I heard it somewhere, I can't find a cite either. It's not the kind of thing they would ever admit to doing, so I'm not sure it would even really be possible to find a cite.
I just went looking for historical ranking data. What I found suggested that Stanford's Rankimg was higher in previous years, in 83, 84, and 85 they were number 1 and they have never dropped below 7. I can't verify my data, so please look for yourself, but unless this event was before then I doubt it happened.
Yes, when I went to MIT in the 80s, Stanford was often considered to be the best overall university in the country, and MIT wanted to become more like Stanford.
I don't know when it achieved such stature, but it also had been one of the Big 3 Computer Science graduate schools for quite some time. (I.e., MIT, Stanford, and CMU.)
No love for Berkeley? I would argue that if you were a perspective student reading USWNR, simply due to proximity to the silicon valley makes the average student get much better chances at jobs and experience in tech.
At the time, Berkeley was considered a distant forth, but there was also a big gap between Berkeley and the rest of the pack.
I recall that my undergraduate advisor thought that I probably wouldn't be able to get into MIT, Stanford, or CMU for grad school, but that I'd have no problem getting into Berkeley. He said staying in would be the problem. They had a reputation at the time for accepting a lot of students and then weeding them out.
