Education: California Gold Rush

The hottest stock on the academic market these days is Stanford University, which says it wants to be “the Harvard of the West.” Last year the already rich school (endowment: $159 million) got a 1-for-3 matching grant of $25 million from the Ford Foundation. Last spring it set out to raise that potential $100 million under an acronymous campaign called PACE (Plan of Action for a Challenging Era). Last week it totted up the first four months’ take: $20.5 million.

Along with dollars came scholars: Stanford is raiding blue-chip faculties all over the East. This fall it is taking on Yale’s entire 40-year-old Center of Alcohol Studies. It captured American Historian David Potter after 19 years at Yale, Mathematician Edward G. Begle after 19 years at Yale, German Historian Gordon Craig after 20 years at Princeton, Novelist-Critic Albert J. Guerard (Stanford ’34) after 23 years at Harvard. Among this fall’s other acquisitions: Albert H. Hastorf, chairman of Dartmouth’s psychology department; Emile Despres, chairman of Williams’ economics department; and James H. Clancy, head of State University of Iowa’s theater arts department. For academic larceny, Stanford is fast matching the University of California at Berkeley—the only other Western U.S. campus that cares or dares to compare itself with Harvard.