Stanford University - Stanford, California - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

The San Francisco Guide says:

The junction of US 101 with University Avenue and Palm Drive marks the entrance to the campus of STANFORD UNIVERSITY, founded by Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died at the age of sixteen. The cornerstone of the first building was laid in 1887; the university was opened in the autumn of 1891. Stanford began not only with a great endowment and a fine group of buildings, but with distinguished faculty members, including Vernon L. Kellogg, Theodore Hoover, Henry R. Fairclough, Robert Eckles Swain, Melville Best Anderson, and Lewis M. Terman. Among its early alumni are Charles K. "Cheerio" Field, Whitelaw Reed, Dane Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, H. L. Davis, Will and Wallace Irwin, Holbrook Blinn, Homer Lea, and Ray Lyman Wilbur. It always has been coeducational. Until 1933 women students were limited to 500; since then the number has been limited to approximately 40 percent of the total enrollment. In 1938-39 there were 4,554 students and 691 faculty members.

The heavy sandstone piers flanking the entrance have taken the place of the low Romanesque towers, pierced by heavy round-headed arches with open pier arcades on each side, which were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

The Stanford entrance way can be seen in Google Street View.