A university “hallowed by no traditions” has built rich traditions over time
Stanford “is hallowed by no traditions. It is hampered by none,” David Starr Jordan said on being installed as the university’s founding president on its opening day, Oct. 1, 1891.
In its 125 years, Stanford has installed 11 presidents, almost all in October with the opening of the school year. The inaugural pageantry waxes and wanes with Stanford’s fortunes and the world’s, and with the tone – celebration, solemnity, aspiration, tough love – that the incoming president aims to convey.
Only two Stanford presidents have forgone a formal inauguration – Donald Tresidder in 1943 amid World War II austerity and Richard Lyman in 1970 amid campus unrest. The rest, including University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne on Oct. 21, 2016, set their personal stamp on a solemn and memorable event.
A slideshow of Stanford presidential inaugurations reveals how a university “hallowed by no traditions” built many rich traditions over time.
Jordan was the choice of founders Jane and Leland Stanford precisely for his departure from educational orthodoxy. For his opening address under the Quad’s west arch, Jordan wore a suit, not the academic robes usually seen at such events – the only Stanford president, besides Ray Lyman Wilbur in 1916, to do so.
Twenty-two years later, in 1913, geologist John Casper Branner was inaugurated as Jordan’s hand-picked successor. By then, Stanford had grown conscious of a need for ceremony. Branner began the Stanford tradition of an inaugural procession.
Memorial Church and Stanford’s assembly hall were still undergoing repairs in the wake of the 1906 earthquake, so Branner gave his address from a makeshift stage on the Inner Quad. Students honored him by giving him a massive presidential throne.
That night, student bands played in the Quad while lantern slides projected congratulatory telegrams onto a screen hung from the Quad’s east arch.
Two years later, Ray Lyman Wilbur struck a blow against ceremony by wearing a morning coat and top hat to his own inauguration – sober if formal business attire in 1916.
“The university should not be something apart from the world about it. It should break down barriers that tradition or ignorance have built up.”
– Ray Lyman Wilbur, in his 1916 inaugural address
To emphasize Wilbur’s message of modernity, and Stanford’s growing presence, Stanford staged a transcontinental phone call that evening to welcome Wilbur to the presidency. Stanford highlighted the glamour of this new communications service, then less than a year old, by installing 100 extension lines on each end.
New York alumni congratulated Wilbur as he sat in Old Union amid a bank of phones into which students, alumni and friends swapped choruses of “Hail, Stanford, Hail” with the East Coast crowd.
During World War II, instead of an inauguration, Wilbur’s successor, Donald B. Tresidder, gave a brief speech to students in 1,700-seat Memorial Auditorium upon taking office in 1943. A public-address system out front handled the overflow.
Tresidder’s successor, Wallace Sterling, was lavishly inaugurated in 1949 in Frost Amphitheater, where all inaugurations since have been held.
The event was preceded by a banquet for 600 alumni and friends at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The weekend of celebrations broadcast – literally, since NBC radio carried the inauguration on its Western States feed – Stanford’s intent to climb into the top ranks of research universities.
More than 575 people in academic robes, including 32 presidents of other colleges, proceeded to Frost from a religious ceremony in Memorial Church. A brass ensemble in Hoover Tower serenaded the crowd from above.
Sterling’s famous “A Lofty Purpose Shared” address outlined the expanding ambition of postwar universities: to break new ground in research, science, technology and democratized access to education, to equip students to make informed choices in a fast-changing world.
“Education has enabled man to take the measure of many things. Its pre-eminent task today is to enable him to take his own measure – his own moral measure and the moral measure of the society of which he is a part.”
– Wallace Sterling, in his 1949 inaugural address
In 1968, Kenneth Pitzer took office amid another war, this time in Vietnam. Anti-war protest, often destructive, roiled the country including Stanford. Personnel data had gone missing from Stanford offices during one such protest, and some faculty in Pitzer’s inaugural procession heard students yelling out their salaries as they passed by.
In 1980, when biologist Donald Kennedy became Stanford’s eighth president, he sought to narrow the rift between students and faculty that had emerged during the Vietnam years. Eighteen student flag-bearers were chosen from Stanford’s popular Human Biology program, which Kennedy had championed.
For Kennedy, Stanford launched the tradition of a presidential gown, custom-tailored for every president since from cardinal-red faille lined with white. Quoting Fanny Brice in the musical Funny Girl, Kennedy quipped, “The groom was prettier than the bride.” The audience of 7,000 was invited to the Quad for refreshments and a receiving line for Kennedy and his wife, and this, too, became tradition.
Historian Gerhard Casper emphasized academics and academic freedom in his 1992 inaugural speech with a meditation on Stanford’s motto Der Luft der Freiheit weht, or “the wind of freedom blows.” His reception in the Quad included a chance to enter Memorial Church for the first time since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Casper shook hands for more than two hours. He hugged a freshman from his native Hamburg, Germany, as well as the young son of a faculty member who was wearing his father’s academic cap.
John Hennessy’s inauguration in 2000 was the first held in late October to coincide with Reunion Homecoming and its convergence of alumni events. In his inaugural address, Hennessy unveiled the $1 billion Campaign for Undergraduate Education, then the largest fundraising drive ever mounted by a university.