Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David Starr Jordan—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto. David was intrigued by the offer, the generous salary, the glorious weather, the promise of reuniting with those oily treasures of the Pacific Ocean. His only hesitation was the Stanfords themselves. Leland Stanford was a Republican senator who was widely considered a robber baron. His wife, Jane, had little formal education and was fond of visiting mediums to try to reach their deceased son. David worried that if he accepted, he would feel like a kept man, a pawn, controlled by the whims of two people whom he considered his moral and intellectual inferiors. But… that weather… that salary. In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.