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University of California
[Note: Part of the HET Website. This page is not related to or endorsed by University of California or any other organization. See the official Berkeley website]
The University of California was established by the State of California in 1868, with its flagship campus at Berkeley.
California was the westernmost part of a large chunk of territory ceded by Mexico the United States in 1848, after the brief Mexican-American war. Distant and relatively inaccessible, California was originally sparsely populated. But the 1849 Gold Rush quickly changed all that, and brought a massive stream of immigrants from the east. The sleepy old mission town of San Francisco, at the entry of the San Francisco Bay, catapulted from less than 500 persons to 25,000 in a less than a year. By 1850, California was populous enough to apply for admission as a new state of the United States.
In 1862, the US Congress passed the Morrill Act making grants of federal land for states to fund the erection of colleges of "agricultural and mechanical arts". But there was no formula on what that meant. While some took it to mean it had to be a technical school, to train farmers and machinists, the federal act specifically noted it did not have to exclude standard academic fare like classics or sciences generally. Having populated rapidly, California, at the time, had next to no schools of any kind in place, and so the State legislature of California determined to use the Morrill funds to address the education deficiency. Many originally looked to older state schools, like Wisconsin, as a model, but tussles on the design delayed plans. California submitted a hazy proposal in 1866, just before the Morrill five-year deadline, to ensure it did not miss out, but it was merely a barely adequate outline and it would take a few more years to take shape and launch.
For location, they naturally chose the San Francisco Bay area, the most populated region of the state at the time. To get it up and going as quickly as possible, the State struck a deal with the local College of California, a private Presbyterian-Congregationalist high school that had been set up by pioneers in Oakland a few years earlier (1854). The College transferred its existing facilities, and some of its teachers and administrators, to the University of California in 1868. This is formally the beginning of the University of California. The college facilities were temporary, and the State purchased a large empty track of land north of Oakland, which they elected to call "Berkeley" (after the Enlightenment thinker), to erect the main permanent campus. From the outset, the university was non-sectarian and became co-educational from 1870.
California opened for classes in the Fall of 1869, with nine teachers but as yet no president (Civil War general George B. McClellan had been offered the post, but turned it down). A Board of Regents, composed of elected state officials, was set up to govern the university, but was still debating the shape of the university. In the 1868 charter, the University of California envisaged six colleges: Letters, Agriculture, Mechanics, Chemistry, Mining, and Civil Engineering. By the terms of the State's deal with the College of California, the latter college would essentially continue as before, recast the "College of Letters" of the University, and teach a standard academic curriculum in the liberal arts, dominated by classics (Latin, Greek, mathematics, etc.) while the five remaining technical colleges were under construction. But several politicians felt that the compromise was inadequate, and the continuation of archaic curriculum was an affront to the new university's mission of public usefulness. So they made an offer to education reformer Daniel Coit Gilman, then at Yale's Sheffield School, who had set up a pioneering curriculum in modern subjects (natural and applied sciences, modern history, modern languages, geography, international law, economics, etc.). But Gilman was angling for the presidency of Yale itself, and decided to wait until that failed in 1872, to resign from Sheffield and take up California's offer (Henry Durant, the retired head of the College of California. served as interim president until 1872)
After his arrival in 1872, president Gilman promptly set about trying to bring his vision into fruition, appointing more professors and proposed setting up additional professional colleges in Law and Medicine. In emulation of Sheffield, Gilman himself taught a courses in political economy, geography and history in the main college for the first couple of years. The university finally moved from Oakland to its new Berkeley campus in 1873. The Morrill funds only covered establishment of the university, the operating expenses were dependent on appropriations by the State legislature, making the university a political issue of wider interest. Seeking to break the university's dependence on the State, Gilman set about trying to raise an endowment by seeking private donations from the nouveau riche California business community.
But Gilman could not outrun California's politics. From the outset, the California press, notably the San Francisco Evening Post edited by Henry George, decried the fledgling university, noting that the Morrill Act required that it be a technical school, not a school of "polite learning". By "technical" they understood "vocational", and were dissatisfied when Gilman's appointed academic scientists rather than practitioners to head the technical colleges. Their bark was given bite when the "Granger movement", a coalition of farmers organized to fight monopolistic railway rates, erupted in California. The Grangers formed a new political party ("People's Independents") and defeated both Democrats and Republicans in the California state elections of 1873. Denouncing all forms of elitism, the Grangers took aim at the university and Gilman in particular. Gilman's courtship of the California business elites only stoked Granger antagonism, and ensured those same elites kept their wallets closed until the dust settled. The legislature debated seizing control of the university, dismantling all but the agricultural and mechanical colleges, and replacing the appointed Board of Regents with a popularly-elected governing board. The local press (notably George) made sensational allegations of corruption in university building contracts. Although an inquiry by the State legislature in 1874 exonerated the Regents, things did not stabilize. The Granger campaign to bring the university under tighter public control, and and transform it into "a sort of low manual labor school" (Gilman's words), crippled the fund-raising efforts. Concluding that Berkeley's outlook was bleak, Gilman did not have to think twice when the opportunity came up to head a new private university funded by Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and resigned the presidency of California in 1875..
The University limped on, under an interim president, John LeComte, a physician. A German-trained "new generation" historian Bernard Moses was brought in 1876 as Professor of History and Political Science, and took over Gilman's social science load, including economics Nonetheless, the California regents apparently felt there was a need for a separate professor in political economy and seem to have opened a competition for it. San Francisco journalist Henry George threw his hat into the ring, and in 1877 delivered a lecture at Berkeley on the "study of political economy", the kernel of what was to become Progress and Poverty (1879). However, nothing came of this. For the next fifteen years, Bernard Moses taught all the economics, history and jurisprudence courses almost single-handedly. Moses founded the short-lived Berkeley Quarterly in 1880, and carved out the Department of History and Political Science in 1882.
In 1879, the State Constitution of California was amended, and Article IX, Section 9 converted the University of California into a public trust corporation, and guaranteed its continued existence in its original form. Legislative interference was now limited, but not non-existent. The immediate existential threat to the university was lifted, but the situation at Berkeley remained unsettled for the next few decades. The series of weak presidents, many merely acting presidents drawn from the faculty, continued to play a defensive role against the continued interference of heavy-handed California politicians. But the establishment of Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto in the late 1880s.
The "College of Commerce" (future Haas School of Business) was founded in 1898, and Carl Plehn was appointed its first dean. In 1902, the "Flood Endowment", financed by the Bear Gulch Water Company, provided the principal funding ($5m) for Commerce school. In the main Berkeley college, economics was originally taught as part of the "Department of History and Political Science", until it a separate "Department of Economics" was created in 1902 and placed under Adolph C. Miller. A former Berkeley graduate, then at the Univ of Chicago. Millar returned to Berkeley as the new Flood Professor of Economics and head of the department. Miller's former Chicago student Wesley Clair Mitchell joined Berkeley in early 1903 as junior faculty. Moses continued teaching in the History and Political Science departments. Moses's former student Jessica Peixotto, fresh with a new Columbia Ph.D., was appointed lecturer in "social economics" at Berkeley in 1900.
(to be completed)
Early History
Institutional wave
Later 20th Century
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