Palo Alto in Europe

A mile-long driveway through fields full of pheasants leads to the 365-room Tudor mansion of Lancaster stone in the Lincolnshire countryside, 100 miles from London. Inside Harlaxton Manor, the glow of a 15-foot crystal chandelier reflects from marble floors in a 134-year-old room, once a Jesuit chapel. And on the great staircase, a leggy young blonde from Stanford University remarks: "Gee, nobody but nobody gets to live in a place like this."

Yet somebody does: 50 Stanford men, aged 17 to 22, now occupy the huge mansion's west wing, and 30 Stanford coeds live in the east wing. For the next six months, they will study in the stately building, little changed from its ancient beginnings as an English country house except for the ceiling nudes, chastely painted over by the Jesuits who leased the building to Stanford. The students will play croquet on the well-trimmed lawns, shoot arrows in the gardens, ride to hounds with adjacent estate owners. Harlaxton Man or is the newest of Stanford's five permanent campuses in Europe.

Gonzaga in Florence. The U.S. campus abroad is a contagious new fashion in American undergraduate education. Stanford started it in 1958 by acquiring a German estate in tiny Beutelsbach, near Stuttgart. It added a villa in Florence, a hotel in Tours, another hotel near Vienna only last September. New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University took over Wroxton Abbey from Oxford's Trinity College, moved in last summer. Spokane's Gonzaga University (enrollment: 2,440) has its own six-story building in Florence, and California's University of Redlands (enrollment: 1,500) leases a building in Salzburg. Temple University announced last week that it will open an art branch in a villa on the Tiber River in Rome. At least 10 U.S. universities operate 15 independent branches in Europe.

The overseas branch is a refinement of the fast-multiplying programs (70 to date) in which U.S. schools annually send some 10,000 students abroad. Even a small school like Michigan's Kalamazoo College (enrollment: 1,100), for example, sends 90% of its students overseas. Stanford officials, however, prefer the branch concept, arguing that it permits them to shape their own curriculum abroad, eliminates any problems in meshing programs and credits, eases the need for extensive foreign-language instruction. It also permits the U.S. school to pick its own site instead of sending its students to crowded university towns where housing may be scarce and the influx of Americans may already be resented. "Because we don't do this," says Stanford's overseas director, Robert A. Walker, "we are popular with the communities in which we locate."

Meeting the Natives. To critics who contend that the branch concept keeps the American from really getting to know Europeans, Stanford's President J. E. Wallace Sterling points out that the students study only four days a week, freely mingle with townspeople on the other three. Each Stanford student in Germany is "adopted" by a German family, dines in a village home weekly. Students in Austria form a mixed choir with local people. The Florence campus is more isolated, but not enough, as Coed Martha Craig discovered, to keep Italian men from "following you in hordes."

Stanford students spend two quarters abroad, take a full 16-credit course load. They concentrate mainly on humanities, taught by Stanford teachers, and languages, taught by foreigners. At Harlaxton Manor, they will also hear top British professors lecture on British technology, social change, politics and education. They pay their regular Stanford board and tuition, plus half their plane fare (the university pays the rest) and about $70 for two field trips.

With over half of the Stanford student body in on the program, the home campus at Palo Alto is ever more sophisticated. Any lecture spoken in a foreign language draws up to 400 students, and the University is considering a sociology course taught in French, political science in German, comparative literature in French. The experience has knocked most stereotypes about foreigners out of student minds. "If you ask a returning student what he thinks of the Germans," says Walker, "he'll be insulted--and tell you there are all different kinds of Germans."

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