It's been over two years since my three-year position as a Visiting Professor at Stanford ended, and I've only been on campus two times since -- until today. Our weather has turned gloomy, so the campus seemed even more subdued than usual, with the heavy sky muting its vibrant colors and stately architecture.
Going back somewhere or another is something I always seem to be doing. Back to somewhere I lived or somewhere I worked. Usually the specific environments have remained much as I remembered them, but I, somehow, seem quite different now.
Accordingly, even though it was familiar, I saw Stanford with new eyes. The lines and angles, the vegetation, the uncrowded, leisurely pace. Compared to the bustle at a public university like U-C, Stanford has vast empty expanses. Comparatively few students occupy what is an extremely large space.
Few realize that Stanford was not supposed to be a private university. The school is named for the only son of the wealthy Stanfords -- Leland, Jr. After her husband dies, Mrs. Stanford was pushing for the school to be public and accessible to a broad slice of the public.
She met resistance from the administrators who had determined they would make better money if the college remained private. However, Mrs. Stanford had the power to get her way, and might well have, except for a shocking development.
On vacation in Hawaii, she died, quite suddenly. The examining coroner declared that she had been poisoned.
Then, something even stranger happened. The head administrator went to Hawaii, collected her body, returned it to California, where a new medical examiner said she'd died of natural causes.
The university's fate was sealed, and of course, it remains an elite, expensive, exclusive university to this day.
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