California. San Mateo County and Santa Clara County, which each abutted Stanford University, had a combined population of less than 150,000. By 1950, however, the population of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties exceeded San Francisco’s 1920 population. An area without another university-affiliated hospital beckoned. The viability of a teaching hospital at Stanford, as part of a revitalized Medical School, had come much sooner than Dean Ophuls had anticipated. That left an opening that Wallace Sterling exploited.

After an intense internal review of the Medical School, and a survey Sterling personally made of medical faculty, the Stanford Board of Trustees, in 1953, approved the president’s proposal to move the Medical School from San Francisco to the university’s main campus, 30 miles south. Doing so would provide convenience for students and faculty and promised to enhance the Medical School’s reputation. The biggest drawback was cost. The move would be the most ambitious university project since reconstruction of the campus following the 1906 earthquake. This led to a major fundraising campaign, raising $22 million for new facilities and a major improvement of its endowment.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The campaign included money from foundations, large and small. How Stanford’s administrators achieved their goals demonstrated skill in aligning the needs and wants of the university with the agendas, both formal and informal, of their funders.

In May 1955, for instance, President Sterling received an invitation from Henry Ford II (president of the Ford Motor Company and chairman of the Ford FoundationFootnote ¹⁵⁶) to send faculty members to the 1955 Ford Educational Forum. Educational gatherings organized by captains of industry are seldom big attractions to academics. In this case, however, Frederick Glover, Stanford’s assistant to the president, had sent a note to Business School dean Hugh Jackson:

Jackson sent a professor of accounting to the 1955 Ford Educational Forum. Of the forty-five private universities with medical schools under consideration for funding, only one other besides Stanford (the University of Pittsburgh) sent a representative to the Forum.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Stanford clearly took the desires of its potential funder seriously.

In July 1956, Sterling sent a letter to Ford Foundation vice president William McPeak in response to an inquiry about medical school grants made by the Commonwealth Fund. The previous month, Foundation president Gaither had announced the makeup of a committee that would determine how to distribute $90 million that the Foundation had appropriated in December 1955 for American privately supported medical schools.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The Ford Foundation was now seeking guidance on how to proceed with its new program.

Sterling reported to McPeak that in 1954, the Commonwealth Fund had provided Stanford a grant of $220,000 to fund studies of how best to transfer the medical school from San Francisco, and a subsequent unrestricted grant of $1 million. “I suppose it is always difficult for the recipient of a grant to explain precisely to a third party the reasons which the donor had for making the grant,” Sterling answered. He felt “reasonably certain” of three reasons. First, Stanford was a private institution. Second, the advantage of putting the medical school faculty into community with faculty from Stanford’s other schools—including enhanced curriculum (thereby solving the problem Abraham Flexner had identified). Third, a combination of historical accomplishment, “worthy” plans, and genuine need for financial support.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Sterling added another compelling reason that he “had a strong suspicion” figured in the Commonwealth Fund’s decision, one he clearly wanted the Ford Foundation to consider: geography. Stanford was “the only privately supported Medical School rated among the top medical schools in the country which is located west of the Mississippi” except for Washington University of St. Louis “which is virtually on the banks of the river.” Sterling concluded: “I believe that this combination of quality and location made the Stanford case seem especially deserving and meritorious.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

Although the Ford Foundation had a program of support for medical education that required universities to submit no applications, Wallace Sterling had found a way to submit a version of one to a receptive audience. McPeak responded, “we are very grateful for your going to the trouble” of providing the information. “It is very helpful.”Footnote ¹⁶² And it certainly helped Stanford’s case for a sizeable grant.

Eight days later, Sterling spoke with San Francisco attorney A. Crawford Greene, a member of the Ford Foundation committee that would determine distribution of the $90 million for medical schools. Greene indicated that most of the money would “be distributed with an eye to the geographic location, the past record, the present strength, and not least of all the future promise of the schools,” concluding that such a distribution pattern would benefit Stanford.Footnote ¹⁶³

Greene proved to be correct. Stanford received $3.1 million (out of the $90 million), an important kickstart to its upcoming Medical School fundraising campaign. Out of a total of forty-five recipients, only Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell received larger grants. For Stanford, this was a far cry from being completely shut out by Abraham Flexner from the General Education Board’s medical school grants.

An increasing sensitivity to regional parity at the Ford Foundation represented an opening for Stanford as the only private university from the West among the original members of the American Association of Universities. From 1955 to 1959, the Ford Foundation increased its giving to Stanford. Ford gifts to specific programs at Stanford totaled more than $13 million during the 1950s, including substantial grants (at least a half million in each field) for the behavioral sciences, medical school, education, legal studies, business school, and engineering. In addition, Stanford received $3.6 million for faculty salaries from Ford in 1956.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Stanford became the number three recipient among universities of Ford Foundation grants.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

In the 1950s, Stanford received as much funding from foundations as from industry gifts and government grants (including from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation) combined.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

The Special Program in Education

In May 1949, a month after he assumed the duties as Stanford’s president, Wallace Sterling wrote, “the joy in Heaven over the conversion of one black sheep is as nothing to the joy of a college president over an unrestricted dollar.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Since 1950, Stanford had been successfully experimenting with commercial development of non-academic land near the campus, among other strategies, to bolster its unrestricted funds, but near the end of the decade it would benefit mightily from the Special Program in Education, a pet project of the Ford Foundation’s new president, Henry Heald.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Heald, president of New York University (NYU, a private research university), succeeded Rowan Gaither at the Foundation in 1956. He was the first university president to head the Ford Foundation. While he had been NYU president, the university had become a recipient of Ford Foundation grants.

During his first year as Ford president, Heald discussed general foundation activity at a meeting of what he termed “important university presidents.” One of the issues mentioned was an “increasing tendency for faculty members and foundation representatives to deal [work] on projects before they are presented to administrative officers [and some presidents believed] that they were losing control of their institutions.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Heald’s staff, in turn, suggested that this was not the case at the Ford Foundation. One responded, “We have a rule … that we will not discuss a project with a professor until it has been approved by the administration of the institution.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Another wrote to Heald, “In our staff work inside and outside the office we have supported an institutional approach rather than departmental and disciplinary project approaches.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Heald’s most famous higher education program at the Ford Foundation reflected this institutional approach. In 1959, he proposed a Special Program in Education designed to provide between $30 million and $50 million annually (between $300 million and $500 million during a ten-year period) to a maximum of twenty universities. The Program focused on a narrow but geographically diverse band of targets, in keeping with the priorities expressed by Rowan Gaither five years earlier. One of the intended results, as stated in the Program proposal, was:

Although the program had ambitious goals to make universities better, it was not designed as a disruptive force. New universities need not apply because “regional excellence can be produced faster and sustained longer by building on existing institutions than by creating new ones.” Not all leading universities would qualify for the Special Program. Private universities were the focus, but not all of them.Footnote ¹⁷³ Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, which had been “generously supported in the Foundation’s regular programs, and will no doubt continue to be” were excluded.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The Ford Foundation trustees approved the Special Program in Education in September 1959. The program involved no requests for proposals. Instead, the Foundation chose its targets. Stanford University was one of them.

For Stanford, the timing could not have been better. One thing granting organizations like to see is a clear idea of what their potential grantees would do with the funds they receive. In 1958, Sterling had asked his assistant for financial affairs Kenneth Cuthbertson (soon to be named vice president for finance), to oversee a unique, year-long campus wide study of current conditions, projected needs, and opportunities. Robert Moulton, Cuthbertson’s Stanford classmate and friend who in 1957 had moved from the Ford Foundation to become Sterling’s assistant for long-range planning, began a statistical comparison of Stanford’s projected long-term needs to its existing funds. Moulton’s ten-year forecasts, the first at any major university and using campus-wide data marshalled by Cuthbertson, highlighted the need to double Stanford’s gift support. The resulting report, Stanford’s “Minimum Financial Need in the Years Ahead,” written principally by Cuthbertson and Moulton, included a compelling introduction by university provost Frederick Terman. (The study was later dubbed the Red Book because, for convenience, it was bound in a Stanford-red buckram binding.) The study identified $346 million in potential improvements (particularly faculty, graduate student, and research facilities) over the next ten years, Stanford would need an additional $150 million (doubling the rate of giving as of 1960, and some ten times the university’s total expenditures in 1950) to become the university the president, the trustees, the faculty, and key alumni leaders, hoped it would become by 1970.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Sterling, accompanied by the provost, deans, and key staff, presented these findings to Stanford’s Board of Trustees in October and early November 1959. Although initially stunned by its ramifications, the trustees agreed that the university should undertake the necessary fundraising.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Less than a month later, Ford Foundation secretary Joseph McDaniel and Heald’s right-hand man, James Armsey, arrived at Stanford for an unexplained, last-minute informal visit with Sterling, Cuthbertson, and several deans at the president’s campus home. When asked if Stanford had considered its future needs, President Sterling reached for the Red Book, sharing the set of plans approved by Stanford’s trustees earlier that month. Although the Red Book had not been created for this singular meeting, it made the desired impression. “It happened, fortunately, I believe, for their program and ours,” wrote Armsey, “that Stanford had recently presented to its trustees a 10-year projection of plans and needs, had received trustee approval, and was now embarked on the task.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Taking a cue from the Special Program’s explicit goal of geographic diversity, Stanford officials emphasized its western location—as they had done in previous correspondence with foundations. Stanford’s formal response to the Ford visit specifically mentioned “faith in the future destiny of this newest part of the United States.” Helping to assure the Ford Foundation of a sound investment, the university’s response noted that “Stanford has heretofore mirrored the growth of California and the West; it will continue to do so.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸

By the 1950s, the Ford Foundation had a large staff and encouraged interaction between staff members and professors involved with work related to grant proposals. Yet the Special Program on Education, just like the 1950 Behavioral Studies program and the 1956 Medical School program, primarily involved contact between university presidents, selected other administrators, and Ford Foundation high-level administrators. The schedule for Armsey and McDaniel during their Stanford visit reflected that emphasis. Only one faculty member was present. Otherwise, aside from President Sterling and Provost Terman, only deans, vice presidents, the vice provost, assistants to the president, and the assistant controller attended.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

At a meeting in September 1960, the Ford Foundation Board decided to make a $25 million three-for-one matching grant totaling $100 million to Stanford. Stanford was one of five recipients of money as part of the Ford Foundation’s regional initiative regarding higher education. Johns Hopkins and Notre Dame each received $6 million, the University of Denver $5 million, and Vanderbilt University $4 million.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Stanford’s $25 million was more than all the others combined. This was the largest unrestricted higher education grant in history to that point.

Stanford made its $25 million Ford grant the keystone of a subsequent $100 million PACE (Plan of Action for a Challenging Era) campaign, 1961–1964, a watershed in Stanford’s fundraising history. The PACE campaign, the largest university-wide fundraising campaign of its time in the United States, closed its books in less than three years after bringing in $114 million (about $1.1 billion in 2023 dollars).Footnote ¹⁸¹

By several measures, Stanford proved an excellent choice for Ford Foundation money. The university made dramatic strides, based on growth (from a $15.3 million enterprise in 1950 to more than $60 million by the mid-1960s)Footnote ¹⁸² and an increase in endowment (from $41 million in 1949 to $268 million in 1968). Fundraising during Sterling’s administration (1949–1968) brought in ten times more than it had between 1905 and 1949. The professoriate nearly tripled in size, while per capita salaries had more than doubled. And despite increasingly selective admissions now drawn from across the country, the student body grew by 40 percent, mostly graduate students.Footnote ¹⁸³

Perhaps most telling was Stanford’s rise in the academic rankings (from around fifteenth in the mid-1950s to third overall, by some measures, in the mid-1960s).Footnote ¹⁸⁴ A 1973 Carnegie Commission study considered it among the best half-dozen American universities.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This not only suggested that the Ford Foundation’s investment in Stanford paid off. Ford’s willingness to invest substantial amounts across many fields in a university whose position in the rankings in the 1950s fell short of the top ten in most of these disciplines, suggests an institutional model in action. Rather than simply cherry pick the top five departments in each field, the Ford Foundation’s administrators instead demonstrated confidence in the ability of President Wallace Sterling and his staff to use the funds to develop and hone excellence, just as the General Education Board had expressed confidence in the leadership ability of his predecessor, Ray Lyman Wilbur.