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University of California, Berkeley

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Template:UC taxobox The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UCB, UC Berkeley, The University of California, California, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. The oldest and flagship campus of the University of California system, Berkeley is consistently ranked as the best public university in United States and is known for the distinction of its faculty, libraries, and research.

Founded in 1868, Berkeley enjoyed a golden age in the physical, chemical, and biological sciences in the 20th Century, leading to the development of the first cyclotron by Ernest O. Lawrence, the isolation of the human polio virus, and the discovery of numerous elements, including Plutonium, Berkelium, and Californium. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to nineteen past and present faculty, among the 54 Nobel laureates associated with the university. The campus gained attention worldwide with the birth of the Free Speech Movement and student protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War, significantly defining the 1960s in America. Later developments include a number of key technologies associated with the development of the Internet, BSD Unix, and the Open Source Software movement.

History

File:Berkeley1940.jpeg
U.C. Berkeley campus circa 1940

In 1866, the land which is now the Berkeley campus was first purchased by the private College of California (established by Congregational minister Henry Durant in 1855). However, lacking the funds to operate, the College of California merged with state-run Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College, forming the University of California on March 23, 1868, with Durant becoming the first president. The university first opened in Oakland in 1869. In 1873, with the completion of North and South Halls, the university relocated to the Berkeley campus with 167 men and 222 women students enrolled. (Note that Berkeley is not the oldest public university in California; that honor belongs to San Jose State University.)

Through the middle decades of the 20th century, the Berkeley campus enjoyed a golden age in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. During that period, with Professor Ernest O. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron, researchers affiliated with the campus discovered a great number of chemical elements heavier than uranium, the only ones known at that time, garnering a number of Nobel Prizes for these efforts along the way. Two of the elements, Berkelium and Californium, were named in honor of the university. Another two, Lawrencium and Seaborgium, were named in honor of faculty members Ernest O. Lawrence and Glenn T. Seaborg.

During World War II, Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in the hills above Berkeley began to contract with the U.S. Army in efforts to help understand the fundamental science needed to develop the atomic bomb (including the then-secret discovery of plutonium by Seaborg). Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. The University agreed to manage the project without knowing its purpose the same year, beginning a relationship with the Department of Defense which has endured to the present. Room 307 of Gilman Hall, where Seaborg discovered plutonium, is now a National Historic Landmark. Two other University of California managed labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, were established during this time period.

During the McCarthy era in 1949, the Board of Regents adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath to be signed by all University of California employees. A number of faculty members firmly took a stand against the oath requirement and were eventually dismissed. They were reinstated with full honor and back-pay ten years later; one of them, Edward C. Tolman — the noted comparative psychologist — now has a building on the campus named after him (it houses the departments of psychology and education). An oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic" is still required by all UC employees.

In 1952 the University of California became an entity separate from the Berkeley campus as part of a major restructuring of the UC system, and each campus was given its own Chancellor, and greater autonomy.

1962 ushered in a new day for people with disabilities when Ed Roberts became a student. He would found the Independent Living movement with other wheelchair users while on campus.

The University gained notoriety worldwide nearly a century after its founding for the student body's active protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. This period of social unrest on campus could be traced to the Free Speech Movement, which originated on the Berkeley campus in 1964 and inspired the political and moral outlook of a generation.

Today, the majority of students at UC Berkeley are less politically active than their predecessors and have political opinions similar to students at most other American universities. However, a small number of outspoken radical groups continue to flourish and thrive.

Reputation and Academics

According to the National Research Council, Berkeley ranks 1st nationally in the number of graduate programs in the top 10 in their fields (97 percent) and 1st nationally in the number of "distinguished" programs for the scholarship of the faculty (32 programs). Similarly, Berkeley is the only university in the nation to have all of its PhD programs ranked in the top five by US News and World Report. US News also consistantly ranks Berkeley as the top public university in the country and in the top three overall for both of the ranked undergraduate programs, Business and Engineering.

The north side of Doe Library with Memorial Glade in the foreground.

World Universities Rankings performed in 2004 by the UK Times Higher Education Supplement named Berkeley No. 2 in the world overall. Similar rankings by Shanghai Jiaotong University Institute for Higher Education place Berkeley as fouth in the world.

Berkeley has graduated more students who go on to earn doctorates than any other university in the United States, and its enrollment of National Merit Scholars was third in the nation prior to 2002, when participation in the National Merit program was discontinued. With more than 7,000 courses in nearly 300 degree programs, the university awards about 5,500 bachelor's degrees, 2,000 master's degrees, 900 doctorates and 200 law degrees each year.


The University's library system houses nearly 10 million volumes, spread over 32 departmental (and affiliated) libraries. Its library is ranked third in North America by the Association for Research Libraries after Harvard University and Yale University.


A Free Speech Movement Rally on their way to Sproul Plaza, the center of student activism.

UC Berkeley has a reputation for student activism. Although there are claims that the university’s students have become politically apathetic and civically disengaged in the decades since the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War, there are also counter-claims that today’s campus activism spans a broader range of causes (making it appear more dispersed) and utilizes new approaches, such as e-mail networks and listservs.

Beginning in 1996, California Proposition 209, which ended Affirmative Action in California and the University of California system, and its subsequent impact on the campus population of African American, Latino, and Native American students helped to rekindle activism around issues of race. In this instance, reaction came not only from students, but also from alumni. Four alums established the IDEAL Scholars Fund to increase the number of qualified, underrepresented students of color at UC Berkeley.

Other creative protests included those in support of Professor Ignacio Chapela in his campaign for "tenure justice” against claims of undue influence from Novartis and the biotechnology industry. Chapela was eventually granted tenure.

Campus architecture and architects

Memorial Glade, at the center of the Berkeley campus.

The campus is 1,232 acres (5 km²) in its entirety, though the main campus is on the western 178 acres (0.7 km²). Despite its urban setting, the campus manages to maintain a surprisingly park-like atmosphere, crossed by two creeks and including the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America. Overlooking the main campus on the east side are several research units, most notably the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Space Sciences Laboratory, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and the Lawrence Hall of Science. Much of the rugged upper hill territory is still undeveloped. Residential Halls and administrative buildings spill out into the city of Berkeley, particularly to the south of the campus.

The campus and its surrounding community are home to a number of notable buildings by early 20th century campus architect John Galen Howard, his peer Bernard Maybeck (best known for the Palace of Fine Arts), and Maybeck's student, Julia Morgan. Later buildings were designed by prominent architects such as Charles Willard Moore (Haas School of Business) and Joseph Esherick (Wurster Hall).

Very little of the early University of California (c. 1868–1903) remains, with the Victorian Second Empire style South Hall (1873) and Piedmont Avenue (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted) being notable exceptions. What is considered the historic campus today was the eventual result of the 1898 "International Competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California," funded by the mother of William Randolph Hearst and initially held in the Belgian city of Antwerp (eleven finalists were judged again in San Francisco, 1899). This unprecedented competition came about from one-upmanship between the prominent Hearst and Stanford families of the Bay Area. In response to the founding of Stanford University, the Hearst Family decided to "adopt" the fledgling University of California and develop their own world-class institution. Although a Frenchman, Emile Bénard, won the competition, he disliked the "uncultured" San Francisco atmosphere and refused to revise and oversee the plan. He was replaced by the fourth place winner John Galen Howard, who would later become UC Berkeley's resident campus architect. Only University House, designed by architect Albert Pissis and then home to the President of the University of California, was placed according to the Bénard plan (it is today the home of UC Berkeley's Chancellor).

Sather Gate marks the original southern entrance to the campus, and now the entrance from Sproul Plaza

Much of the older campus is built in the stately Beaux-Arts Classical style, which was regarded as the most cultured, beautiful, and "scientific" style by the cultural establishment at the time of the competition, and thus was the style preferred by John Galen Howard and Phoebe Hearst (who paid his salary). With the support of University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Howard designed over twenty buildings, which set the tone for campus up until it post-World War II expansion in the 1950s and 60s. These included the Hearst Greek Theatre, the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Doe Memorial Library, California Hall, Wheeler Hall, (Old) Le Conte Hall, Gilman Hall, Haviland Hall, Wellman Hall, Sather Gate, and the 307-foot Sather Tower (nicknamed "the Campanile" after St. Mark's Campanile in Venice). Buildings he regarded as temporary, non-academic, or not particularly "serious" were designed in shingle or Collegiate Gothic styles, such as North Gate Hall, Dwinelle Annex, and Stephens Hall.

This collection of buildings (Founders' Rock, University House, Faculty Club and Glade, Hearst Greek Theatre, Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Doe Library, Sather Tower and Esplanade, Sather Gate and Bridge, Hearst Gymnasium, California, Durant, Wellman, Hilgard, Giannini, Wheeler, North Gate and South Halls), collectively are a California Historical Landmark and are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Bowles Hall—built in 1928—is California's oldest state-owned dormitory and is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

John Galen Howard retired in 1924, his support base gone with both Phoebe Hearst's death and President Wheeler's resignation in 1919. William Randolph Hearst, seeking to memorialize his mother, contributed to Howard's resignation by commissioning Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan to design a series of dramatic buildings on the southern part of the campus. These were originally to include a huge domed auditorium, a museum, an art school, and a women's gymnasium, all arranged on an eastward esplanade and classically oriented towards the campanile. However, only the Hearst Women's Gymnasium was completed before the Great Depression, at which point Hearst decided to focus on his estate at San Simeon instead.

View of campus looking north, with Evans Hall and Sather Tower on the right. South Hall is the brick building in the center.

The dramatic increase in enrollment during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s led to the rapid expansion of the campus, beginning with the University's appropriation of the north end of Telegraph Avenue to form Sproul Plaza and headed on its east side by Sproul Hall, a new neoclassical building for the campus administration. However, the administration moved out of Sproul and into California Hall, situated in the heart of campus, after students barricaded themselves in Sproul during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. (Today, Sproul Hall houses Student Services and the Admissions Office, and Sproul Plaza is the center of student activities.) A series of huge Brutalist concrete buildings were also built to provide much-needed housing, lab, office, and classroom space, including Evans Hall, Cory Hall, Wurster Hall, Davis Hall, McCone Hall, Zellerbach Hall, the undergraduate dorms Units 1, 2, and 3, and others.

Gray-green Evans Hall is the tallest instructional building on the campus and houses the offices of faculty in mathematics, statistics, and economics, which once included former Assistant Professor of Mathematics Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Students widely revile Evans as the ugliest building on campus, with the possible exception of Wurster Hall. (Ironically, Wurster Hall is the building that houses UC Berkeley's architecture department.) The most recent campus development plan lists Evans Hall as a candidate for demolition within the next fifteen years. Cory Hall, the electrical engineering building, was the site of two attacks by the Unabomber in 1982 and 1985. Its neighbor Soda Hall (computer science) is one of the few classroom buildings on campus with showers. It was completed in August 1994, at the cost of $35.5 million, raised entirely from private gifts. Dwinelle Hall is another large building on campus; its rooms are strangely numbered both because Dwinelle Hall was built on a slope, with entrances on different levels, and because expansion wings were numbered differently from the original building. Because this confusing building is host to both large lower-division lecture classes and many smaller discussion classes, it is sometimes called the "freshman maze."

Underneath UC Berkeley's oldest buildings is a system of steam tunnels which carry steam to those buildings for heat and power. During the 1960s, Berkeley students chained the doorknobs of the Chancellor's office in protest over the Vietnam War. The Chancellor, having no other way in or out of the building, used the steam tunnels to escape. Afterwards, the exterior double doors on that building were changed so they only had one doorknob, and this remains today.

Recent developments include the newly completed Jean Hargrove Music Library, only the fourth free-standing music library to be constructed in the United States. Current major construction projects include the first free-standing buildings to be devoted to East Asian Studies in the United States, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library and the Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies, designed by noted architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien; the former has broken ground and is scheduled for completion in Fall 2007. The headquarters building for CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) broke ground in 2004 and is expected to be completed in 2007; it will include nanofabrication facilities, labs, and classrooms. Finally, the massive 285,000 square foot Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility will be completed in mid-2006; oriented towards health-related interdisciplinary research, three-quarters of the building is devoted to labs and specialized facilities while one-quarter will be office and instructional facilities.

Organization

Chancellors

The position of Chancellor was created in 1952 during the reorganization and expansion of the University of California; there have since been nine inaugurated chancellors (1 was acting chancellor):

  1. Clark Kerr (1952–1958)
  2. Glenn T. Seaborg (1958–1961)
  3. Edward W. Strong (1961–1965)
  4. Martin E. Meyerson (1965, acting)
  5. Roger W. Heyns (1965–1971)
  6. Albert H. Bowker (1971–1980)
  7. Ira Michael Heyman (1980–1990)
  8. Chang-Lin Tien (1990–1997)
  9. Robert M. Berdahl (1997–2004)
  10. Robert J. Birgeneau (2004–present)

Colleges and schools

Haas School of Business

Berkeley's 130-plus academic departments and programs are organized into 14 colleges and schools. ("Colleges" are both undergraduate and graduate, while "Schools" are graduate-only, the exception being the School of Business.):

Contributions to computer science

Cal has nurtured a number of key technologies associated with the early development of the Internet and the Open Source Software movement. The original Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD Unix, was assembled in 1977 by Bill Joy as a graduate student in the computer science department. Bill Joy also developed the original version of vi. PostgreSQL emerged from faculty research begun in the late 1970s. Sendmail was developed at Berkeley in 1981. BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain package) was written by a team of graduate students around the same time period. The Tcl programming language and the Tk GUI toolkit were developed by faculty member John Ousterhout in 1988. SPICE and espresso, popular tools for IC Designers, were also invented at Berkeley under the direction of Professor Donald Pederson. The RAID and RISC technologies were both developed at Berkeley under David Patterson.

Perhaps the most pervasive contribution to computing from UCB has been the algorithms and analysis of floating-point arithmetic, led by Professor William Kahan. These include extensive and ongoing contributions to the IEEE 754 standard.

The XCF, an undergraduate research group now located in Soda Hall, has been responsible for a number of notable software projects, including GTK+, The GIMP, and the initial diagnosis of the Morris worm. In 1992, Pei-Yuan Wei, an undergraduate at the XCF, created ViolaWWW, one of the first graphically-based web browsers. ViolaWWW was the first browser to have embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. In the spirit of Open Source, he merely donated the code to Sun Microsystems, thus inspiring Java applets. ViolaWWW would also inspire researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to create the Mosaic web browser.

SETI@home was one of the first widely disseminated distributed computing projects, allowing hobbyists and enthusiasts to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer processor cycles in the form of a screen saver.

In an interesting example of the confluence of intellectual ideas, many of the arguments for the efficacy of Open Source software development, and of the Wikipedia project itself, find parallels in writings on urban planning and architecture published in the late 1970s by Christopher Alexander, a Berkeley professor of architecture. Across campus around that same time period, John Searle, a Berkeley professor of philosophy, introduced a celebrated critique of artificial intelligence using the metaphor of a Chinese Room.

List of research projects conducted at Berkeley:

Sports and traditions

File:Cal-logo.gif
Cal Logo
Rally Committee running Cal flags across the Memorial Stadium field at the 2002 Big Game. (Note the Stanford visitors section on the left and the Cal alumni section on the right.)

Cal's sports teams compete as the California Golden Bears. They participate in the NCAA's Division I-A, and in the Pacific Ten Conference. The annual football Big Game between the Bears and their rivals the Stanford Cardinal is the most important game on Cal's schedule. The winner of this game gains custody of the Axe. The Play, one of the most dramatic last-minute plays in college football history, occurred on November 20, 1982, in the 85th Big Game.

Berkeley's current football coach, Jeff Tedford, has led the team to some of the most successful campaigns in the school's history. Indeed, seen on campus, variously, have been shirts saying "Ted Heads," "Tedford for President," and "Tedford is God."

Berkeley's main athletic venues, Memorial Stadium and Haas Pavilion, rank as some of the best college sports facilities in the nation. The Stadium, built to model the Colosseum in Rome, is consistently ranked as one of the best views by Sports Illustrated.

Across the street is Witter Rugby Field, home to Cal's varsity rugby team, the oldest varsity team on campus (they were founded in 1886). The Bears, coached by alumnus and campus legend Jack Clark, are utterly dominant on the American university rugby scene, once winning 12 consecutive national titles. Overall, the Bears have won the national championship 21 times since it was first awarded in 1980, and won the national championship in 2005.

In basketball, Haas Pavilion, donated in part by the owners of Levi-Straus and built on top of the old Harmon Gymnasium, is considered one of the most intimidating environments for visiting teams.

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The Haas Pavilion.

Close to Haas Pavilion is Edwards stadium. This is where the Cal track team practices and competes. The University of California Marching Band has served the university since 1891, and performs at every football game and many other sports games and spirit activities. The university also has a Rally Committee, formed in 1901, the members of which have served as the official guardians of Cal Spirit ever since. RallyComm wears traditional blue and gold rugbies.

The official school colors, Yale Blue and California Gold, were established in 1874. Yale Blue was chosen because most of the original faculty were Yale University graduates. Gold was selected to represent the Golden State of California.

The official mascot is Oski the Bear, who first debuted in 1941. Previously, live bear cubs were used as mascots at Memorial Stadium. It was decided in 1940 that a costumed mascot would be a better alternative to a live bear. Named after the Oski-wow-wow yell, he is cared for by the Oski Committee. The wearer of the costume is kept a secret. It is the tradition to have the basketball player with the largest feet donate his shoes for Oski to wear.

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The Edwards Stadium.

Cal's independent student-run

newspaper is the Daily Californian. Founded in 1871, The Daily Cal became independent in 1971 after the campus administration fired three senior editors for encouraging readers to take back People's Park. Cal's student-run radio station, KALX-FM, broadcasts on 90.7 MHz.

The annual summer orientation for incoming freshmen is called CalSO, short for Cal Student Orientation.

The Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) is the student government organization that controls funding for student groups and organizes on-campus student events. It is currently the only autonomous student government in any public U.S. university.

New Construction and Development

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Artist rendering of the Stanley Hall interdisciplinary center.

In Mid-2006 the new Stanley Hall, named after the 1946 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is planned to open its doors. It will house the headquarters of the California Institute for Quantitative Biology and will serve as a center for interdisciplinary teaching and research as part of the campus Health Sciences Initiative. Designed by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, the 285,000 sq. ft. building will contain 40 laboratories, a 300-seat auditorium, state-of-the-art audio visual technology, and one of the world's largest magnets. The 11 story structure was designed to be at the intersection of innovation and history - with a stone facade similar to the buildings on central campus.

File:Tien Center.gif
Tien Center for East Asian Studies.

The new portion of Davis Hall will serve as the headquarters for the Center for Information Technology Reasearch in the Interst of Society (CITRIS). Estimated at 185,000 sq. ft., the building will support a 'broad array of projects, from information systems for emergency and disaster response in an earthquake to life-saving medical alert sensors, to "smart" buildings thatautomatically adjust their internal environments, to save energy and reduce pollution.'

The Tien Center for East Asian Stuides, named for one of the campuses most beloved chancellors, will contain two facilities - the C.V. Starr East Asian Stuides Library and the Institute of East Asian studies - that will make Berkeley one of the preeminent research centers on the subject. The library will house one of the two largest collections of East Asian materials in the world outside of the Library of Congress.

Lists of distinguished Berkeley people

The University of California, Berkeley faculty currently boasts 221 American Academy of Arts & Sciences Fellows, 3 Fields Medal holders, 83 Fulbright Scholars, 139 Guggenheim Fellows, 11 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 28 MacArthur Fellows, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 128 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 84 Sloan Fellows, and 7 Wolf Prize winners.

Research facilities

Points of interest

Further reading

  • Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, Berkeley Landmarks. An Illustrated Guide to Berkeley, California's Architectural Heritage. Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, 2001, ISBN 0-970-667604
  • Jo Freeman, At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965. Indiana University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-253-216222
  • Harvey Helfand, University of California, Berkeley. Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, ISBN 1-568-982933
  • W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s. Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-195-066677
  • Geoffrey Wong, A Golden State of Mind. Trafford Publishing, ISBN 1-552-126358
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Berkeley.

Official websites

Other

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