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University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley (also UCB, Cal, Berkeley, or UC Berkeley) is the oldest campus of the University of California, situated in Berkeley, California on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate. There are over 33,000 students (more than 23,000 undergraduates and almost 10,000 graduates) enrolled and over 1,900 faculty.

  Sather Gate marks the original southern entrance to the campus, now the nothern entrance to Sproul Plaza
Table of contents
1 History
2 The campus
3 Notable buildings
4 Academics
5 Organization

5.1 Chancellors
5.2 Colleges and schools

6 Computer-related developments
7 Sports and traditions
8 Noted Cal alumni

8.1 Nobel laureates
8.2 Academia
8.3 Arts and media
8.4 Business
8.5 Politics and government
8.6 Law
8.7 Turing Award laureates
8.8 Technology
8.9 Athletics
8.10 One of a kind

9 Noted Cal faculty
10 Noted Cal students
11 External links

History

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.

Through the middle decades of the twentieth 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, a relationship which has endured to the present (though not without its strains).

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). The loyalty oath is still required for all employees of the University today, however.

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.

The campus

  View of campus looking north, with Sather Tower and Evans Hall at right, and the Berkeley Hills in the distance. South Hall is the brick building in the foreground.

The overall area of the campus is 1,232 acres (5 km˛), though the main campus, where the academic buidings are located, is on the lower 178 acres (0.7 km˛). The main campus is shaped like a rectangle, with the two long sides running east to west. Except for a few designated open areas, the entire rectangle has been developed. Overlooking the main campus on the east side are several research units, most notably the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Lawrence Hall of Science. Much of the rugged upper hill territory is still undeveloped. Residence halls and administrative buildings spill out into the city of Berkeley, particularly to the south of the campus.

The campus layout was designed by E Benard, the winner of a world-wide competition sponsored by Phoebe Apperson Hearst in the early 1900s.

Notable buildings

The campus and surrounding community host a number of notable buildings by turn-of-the-20th century architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan. Historic buildings on campus include Sproul Hall, Hearst Mining Building, the Faculty Club, Doe Library, California Hall, Gilman Hall, Hilgard Hall, Wheeler Hall, and the Hearst Women's Gymnasium.

University House on the north side of campus is home to chancellor, and the bank in front is landscaped with flowers forming a working clock. Before administrative reorganization and the creation of individual campus chancellors, the UC President resided in University House.

The oldest building on campus is South Hall, built in 1873. Together with North Hall (which was destroyed in a fire), it was one of the first two buildings on campus. The university's tallest building is 307-foot Sather Tower, a bell and clock tower also known as the Campanile (resembling the one in Venice). Sproul Plaza is the main southern entrance to campus, close to bustling Telegraph Avenue and historic Sather Gate.

Evans Hall is the tallest instructional building on the campus, housing primarily the offices of faculty in mathematics, statistics, and economics. It is a gray-green structure rising ten floors above ground. It once held the office of Theodore Kaczynski, assistant professor of mathematics. A student committed suicide by jumping from an open tenth-floor balcony in 2002; following this event, glass panels were installed. Evans is widely considered to be one of the ugliest buildings on campus.

Cory Hall, the electrical engineering building, was the site of two attacks by the Unabomber, former Assistant Professor Ted Kaczynski, in 1982 and 1985. Its neighbor Soda Hall (computer science), is the only classroom building on campus with showers. It was completed in August 1994, at a cost of $35.5 million, raised entirely from private gifts.

Academics

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

Berkeley has graduated more students who would go on to earn doctorates than any other university in the country. Its enrollment of National Merit Scholars is third in the nation.

The University currently boasts 122 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 86 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 8 Nobel Prize winners, 2 Fields Medal holders, 138 Guggenheim Fellows, 81 Fulbright Scholars, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 19 MacArthur Fellows, 62 Sloan Fellows among a bevy of distinguished faculty.

According to the National Research Council, Berkeley ranks first nationally in the number of graduate programs in the top 10 in their fields and first nationally in the number of "distinguished" programs for the scholarship of the faculty.

With about nine million volumes, University of California's library holdings rank fourth in North America, after the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Yale University.

Organization

 

Chancellors

Here is a full list of Chancellors since the position was created in 1952:

  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-present)

See also: List of UC Presidents

Colleges and schools

  Haas School of Business

Berkeley's more than 130 academic departments and programs are organized into 14 colleges and schools:

  • Haas School of Business
  • College of Chemistry
  • Graduate School of Education
  • College of Engineering
  • College of Environmenal Design
  • School of Information Management
  • Graduate School of Journalism
  • Law School (Boalt Hall)
  • College of Letters and Science
  • College of Natural Resources
  • School of Optometry
  • School of Public Health
  • Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy
  • School of Social Welfare

Computer-related developments

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. 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.

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.

In 1992, Pei-Yuan Wei, an undergraduate, 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 Supercomputer 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:

  • Daedalus project - Combine intelligent adaptive applications with smart networking software that can multiplex connections over a wide variety of different networking technologies.
  • Digital library project
  • GiST - A Generalized Search Tree for Secondary Storage
  • Harmonia research project - open interactive programming tools
  • Sather - Object oriented language derivered from Eiffel programming language
  • Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System - Instructional software for teaching undergraduate, and potentially graduate, level operating systems courses.

Sports and traditions

 

Cal's sports teams compete as the California Golden Bears (often referred to as "Cal"). They participate in the NCAA's Division I-A, and in the Pacific Ten Conference. The annual football "Big Game" between the Bears and the rival Stanford Cardinal is the most important game on Cal's schedule. The winner of this game gains custody of the Axe.

Cal's independent student-run newspaper is the Daily Californian.

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, which is in charge of most aspects of the Cal Spirit.

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.

 

The official mascot is Oski T. 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.

The Associated Students of the University of California, or ASUC, is the student government organization that controls funding for student groups and organizes on-campus student events.

Noted Cal alumni

(Alumni who also served as faculty are listed in bold font, with degree and year in parenthesis)

Nobel laureates

Academia

  • Josiah Royce, 1875 - philosopher, professor at Harvard University
  • T. Y. Lin (M.S. 1933) - Professor of Civil Engineering, bridgebuilder
  • Kenneth Pitzer (Ph.D. 1937) - Dean of the College of Chemistry (1951-60), Professor of Chemistry, President of Rice University and Stanford University
  • Clark Kerr (Ph.D. 1939) - Professor of Industrial Relations, Chancellor (1952-58), UC President (1958-67)
  • Chien-Shiung Wu, Ph.D 1940 - physicist
  • Robert E. Connick (Ph.D. 1942) - professor of chemistry, dean of college of chemistry, vice-chancellor
  • John Bahcall, 1956 - physicist, co-winner of the Fermi award in 2003
  • Maxine Hong Kingston (B.A. 1962) - author, Senior Lecturer

Arts and media

Business

Politics and government

Law

Turing Award laureates

Technology

Athletics

  • Jackie Jensen, 1950 - professional baseball player
  • Joe Kapp, 1959 - professional football player
  • Leigh Steinberg, 1970, J.D. 1973 - sports agent
  • Kevin Johnson, 1987 - professional basketball player
  • Mary T. Meagher, 1987 - Olympic swimmer, winner of 3 gold medals
  • Matt Biondi, 1988 - Three-time Olympian, winner of 8 gold medals

One of a kind

Noted Cal faculty

(Faculty who were also alumni are listed above in bold.)

 
  • George A. Akerlof - Nobel laureate (2001, economics), Professor of Economics
  • Luis W. Alvarez - Nobel laureate (1968, physics), Professor of Physics
  • Walter Alvarez - Professor of Geology
  • Richard Borcherds - Fields medal holder, Professor of Mathematics
  • Melvin Calvin - Nobel laureate (1961, chemistry), University Professor of Chemistry, discovered Calvin Cycle
  • Owen Chamberlain - Nobel laureate (1959, physics), Professor of Physics
  • Donald Davidson - philosopher, Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy
  • Gerard Debreu - Nobel laureate (1983, economics), Professor of Economics and of Mathematics
  • Donald A. Glaser - Nobel laureate (1950, physics), Professor of Molecular Biology and of Physics
  • John C. Harsanyi - Nobel laureate (1994, economics)
  • Robert Hass - U.S. Poet Laureate, Professor of English
  • Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber, Assistant Professor of Math
  • William Kahan - recipient of the 1989 Turing Award
  • Alfred Kroeber - professor of anthropology
  • Ernest O. Lawrence - Nobel laureate (1939, physics)
  • G.N. Lewis - Dean of the College of Chemistry, professor of physical chemistry
  • Bernard Maybeck - drawing instructor (1894), professor of architecture (1898-1903)
  • Edwin M. McMillan - Nobel laureate (1951, chemistry), Professor of Physics, Director, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
  • Daniel L. McFadden - Nobel laureate (2000, economics)
  • Czeslaw Milosz - Nobel laureate (1980, literature), Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Emeritus
  • John H. Northrop - Nobel laureate (1946, chemistry)
  • Robert Oppenheimer - Professor of Physics, Director of Manhattan Project
  • Andreas Papandreou - Professor and Chair of Economics, Prime Minister of Greece
  • Ken Ribet - Professor of Mathematics, contributor to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
  • Emilio G. Segrč - Nobel laureate (1959, physics), Professor of Physics, Emeritus
  • Julian Schwinger - theoretical physicist, National Research fellow
  • Wendell M. Stanley - Nobel laureate (1946, chemistry)
  • Edward Teller - "father" of the Hydrogen bomb, Professor of Physics
  • Chang-Lin Tien - University Professor (UC system), NEC Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Chancellor of Berkeley campus (1990-1997)
  • Charles H. Townes - Nobel laureate (1964, physics), University Professor of Physics

Noted Cal students

External links


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