There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley.
Should there be?
According to the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta Stanford
University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you
could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes
through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to
buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone
seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck
syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously
paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are
careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus
has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding
entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one
crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.
Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions
of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual
nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the
photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the
co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late
twenties. The initial investor was a Stanford alumnus....
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