Stanford

We had some time to kill, so why not slay it at Stanford? After all, Stanford has rightfully earned its reputation as a one-school Ivy League. I don’t know much about Stanford. In high school I thought about applying there, but I never went any further than picking up the school’s brochure. I must say, though, that the brochure looked very nice. Lots of ethnically diverse students frolicking in the California sun. My high school self, being a pale and bitter misanthrope, was not impressed.

Stanford was named after Leland Stanford, a railroad tycoon who got filthy rich exploiting his Chinese workers. Add Stanford to the list of “schools named after bloated plutocrats”—also featuring Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie Mellon. But hey, it could be worse. Stanford certainly has it easier than nearby Hitler University.

My first glimpse of Stanford came at a great, great distance. On our vertigo-inducing drive up the mountainside, we stopped at a scenic overlook to do some overlooking. Our guide pointed out a cluster of red roofs on the horizon. That was Stanford. The Farm. The…uh…actually, that’s the only nickname Stanford has. The Farm. I can’t complain, though, as I attend a school nicknamed The Hill. I admired the vista of Stanford, but I was a bit distracted at the time. My instinct for self-preservation had kicked in; I was planning on how to survive the trip down the mountain without puking.

We arrived at Stanford about forty-five minutes later. The descent was rough; I intensely regretted all of the trail mix I had eaten. But I heroically resisted the urge to vomit. So there’s the first good thing I can say about Stanford: it did not make me throw up.

Someone once described Stanford as looking “very Taco Bell.” There’s a grain of truth in that, I suppose. The buildings all have red-tile roofs; that, combined with the ubiquitous yellow brick, gives the campus a prefabricated feel. You can imagine Stanford dropping out of the sky fully-formed. Like Duke, another triumph of synthetic architecture, Stanford seems a little artificial.

But who says artificial can’t be beautiful? Taco Bell or no, Stanford is still a gorgeous place. It’s dotted with wide stone plazas and crisscrossed by long, open air corridors lined with pillars. Everything is big and squat; the history building has only two stories, but we spent nearly fifteen minutes walking around. The clock tower is the only thing on campus that stands taller than the average giraffe. The whole campus has a very monastic feel. I kept expecting an angry abbot to show up and chide us for missing vespers.

We spent a good hour wandering the campus. Stanford, like most colleges, has more than its fair share of god-awful modern art. The place is littered with twisted hunks of metal that look like tragic helicopter accidents. One piece resembled the work of Constantin Brancusi, assuming, of course, that Brancusi was stoned out of his mind when he designed it. There is also, for reasons known only to God, a giant totem pole in the middle of one of the quads.

Thankfully, the buildings are pretty enough to balance out the sculptures. They get ample support from the vegetation; Stanford is one of the greenest campuses I have seen. I don’t mean “green” in the Al Gore sense. I speak literally. Trees and grass grow everywhere, bravely defying the California heat. No matter how hard the sun beats down, the trees keep on growing. There are even a couple willow trees, strategically placed around a fountain to give the place a wonderfully collegiate atmosphere.

I should mention the food. Not much was open, given that it was both the summer and the day before a national holiday. I worried we might have to end up scrounging in the garbage cans for food…again. But we were in luck: a little Mexican place called “The Treehouse” was open. It was everything you would expect from a college joint. It offered the staples of college life—burritos, pizza, burgers—in ridiculous quantities at a very reasonable price. No, they didn’t pay me to write that. I wish they had, though, as I spent more than I intended during my San Francisco visit.

As I sat in one of the many little courts across campus, munching by bean-and-cheese burrito (by Mexican standards, I’m a vegetarian) I began to do a little thinking. I’ve often considered Stanford for graduate school. It boasts a great history program and has a great reputation in general. Now, thanks to my trip, I know that it also has a beautiful campus. Does that outweigh the fact that I’d be a couple thousand miles from home? That’s the only thing holding me back.

I figure that maybe, just maybe, I can swing it. Stanford is awfully hard to resist. It’s a great campus. Palo Alto is a great campus town. And the Treehouse serves one mean bean-and-cheese burrito.