Stanford University’s founding grant, a copy of which you’ll find on the back of your room’s emergency escape plan, was written in 1885 with several stipulations. These included the mandatory wearing of corsets for girls and garter socks for boys, a practice still observed in Synergy because their rule-by-consensus makes it difficult to change anything without a six hour sit-in followed by 20 years of voting. The founding grant also mandated that Stanford would have at least one tower at all times and not be affiliated with any religion.

The original plans for the Quad, drawn up in 1884, included a church. Because blueprints were really hard to change in those days, the founding grant was too late. Luckily, the 1906 earthquake devastated the building when its 70-foot clock tower crashed into the facade and crumbled it. The first president of Stanford, the Jewish studmuffin David Starr Jordan (named for the Starr of David), decided not to rebuild. He felt that since Jesus was a carpenter, he would have wanted it that way.

Jane Stanford, a Protestant who donated heavily to Catholic charities so she would be regarded as tolerant of dirty Italian and Irish immigrants invading America — even though she wasn’t — died in 1905. Her will stated the church should be rebuilt in case of fire, earthquake or “nucular” attack. She had signed it with the blood of her lover, Herbert Hoover, who was 66 years her junior and graduated from Stanford in the “pioneer class” of 1895 with a degree in Belgian Famine Relief and a minor in The Depression. The school had to respect Jane’s posthumous wishes.

When Herbert entered into gay marriage with former Stanford classmate Lou Henry, David Starr Jordan convinced the Board of Directors that his signature, like that of all gays, was no longer valid on any legal documents. He destroyed the church and the tower with it. Herbert Hoover was so distraught at the damage he had caused that he grew determined to build a tower of his own as soon as he was able to get it up.

During World War I, Herbert and Lou Henry led the effort for famine relief in Belgium. Since it is widely known that Brussels is a hotbed of homosexuality, they were accepted there as they had not been at David Starr Jordan’s annual “Half Moon Bay Bash and Weenie Roast.” Lou Henry made off with quite a collection of Belgian lace. (You can still see it on display in the exhibit room dedicated to him at Hoover Tower, open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every single day, including Sunday, the Lord’s day.)

After reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise,” the book upon which the very first IHUM, “Sexual Encounters and Identities at Princeton” a.k.a. “Rosalind Connage, You a Ho,” was based in 1920, Stanford students and faculty joined the then communist flapper movement. The school even changed its mascot from the borderline-racist Indian to the borderline-stupid Commie Red. Meanwhile, Hoover extended his famine relief efforts in the 1920s to Bolshevik Russia, inciting everyone on campus to herald him as a prince among queens.

In fact, the school allowed him to open the Hoover Institution in 1919. The tower, which posed as a conservative think-tank, was really a cover for his second husband, J. Edgar Hoover’s, all-male nude revue and drag show. When J. Edgar Hoover became head of the F.B.I. in 1924, he cut ties with Bert. His mistake was in taking the costumes back to Washington, D.C., a decision that would later give political pundits reason to call him “a fruit.”

For propriety’s sake, Hoover Tower was kept off the campus maps until 1941, when missiles became cool and the rest of the country learned to accept phallic symbols. In the 1990s, Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice rewrote the history books to claim that the tower did not even open until 1941 and that it was a “library.” Of course, there’s good reason students aren’t allowed in the Hoover Tower stacks to this day.

Kathryn McGarr is a senior majoring in history and based this article on reliable primary sources. To learn nothing more at all, email her at kmcgarr@stanford.edu.