The University of California began as a merger that wasn't really one
In the 1860s California had two half-colleges: a private liberal arts school with buildings and students but no money, and a state college with federal money but existing only on paper. A governor proposed combining them. What emerged in 1868 was a brand new university that kept a single professor from the old college.
The private half traced back to Henry Durant, a Yale-educated Congregational minister who opened Contra Costa Academy in downtown Oakland on June 20, 1853. It won a college charter in 1855 but struggled to attract students to Greek and Roman classics, and bought land in what became Berkeley. The state half was an Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College created in 1866 purely to claim federal land-grant funds. Governor Frederick Low, who admired the University of Michigan model, suggested the union after a Yale professor scolded Californians at an 1867 commencement for founding a polytechnic instead of a real university.
The college's trustees agreed on October 9, 1867, on condition that the result be a full university with a College of Letters. Governor Henry H. Haight signed the founding law on March 23, 1868. But Haight felt no duty to honour his predecessor's informal promises: only two trustees became regents and just one faculty member, Martin Kellogg, was kept. When the trustees had second thoughts, they brought a friendly lawsuit to test the deal and promptly lost. The Berkeley campus opened in September 1873.
California's 1879 constitution gave the university unusually strong independence from the rest of state government, which later helped a law school stay outside the regents' control. For decades Berkeley was the only campus. The research mission came later too: the founding act said nothing about research, and only in the 1930s did President Robert Gordon Sproul begin describing the university's purpose as teaching, research and public service. Between 1957 and 1960, under Clark Kerr, it became a true multicampus system.
Today its ten campuses enrol 299,407 students, its faculty and researchers had won 75 Nobel Prizes as of 2025, and it helps manage three national laboratories, including Los Alamos.
Source: University of California
