Recent uc_history items

Approaching a Tipping Point? A History and Prospectus of Funding for the University of California

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In its first four decades, UC depended largely on income generated by federal land grants and private philanthropy, and marginally on funding from the state. The year 1911 marked a major turning point: henceforth, state funding was linked to student enrollment workload. As a result, the University grew with California’s population in enrollment, academic programs, and new campuses. This historic commitment to systematically fund UC, the state’s sole land-grant university, helped create...

The University of California: Creating, Nurturing, and Maintaining Academic Quality in a Public University Setting

Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At 150 years following its founding in 1868, the University of California is regarded by many as the most successful and highly respected public research university in the world. Particularly impressive are the very high standings of its campuses in national and international rankings, the size of the ten-campus university, the high quality of the education it provides, the access and the route of upward mobility that it affords for students in the state, the success that it has had in developing new campuses that have achieved strong reputations in surprisingly short times, the attractiveness of the university to students and their families, and the substantial role that the university has played in the unparalleled technological innovation climate of California.

The purpose of this book is to identify and analyze the essential ways in which that success has come about. The book is not a history of the University of California, per se. Instead, it is an analysis of the...

Entrepreneurial President: Richard Atkinson and the University of California, 1995-2003

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Richard C. Atkinson was named president of the University of California in August 1995, just four weeks after the UC Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action in the admission of students. The Regents’ decision reversed thirty years of history and made Richard Atkinson the first UC president in decades to face the conflict between the California Master Plan’s goal of broad educational access and UC’s high academic standards without the tool of affirmative action.

UC’s often stormy transition to the post-affirmative action age was to be his first major task as president. Entrepreneurial President analyzes this and other defining issues of Atkinson’s eight-year presidency: UC’s expansion into new forms of scientific research with industry; Atkinson’s much-publicized challenge to the nation’s dominant college-entrance examination, the SAT; and the 1999 arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of espionage,...

Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President

Mon, 5 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

David Pierpont Gardner was president of one of the world's most distinguished centers of higher learning—the nine-campus University of California—from 1983 to 1992. In this remarkably candid and lively memoir he provides an insider's account of what it was like for a very private, reflective man to live an extremely public life as leader of one of the most complex and controversial institutions in the country. Earning My Degree is a portrait of uncommon leadership and courage and a chronicle of how these traits shaped a treasured, and sometimes mystifying, American institution. Before his tenure as president, Gardner spent seven years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during a tumultuous era of culture wars, ethnic division, and anti–Vietnam War protests, leaving his post as vice chancellor to serve as vice president of the University of California from 1971 to 1973. In 1973 he was named president of the University of Utah, and while there he chaired the National...