Stanford University is a private research university in Stanford, California. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California, and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr. The university admitted its first students in 1891, opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland died in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry.
The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as conservative, although its directors have contested the idea that it is partisan.
Gerhard Casper is a political scientist who is a former president of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000, a former Dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1979 to 1987, and a former provost of the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1992. Casper was president of the American Academy in Berlin from July 2015 through July 2016; from August 2019 to January 24, 2020, he served as the institution's trustee-in-residence.
Richard Wall Lyman, the seventh president of Stanford University, was an American educator, historian, and professor.
Larry Jay Diamond is an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University's main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond served as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2009-2016. He was succeeded in that role by Francis Fukuyama and then Kathryn Stoner.
Stephen David Krasner is an American political scientist and former diplomat. Krasner has been a professor of international relations at Stanford University since 1981, and served as the Director of Policy Planning from 2005 to April 2007 while on leave from Stanford.
Abbas Malekzadeh Milani is an Iranian-American historian, educator, and author. Milani is a visiting professor of political science, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Milani's book, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, he has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1,000 years ago.
Coit Dennis Blacker is the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council under National Security Advisor Anthony Lake during the Clinton administration. From 2003 to 2012, he was the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and is a current Study Group Member of the National Commission on Terrorism.
Siegfried S. Hecker is an American metallurgist and nuclear scientist. He served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 to 1997 and is now affiliated with Stanford University, where he is research professor emeritus in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, and senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. During this time, he was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1988) for outstanding research on plutonium and the forming of materials, and for leadership in developing energy and weapons systems.
Stephen Glenn Charles Hilton is a British and American political commentator, former political adviser, and contributor for Fox News Channel. He served as director of strategy for the British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012. Hilton hosted The Next Revolution, a weekly current affairs show for Fox News from 2017 to 2023. He is a proponent of what he calls "positive populism" and a vocal supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Crowdpac, but stepped down as CEO in 2018 due to conflicting values with the company.
Michael Anthony McFaul is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul became the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University in 1995, where he is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs, where he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's Russian reset policy.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
John Wilfred Meyer is an American sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, he became the recipient of American Sociological Association's highest honor - W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.
The Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy (MIP) at Stanford University is a two-year graduate program granting the Master of Arts degree. Housed within Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, MIP is a multidisciplinary program dedicated to the study and analysis of international affairs. The current director of MIP is Francis Fukuyama, also the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Dr. Chonira Aturupane is the associate director of academic and student affairs.
The Next Revolution was a television program that debuted on the Fox News Channel, being broadcast on the channel from June 4, 2017 – May 28, 2023. The hour-long weekly program was hosted by Steve Hilton, who served as a political adviser to former British prime minister David Cameron. The program focused on providing opinion commentary about the right-wing populist movement.
Andrea Dew Steele is an American activist who co-founded Emerge California in 2002, and founded Emerge America in 2005 which now has affiliates in 27 different states of the U.S., with the goal of having an affiliate in all 50 states by 2020. The goal of Emerge affiliates is to increase the number of Democratic women in all areas of the government. Steele spent her career in Democratic activism and has been a director at Human Rights Watch. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
Lina Maria Hidalgo is an American politician in the state of Texas. She is the county judge of Harris County, the third-most populous county in the United States. Hidalgo is the first woman and the first Latina to be elected to this office. Notwithstanding the label, the position of county judge is for the most part a nonjudicial position in Texas. Hidalgo functions as the county's chief executive and its emergency manager. She oversees a budget of over $4 billion.
Tina Lynn Seelig is an American educator, entrepreneur, and author of several books on creativity and innovation. She is a faculty member at Stanford University.
Raj Jayadev is an American community organizer and criminal justice advocate. He is the founder of the Silicon Valley De-bug, a grassroots organization that supports people who have been impacted by the criminal justice system and their loved ones, advocating for criminal justice reform, economic justice, housing and immigrant rights. De-bug is a multi-media platform that centers the stories of marginalized communities in California. In 2018, Jayadev received a MacArthur Fellow Award for his work with the organization.
