Ray Lyman Wilbur is the longest-serving president of Stanford, from 1916 to 1943 (27 years). After World War I, he organized departments into schools and appointed deans, thus establishing an administrative structure intermediate between the president and department heads (Lowen, 1997). Under the leadership of Wilbur and then trustee Herbert Hoover, the Graduate School of Business and the School of Engineering are created in 1925, and both are now world leaders in their respective fields. Along with the Law School (est. 1893), the School of Medicine (est. 1908), the School of Education (est. 1917), the School of Mineral Sciences (est. 1947, later of Earth Sciences, and now of Sustainability), and the later reorganized School of Humanities and Sciences (est. 1948), they form the current seven schools of Stanford.

In the prosperous 1920s, Herbert Hoover professionalized university operations and helped to put Stanford on a sound financial footing with the benefactions flowing to universities, largely due to his national political career as President Harding's secretary of commerce (Lowen, 1997). In 1928, Hoover campaigned at Stanford (Hoover Institution) and was later elected as the 31st U.S. president. His presidency, under which Wilbur served as the Secretary of Interior, strengthened the ties between Stanford and Washington D.C., despite being 2,800 miles apart. In 1941, he founded an institute to collect global political material – today’s Hoover Institution Library and Archives, a leading think-tank continuing the ties between Stanford and global politics.

In 1920, History Professor Yamato Ichihashi, one of the first scholars of Japanese descent to teach in the United States, is appointed to Stanford’s first endowed professorship. During World War II, Ichihashi and his wife Kei are sent to internment camps with 34 Japanese-American Stanford students (Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences).