Early in the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the nation’s elite universities to join in the quest for powerful new technological weapons to counter the Nazi threat. Urged on by Nobelist Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and director of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, the University of California responded to Roosevelt’s call in 1943 by lending its scientific leadership to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The goal: to design and build the world’s first atomic bomb. UC president Robert Gordon Sproul intended from the outset that the University’...
When the University of California moved to a permanent campus site in Berkeley, many described what they found there as a wilderness. Early faculty and students proceeded to build a campus and community, creating clubs, musical groups, fraternities, and athletics. This experience is brought to life in this essay through contemporary memoirs and campus publications, notably, the papers of a leading university family, Joseph Le Conte with his son, J.N. Le Conte, and youngest daughter, Carrie Le Conte. Through these sources, we can glimpse student life between 1880, when Carrie matriculated,...
Beginning in earnest in the 1950s, most state governments began a process of creating public university systems with a governing board and intended to coordinate and manage usually a range of institutional types and including a major public flagship university. By the late 1980s, enthusiasm for more centralized structures and state-wide “superboards” began to wane, in part because of the opposition of flagship campuses fearful of the “leveling” result they had seen in Wisconsin. The two decades after 1990 were marked both by austerity and limited growth and...
This paper explores the proposition that if American higher education has been broadly successful in serving its society, it is in large part because American colleges and universities, and the system of which they are part, were created under conditions of weakness, both academic and financial.
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.
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...
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...
