University of California

The Role Of The Land-Grant Institution In The 21st Century

James E. Sherwood
2004

The paper focuses on the land-grant mission of outreach to its community. It reviews the history of the land-grant institution and its missions, especially in the context of changes in higher education at the end of the 20th century that affect funding, demographics, and institutional mission and culture. UC Berkeley provides a case study. The paper proposes that land-grant institutions need a specific organization or unit dedicated to lifelong learning, and that there needs to be a national, standard-setting body for engagement.

Approaching a Tipping Point? A History and Prospectus of Funding for the University of California by John Aubrey Douglass and Zachary Bleemer

John Aubrey Douglass
Zachary Bleemer
2018
This year marks the University of California’s (UC) 150th anniversary. In part to reflect on that history, and to provide a basis to peer into the future, the following report provides a history of the University of California’s revenue sources and expenditures. The purpose is to provide the University’s academic community, state policymakers, and Californians with a greater understanding of the University’s financial history, focusing in particular on the essential role of public funding.

How California Determined Admissions Pools: Lower and Upper Division Student Targets and the California Master Plan for Higher Education, by John Aubrey Douglass

John Aubrey Douglass
2001

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education made a number of recommendations in the area of admissions. Key was a proposed target of at least 60% of all undergraduate students being at the upper division level at the University of California and what became the California State University system. At the time, approximately 51 percent of the instruction at both UC and the State Colleges (CSU) were at the upper division. It was assumed that there was a high correlation between upper division instruction and the status of undergraduates as Juniors and Seniors. The plan,...

John Aubrey Douglass

Senior Research Fellow

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...

How Best To Coordinate California Higher Education: Comments On The Governor's Proposed Reforms

Warren H. Fox
2005

California government is now considering major reforms in the organization of higher education, specifically dismantling the state’s independent planning and coordinating agency, the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC), and placing it and the Student Aid Commission under a new position in the governor’s office, possibly a Secretary of Higher Education. This recommendation is the result of Governor Schwarzenegger’s establishment of the California Performance Review Commission, in February of 2004, to investigate possible reorganization and other reforms for reducing...

POLICY OPTIONS FOR UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BUDGETING

Charles E. Young
2011

Within a quarter century after the end of World War II (1945-1970), largely because of the support and investment it received from the State, the University of California had changed from two modest-size general campuses (Berkeley and Los Angeles) and the medical campus in San Francisco (UCSF), to a system of eight general campuses. California was at the pinnacle of its success-its economy strong and growing. Since then, however, the fiscal and political problems facing California have led to a steady erosion in funding support for the University of California, and now are leading to...

The One University Idea and its Futures by Patricia A. Pelfrey

Patricia A. Pelfrey
2016

The University of California, the nation’s first multicampus system, is unique in its central organizing principle, known as the one-university idea. Its premise is simple: that a large and decentralized system of campuses, which share the same mission but differ in size, interests, aspirations, and stage of development, can nevertheless be governed as a single university. Long regarded as a major structural reason for the UC system’s rise to pre-eminence among public research universities, the one-university model has been a unifying administrative and cultural ethos within UC for...

Biology At Berkeley

Martin Trow
1999

This paper is concerned with the reorganization of biology at Berkeley, begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and now well along. Key to the initiation of change was the appointment of a Chancellor and Vice-chancellor who were committed to the changes, and the enlistment of outstanding biologists already at Berkeley to design the reform and carry it through. The paper raises the following questions: what led to the momentous changes in this leading research university; what actually happened as a result of the reform; what the key forces were that made the reform possible, and...

History's Coils: The UC Nuclear Weapons Laboratories by Patricia A. Pelfrey

Patricia A. Pelfrey
2018

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’...

A University in the Wilderness: Building a Community and Culture at the New University of California by Karen Merritt

Karen Merritt
2017

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,...