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Public university in Berkeley, California From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California)[10][11] is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and is the founding campus of the University of California system.[12]
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Former names | University of California (1868–1958) |
|---|---|
| Motto | Fiat lux (Latin) |
Motto in English | "Let there be light" |
| Type | Public land-grant research university |
| Established | March 23, 1868[1] |
Parent institution | University of California |
| Accreditation | WSCUC |
Academic affiliations | |
| Endowment | $7.4 billion (2023)[2] |
| Chancellor | Richard Lyons |
| Provost | Benjamin E. Hermalin[3] |
Total staff | 23,524 (2020)[4] |
| Students | 45,307 (Fall 2022)[5] |
| Undergraduates | 32,479 (Fall 2022)[5] |
| Postgraduates | 12,828 (Fall 2022)[5] |
| Location | , California , United States 37°52′19″N 122°15′30″W |
| Campus | Core central: 178-acre (72-hectare)[6][7] Large suburb: 8,164-acre (3,304-hectare)[8] |
| Newspaper | The Daily Californian |
| Colors | Berkeley Blue California Gold[9] |
| Nickname | Golden Bears |
Sporting affiliations | |
| Mascot | Oski the Bear |
| Website | www |
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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, and the Haas School of Business. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".[13] The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was originally founded as part of the university.[14]
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.[15] In 2023, the WIPO’s Annual PCT Review ranked Berkeley's number of patent applications published under the PCT System as 1st from the university sector, with 531 patent applications being published that year.[16] 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.[17][18][19]
Berkeley students compete in thirty varsity athletic sports, and the university is one of eighteen full-member institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Berkeley's athletic teams, the California Golden Bears, have also won 107 national championships, 196 individual national titles, and 223 Olympic medals (including 121 gold).[20][21] Berkeley's alumni, faculty, and researchers include 108 Nobel laureates[22] and 19 Academy Award winners,[23] and the university is also a producer of Rhodes Scholars,[24] Marshall Scholars,[25] and Fulbright Scholars.[26]
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.[27] 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."[28][29]
Ten faculty members and forty male students made up the fledgling university when it opened in Oakland in 1869.[30] 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.[31] The university began admitting women the following year.[32] 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.[33][34] The first female student to graduate was in 1874, admitted in the first class to include women in 1870.[35]
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. Although the University of California system does not have an official flagship campus, many scholars and experts consider Berkeley to be its unofficial flagship. It shares this unofficial status with the University of California, Los Angeles.[36][37]
In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, Davis.[38] 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.[39] By the 1920s, the number of campus buildings in Berkeley had grown substantially and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard.[40] In 1917, one of the nation's first ROTC programs was established at Berkeley[41] 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.[42] 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.[43]
In the 1930s, Ernest Orlando Lawrence helped establish the Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and invented the cyclotron, which won him the Nobel physics prize in 1939.[44] Using the cyclotron, Berkeley professors and Berkeley Lab researchers went on to discover sixteen chemical elements—more than any other university in the world.[45][46] 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.[47][48] Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley founded and was then a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1943) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1952).
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.[49] 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.[50][51]
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.[52][53][54] In 1982, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) 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
