The University of California (UC) is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. 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 include the California State University system and the California Community Colleges System.
Governed by a semi-autonomous Board of Regents, the University of California has 10 campuses, a combined student body of 251,700 students, 21,200 faculty members, 144,000 staff members and over 1.86 million living alumni as of October 2016.
The University of California was founded in 1868 and operated temporarily in Oakland until opening its first campus in Berkeley in 1873. Its tenth and 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 UC Hastings College of Law, located in San Francisco, is legally affiliated with UC, but other than sharing its name is entirely autonomous from the rest of the system. It has also received the highest number of Nobel prizes globally.
Collectively, the colleges, institutions, and alumni of the University of California make it the most comprehensive and advanced postsecondary educational system in the world, responsible for nearly $50 billion per year of economic impact. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 62 Nobel Prizes as of 2016.
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 Legislature established an Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in 1866.
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 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 outside 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 (650,000 m²) 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.
In August 1882, the California State Normal School (whose original normal school in San Jose is now San Jose State University) opened a second school in Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. The Los Angeles school remained under the control of the San Jose school until 1919, when the state legislature transferred it to UC control and renamed it the Southern Branch of the University of California. In 1927, it became the University of California at Los Angeles; the “at” would be replaced with a comma in 1958.
After the state electorate severely limited long-term property tax revenue by enacting Proposition 13 in 1978, UC was forced to make up for the resulting collapse in state financial support by imposing a variety of fees which were tuition in all but name. On November 18, 2010, the Regents finally gave up on the longstanding legal fiction that UC does not charge tuition by renaming the Educational Fee to “Tuition.” As part of its search for funds during the 2000s and 2010s, UC quietly began to admit higher percentages of highly accomplished (and more lucrative) students from other states and countries, but was forced to reverse course in 2015 in response to the inevitable public outcry and start admitting more California residents.
Eight campuses operate on the quarter system, while Berkeley and Merced are on the semester system. However, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and all UC law schools operate on the semester system.
Six of the campuses are members of the Association of American Universities, a collection of the top 62 research schools in North America. In 2006 the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) awarded the University of California the SPARC Innovator Award for its “extraordinarily effective institution-wide vision and efforts to move scholarly communication forward”, including the 1997 founding (under then UC President Richard C. Atkinson) of the California Digital Library (CDL) and its 2002 launching of CDL’s scholarship, an institutional repository.
University of California systemwide research on the SAT exam found that, after controlling for familial income and parental education, so-called achievement tests known as the SAT II had 10 times more predictive ability of college aptitude than the SAT.
All University of California campuses except Hastings College of the Law are governed by the Regents of the University of California as required by the Constitution of the State of California. Eighteen regents are appointed by the governor for 12-year terms. One member is a student appointed for a one-year term. There are also seven ex officio members—the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the State Assembly, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, president and vice president of the Alumni Associations of UC, and the UC president. The Academic Senate, made up of faculty members, is empowered by the Regents to set academic policies. In addition, the system-wide faculty chair and vice-chair sit on the Board of Regents as non-voting members.
Originally, the President was directly in charge of the first campus, Berkeley. In turn, other UC locations (with the exception of Hastings College of the Law) were treated as off-site departments of the Berkeley campus. In March 1951, the Regents reorganized the university so that day-to-day “chief executive officer” functions for the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses were transferred in 1952 to chancellors who were entrusted with a high degree of autonomy.
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