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Fact check: False claim that Stanford founding was tied to Harvard rejection

Sudiksha Kochi   | Paste BN

The claim: Couple founded Stanford University because Harvard refused to erect a memorial for their son

Social media users are spreading a false story about the origins of Stanford University.

A Facebook post shared Jan. 31 shows a black and white image of a man in a chair and a woman standing next to him.

The poster claims a "homespun" couple tried to persuade the president of Harvard to erect a memorial for their son, who had passed away after attending the university for a year, but were denied.

"Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the university that bears their name, Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about," reads the caption of the post.

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The post, one of several in this vein, accumulated more than 80 shares. A recently deleted version of the same claim generated close to 1,200 interactions and 2,900 shares in less than a week. 

But the claim is false, as other independent fact-checking organizations have reported.

The Stanfords did found Stanford University after their son died. But he was not enrolled in Harvard at the time, and the couple did not ask the Harvard president to erect a memorial for him.

Paste BN reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment.

Senator and his wife founded Stanford

The story in the Facebook post is baseless, Ernest Miranda, a spokesperson for Stanford, told Paste BN in an email. Stanford Magazine also debunked the story in a December 1998 article.

Leland Stanford, a former California governor and U.S. senator, founded Stanford with his wife, Jane, in 1885, the year after their 15-year-old son, Leland Stanford Jr., died of typhoid while traveling abroad, Miranda said. He was set to matriculate at Harvard in the fall of that year, according to Miranda.

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His parents met with Harvard President Charles Eliot to seek advice about founding a university, Miranda said. But it was not to ask him to erect a memorial of any sort, as the poster claims.

"The educators certainly knew to whom they were speaking and why," Miranda said. 

The post credited the story to Malcolm Forbes, the one-time publisher of Forbes magazine. Paste BN was unable to find evidence that Forbes wrote the story and has reached out to the company for comment.

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The picture in the Facebook post also does not show the Stanfords.

In a reverse image search, Paste BN found that German photographer August Sander captured the photo of the unidentified couple in 1912. The image is on Art Blart, a website featuring an exhibition of his work.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a couple founded Stanford University because Harvard refused to erect a memorial for their son. Stanford and his wife founded the university after their son died of typhoid. They did not ask the Harvard president at the time to erect a memorial.

Our fact-check sources: 

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Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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