Excuse Me?

Evidently Sports Illustrated didn’t get the memo. You know, that Stanford is No. 1 in athletics. Eight Sears Cups in a row, national titles in multiple sports, yadda yadda yadda. How else could one possibly explain the magazine’s choice of the University of Texas as the top sports school in the country?

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t quibble. The national sports weekly put four Stanford athletes on the cover of its October 7 issue, staring down four UT players, asking the question “Who’s No. 1?” And despite its dubious ranking of Texas at the top, the magazine acknowledged that when it comes to NCAA intercollegiate programs, the Cardinal rules.

Texas gets credit for good football and baseball teams, fast swimmers and that little thing they do with their index and pinky fingers, signifying Longhorns. But apparently they were named No. 1 because 80 percent of their 35,000 undergraduates “participate in recreational athletics,” ranging from intramural billiards to hiking. Oh well.

We figure Stanford won where it counted: national titles (4 to 2), individual titles (18 to 6), and, most important, athlete graduation rate (90 percent to 56 percent). Plus, our uniforms are much cooler.

A Home for the Holiday

BIG BIRD: Bravman cooks for more than 50 students each Thanksgiving.

Courtesy Jason Anderson

It’s been more than a quarter-century since John Bravman was a freshman at Stanford. But he hasn’t forgotten what it was like spending Thanksgiving on campus, far away from his family.

“I was from New York, and it was too far to travel home,” recalls Bravman, ’79, MS ’81, PhD ’85. “That first holiday was really hard.”

Motivated by that memory, Bravman has seen to it that the colonists in Freshman/ Sophomore College have a feast worthy of the pilgrims. Every year since FroSoCo opened in 1999, Bravman, dean of the college and vice provost for undergraduate education, has hosted a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at his home on Santa Teresa Lane, only steps from Sterling Quad, where the students live. Last year, he entertained 54 students.

Bravman prepares all of the food himself. Even the cranberry sauce is homemade.

A couple of days before the holiday, he goes shopping. A partial grocery list: 20 bags of cranberries, 30 pounds of sweet potatoes, a 15-pound ham, two giant roasting turkeys, six cases of sparkling cider. On Thanksgiving, he rises at about 4 a.m. to begin cooking. In addition to the potatoes, the stuffing and other fixings, he will make and bake 10 pies (Dutch apple and pumpkin). “Must have a lot of pie,” he says.

The students eat at about 4 in the afternoon, and linger long after dark. By the time Bravman finishes cleanup, it is early Friday morning.

Increasingly, FroSoCo students ask to bring along friends from other dorms who are staying on campus for the holiday. The answer, says Bravman, is always yes. He admits, though, that space is getting tight. “I figure I can seat about 60,” he says. “Last year I put 22 kids out on the porch, 12 in the dining room and the rest in the living room.”

Then, after a pause, he adds: “I suppose I could squeeze a few more into the kitchen.”

Leland's Fixer-Upper

THIS OLD HOUSE: The Stanfords lived here for 13 years.

Leland Stanford Jr. was born there, the governor and Mrs. Stanford entertained dignitaries ranging from William Seward to Gen. William Sherman in its lavish rooms, and once, after it was evacuated during an 1862 flood, a cow took up residence in the parlor. Now, after five years of disuse, the so-called Stanford Mansion in Sacramento is being renovated.

Leland Stanford purchased the grand Italianate home in 1861 for $8,000, shortly before he was elected governor of California. He and Jane lived there until 1874, when they moved to San Francisco. Deeded to a Sacramento charity for orphaned children by Jane Stanford in 1900, it was purchased by the state in the 1980s and designated a historic park. The state closed it in 1997.

Led by the late Peter McCuen, ’56, MS ’57, PhD ’62, the Stanford Mansion Foundation began raising money to refurbish the home more than 10 years ago. The $16 million project has attracted both public and private support, including a donation from relatives of the Stanfords. When it reopens in 2004, the mansion will be a historical museum as well as a venue for official state visits.

GOODNIGHT: Dement.

Stanford Medical Center

After 32 years, more than 15,000 students and several narcoleptic dogs, one of Stanford’s most popular courses is turning out the lights. Human Biology 11—better known as Sleep and Dreams—will be offered to Stanford students for the last time winter quarter.

Psychiatry professor William Dement created the course in 1970 for freshmen in Cedro House, where he was resident fellow. Those informal sessions in the dorm lounge soon became a hotbed of sleep research.

“A genuine sleep laboratory we set up in the basement of Wilbur Hall became the world’s first sleep disorders clinic,” recalls Dement, director of the Stanford Sleep Disorders and Research Center. “Today’s robust field of sleep medicine might not exist had those bright and trained Cedro students not been available.”

The course quickly became a campus favorite, attracting up to 1,000 students each year.

Dement is confident his lessons will stick. “Stanford Sleep and Dreams alumni will remember the important principles for the remainder of their lives,” he says. “[They proved] to me that it is possible to achieve every success and still get enough sleep.”

FOLLOW-UP

New Evidence Supports Klein

Linda Cicero

A recent discovery in Germany bolsters the theory of Stanford archaeologist Richard Klein that humanity’s “big bang” of culture and ingenuity was triggered by a genetic mutation that gave us the capacity for language.

In “Suddenly Smarter” (July/August), Klein said his explanation for the cultural explosion of 45,000 years ago is difficult to verify, because fossils don’t show when speech began. However, he added, “if we can identify some of the genes behind modern cognition and communication and date them, that would help.”

That’s what the German researchers did. Following up on an earlier study identifying a gene related to language, they scrutinized DNA sequences of the parallel gene in mice and chimpanzees, looking for telltale evolutionary differences from the mutated human version. Their analysis, reported in the August 14 Nature, showed that the human mutation emerged around 100,000 years ago.

The new work establishes “that there could have been genetically driven cognitive changes even after the brain reached its modern size about 500,000 years ago,” Klein says. “It should be possible soon to isolate and date additional genes [linked to human communication]. Some will turn out to be hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, but I predict that the last cognitively important changes will date from roughly 50,000 years ago.”