St. Louis ? Hardly a man, woman or child in Lawrence has never heard the university nestled on Mount Oread referred to in a derogatory way as Snob Hill.

Mostly, those two words are uttered by people who attended another university about 90 miles west of Lawrence. You know the school  Silo Tech.

Anyway, that brings me to Stanford, a school with an academic reputation of such majestic proportions it makes such schools as Harvard, Princeton and Yale seem like members of the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference.

If ever there were a Snob Hill of the West, it would seem to be the school named after the dead son of a man who made a fortune in the railroad business. Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid fever weeks before his 16th birthday.

Stanford’s men’s basketball media guide lists more than a hundred notable graduates  from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson to movie producer Richard Zanuck with a vast array of sports notables like John Elway, John McEnroe, Tom Watson, Eric Heiden and Tiger Woods in between.

And did you know that Stanford does not have a men’s basketball coach? Mike Montgomery is NOT the Cardinal coach. He is the school’s Anthony B. Joseph Director of Basketball. Have you ever heard such a highfalutin title? Incidentally, nowhere in the yearbook could I find who Anthony B. Joseph is, but I suspect he is not a pauper, nor was his name drawn out of a hat.

All in all, Stanford could most surely be saddled with a reputation as the scholastic stuffed shirt citadel of the nation. That isn’t the case, though, because two of its most visible sports components are, well, goofy.

Check out the school’s basketball band during tonight’s Kansas-Stanford game. They do all kinds of crazy things  from what they wear to how they perform. CBS will show them a lot, as well as cut-ins of one of the nation’s strangest mascots  a tree with legs, bulging eyes and a silly sign on its back.

To paraphrase an old Phog Allen quote: “The Stanford mascot danced around like a rootless tree, and out of context at that.”

I’m still trying to figure how a team known as the Cardinal has a tree mascot while Iowa State, nickname Cyclones, has a cardinal mascot.

Obviously, you have to be highly intelligent to be admitted to Stanford. Or as Bob Knight would probably say: “I never met a sports writer who went to Stanford.”

Well, neither have I, although Vahe Gregorian, college basketball writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a longtime acquaintance, has the bloodlines. Gregorian’s father Vartan is one of the notables listed in the Stanford basketball yearbook.

Actually, Vahe’s dad is listed as Vartan Greforian, which proves perhaps that typos and inherent intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

“Not only did they spell it wrong,” Vahe told me Friday in the NCAA media workroom, “but they’re a few years behind on his job.”

The elder Gregorian is listed as president of Brown University when, in fact, he left that Ivy League school about two years ago to become president of the Carnegie Corp. in New York City. By the way, Vahe is hardly a family black sheep. He earned an undergraduate degree at Penn and also has a masters from Missouri University.

But back to Stanford. Whether the school’s national perception is carefully crafted or simply a product of ongoing evolution is difficult to determine. Regardless, it’s hard not to smile about a school with a spaced-out band and an ersatz deciduous mascot.

Unless your favorite team happens to be playing Stanford in the NCAA Tournament tonight.