University of California, Berkeley


The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in the Southside and Northside neighborhoods of Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system.
Berkeley has an enrollment of more than 45,000 students. The university is organized around fifteen schools of study on the same campus, including the College of Chemistry, the College of Engineering, College of Letters and Science, and the Haas School of Business. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was originally founded as part of the university.
Berkeley was a founding member of the Association of American Universities and was one of the original eight "Public Ivy" schools. In 2021, the federal funding for campus research and development exceeded $1 billion. Thirty-two libraries also compose the Berkeley library system which is the sixth largest research library by number of volumes held in the United States.
Berkeley students compete in thirty varsity athletic sports, and the university is one of eighteen full-member institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Berkeley's athletic teams, the California Golden Bears, have also won 107 national championships, 196 individual national titles, and 223 Olympic medals. Berkeley's alumni, faculty, and researchers include 63 Nobel laureates and 19 Academy Award winners, and the university is also a producer of Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Fulbright Scholars.

History

Founding

Made possible by President Lincoln's signing of the Morrill Act in 1862, the University of California was founded in 1868 as the state's first land-grant university, inheriting the land and facilities of the private College of California and the federal-funding eligibility of a public agricultural, mining, and mechanical arts college. The Organic Act states that the "University shall have for its design, to provide instruction and thorough and complete education in all departments of science, literature and art, industrial and professional pursuits, and general education, and also special courses of instruction in preparation for the professions."
Ten faculty members and forty male students made up the fledgling university when it opened in Oakland in 1869. Frederick Billings, a trustee of the College of California, suggested that a new campus site north of Oakland be named in honor of Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. The university began admitting women the following year. In 1870, Henry Durant, founder of the College of California, became its first president. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students. The first female student to graduate was in 1874, admitted in the first class to include women in 1870.
Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst funded several programs and new buildings and, in 1898, sponsored an international competition in Antwerp, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan.

20th century

In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, Davis. In 1919, the Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School became the southern branch of the university, which ultimately became the University of California, Los Angeles. By the 1920s, the number of campus buildings in Berkeley had grown substantially and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard. In 1917, one of the nation's first ROTC programs was established at Berkeley and its School of Military Aeronautics began training pilots, including Jimmy Doolittle. In 1926, future Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval ROTC unit at Berkeley. Berkeley ROTC alumni include former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Army Chief of Staff Frederick C. Weyand, sixteen other general officers, ten Navy flag officers, and AFROTC alumna Captain Theresa Claiborne.
In the 1930s, Ernest Orlando Lawrence helped establish the Radiation Laboratory and invented the cyclotron, which won him the Nobel physics prize in 1939. Using the cyclotron, Berkeley professors and Berkeley Lab researchers went on to discover sixteen chemical elements—more than any other university in the world. In particular, during World War II and following Glenn Seaborg's then-secret discovery of plutonium, Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb. Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley founded and was then a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In 1952, the University of California reorganized itself into a system of semi-autonomous campuses, with each campus given a chancellor, and Clark Kerr became Berkeley's first chancellor, while Robert Sproul remained in place as the president of the University of California. Berkeley gained a worldwide reputation for political activism in the 1960s. In 1964, the Free Speech Movement organized student resistance to the university's restrictions on political activities on campus—most conspicuously, student activities related to the Civil Rights Movement.
The arrest in Sproul Plaza of Jack Weinberg, a recent Berkeley alumnus and chair of Campus CORE, prompted a series of student-led acts of formal remonstrance and civil disobedience that ultimately gave rise to the Free Speech Movement, which movement would prevail and serve as a precedent for student opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1982, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute was established on campus with support from the National Science Foundation and at the request of three Berkeley mathematicians—Shiing-Shen Chern, Calvin Moore, and Isadore M. Singer. The institute is now widely regarded as a leading center for collaborative mathematical research, drawing thousands of visiting researchers from around the world each year.

21st century

The school has become more focused on STEM disciplines and fundraising. In 2007, the Energy Biosciences Institute was established with funding from BP and Stanley Hall, a research facility and headquarters for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, opened. Supported by a grant from alumnus Jim Simons, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing was established in 2012. In 2015, Berkeley and its sister campus, UCSF, established the Innovative Genomics Institute to develop CRISPR gene editing, and, in 2020, an anonymous donor pledged $252 million to help fund a new center for computing and data science. For the 2020 fiscal year, Berkeley set a fundraising record, receiving over $1 billion in gifts and pledges, and two years later, it broke that record, raising over $1.2 billion. In 2024, protests at Berkeley regarding the Gaza war resulted in police action.

Controversies

  • Various research ethics, human rights, and animal rights advocates have been in conflict with Berkeley. Native Americans contended with the school over repatriation of remains from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Student activists have urged the university to cut financial ties with Tyson Foods and PepsiCo. Faculty member Ignacio Chapela prominently criticized the university's financial ties to Novartis. PETA has challenged the university's use of animals for research and argued that it may violate the Animal Welfare Act.
  • Cal's Memorial Stadium reopened in September 2012 after renovations. The university incurred a controversial $445 million of debt for the stadium and a new $153 million student athletic center, which it financed with the sale of special stadium endowment seats. The roughly $18 million interest-only annual payments on the debt consumes 20 percent of Cal's athletics' budget; principal repayment begins in 2032 and is scheduled to conclude in 2113.
  • On May 1, 2014, Berkeley was named one of fifty-five higher education institutions under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights "for possible violations of federal law over the handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints" by the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. Investigations continued into 2016, with hundreds of pages of records released in April 2016, showing a pattern of documented sexual harassment and firings of non-tenured staff.
  • On July 25, 2019, Berkeley was removed from the U.S. News Best Colleges Ranking for misreporting statistics. Berkeley had originally reported that its two-year average alumni giving rate for fiscal years 2017 and 2016 was 11.6 percent, U.S. News said. The school later told U.S. News the correct average alumni giving rate for the 2016 fiscal year was just 7.9 percent. The school incorrectly overstated its alumni giving data to U.S. News since at least 2014. The alumni giving rate accounts for five percent of the Best Colleges ranking.
  • Berkeley community members have criticized UC Berkeley's increasing enrollment. Berkeley residents filed a lawsuit alleging that the university's expanding enrollment violated California Environmental Quality Act and that the area lacked the infrastructure to support more students. Critics of the lawsuit accused these community members of NIMBYism. In August 2021, a judge from the Superior Court of Alameda County ruled in favor of the residents, and on March 3, 2022, the California Supreme Court also ruled in favor of the residents, saying that the university needed to freeze its admission rates at 2020–2021 levels. On March 11, 2022, state legislators released a proposal to change CEQA to exempt the university from its restrictions. On March 14, Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. Berkeley has continued to face a housing shortage.
  • In February 2025, Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump administration's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, announced that he would investigate Berkeley as part of the Department of Justice's broader investigation into antisemitism on college campuses.