University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public land-grant research university in the Davis, California area, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institution was first founded as an agricultural branch of the system in 1905 and became the sixth campus of the University of California in 1959.
Founded as a primarily agricultural campus, the university has expanded over the past century to include graduate and professional programs in medicine, engineering, science, law, veterinary medicine, education, nursing, and business management, in addition to 90 research programs offered by UC Davis Graduate Studies. The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is the largest veterinary school in the United States. UC Davis also offers certificates and courses, including online classes, for adults and non-traditional learners through its Division of Continuing and Professional Education.
It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The UC Davis Aggies athletic teams compete in NCAA Division I, primarily as members of the Big West Conference with additional sports in the Big Sky Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. Athletes from UC Davis have won a total of 10 Olympic medals. University faculty, alumni, and researchers have been the recipients of two Nobel Prizes, one Fields Medal, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, three Pulitzer Prizes, three MacArthur Fellowships, and a National Medal of Science. Of the current faculty, 30 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 36 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 13 to the National Academy of Medicine.
History
Agriculture and the land-grant university
In 1868, the University of California was established as a land-grant university, and immediately founded a College of Agriculture as its first college as required by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts and the university's own Organic Act. UC operated a small farm at the Berkeley campus for several years after Ezra S. Carr became professor of agriculture, but he managed to alienate both the university faculty and the state's farmers with his attempt to directly integrate practical training in farming with courses on the larger historical, social, and political dimensions of farming and got himself fired in 1874. The faculty could not understand why students should earn credit towards degrees for hoeing or plowing, and the farmers could not understand how learning the social history of farming could make their children into better farmers.Eugene W. Hilgard, Carr's successor, recognized that Berkeley's soil and climate were terrible for farming; as he himself explained, the campus site was situated "within the belt of extreme coast climate, accentuated by the direct impact of the cold summer fogs pouring through the Golden Gate". He switched from "practical" to what he called "rational" instruction in scientific principles of agriculture at Berkeley. He concentrated on things like soil science and fermentation that could be researched and taught in a university laboratory, supplemented by limited data gathering and experiments at agricultural experimental stations in the field. Hilgard was originally disdainful of the idea of a university farm. He felt that for such a farm to teach effectively, it would necessarily have to be a model farm with examples of the best of everything, without any reference to local profitability, climate, or circumstances, and such a thing was clearly infeasible. However, in his last report as dean of the College of Agriculture before his 1905 retirement, Hilgard finally came around to the idea that a university farm "had become a pressing need" and was "much needed for proper and practical instruction in agriculture".
Founding of the university farm
Around the turn of the 20th century, Peter J. Shields, secretary of the California Agricultural Society, became aware that colleges of agriculture elsewhere had university farms which performed experiments and provided hands-on education in useful agricultural subjects, and that young people were leaving the state to study at such farms. Shields began to champion the cause of a university farm. He was later honored as the "founder" of UC Davis in 1962, when the Shields Oak Grove on campus was named after him, and again posthumously in 1972 when the campus library was named after him. However, local farmer and politician George Washington Pierce Jr. also fought aggressively in the California State Assembly for the creation of a university farm. Shields himself credited Pierce with ensuring that the site criteria in the University Farm Bill were so tightly formulated that they could be met only at the Yolo County town of Davisville. Unlike Shields, Pierce did not live long enough to see the promotion of Davis to a general campus and is now largely forgotten.On March 18, 1905, the University Farm Bill was enacted, which called for the establishment of a farm for the University of California. The bill provided that the University Farm would "be typical and representative of the best general agricultural conditions in California", and authorized an appropriation of $150,000 to cover the cost of purchasing land and constructing appropriate buildings. A committee appointed by the Regents of the University of California took a year to select a site for the University Farm, a 779-acre portion of the stock farm of Jerome C. Davis, near a tiny town then known as Davisville. The regents officially took control of the property in September 1906 and constructed four buildings in 1907.
Short courses were first offered at the University Farm in October and November 1908. On January 5, 1909, the University Farm School officially opened for instruction. At its inception, the Farm School was an agricultural high school offering a three-year course for farm boys who were at least 15 years old. The original class in January 1909 consisted of 18 young men, as the original dormitories were not designed to accommodate girls. In 1913, the minimum age of entrance was raised from 15 to 18. As of 1913, the University Farm community was overwhelmingly male and rather immature. The first female students at Davis came from the College of Agriculture at Berkeley to visit the Farm for a few months in 1914. Women began to participate in the farmers' short courses in 1917 and then the Farm School admitted girls for the first time in 1918.
In May 1922, the Farm School was formally terminated after graduating its final class of 97 students and was replaced that fall with a non-degree vocational program offering a variety of one- and two-year courses. Students who completed the two-year vocational courses were awarded certificates.
From vocational certificates to bachelor's degrees
In 1916, the Farm's 314 students occupied the original campus. The institution grew at a breakneck pace over the next four decades. By 1951, it had expanded to a size of. Along the way, it was renamed in 1922 to become the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture, and in 1938, it became the College of Agriculture at Davis.Initially, no degrees were awarded at Davis. From the very beginning in January 1909, students in the College of Agriculture at Berkeley enrolled at Davis for a single semester to obtain practical training on an actual farm alongside the Farm School students, but had to return to Berkeley to earn their degrees. Because the non-degree program at Davis was so disconnected from the traditional degree programs on the main Berkeley campus, agricultural interests began to agitate to separate Davis and the entire College of Agriculture from the University of California. This forced the regents in 1922 to silence such proposals by initially authorizing a two-year undergraduate program at Davis. By sharing faculty members between Berkeley and Davis and hiring a few more faculty members, the university was able to provide almost all courses of a "complete undergraduate program" at Davis—that is, a four-year program leading to the bachelor's degree. The first class graduated from Davis in 1926.
UC regularly appointed faculty members to joint positions at both Berkeley and Davis. This was possible because the two campuses are separated by only 53 miles, and the opening of a new bridge over the Carquinez Strait in 1927 greatly shortened the drive between them. Sharing faculty meant that the two campuses have always had an amicable relationship, in that Davis gradually developed its own strong identity while remaining proud of its older sibling. Thus, Davis did not suffer from the kind of "hang-ups" which at Los Angeles culminated in a systemwide decentralization process from 1957 to 1960 in which the regents and the UC president delegated most of their powers and responsibilities to chancellors at the campus level. Davis still retains a few traditions from its early era when its identity was much more intertwined with Berkeley, such as the Bossy Cow-Cow cheer, a parody of Berkeley's Oski Yell.
In 1941, the state legislature authorized the creation of a school of veterinary medicine at Davis, but the school's launch was severely delayed by the entrance of the United States into World War II and it did not open until 1948. In 1943, the U.S. Army Signal Corps took over Davis to use the campus as a training facility. The Davis campus was not returned to civilian use until the end of 1944.
From 1926 to 1947, all Davis students earning bachelor's degrees had to travel to Berkeley for graduation. In 1948, "the regents agreed to decentralize graduations". In a ceremony at Davis that year, UC President Robert Gordon Sproul "awarded 101 bachelor of science degrees in agriculture", along with 195 certificates to graduates of the two-year vocational program.
In 1949, UC expanded the Davis campus to what is now West Campus by purchasing the 526-acre Straloch Farm to the west from its owner, Harry Hopkins. The farm came with an 86-acre private airport constructed by Hopkins in 1946. The University Airport is still the only one in the UC system.
Meanwhile, enrollment in the two-year vocational program was falling, as similar options were becoming more widely available elsewhere. In fall 1958, the campus administration announced that the two-year vocational program would be discontinued, and the last certificates were awarded in 1960.