University of California-Berkeley history

Ten faculty members and 40 male students made up the fledgling university when it opened in Oakland in 1869.

In 1870, Henry Durant, founder of the College of California, became its first president.

With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students.

In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, Davis.

The city’s population surged after many people fled San Francisco following the devastating 1906 earthquake.

In 1917, one of the nation's first ROTC programs was established at Berkeley and its School of Military Aeronautics began training pilots, including Gen.

In 1926, future Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval ROTC unit at Berkeley.

Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942.

In 1948, they formed the California Alumni Foundation.

In 1952, the University of California reorganized itself into a system of semi-autonomous campuses, with each campus given a chancellor, and Clark Kerr became Berkeley's first Chancellor, while Sproul remained in place as the President of the University of California.

In fall 1963 he matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, and became a philosophy major.

Devoting himself to the civil rights movement, Savio joined the small army of college-age volunteers who traveled to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and witnessed the violence of white supremacy at close quarters.

In 1975, this was renamed the UC Berkeley Foundation and took on the responsibility for raising private funds.

In 1982, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) was established on campus with support from the National Science Foundation and at the request of three Berkeley mathematicians — Shiing-Shen Chern, Calvin Moore, and Isadore M. Singer.

He then embarked on a career in higher education, teaching at San Francisco State, Modesto Junior College, and finally, beginning in 1990, Sonoma State University.

In 1998 the University of California, Berkeley, honoured Savio and the FSM by creating a library endowment in his name and establishing an archive of the movement in the university’s Bancroft Library.

Since 2000, Berkeley alumni and faculty have received 44 Nobel Prizes, behind only Harvard and MIT among American universities; five Turing Awards, behind only MIT and Stanford; and five Fields Medals, second only to Princeton.

In 2007, the Energy Biosciences Institute was established with funding from BP and Stanley Hall, a research facility and headquarters for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, opened.