University of California
The University of California is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic centers abroad. The system is the state's land-grant university.
In 1900, UC was one of the founders of the Association of American Universities and since the 1970s seven of its campuses, in addition to Berkeley, have been admitted to the association. Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Riverside, and San Diego are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 75 Nobel Prizes as of 2025.
The system's ten campuses have a combined student body of 299,407 students, 26,100 faculty members, 192,400 staff members and over 2.5 million alumni. Its newest campus in Merced opened in fall 2005. Nine campuses enroll both undergraduate and graduate students; one campus, UC San Francisco, enrolls only graduate and professional students in the medical and health sciences. In addition, the University of California College of the Law located in San Francisco is legally affiliated with UC and shares its name but is otherwise autonomous. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-system public higher education plan, which also includes the California State University system and the California Community Colleges system. UC is governed by a Board of Regents whose autonomy from the rest of the state government is protected by the state constitution. The University of California also manages or co-manages three national laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The University of California was founded on March 23, 1868, and operated in Oakland, where it absorbed the assets of the College of California before moving to Berkeley in 1873. It also affiliated itself with independent medical and law schools in San Francisco. Over the next eight decades, several branch locations and satellite programs were established across the state. In March 1951, the University of California began to reorganize itself into something distinct from its campus in Berkeley, with UC president Robert Gordon Sproul staying in place as chief executive of the UC system, while Clark Kerr became Berkeley's first chancellor and Raymond B. Allen became the first chancellor of UCLA. However, the 1951 reorganization was stalled by resistance from Sproul and his allies, and it was not until Kerr succeeded Sproul as UC president that UC was able to evolve into a university system from 1957 to 1960. At that time, chancellors were appointed for additional campuses and each was granted some degree of greater autonomy.
History
Early history
In 1849, the state of California ratified its first constitution, which contained the express objective of creating a complete educational system including a state university. Taking advantage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, the California State Legislature established an Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in 1866. However, it existed only on paper, as a placeholder to secure federal land-grant funds.Meanwhile, Congregational minister Henry Durant, an alumnus of Yale, had established the private Contra Costa Academy, on June 20, 1853, in Oakland, California. The initial site was bounded by Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets and Harrison and Franklin Streets in downtown Oakland. In turn, the academy's trustees were granted a charter in 1855 for a College of California, though the college continued to operate as a college preparatory school until it added college-level courses in 1860. The college's trustees, educators, and supporters believed in the importance of a liberal arts education, but ran into a lack of interest in liberal arts colleges on the American frontier.
File:South Hall UC Berkeley.jpg|thumb|right|South Hall, built in 1873, is the oldest building on the Berkeley campus.
In November 1857, the college's trustees began to acquire various parcels of land facing the Golden Gate in what is now Berkeley for a future planned campus to the north of Oakland. But first, they needed to secure the college's water rights by buying a large farm to the east. In 1864, they organized the College Homestead Association, which borrowed $35,000 to purchase the land, plus another $33,000 to purchase 160 acres of land to the south of the future campus. The association subdivided the latter parcel and started selling lots with the hope it could raise enough money to repay its lenders and also create a new college town. But sales of new homesteads fell short.
Governor Frederick Low favored the establishment of a state university based upon the University of Michigan plan, and thus in one sense may be regarded as the founder of the University of California. At the College of California's 1867 commencement exercises, where Low was present, Yale University professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. criticized Californians for establishing a polytechnic school, instead of a real university. That same day, Low reportedly first suggested a merger of the already-functional College of California with the nonfunctional state college, and went on to participate in the ensuing negotiations.
On October 9, 1867, the college's trustees reluctantly agreed to join forces with the state college to their mutual advantage, but under one condition—that there not be simply an "Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College", but a complete university, within which the assets of the College of California would be used to create a College of Letters. Accordingly, the Organic Act, establishing the University of California, was introduced as a bill by Assemblyman John W. Dwinelle on March 5, 1868, and after it was duly passed by both houses of the state legislature, it was signed into state law by Governor Henry H. Haight on March 23, 1868.
However, as legally constituted, the new university was not an actual merger of the two colleges, but was an entirely new institution which merely inherited certain objectives and assets from each of them. Governor Haight saw no need to honor any tacit understandings reached with his predecessor about institutional continuity. Only two college trustees became regents and a single faculty member was hired by the new university. By April 1869, the trustees had second thoughts about their agreement to donate the college's assets and disincorporate. To get them to proceed, regent John B. Felton helped them bring a "friendly suit" against the university to test the agreement's legality—which they promptly lost.
The University of California's second president, Daniel Coit Gilman, opened its new campus in Berkeley in September 1873.
UC affiliates
Section 8 of the Organic Act authorized the Board of Regents to affiliate the University of California with independent self-sustaining professional colleges. "Affiliation" meant UC and its affiliates would "share the risk in launching new endeavors in education". The affiliates shared the prestige of the state university's brand, and UC agreed to award degrees in its own name to their graduates on the recommendation of their respective faculties, but the affiliates were otherwise managed independently by their own boards of trustees, charged their own tuition and fees, and maintained their own budgets separate from the UC budget. It was through the process of affiliation that UC was able to claim it had medical and law schools in San Francisco within a decade of its founding.In 1879, California adopted its second and current constitution, which included unusually strong language to ensure UC's independence from the rest of the state government. This had lasting consequences for the Hastings College of the Law, which had been separately chartered and affiliated in 1878 by an act of the state legislature at the behest of founder Serranus Clinton Hastings. After a falling out with his own handpicked board of directors, the founder persuaded the state legislature in 1883 and 1885 to pass new laws to place his law school under the direct control of the Board of Regents. In 1886, the Supreme Court of California declared those newer acts to be unconstitutional because the clause protecting UC's independence in the 1879 state constitution had stripped the state legislature of the ability to amend the 1878 act. To this day, the College of the Law remains a UC affiliate, maintains its own board of directors, and is not governed by the regents.
File:Animal Science Building, UC Davis.jpg|thumb|Hart Hall at UC Davis, built in 1928, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
In contrast, Toland Medical College and later, the dental, pharmacy, and nursing schools in San Francisco were affiliated with UC through written agreements, and not statutes invested with constitutional importance by court decisions. In the early 20th century, the Affiliated Colleges began to agree to submit to the regents' governance during the term of President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, as the Board of Regents had come to recognize the problems inherent in the existence of independent entities that shared the UC brand but over which UC had no real control. While Hastings remained independent, the Affiliated Colleges were able to increasingly coordinate their operations with one another under the supervision of the UC president and regents, and evolved into the health sciences campus known today as the University of California, San Francisco.