CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In academia, where brand reputation is everything, one university holds an especially enviable place these days when it comes to attracting students and money. To find it from this center of learning, turn west and go about 2,700 miles.
马萨诸塞州坎布里奇——在学术界，品牌信誉就是一切。就吸引学生和金钱而言，有一所大学目前占据着一个特别令人羡慕的地位。要找到它，你需要从这个学术重镇向西走大约2700英里（约4300多公里）。
Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America's "it" school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation's lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their "dream college"; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.
在一波科技热浪的推动下，按照曾经由哈佛大学(Harvard University)主宰的指标来衡量，斯坦福大学(Stanford University)已经成为美国高等院校的“老大”。该校连续两年成为全美本科生录取率最低的大学；在过去六年的五年中，根据《普林斯顿评论》(Princeton Review)面向高三学生进行的调查，斯坦福高居美国高中生“梦想中的大学”排行榜之首。年复一年，该校募集到比其他任何大学都要多的捐赠资金。
No one calls Duke "the Stanford of the South," or the University of Michigan "the public Stanford," at least not yet. But, for now at least, there is reason to doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher education is Harvard, founded 378 years ago, which held its commencement on Thursday.
没有人把杜克大学(Duke University)称为“南方的斯坦福”，或者把密歇根大学(University of Michigan)称为“公立斯坦福”，至少现在还没有。但至少就目前而言，我们有理由怀疑人们长期以来形成的一个共识：美国高等教育的黄金标准是哈佛大学。这家创建于378年前的著名学府在上周四举行了一年一度的毕业典礼。

"There's no question that right now, Stanford is seen as the place to be," said Robert Franek, who oversees the Princeton Review's college and university guidebooks and student surveys. Of course, that is more a measure of popularity than of quality, he said, and whether it will last is anyone's guess.
“斯坦福现在被视为美国最好的大学，这一点毫无疑问，”《普林斯顿评论》学院与大学指南及学生调查事务负责人罗伯特·弗兰尼克(Robert Franek)这样说道。当然，这些调查显示的是受欢迎程度，而不是教育质量，而且谁也说不准这种状况能否持续下去，他说。
Professors, administrators and students here insist that on the whole, they are not afraid that Harvard will be knocked off its perch, either in substance or in reputation. But some concede, now that you mention it, that in particularly contemporary measures, like excellence in computer science, engineering and technology, Harvard could find much to emulate in that place out in California.
哈佛大学的教授、管理层和学生坚持认为，就整体而言，他们并不害怕哈佛将被赶下王座，无论是在实质上还是在声誉上。但谈到这个话题时，一些人也承认，如果根据当代的指标来衡量，特别是在计算机科学和工程技术学科的卓越之处，加州那所大学的确有许多值得哈佛效仿的地方。
"Harvard for a long time had sort of an ambiguous relationship to applied science and engineering," said Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor here and a former dean of Harvard College. "It wasn't considered the sort of thing gentlemen did."
“长期以来，哈佛跟应用科学和工程学科的关系一直模棱两可，”哈佛大学计算机科学教授，哈佛学院(Harvard College)前院长哈利·R·刘易斯(Harry R. Lewis)说。“这些学科不被看做是绅士应该学的东西。”
People in academia tend to roll their eyes at the incessant effort to rank colleges and universities, insisting that they pay little attention to the ratings that their institutions spend so much time and energy chasing. They scoff at the notion that there is one pre-eminent institution, or that vast and varied schools can be seeded like football teams.
学界中人往往对层出不穷的高校排行榜不以为然。尽管这些人所在的大学不遗余力地追逐好名次，但他们坚称自己甚少注意这些排名。他们对大学体系中存在一所超群绝伦的大学，数量众多、各式各样的学校可以像橄榄球队那样排列名次这类观点嗤之以鼻。
That has not stopped a growing list of organizations from taking a crack at it, and for what it's worth, in recent years ranking systems from U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and Newsweek and The Daily Beast have, at various times, placed Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Williams, Yale and the United States Military Academy at the top of the heap.
这并没有阻止越来越多的组织在这一领域一试身手。近些年来，《美国新闻与世界报道》(U.S. News & World Report)、《福布斯》(Forbes)、《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)和《每日野兽》(The Daily Beast)在不同时间把哈佛、普林斯顿(Princeton)、斯坦福、威廉姆斯(Williams)、耶鲁(Yale)和西点军校(United States Military Academy)置于傲视群雄的榜首位置。
Stanford basks in its image as the hub of Silicon Valley, alma mater to a string of technology moguls; incubator of giants like Google, Yahoo and Cisco; and beneficiary of their success and philanthropy. In fact, while the university declined to comment for this article, administrators and professors there have voiced concerns that too much of the university's appeal is based on students' hopes of striking it rich in Silicon Valley.
位于硅谷中心的斯坦福大学沐浴在各种光环之下：一连串科技大佬的母校；谷歌(Google)、雅虎(Yahoo)和思科(Cisco)等公司的孵化器；他们的成功和慈善事业的受益者。事实上，虽然这所大学拒绝对本文发表评论，但该校的管理层和教授已经表达了另一种担忧：斯坦福大学的吸引力过多地基于学生们的硅谷致富梦。
Other colleges would love to have such problems.
其他大学很想碰到这样的问题。
"There has been an explosion of interest in engineering and related areas," said Alan M. Garber, Harvard's provost. "We simply have had a hard time keeping up with that demand."
“对工程及相关领域的兴趣一直呈爆炸式增长，”哈佛大学教务长艾伦·M·加伯(Alan M. Garber)说。“我们根本无法跟上这种需求。”
At the same time, he said, Harvard has a number of joint projects with its neighbor the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and "it doesn't make sense for us to duplicate a lot of what M.I.T. does within Harvard."
与此同时，哈佛与它的邻居美国麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)合作设立了许多项目，“对于我们来说，在哈佛内部大量重复麻省理工学院正在做的事情没有任何意义。”
Undergraduates here are aware of the contrasts with Stanford (and Yale and Princeton and M.I.T.), but they vary widely in how seriously they take the topic.
哈佛的本科生都知道该校跟斯坦福（以及耶鲁、普林斯顿和麻省理工学院）的差别，但在对待这个话题的严肃程度上，他们存在很大的不同。
Max Shayer, a senior from Alaska, graduated on Thursday after studying engineering and plans to work for a big oil company. But his younger brother has chosen to attend Stanford over Harvard, among other colleges, where he is likely to study engineering.
来自阿拉斯加的大四学生马克斯·沙耶尔(Max Shayer)上周四正式毕业。这位工程专业学生计划去一家大型石油公司工作。但他的弟弟已经选择上斯坦福大学，可能会学习工程专业，他舍弃的众多院校中就包括哈佛大学。
Mr. Shayer said he was pleased with his own engineering education but said he felt that big industrial companies, like Boeing, recruited more heavily at Stanford because of its legacy. "I would like to see Harvard build relationships with these long-established industries," he said.
沙耶尔说，他对自己接受的工程教育非常满意。但他觉得，像波音公司( Boeing)这样的大企业传统上更侧重于招聘斯坦福大学的毕业生。“我希望哈佛能够跟这些历史悠久的产业建立关系，”他说。
And, noting the incremental and inscrutable annual changes in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, others were skeptical about the idea of putting any particular university, or pair of universities, at the top of a national heap.
其他人则以《美国新闻与世界报道》排行榜每年高深莫测的增量变化为例，纷纷质疑把任何特定大学或一对大学置于全国高校之上这种想法。
"It really depends on what you're looking to do," said Patrick Galvin, a graduating Harvard senior from California. "The top 10 schools are so incredible — they're separated by very little."
“这真的取决于你打算学习什么专业，”来自加州的哈佛应届毕业生帕特里克·高尔文(Patrick Galvin)说。“排名前十的学校都非常优秀，它们的差别微乎其微。”
About 5 percent of Harvard's undergraduate degrees are awarded in computer science or engineering, compared with about 27 percent at Stanford. At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduate students take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.
在哈佛大学，大约5%的本科学位被授予给计算机科学或工程专业学生，而斯坦福大学的这一比例大约为27%。在斯坦福大学，大约90%的本科生至少选修一门计算机编程课，而这样做的哈佛学生仅有一半左右。
The disparity has deep cultural roots at many liberal arts institutions: Anything that looked like practical career preparation was seen as something less than real undergraduate education. Stanford, which established an engineering school in the 1920s, was never like that. In fact, it has become one of many universities that worry about how far the pendulum has swung away from the humanities.
在许多文理院校，这种差距具有深厚的文化根源：凡是看起来务实的职业生涯准备，都不算是真正的本科教育。早在1920年代就开设了工程学院的斯坦福大学从来没有这样的传统。事实上，和许多大学一样，它开始担心大学教育的钟摆是否已经过度远离人文学科。
Harvard administrators have worked for years to expand offerings in computer science and engineering, but the going has been slow. Harvard created its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2007, and it is planning a new campus across the Charles River, in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, largely for those studies.
哈佛大学管理层多年来一直努力扩展计算机科学和工程类学科教育，但进展缓慢。2007年，哈佛创建了工程与应用科学学院(School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)，目前正计划在查尔斯河对面的波斯顿的奥斯顿社区设立一个主要从事这类学科教育的新校区。
Harvard professors in a variety of fields said that a little fear of a competitor was a healthy thing, and that the university was less complacent about its leadership than it once was.
哈佛大学从事各个领域研究的教授们表示，有点害怕竞争对手是一件健康的事情，这所大学对于它的领导力已经不像过去那么自满了。
"I think there's a halo effect that doesn't do Harvard any good, because Harvard has, at times, had pockets of mediocrity that it could get away with," said Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology and a noted author on that field and linguistics.
“我认为光环效应对于哈佛大学没有一点好处，因为它有时会为哈佛的一小部分平庸学科提供荫蔽，”心理学教授，心理学和语言学领域的著名作家史蒂芬·品克(Steven Pinker)这样说到。
Jill Lepore, the noted historian and Harvard professor, said that the gap between the real Harvard and the imagined one — the university in the film "The Social Network," she wrote, "is utterly unfamiliar to me" — was very, very old. She cited Benjamin Franklin, who as a teenager was frustrated that he could not attend Harvard College and lampooned it instead in one of his letters to The New-England Courant under the pseudonym Silence Dogood.
哈佛大学教授、著名历史学家吉尔·莱波雷(Jill Lepore)表示，真正的哈佛和想象中的哈佛之间的差距是非常非常古老的。电影《社交网络》(The Social Network)中的那所大学“对我来说，相当之陌生，”她写道。她举了本杰明·富兰克林(Benjamin Franklin)的例子：不能上哈佛学院让少年富兰克林非常沮丧，于是他就借用笔名“无名好汉”(Silence Dogood)给《新英格兰报》(The New-England Courant)写了一封信，对这所学校大加讽刺。
He wrote of dull-witted children educated at great expense, who "learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a room genteelly," but emerge "as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited."
他写道，那些花费巨大代价在这里接受教育的蠢孩子“仅仅学会了怎样才能显得派头十足，如何彬彬有礼地进入一个房间，”但最终“还是那个榆木脑袋，只不过变得更加骄傲和自负”。
Decades later, his view of Harvard apparently changed, Franklin became one of its patrons.
几十年后，他对哈佛的看法明显改观，富兰克林成为了该校的赞助人之一。