Center for Studies in Higher Education

The one-university idea—that the University of California is a single institution whose campuses are united in the pursuit of a common mission and common standards of quality—has been a guiding organizational principle since UC President Robert Gordon Sproul first articulated it in the 1930s. This paper examines the origins of the one-university idea in the Sproul era, the role it has played in UC’s institutional development through waves of decentralization and campus expansion, and whether it remains relevant today.