A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun thread bare suit, stepped off the train in Boston and walk timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University President's outer office. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, Country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn't even deserve to be in Cambridge. "We want to see the president," the man said softly. "He'll be busy all day," the secretary snapped.
"We'll wait," the lady replied". For hours the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn't and the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted. "May be if you see them for a few minutes, they'll leave," she said to him.
He sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern faced and with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, "We had a son who attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus." The president wasn't touched.... He was shocked.
"Madam," he said, gruffly, "we can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery. "Oh, no," the lady explained quickly. "We don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard." The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, and then exclaimed, "A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical buildings here at Harvard."
For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased. Maybe he could get rid of them now. The lady then turned to her husband and said quietly, "Is that all it costs to start a university? Why don't we just start our own?" Her husband nodded at that. The president's face wilted in confusion and Bewilderment.
Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name, Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
You can easily judge the character of someone by his attitude towards others he thinks beneath him.
When I searched for Stanford University I found that it was initially built on the Horse farm of Stanfords and is still colloquially known as "The Farm". The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet). What a beginning and a rise to stardom. Great Attitude that determined the altitude.
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