This month, as Green Library opens its doors to the incoming Class of 2029, transferring students, first-year graduate students, and new faculty and staff, we are honoring the building’s eponym, Cecil H. Green, with the planned installation of a brass plaque adjacent to his portrait painting unveiled at the dedication of Green Library. We would like to share the inscription with our readers and invite you to listen to the inspiring words of Cecil Green and Stanford dignitaries in sound recordings of the groundbreaking ceremony on February 8, 1977 and the dedication ceremony on April 11, 1980.
For Future Excellence
Cecil H. Green (1900-2003) was a legendary innovator and entrepreneur in the development of exploration geophysics and silicon transistors. In his early working years at the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto, he became acquainted with scientists at Stanford University. From the small laboratory and shop that produced seismic equipment for Geophysical Service, Inc., where he spent much of his career, Cecil Green and his partners J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty co-founded Texas Instruments in 1951 for the manufacturing of integrated circuits and electronics equipment. Personable and unassuming, he always attributed his remarkable success to being in the right place at the right time.
Cecil Green and his wife, Ida M. Green (1903-1986), pictured right, were extraordinarily generous and compassionate individuals. Together, they endowed professorships, erected buildings, served as board members and trustees, and otherwise sustained dozens of cultural and civic organizations, hospitals, and universities. As recipients of numerous prestigious awards and recognitions for their philanthropy, they often referred to their donations as investments in future excellence.
At Stanford University, despite never having attended, Cecil and Ida Green established a professorship and graduate fellowships in Geophysics and contributed to the fund for the Earth Sciences research building. They became the principal benefactors of the construction of the East Wing of the Main Library, renamed as the Cecil H. Green Library. In 1988, they received Stanford’s Uncommon Man and Uncommon Woman Awards. In 2003, they posthumously endowed the Ida M. Green University Librarianship.
At the groundbreaking ceremony for the East Wing in 1977, pictured left, Cecil Green confidently asserted that the new library would become the common crossroads and nerve center for the Stanford campus. At the dedication of Cecil H. Green Library in 1980, he described the event as a supreme moment of happiness and spoke as follows:
"So, from the point of view of a specialist who has finally come around to being also a generalist, I would say that a library literally illuminates future frontiers of thought, as it also preserves the accumulated knowledge of the past. And as the sages have stated, a library, such as this one, by its books gives life beyond life, so that such stored knowledge helps to give mankind virtual immortality."