by JOHN SUMMERS
It was Stanford that taught two computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to ignore the line separating scholarship from entrepreneurship, the disinterested quest for knowledge from the instrumental expectation of profitability. Page and Brin met during an orientation session for computer science graduate students. Eventually they convinced Stanford to lend the computing power for the experiments that led to Google. The company models its headquarters on a university campus and promotes itself as a simulacrum of a postgraduate student milieu. It rewarded Stanford for the right to use its key internet search technology, developed by Page and Brin as students there, with stock and royalties; Stanford’s president John Hennessy has a seat on the board.
Neither Page nor Brin completed their postgraduate degrees, but they staffed Google with the graduates of elite private universities. Early senior management at the company, including Sheryl Sandberg (Harvard, 1991) and key advisers such as Bill Campbell (Columbia, 1962), came from the Ivy League, as did chief executive Eric Schmidt (Princeton, 1976). Schmidt and Campbell serve on university boards of trustees. The fathers of Page, Brin and Schmidt are all professors. The “facebooks” of Harvard supplied Mark Zuckerberg with the initial “social capital” for his new media company. Just as Page launched Google by using Stanford’s computing to copy the entire internet, so Zuckerberg began Facebook by breaking into Harvard’s online directories and downloading images to his personal computer. University officials charged him with violating copyrights and privacy. Soon, though, the social networking site spread to Princeton and Stanford, then to Dartmouth, Yale, Cornell and Columbia, universities where all students, in effect, minor in marketing.
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