University celebrates founders, community at day-long event

BY BARBARA PALMER

At the wreath-laying ceremony held last Sunday as part of the Founders' Celebration, President John Hennessy quoted a century-old statement by university co-founder Jane Stanford, who imagined herself looking ahead 100 years, beyond the challenges then facing the university. "I could see beyond all this the children's children's children coming here from the East, the West, the North and the South," Jane Stanford mused in 1904.

San Francisco's Green Street Mortuary Band marches down Palm Drive on Sunday during Stanford's annual Founders' Celebration, which coincides with Community Day. Photo: L.A. Cicero

"The Stanfords may have had a master plan -- but the results would have blown their minds," said Hennessy at the conclusion of the ceremony, which included a speech from the first student from Mongolia to attend Stanford and a spirited performance by the Stanford Gospel Choir.

In her speech at the Founders' Celebration, Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, a master's degree student in international policy studies, said she often thinks about what Stanford was like 100 years ago. Tsedevdamba, who runs a nonprofit group advocating democracy in Mongolia, was born in a farming village.

"I often imagine what it must have been like to invest, build and manage a brand-new university in the most western part of America," she said. "It is not hard for me to imagine the smell of dust, wilderness of locality, noise of construction and silence of isolation of those historic first days of our university. It is easy to do so because we can still find such places around the world and can imitate the process if we wish."

It's harder, Tsedevdamba said, to imagine the tremendous energy, dedication, courage and vision the Stanfords embraced.

"From every stone placed in the campus, from notes in every single classroom and from every record of our university's proud history, I sense a special character. ... It is the character of a strong-willed, determined and ambitious individual who is ready to challenge existing distances, theories, beliefs, regimes and herself to make a better future for her world."

More evidence of the imagination-stretching reach of the Stanfords' vision could be found Sunday at the end of Palm Drive, where student, faculty and staff volunteers entertained thousands of visitors at the third annual Community Day open house. Activities and exhibits offered everything from a chance to pose for a picture with a pet therapy dog in the health tent to a microscopic look at a complete Bible contained on a chip about the size of a potato chip sponsored by the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility. There was a solar-powered car, a chemistry "magic" show and ice cream-making with liquid nitrogen. Student athletes signed photographs for young fans, while crowds lined Serra Mall to cheer for contestants in high wheeler bicycle races and for members of "Perfection on Wheels," a BMX stunt team.

At the Cantor Arts Center (which opened as the Leland Stanford Junior Museum in 1894), children created mobiles with scraps of colored cardboard, copper wire and coat hangers beneath Double Gong, a 1953 mobile by the American artist Alexander Calder, part of a current exhibit of modern and contemporary art from alumni and other collections. The Scott Barnhill Quartet played jazz near where picnicking families wandered in the Rodin Sculpture Garden.

In front of the Main Quad, student Bianca Redhead showed children the rules of a rubber-band game played in resource-poor Haiti, and members of Gamma Zeta Alpha, a Latino interest fraternity, introduced children to Aztec calendar symbols and assisted as they painted round disks (some painted ancient symbols and some painted pizzas, said an approving Gasper Martinez, a fraternity member). In Wallenberg Hall, students that are part of an outreach program that will take a workshop on Shakespeare into area high schools beginning this spring performed an excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream using feather boas and stuffed animals as props.

At the end of the day, visitors who brought book and magazine donations to a Community Day book drive helped extend the day's opportunities for education: Bridge to Asia, a nonprofit organization, collected 30 cartons of books that will be donated to students and teachers in developing countries.