芝加哥大学(The University of Chicago，简称:UChicago、"芝大")由石油大王约翰·洛克菲勒于1890年创办，坐落于美国金融中心芝加哥，是一所私立研究型大学，常年稳居多家世界大学排行榜前十位。
芝加哥大学于1890年由石油大王约翰·洛克菲勒创办，素以盛产诺贝尔奖得主而闻名，约40%的诺贝尔经济学奖得主与芝大相关。 截止至2020年10月，芝加哥大学的校友、教授及研究人员中，共产生了100位诺奖得主、位列世界第四，另有10位菲尔兹奖得主(世界第六)、4位图灵奖得主及25位普利策奖得主曾在芝大工作或学习。 华人诺贝尔物理学奖得主杨振宁、李政道、崔琦均在芝加哥大学取得物理学博士学位。 美国第44任总统奥巴马曾长期在芝大法学院教授宪法(1992-2004年)。
芝加哥大学以开放的精神，兼收并蓄地包容了德国威廉·冯·洪堡与英国约翰·亨利·纽曼两种大学理念，建构了独特而卓越的组织、研究和教学理念，在很短的时间内成为美国乃至世界TOP级大学。芝大的教育观念强调"宏观与实验"精神、注重对纯理论和大师经典学习研究的教学方法，奠定了它在美国教育史上的独特而重要地位。 教学中十分注重培养学生的独立思考精神和批判性思维，鼓励挑战权威，鼓励与众不同的思维方式和观点，培养了众多诺贝尔奖获得者。截止2018年，芝加哥大学本科生6286人，硕士和博士研究生10159人，全球校友约182,000人，芝加哥大学本科生选择毕业后继续深造的比例在全美名列前茅，有15%~20%的本科生通过深造获得了博士学位。 芝大首位任校长哈珀首创了季制学期并沿用至今， 一学年分为四季，全年无休的课程制度让学生可以自由的安排学术计划，每分每秒都不被浪费。夏季(六月至八月)，秋季(九月至十二月)，冬季(一月至三月)，春季(四月至六月)。学年通常在九月下旬开始，并在六月月中旬结束。学校在每个季度结束后均组织一次毕业典礼。自哈钦斯任校长以来，学校便以实现通识教育为目标，采取核心基础与专业课程分离的政策。 对于刚进入大学的新生(freshman)，在大一大二时必须修毕校方所指定的所有核心课程学分。在2012-2013年，芝大的核心课程每门课堂仅限17名学生，由一名全职教授(而非助教)授课。譬如在2009~2010学年，芝大要求本科生修满15门核心课程，熟练掌握一门外语，通过游泳测试，以及三门体育课(根据入学情况)。在修完指定的核心课程学分后，学生在大三大四可以依自己的兴趣与期望，专攻校方所提供的五大系，50个主修专业和28个辅修专业，而学生在日后所获得的校方文凭认定，就是根据他们在大学后两年所专攻的专业领域。芝大的本科课程以苛刻的标准、繁重的学业压力而著称，但芝大也正因此才提供了能令人信服和终身受益的学习经历。而录取方面，芝加哥大学是美国入学竞争极为激烈的大学之一，2015年公布的本科录取率为7.6%。
The university is organized around seven schools on the same campus: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. The university also houses the public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution. Studen
ts compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. As of May 26, 2022, Stanford has won 131 NCAA team championships, more than any other university, and was awarded the NACDA Directors' Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, by 2021, Stanford students and alumni had won at least 296 Olympic medals including 150 gold and 79 silver medals.
As of April 2021, 85 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created 5.4 million jobs as of 2011, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
History
Main article: History of Stanford University
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to the memory of Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford's previous Palo Alto farm.
Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Stanford was referred to as the "Cornell of the West" in 1891 due to a majority of its faculty being former Cornell affiliates (professors, alumni, or both), including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to make higher education accessible, non-sectarian, and open to women as well as men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt that radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.
From an architectural point of view, the Stanfords, particularly Jane, wanted their university to look different from the eastern ones, which had often sought to emulate the style of English university buildings. They specif
ied in the founding grant that the buildings should "be like the old adobe houses of the early Spanish days; they will be one-storied; they will have deep window seats and open fireplaces, and the roofs will be covered with the familiar dark red tiles". This guides the campus buildings to this day. The Stanfords also hired renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who previously designed the Cornell campus, to design the Stanford campus.
When Leland Stanford died in 1893, the continued existence of the university was in jeopardy due to a federal lawsuit against his estate, but Jane Stanford insisted the university remain in operation throughout the financial crisis. The university suffered major damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; most of the damage was repaired, but a new library and gymnasium were demolished, and some original features of Memorial Church and the Quad were never restored.
During the early 20th century, the university added four professional graduate schools. Stanford University School of Medicine was established in 1908 when the university acquired Cooper Medical College in San Francisco; it moved to the Stanford campus in 1959. The university's law department, established as an undergraduate curriculum in 1893, was transitioned into a professional law school starting in 1908, and received accreditation from the American Bar Association in 1923. The Stanford Graduate School of Education grew out of the Department of the History and Art of Education, one of the original 21 departments at Stanford, and became a professional graduate school in 1917. The Stanford Graduate School of Business was founded in 1925 at the urging of then-trustee Herbert Hoover. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
In the 1940s and 1950s, engineering professor and later provost Frederick Terman encouraged Stanford engineering graduates to invent products and start their own companies. During the 1950s he established Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech commercial campus on university land. Also in the 1950s William Shockley, co-inventor of the silicon transistor, recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics, and later professor of physics at Stanford, moved to the Palo Alto area and founded a company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. The next year eight of his employees resigned and formed a competing company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The presence of so many high-tech and semiconductor firms helped to establish Stanford and the m
id-Peninsula as a hotbed of innovation, eventually named Silicon Valley after the key ingredient in transistors. Shockley and Terman are often described, separately or jointly, as the "fathers of Silicon Valley".
Stanford in the 1960s rose from a regional university to one of the most prestigious in the United States, "when it appeared on lists of the "top ten" universities in America… This swift rise to performance [was] understood at the time as related directly to the university's defense contracts…"
In the following decades however controversies would damage the reputation of the school. The 1971 Stanford prison experiment was criticized as unethical, and the misuse of government funds from 1981 resulted in severe penalties to the school's research funding and the resignation of Stanford President Donald Kennedy in 1992.
Land
Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.
Stanford's main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
The central campus includes a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it. Two other reservoirs, Searsville Lake on San Francisquito Creek and Felt Lake, are on more remote sections of the founding grant.
Central campus
The academic central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Jane Stanford Way, and Sand Hill Road. The United States Postal Service has assigned it two ZIP Codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P.O. box mail. It lies within area code 650.
Non-central campus
Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.
On the founding grant:
· Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research. Researchers and students are involved in biological research. Professors can teach the importance of biological research to the biological community. The primary goal is to understand the system of the natural Earth.
· SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Off the founding grant:
·
Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892. Based on US Pacific Coast its a oldest marine laboratories. Its include 10 research laboratories. And also used for archaeological exploration purpose. A graduate student of the anthropology department discover some broken elements, which leads to proof that 100 years before it was home to a Chinese American fishing village.
· Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a "mini-Stanford."
· Redwood City campus for many of the university's administrative offices in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.
· The Bass Center in Washington, D.C. provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.
· China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Peking University.
Faculty residences
Many Stanford faculty members live in the "Faculty Ghetto," within walking or biking distance of campus. The Faculty Ghetto is composed of land owned by Stanford. Similar to a condominium, the houses can be bought and sold but the land under the houses is rented on a 99-year lease. Houses in the "Ghetto" appreciate and depreciate, but not as rapidly as overall
;Silicon Valley values. For faculty housing there are some changes that come from the date February 1, 2022.
Other uses
Some of the land is managed to provide revenue for the university such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park. Stanford land is also leased for a token rent by the Palo Alto Unified School District for several schools including Palo Alto High School and Gunn High School. El Camino Park, the oldest Palo Alto city park (established 1914), is also on Stanford land.
Stanford also has the Stanford Golf Course and Stanford Red Barn Equestrian Center used by Stanford athletics though the gold course can also be used by the general public.
Landmarks
Contemporary campus landmarks include the Main Quad and Memorial Church, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Bing Concert Hall, the Stanford Mausoleum with the nearby Angel of Grief, Hoover Tower, the Rodin Sculpture Garden, the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the Arizona Cactus Garden, the Stanford University Arboretum, Green Library and the Dish. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1937 Hanna–Honeycomb House and the 1919 Lou Henry Hoover House are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places. White Memorial Fountain (also known as "The Claw") between the Stanford Bookstore and the Old Union is a popular place to meet and to engage in the Stanford custom of "fountain hopping"; it was installed in 1964 and designed by Aristides Demetrios after a national competition as a memorial for two brothers in the class of 1949, William N. White and John B. White II, one of whom died before graduating and one shortly after in 1952.
Academics
Admissions
Stanford is considered by US News to be 'most selective', with an acceptance rate of 4%. Half of applicants accepted to Stanford have an SAT score between 1440 and 1570 or an ACT score of 32 and 35. Admissions officials consider a student's GPA to be an important academic factor, with emphasis on an applicant's high school class rank and letters of recommendation. In terms of non-academic materials as of 2019, Stanford ranks extracurricular activities, talent/ability and character/personal qualities as 'very important' in making first-time, first-year admission decisions, while ranking the interview, whether the applicant is a first-generation university applicant,