Timeline
1943
Hanna in Washington
Hanna becomes Stanford’s Director of University Services. He employs his bent for rainmaking to negotiate for Stanford federal contracts for wartime training. His Washington experience sparks his interest in postwar international development, which in turn helps shift the focus of the school toward global concerns.
Grad students make educational toys for war-impoverished South Korean children in 1951 in Paul Hanna's home workshop, left on site by Frank Lloyd Wright's construction workers. Mary-Margaret Scobey, Ed.D ’52, kneeling, later led San Francisco State's childhood education department. Roland Force, ’50, MA ’51, PhD ’58, manning the jigsaw, became director of Hawaii's Bishop Museum and the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian.
Stanford News Service
1946
With growing global role, more funding
Eurich helps found the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a powerful magnet for research dollars that is divested from the university in the 1970s amid concerns over its classified defense work. In 1948, he serves as acting university president after the sudden death of Donald Tresidder.
Hear Eurich's oral history, conducted by the Stanford Historical Society.
Educational psychologist Alvin Eurich, shown in 1948, left Stanford to lead the Ford Foundation's education division, in which role he steered millions to such Stanford enterprises as the School Planning Lab.
Stanford University Archives
1966
'Scholar-doers' for international development education: SIDEC
Prof. Paul Hanna founds the Stanford International Development Education Center (SIDEC) to study education as an aid to economic, political and social progress in developing countries.
SIDEC and its successor master’s and doctoral programs in International Comparative Education (ICE) count among their alumni past presidents of Peru, the Maldives and Guatemala; the adviser of the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City; and ministers of education in Tanzania and Kenya as well as policy makers, researchers and education professors across the globe.
Prof. Hans Weiler, a chief architect of SIDEC and expert in the education and politics of Francophone Africa, led UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning and helped reconstruct higher education in eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
1967
Required reading
The Peace Corps sends SIDEC researcher Prof. Robert
Textor’s book Cultural Frontiers of the
Peace Corps to its 10,000 global volunteers.
At SIDEC, Textor developed ethnographic futures research, a way to use the insights of cultural anthropology to study people’s ideas about the future, their values, and their concepts of change.
2000
Gardner Center opens
The John
W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities, honoring one of Stanford's most influential alumni, opens with Milbrey McLaughlin as founding director.
As U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Gardner, ’33, MA ’36, founded the Title 1 program for low-income children. He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation; as chair of the National Urban Coalition, and as founder of Common Cause. His views and activism shaped groundbreaking endeavors including the White House Fellows Program, public television and Medicare.
John W. Gardner "was very committed to youth and to young people and saw them as really the resource for community-building, but he said you’ve got to go beyond those institutional boundaries," McLaughlin remembers. "The role of the Gardner Center is to look across those institutional boundaries.”
2012
Innovating for Brazil
The school and the Lemann Foundation open the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil, a 10-year venture headquartered at CERAS that develops new approaches to learning, especially among low-income students, both in and out of the Brazilian school system.
Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education and a specialist in comparative international education, speaks at the Lemann Center's 2012 opening.
