This brief provides additional information on the role of the Academic Senate in new campus planning in the 1960s. A previous report, “The Role of the Academic Senate in Tenth Campus Planning,” provided background information for the University of California Academic Council and the Assembly of the Academic Senate regarding the potential role of the Academic Senate in establishing UC Merced. The Merced campus is scheduled to begin instruction in the fall of 2004. This report is intended to provide contextual information for the Academic Senate’s UC Merced Task Force.
John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow -- Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press 2021), Envisioning the Asian...
Josiah Dwight Whitney’s accomplishments as California’s State Geologist and director of the California State Geological Survey from 1860 to 1874 have been well-recognized. Whitney and his associates brought to the Survey the best science of their era that shaped their exploration, mapping, and collection of plant, fossil and mineral specimens. For the first time, they created a comprehensive physical definition of a state only haphazardly explored and described up to that time. Whitney’s self-certainly in his expertise and personal views often led to tumultuous, even self-defeating,...
In honor of the 125th of the founding of the University of California, the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, in cooperation with the Institute of Governemental Studies, takes pleasure in publishing a series of "chapters" in the history of the University. These are designed to illuminate particular problems and periods in the history of U.C., especially its oldest and original campus at Berkeley, and to identify special turning points or features in the "long century" of the University's evolution. Histories are stories meant to be read and enjoyed in their own right, but...
History of Chemical Engineering (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) at the University of California, Berkeley including establishment of department within the College of Chemistry. The department has an unusual history among chemical engineering programs in the United States and also has become one of the most respected departments in that area. Although not unique, only a few chemical engineering programs sit outside of engineering departments in the United States.
Clark Kerr defined and put into place what is essentially the modern version of the University of California and built the wherewithal for developing and sustaining academic quality. He defined the structure of multiple campuses all with the same research mission and equal opportunity. He fostered the ambitious conversion of three specialized sites and the creation of three entirely new campuses, all to become general campuses with equal opportunity. These steps provided enrollment capacity for the next sixty years. He decentralized governance so that the nature and scope of academic...
Globally, fees and tuition are growing as an important source of income for most universities, with potentially significant influence on the market for students and the behavior of institutions. Thus far, however, there is no single source on the fee rates of comparative research universities, nor information on how these funds are being used by institutions. Furthermore, research on tuition pricing has also focused largely on bachelor’s degree programs, and not on the rapid changes in tuition and fees for professional degrees. This paper offers a brief scan of pricing trends among a...
In the discourse that swirled in the mid-1800s around the creation of new American public universities, three major and interrelated tensions became evident: the first related to the continued debate regarding the proper curricular balance between practical education and classical studies; the second focused on the appropriate autonomy of institutions intended to serve the public interest in a society often racked by sectarian and class conflict; and the third centered on the degree to which these public institutions should be selective in their admissions and representative of the state’s...
Since establishing its first campus in 1868, the University of California (UC), California’s landgrant university, developed into the nation’s first multicampus systemin the United States, and is today widely recognized as the world’s premier network of public research universities. This short essay provides a...
In the post-Revolutionary War era, private institutions dominated America’s emerging higher education landscape, all tied to sectarian communities and often with limited forms of public financing. The United States could have sustained that dominance, essentially differing to the private sector in expanding access, and delaying the “rise of the publics.” This did not happen. A major turning point came in the mid-1800s. Private colleges seemed incapable or simply not interested in serving the broader needs of American society. Institutions such as the University of Virginia, and the new...
