Frederick Terman, an engineer who joined the faculty in 1925, became the
dean of the School of Engineering after the Second World War and the provost
in 1955. He is often called “the father of Silicon Valley.” In the
thirties, he encouraged two of his students, William Hewlett and David
Packard, to construct in a garage a new line of audio oscillators that
became the first product of the Hewlett-Packard Company.
Terman nurtured start-ups by creating the Stanford Industrial Park, which
leased land to tech firms like Hewlett-Packard; today, the park is home to
about a hundred and fifty companies. He encouraged his faculty to serve as
paid consultants to corporations, as he did, to welcome tech companies on
campus, and to persuade them to subsidize research and fellowships for
Stanford’s brightest students.
William F. Miller, a physicist, was the last Stanford faculty member
recruited by Terman, and he rose to become the university’s provost. Miller
, who is now eighty-six and an emeritus professor at Stanford’s business
school, traces the symbiotic relationship between Stanford and Silicon
Valley to Stanford’s founding. “This was kind of the Wild West,” he said.
“The gold rush was still on. Custer’s Last Stand was only nine years
before. California had not been a state very long—roughly, thirty years.
People who came here had to be pioneers. Pioneers had two qualities: one,
they had to be adventurers, but they were also community builders. So the
people who came here to build the university also intended to build the
community, and that meant interacting with businesses and helping create
businesses.”