History of the University of California, Los Angeles
Encyclopedia
The History of University of California, Los Angeles
begins in 1919, when the Southern Branch of the University of California, which was created by the State Legislature, took over the facilities of Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School
. After moving to its new campus in Westwood
in 1929, it was renamed UCLA and has since expanded to become a leading world university.
authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School
in downtown Los Angeles
to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California
. The State Normal School
at Los Angeles opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library
system. The new facility included an elementary school
where teachers-in-training could practice their teaching technique on real children. In 1887, the school became known as the Los Angeles State Normal School.
In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue in Hollywood. In 1917, UC Regent Edward A. Dickson, the only regent representing the Southland at the time, and Ernest Carroll Moore, Director of the Normal School, began working together to lobby the State for the second University of California
campus, after Berkeley
. On May 23, 1919, their efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens
signed Assembly Bill 626 into law, which turned the school facilities into the Southern Branch of the University of California and added its general undergraduate program, the College of Letters and Science. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year, offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Letters and Science students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College, under Moore's continued direction. The school newspaper Cub Californian, athletics, student government, and Greek chapters were quickly organized in the first year at the Vermont location.
Enrollment expanded so rapidly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the 25 acres (101,171.5 m²) Vermont Avenue location by 3000 students. The Regents conducted a search for a new location and announced their selection of the "Beverly Site"—in an as yet undeveloped 383 acres (1.5 km²) area just west of Beverly Hills
—on March 21, 1925. As the Regents decreed the new site must be a gift or come without cost, the owners of the estate, the Janss brothers
, agreed to sell the property for approximately $1 million, less than one-third the land's value. Municipal bond measures passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a state bond measure passed that year, provided $3 million for new campus construction (as well as 3 million for construction at Berkeley).
The athletic teams entered the Pacific Coast Conference
in 1926, under the name "Grizzlies," but after it was pointed out that the University of Montana played under this name much inconclusive debate took place over what the new campus mascot should be. In 1927, the student council adopted the nickname "Bruins", a name offered by the student council at Berkeley. That same year, the Regents renamed the school itself the "University of California at Los Angeles." (The word "at" was officially replaced by a comma
in 1958.)
Dr. Moore broke ground on the new campus in Westwood
on September 27, 1927. The original four buildings were the College Library, Royce Hall
, the Physics-Biology Building, and the Chemistry Building (presently Powell Library
, Royce Hall, the Humanities Building, and Haines Hall, respectively), arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard on the 400 acre (1.6 km²) campus. George W. Kelham
of San Francisco was the supervising architect, assisted by David Allison of the Los Angeles firm Allison & Allison
. Allison, who was also the designer of the Vermont Avenue campus, envisioned the Romanesque
style of the Westwood campus. The neighboring communities of Westwood Village and Bel Air were developed alongside the university. (The original Vermont campus became home to Los Angeles City College
.)
The first undergraduate classes on the new campus were held in 1929 with 5,500 students. (Glenn T. Seaborg
was a member.) Also in 1929, the Bruin and Trojan football teams met for the first time, with the Bruins losing 76-0. The first building dedicated to housing was built in the early 1930s. Titled Hershey Hall, the building was named after Almira Hershey
who willed $300,000 to UCLA to have the dorm built. The emergence of the Great Depression
slowed down but did not halt UCLA's development. A Southern section of the UC faculty Academic Senate was voted on in 1931 and organized in 1932. In 1933, after intense lobbying by alumni, faculty, administration and community leaders, UCLA was permitted to award the Master's degree
, and in 1936, the doctorate
, against resistance from Berkeley.
The UCLA student body in those years quickly gained a radical reputation. In 1934, Provost Ernest Moore declared UCLA "the worst hotbed of communism
in the U.S", and suspended five members of the ASUCLA student government for allegedly "using their offices to assist the revolutionary activities of the National Student League, a Communist organization which has bedeviled the University for some months." The incident leading to this action was the student government's negotiation of a request by Celeste Strack, student member of the NSL, to hold a student forum on issues pertaining to the upcoming gubernatorial contest, after Moore had already refused her and requested ASCULA not to entertain her request. Over 3,000 students gathered to protest in Royce Quad, and a campus police officer, attempting to silence the speakers, was thrown into some bushes. The crowd dispersed before any arrests were made, and University President Robert Sproul
later reinstated the students, but not before a vigilante group of 150 athletes calling themselves "UCLA Americans" had formed, pledging to "purge the campus of radicals."
In 1934, UCLA received its first major bequest—still one of the most generous in its history—the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
. The rare books and manuscripts collection includes some of the world's largest collections of English literature, history, and fine printing.
The enrichment of the library and development of graduate studies allowed for additional colleges and professional schools at UCLA. The College of Commerce (later the graduate School of Business Administration) was established in 1935. In 1939 the School of Education replaced the Teachers College, and the College of Applied Arts (later the College of Fine Arts) was established.
immediately put the campus on a wartime basis. Faculty adjusted the curriculum and academic schedule to assist students entering military service. A student defense committee, later called the Student War Board, was organized to coordinate emergency services. Japanese-American students issued a statement that read, "None of us have known loyalty to any country than America. We stand ready with other Americans to act in whatever capacity we may be called upon to perform in order to carry out the resolution of our government.".
President Sproul immediately established a University War Council, and with the year an "Engineering, Science and Management War Training" program in industrial sciences was established at UCLA, which trained workers in defense industries. UCLA became responsible for Project 36 of the Manhattan Project
, that of purchasing and inspecting equipment for the scientists at Los Alamos. In conjunction with these projects, the UCLA College of Engineering was established in 1943.
Enrollment in ROTC, which had been established early in UCLA's history (1920) and accommodated for more the one third of the male student body by 1940, actually tapered off through the 1940s, in favor of development of special units. These were:
Male enrollment at UCLA dropped from 5107 before the war to 2407 the year after. When Provost Earl Hendrick, UCLA's chief executive officer at the time, resigned in 1942, no new provost was appointed to replace him, and UCLA was administered by an interim faculty committee until 1945. Fraternity houses became cadets quarters. Athletic programs continued but were curtailed. Gasoline was rationed, and many drove to and from campus in car pools. Blood drives, scrap collections, War bond
sales, and fruit harvesting became normal extracurricular activities. Students and faculty planted vegetable "Victory Gardens" as a way to be patriotic and relieve scarcity.
A service banner hung for 4 years in Kerckhoff Hall. By the end of the war on Tuesday, August 15, 1945, it held 5,702 stars, of which 151 were gold for the Bruins who lost their lives. (These totals, however, were inaccurate. Actual totals were higher.)
, once spanned by an elegant bridge between Royce quad and the administration building, was filled in with 400000 cubic yards (305,821.9 m³) of earth to create 26 acres (105,218.4 m²) additional of usable land, upon which Schoenberg Hall, the Architecture building, Bunche Hall, and the Murphy Sculpture Garden were eventually built. The last Allison-designed building constructed was the Business and Economics building, which later became the Social Welfare building. In 1948, Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket succeeded Allison as chief architects, and as Italian Romanesque was considered too expensive, further construction on campus took on a more modern tone, although elements of Alison's architecture, the brick walls, tile roofs and stone trim, were retained throughout.
In conjunction with the building boom, the UCLA Medical and Law Schools were established in 1946 and 1947, respectively. The department of Theater Arts was also established in 1947. By 1950, the number of veterans began to decline, but total student enrollment reached a new high of 14,318 students.
in the late 1940s, the UC system became suspected of harboring un-American activities. The Regents on March 25, 1949 had adopted a policy which required all faculty and staff to swear a loyalty oath
that disavowed membership in the Communist Party. At a special session of the UC Academic Senate's Northern Section, Dr. Edward C. Tolman
argued that the policy violated academic freedom
and should be rescinded. The Senate, however, voted to request that the controversial oath be "deleted or revised." By August 1950, 36 faculty of Senate rank and 62 non-Senate UC employees were dismissed for refusing to sign the loyalty oath, including three from UCLA: Dr. John Caughey, History; Dr. Charles L. Mowat, History; and Dr. David S. Saxon, Physics. (While the state Supreme Court, in 1952's Tolman vs. Underhill, decided that the Regents did not had the power to compel loyalty oaths, in a separate case decided the same day it affirmed the power of the Legislature to require loyalty oaths of all state employees, and ordered the faculty non-signers to be reinstated only on the condition they sign the state's oath.)
On Oct 21, 1950, William Worden, a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post, published "UCLA's Red Cell: Case History of College Communism," which documented the efforts and methods of leftist student activists to control meetings, propagandize the Daily Bruin
, distribute literature, file charges of racial discrimination, organize picket lines and incite riots. While Worden estimated that only one out of 400 UCLA students were involved in such practices, the only faculty member the California Un-American Activities Committee discovered to have been a member of the Communist party was a woman who played piano for physical education classes in the women's gym.
In response to these controversies, after Provost Dykstra died in 1950, the Regents sought to install someone who would dispel the "hotbed of Communism" stigma at UCLA. After an 18-month search, the Regents selected Dr. Raymond B. Allen, head of the Psychological Strategy Board
in Washington, D.C.. Formerly the president of University of Washington
, he was noted for having purged three Communist staff there in the late 1940s. His philosophy of academic freedom:
Allen was also selected because he held an MD and had organized the schools of medicine and dentistry at UW. As the UCLA Medical Center, the largest single building project in UC history at that time, was being constructed, three allied schools of Nursing, Dentistry, and Public Health were also initiated.
Up until the mid-50s, postwar construction had been financed on tax surpluses accumulated during World War II and the Korean War
. After those surpluses ran out, further construction was financed on state bond issues. However, the state at that time would not finance student housing, and UCLA comprised 17,000 students with only Hershey Hall (originally constructed in 1930 as a 129 bed women's dorm) accommodating any students on campus. So the Regents floated a loan from the federal government to build Dykstra Hall and Sproul Hall on the hill west of the athletic fields. They opened in 1959 and 1960, respectively. The UCLA Faculty Club assessed their membership $100 apiece and floated a loan from the Regents to build the Faculty Center, which was completed in 1959. Ackerman Union was also built from a Regents loan paid for by fees self-assessed by students in this period.
, one of the nation's first large computers, powered by vacuum tubes, was built at UCLA in 1950. IBM established the Western Data Processing Center at UCLA in 1956, an early support and regional training center for the use of computers for quantitative research. Other primitive computers obtained by the Center for Health Sciences and Department of Engineering were linked with SWAC to form an early Campus Computing Network.
The library was also built up to 1,500,000 volumes, twelfth largest in the United States, and specialized branch libraries began to be established in major buildings on campus.
, football coach from 1949–57, lead UCLA to 66 victories and a national championship in 1954 until his death in 1958, of a heart attack. John Wooden
's basketball teams began to become known. They won four Southern Division titles and were PCC champions three times. "Ducky" Drake's track teams won the PCC and NCAA championships in 1956. Bill Ackerman and J.D. Morgan's tennis teams won five national championships between 1950 and 1956, and the first ever NCAA national championship in volleyball was awarded to UCLA in 1956.
universities threatened to break up the UC system. UCLA was fined $93,000 for its involvement and its football team was placed on a three year probation. Chancellor Allen wanted UCLA to independently break off from the conference, but President Sproul apparently kept him from doing this. Some alumni seriously wanted UCLA to break away from the Northern California Regents and the UC president entirely. The conflict continued until a 1957 UCLA Alumni Association proposal to the Regents was ultimately successful in moving both UCLA and Berkeley out of the PCC by 1959, effectively breaking up the conference.
Relations between the Pacific Coast universities involved remained hostile for at least a decade. Allen himself resigned as Chancellor in 1959, after he was passed over for the UC president's position when Sproul retired. UCLA Vice Chancellor Vern Knudsen was then appointed full Chancellor in the year before his retirement, after 38 years of service, after which Dr. Franklin David Murphy, dean of the University of Kansas
Medical School, was chosen to be UCLA's next Chancellor.
, signed into state law in 1959, Chancellor Murphy worked to develop a long-range plan for further development and increased autonomy for UCLA. He rapidly increased the number of interdisciplinary institutes and specialized research centers, including various international area studies centers. He worked with the Regents to increase UCLA's library holdings at a faster pace than Berkeley's library so the two would reach parity. A School of Library Service was instituted in1960, followed by the School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1966. The quarter system was implemented in 1965.
. (Alums Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for peace-keeping efforts in the Middle East, and Dr. Glen Seaborg won in 1951 for the discovery of plutonium at Berkeley.)
's "Song of the Vowels" was the first object acquired in 1965, for $75,000 raised by Regent Norton Simon and the UCLA Art Council.
won the first of what would become a nearly uninterrupted series of 10 NCAA basketball championships before he eventually retired in 1975. Tommy Prothro coached the Bruin football team to its first Rose Bowl victory, against Michigan State, in 1966. Quarterback Gary Beban became the first UCLA player to win the Heisman Trophy
in 1967. More national championships were won in tennis (1965), track (1966), and volleyball (1965 & 1967), and numerous conference titles were won in other sports.
began to be felt at UCLA, when over 500 students, as part of a nationwide protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society
, protested the recruitment of graduates on campus by Dow Chemicals
, which produced napalm
, an incendiary chemical used in the war. The protests escalated as the war continued.
On January 17, 1969, UCLA students and Black Panther Party
members John Huggins
, 23, and Bunchy Carter
, 26, were slain in Campbell Hall by members of United Slaves
, a rival black power organization headed by Maulana Karenga, in a dispute over the leadership of the new African American Studies Center. Federal agents working under the FBI's COINTELPRO
program infiltrated both organizations and provoked the conflict between them.
Later in 1969, the UC
Regents fired Angela Davis
, a radical feminist
and lecturer in the Philosophy Department, for openly identifying as a member of the Communist Party USA
. Outraged faculty threatened to withhold grades if Davis was not reinstated, and nearly 2,000 students crammed into Royce Hall's auditorium when Davis delivered her first lecture despite the Regents' decision to remove credit for the class. The overflowing audience gave the 25-year-old professor a standing ovation. On October 22, Chancellor Young complied with a State Superior Court order overruling the Regents' decision by restoring course credit to Davis's class. Eight months later, the Regents again dismissed Davis from the UCLA faculty.
Student unrest at UCLA was further exacerbated when President Richard Nixon
ordered the invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard fired upon student protesters at Kent State
. Hundreds of student protesters marched through campus and vandalized several buildings, including an ROTC building, and part of Murphy Hall. Chancellor Young declared a State of Emergency
and summoned the LAPD
on campus; 74 arrests were made and 12 people reported injuries. This demonstration and many others at UC campuses throughout the state caused then-Governor Ronald Reagan
to shut down the state's colleges and universities for the first time in California's history.
ARPANET
, the world's first electronic computer network, was deployed on the UCLA campus by student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420. Supervised by Prof. Leonard Kleinrock
, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to Douglas Engelbart
's lab at Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park
, California. SDS 940
Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login". The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.
Turing Award
laureate Vinton Cerf was a doctoral student in the computer science department under Kleinrock in the early 1970s and also worked on the ARPANET. He would later team with Bob Kahn
in the writing of the seminal 1974 paper A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. This work proved foundational for their later development of the Transmission Control Protocol
- TCP/IP protocol.
.
In 1984, UCLA hosted the gymnastics and tennis competitions for the Olympic games and served as an "Olympic village." Also in 1984, the Alumni Association donated the "Bruin Bear" stature on Westwood Plaza.
In 1987, Professor Donald Cram received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, for "host-guest chemistry."
In 1988, Dr. Kleinrock chaired a group which produced the report Toward a National Research Network. This report was presented to Congress and was so influential on then-Senator Al Gore
that it proved to be the foundation for what would be passed as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991
, written and developed by Gore. Indeed, funding for the development of Mosaic
in 1993, the World Wide Web
browser which is often credited as leading to the Internet boom during the mid-1990s, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.,, On January 11, 1994, as Vice-President, Gore gave the opening speech for the The Superhighway Summit
held at UCLA's Royce Hall. In 2001, Gore joined the faculty of UCLA as a visiting professor in the School of Public Policy and Social Research, Department of Policy Studies, family-centered community building.
Student activism in the 1980s centered primarily on the South Africa
n government's apartheid policies, the U.S.'s Central America
n policy, as well as the implementation of affirmative action in the state. In 1988 poor race relations on campus lead to student riots over the disqualification of Lloyd Monserratt
as student body president in a campaign that pitted a coalition of minority
students against the candidates put forth by members of the Greek system (this antagonism continues today).
In the 1990s, student activists tended to focus on university and statewide concerns, such as union recognition for graduate teaching assistants, the expansion of the Chicano Studies Center, Proposition 187, which denied social services to illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California.
Charles Young, the longest serving university chancellor in U.S. history, retired in 1997, the same year Prop 209 was implemented. The year before he left, ethnic minority enrollment at UCLA approached 60 percent. The university hosted 120 endowed faculty chairs, 6.7 million volumes in the UCLA Library, and operating expenses approached $2 billion. Extramural funding for research had increased from $66.4 million in 1968-'69 to $406 million in 1995-'96. Private fund-raising likewise flourished, from $6.1 million raised in 1968-'69 to $190.8 million in 1995-'96.
In 1995, 2001, and 2004, Mother Jones
magazine named UCLA in its annual listing of the Top 10 Activist Campuses, reflecting the rallying spirit of its student bodies over the years.
The Bruin Republicans held the first affirmative action bake sale
protesting racial preferences in 2003, a practice which has been copied by other conservative student groups at universities across the country. In 2006, Andrew Jones, former Bruin Republicans president and Daily Bruin columnist, founded the IRS-recognized non-profit organization known as the Bruin Alumni Association
, though the organization is not affiliated with the university, with Bruin Republicans, or with any on-campus student organization. Its stated purpose is to expose the "Dirty Thirty" most liberal professors at UCLA. Controversy developed over Jones' offer of monetary compensation for students who recorded the lectures of faculty members for later exposure on his site.
Other recent activism includes a movement since 2004 to pressure the UC Regents
to divest from Sudan
because of the mass killings in the Darfur
region.
Between October 2005 and November 2006, an experienced hacker broke into a university database containing approximately 800,000 files of personal information. Names, Social Security Number
s, and basic contact information was contained in these files, but banking numbers were not. On November 21, 2006, the system administrators noticed unauthorized activity and blocked further access to the database. While it was not conclusive whether the hacker used these records to commit identity theft or fraud, it was determined that very few records were actually accessed and even fewer specifics were obtained.
In March 2006 the Regents voted in favor of divestment, becoming the largest university system yet to do so.
The UCLA Taser incident
occurred on November 14, 2006, when student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was stunned multiple times by campus police
for allegedly refusing to be escorted out of Powell Library
, following his refusing to present his BruinCard to a Community Service Officer
.
5-4. The victory gave UCLA its 100th NCAA championship title; it is the first school with this distinction.
In 2009, a student was slashed in the throat in a Chemistry class at UCLA. Damon Thompson of Belize was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The student was in a pool of blood but was saved by her teaching assistant who slowed down the bleeding.
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
begins in 1919, when the Southern Branch of the University of California, which was created by the State Legislature, took over the facilities of Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School
California State Normal School
The California State Normal School was a teaching college founded on May 2, 1862, whose original campus later became both the California State University and its San Jose State University campus....
. After moving to its new campus in Westwood
Westwood, Los Angeles, California
Westwood is a neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the home of the University of California, Los Angeles .-History:...
in 1929, it was renamed UCLA and has since expanded to become a leading world university.
The beginning of the university
The State Normal School (1881-1919)
In March 1881, after heavy lobbying by Los Angeles residents, the California State LegislatureCalifornia State Legislature
The California State Legislature is the state legislature of the U.S. state of California. It is a bicameral body consisting of the lower house, the California State Assembly, with 80 members, and the upper house, the California State Senate, with 40 members...
authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School
California State Normal School
The California State Normal School was a teaching college founded on May 2, 1862, whose original campus later became both the California State University and its San Jose State University campus....
in downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, United States, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area...
to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California
Southern California
Southern California is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego...
. The State Normal School
Normal school
A normal school is a school created to train high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose is to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name...
at Los Angeles opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library
Los Angeles Public Library
The Los Angeles Public Library system serves the residents of Los Angeles, California, United States. With over 6 million volumes, LAPL is one of the largest publicly funded library systems in the world. The system is overseen by a Board of Library Commissioners with five members appointed by the...
system. The new facility included an elementary school
Elementary school
An elementary school or primary school is an institution where children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as elementary or primary education. Elementary school is the preferred term in some countries, particularly those in North America, where the terms grade school and grammar...
where teachers-in-training could practice their teaching technique on real children. In 1887, the school became known as the Los Angeles State Normal School.
Southern Branch of the University of California (1919-1927)
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
campus, after Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. On May 23, 1919, their efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens
William Stephens
William Dennison Stephens was an American federal and state politician. A three-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1916, Stephens was also the 24th Governor of California from 1917 to 1923....
signed Assembly Bill 626 into law, which turned the school facilities into the Southern Branch of the University of California and added its general undergraduate program, the College of Letters and Science. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year, offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Letters and Science students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College, under Moore's continued direction. The school newspaper Cub Californian, athletics, student government, and Greek chapters were quickly organized in the first year at the Vermont location.
UCLA Bruins (1927)
In 1923, third and fourth year instruction was approved for the College of Letters and Science, after a political struggle with UC president Barrows and several Northern California regents who preferred that Berkeley remain the sole upper-division degree granting institution. In 1925, the Southern Branch awarded its first Bachelor of Arts degrees to 100 women and 24 men.Enrollment expanded so rapidly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the 25 acres (101,171.5 m²) Vermont Avenue location by 3000 students. The Regents conducted a search for a new location and announced their selection of the "Beverly Site"—in an as yet undeveloped 383 acres (1.5 km²) area just west of Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills, California
Beverly Hills is an affluent city located in Los Angeles County, California, United States. With a population of 34,109 at the 2010 census, up from 33,784 as of the 2000 census, it is home to numerous Hollywood celebrities. Beverly Hills and the neighboring city of West Hollywood are together...
—on March 21, 1925. As the Regents decreed the new site must be a gift or come without cost, the owners of the estate, the Janss brothers
Janss Investment Company
The Janss Investment Company was a family run, Los Angeles, California, real estate development company that operated from 1895 to 1995.-First generation:...
, agreed to sell the property for approximately $1 million, less than one-third the land's value. Municipal bond measures passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a state bond measure passed that year, provided $3 million for new campus construction (as well as 3 million for construction at Berkeley).
The athletic teams entered the Pacific Coast Conference
Pacific Coast Conference
The Pacific Coast Conference was a college athletic conference in the United States which existed from 1915 to 1959. Though the Pacific-12 Conference claims the PCC's history as part of its own, the older league had a completely different charter and was disbanded in 1959 due to a major crisis...
in 1926, under the name "Grizzlies," but after it was pointed out that the University of Montana played under this name much inconclusive debate took place over what the new campus mascot should be. In 1927, the student council adopted the nickname "Bruins", a name offered by the student council at Berkeley. That same year, the Regents renamed the school itself the "University of California at Los Angeles." (The word "at" was officially replaced by a comma
Comma
A comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory...
in 1958.)
Dr. Moore broke ground on the new campus in Westwood
Westwood, Los Angeles, California
Westwood is a neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the home of the University of California, Los Angeles .-History:...
on September 27, 1927. The original four buildings were the College Library, Royce Hall
Royce Hall
Royce Hall is a building on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles . Designed by the Los Angeles firm of Allison & Allison in the Italian Romanesque Revival style and completed in 1929, it is one of the four original buildings on UCLA's Westwood campus and has come to be the...
, the Physics-Biology Building, and the Chemistry Building (presently Powell Library
Powell Library
Powell Library is the main college undergraduate library on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles . It was constructed from 1926 to 1929 and was one of the original four buildings that comprised the UCLA campus in the early period of the university's life...
, Royce Hall, the Humanities Building, and Haines Hall, respectively), arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard on the 400 acre (1.6 km²) campus. George W. Kelham
George W. Kelham
George William Kelham was an American architect most active in the San Francisco area.Born in Manchester, Massachusetts, Kelham was educated at Harvard and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1896...
of San Francisco was the supervising architect, assisted by David Allison of the Los Angeles firm Allison & Allison
Allison & Allison
Allison & Allison was the architectural firm of James Edward Allison and his brother David Clark Allison . Originally based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Allisons moved to southern California in 1910 and at first specialized in public schools.Among the notable projects by this firm are:*...
. Allison, who was also the designer of the Vermont Avenue campus, envisioned the Romanesque
Romanesque architecture
Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of Medieval Europe characterised by semi-circular arches. There is no consensus for the beginning date of the Romanesque architecture, with proposals ranging from the 6th to the 10th century. It developed in the 12th century into the Gothic style,...
style of the Westwood campus. The neighboring communities of Westwood Village and Bel Air were developed alongside the university. (The original Vermont campus became home to Los Angeles City College
Los Angeles City College
Los Angeles City College, known as LACC, is a public community college in the East Hollywood section of Los Angeles, California. A part of the Los Angeles Community College District, it is located on Vermont Avenue south of Santa Monica Boulevard...
.)
The first undergraduate classes on the new campus were held in 1929 with 5,500 students. (Glenn T. Seaborg
Glenn T. Seaborg
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American scientist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements", contributed to the discovery and isolation of ten elements, and developed the actinide concept, which led to the current arrangement of the...
was a member.) Also in 1929, the Bruin and Trojan football teams met for the first time, with the Bruins losing 76-0. The first building dedicated to housing was built in the early 1930s. Titled Hershey Hall, the building was named after Almira Hershey
Almira Hershey
Almira Hershey was a Hollywood hotel proprietor and property developer.-Early life:Almira, better known as Mira, was the fourth and youngest daughter of Benjamin Hershey , a lumber and farming magnate....
who willed $300,000 to UCLA to have the dorm built. The emergence of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
slowed down but did not halt UCLA's development. A Southern section of the UC faculty Academic Senate was voted on in 1931 and organized in 1932. In 1933, after intense lobbying by alumni, faculty, administration and community leaders, UCLA was permitted to award the Master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
, and in 1936, the doctorate
Doctorate
A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...
, against resistance from Berkeley.
The UCLA student body in those years quickly gained a radical reputation. In 1934, Provost Ernest Moore declared UCLA "the worst hotbed of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
in the U.S", and suspended five members of the ASUCLA student government for allegedly "using their offices to assist the revolutionary activities of the National Student League, a Communist organization which has bedeviled the University for some months." The incident leading to this action was the student government's negotiation of a request by Celeste Strack, student member of the NSL, to hold a student forum on issues pertaining to the upcoming gubernatorial contest, after Moore had already refused her and requested ASCULA not to entertain her request. Over 3,000 students gathered to protest in Royce Quad, and a campus police officer, attempting to silence the speakers, was thrown into some bushes. The crowd dispersed before any arrests were made, and University President Robert Sproul
Robert Gordon Sproul
Robert Gordon Sproul was eleventh President of the University of California serving from 1930 to 1958....
later reinstated the students, but not before a vigilante group of 150 athletes calling themselves "UCLA Americans" had formed, pledging to "purge the campus of radicals."
In 1934, UCLA received its first major bequest—still one of the most generous in its history—the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library , one of twelve official libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the most comprehensive rare books and manuscripts libraries in the United States, with particular strengths in English literature and history , Oscar Wilde, and fine...
. The rare books and manuscripts collection includes some of the world's largest collections of English literature, history, and fine printing.
The enrichment of the library and development of graduate studies allowed for additional colleges and professional schools at UCLA. The College of Commerce (later the graduate School of Business Administration) was established in 1935. In 1939 the School of Education replaced the Teachers College, and the College of Applied Arts (later the College of Fine Arts) was established.
UCLA during World War II
The December 7, 1941 airstrike on Pearl HarborPearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
immediately put the campus on a wartime basis. Faculty adjusted the curriculum and academic schedule to assist students entering military service. A student defense committee, later called the Student War Board, was organized to coordinate emergency services. Japanese-American students issued a statement that read, "None of us have known loyalty to any country than America. We stand ready with other Americans to act in whatever capacity we may be called upon to perform in order to carry out the resolution of our government.".
President Sproul immediately established a University War Council, and with the year an "Engineering, Science and Management War Training" program in industrial sciences was established at UCLA, which trained workers in defense industries. UCLA became responsible for Project 36 of the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
, that of purchasing and inspecting equipment for the scientists at Los Alamos. In conjunction with these projects, the UCLA College of Engineering was established in 1943.
Enrollment in ROTC, which had been established early in UCLA's history (1920) and accommodated for more the one third of the male student body by 1940, actually tapered off through the 1940s, in favor of development of special units. These were:
- An advanced training program in meteorology for Army, Navy, Weather Bureau and commercial airline personnel.
- The 1943 establishment of a Navy V-12V-12 Navy College Training ProgramThe V-12 Navy College Training Program was designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in the United States Navy during World War II...
officer training program that included an enrollment of nearly 600 midshipmen and WAVESWAVESThe WAVES were a World War II-era division of the U.S. Navy that consisted entirely of women. The name of this group is an acronym for "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service" ; the word "emergency" implied that the acceptance of women was due to the unusual circumstances of the war and...
.
- The 1943 establishment of several Army Specialized Training Units at UCLA, the largest being for language and geography area specialists.
Male enrollment at UCLA dropped from 5107 before the war to 2407 the year after. When Provost Earl Hendrick, UCLA's chief executive officer at the time, resigned in 1942, no new provost was appointed to replace him, and UCLA was administered by an interim faculty committee until 1945. Fraternity houses became cadets quarters. Athletic programs continued but were curtailed. Gasoline was rationed, and many drove to and from campus in car pools. Blood drives, scrap collections, War bond
War bond
War bonds are debt securities issued by a government for the purpose of financing military operations during times of war. War bonds generate capital for the government and make civilians feel involved in their national militaries...
sales, and fruit harvesting became normal extracurricular activities. Students and faculty planted vegetable "Victory Gardens" as a way to be patriotic and relieve scarcity.
A service banner hung for 4 years in Kerckhoff Hall. By the end of the war on Tuesday, August 15, 1945, it held 5,702 stars, of which 151 were gold for the Bruins who lost their lives. (These totals, however, were inaccurate. Actual totals were higher.)
Veterans return
Before the war ended, veteran students on the G.I. Bill began to trickle in at UCLA. President Sproul created an Office of Veteran's Affairs at UCLA in 1945, which helped ease the transition from military life to academic existence. By 1947, veterans accounted for 43% of the total student body.Post-war building boom
The end of the war lead to a building boom on campus. A deep arroyoArroyo (creek)
An arroyo , a Spanish word translated as brook, and also called a wash is usually a dry creek or stream bed—gulch that temporarily or seasonally fills and flows after sufficient rain. Wadi is a similar term in Africa. In Spain, a rambla has a similar meaning to arroyo.-Types and processes:Arroyos...
, once spanned by an elegant bridge between Royce quad and the administration building, was filled in with 400000 cubic yards (305,821.9 m³) of earth to create 26 acres (105,218.4 m²) additional of usable land, upon which Schoenberg Hall, the Architecture building, Bunche Hall, and the Murphy Sculpture Garden were eventually built. The last Allison-designed building constructed was the Business and Economics building, which later became the Social Welfare building. In 1948, Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket succeeded Allison as chief architects, and as Italian Romanesque was considered too expensive, further construction on campus took on a more modern tone, although elements of Alison's architecture, the brick walls, tile roofs and stone trim, were retained throughout.
In conjunction with the building boom, the UCLA Medical and Law Schools were established in 1946 and 1947, respectively. The department of Theater Arts was also established in 1947. By 1950, the number of veterans began to decline, but total student enrollment reached a new high of 14,318 students.
UCLA in the McCarthy Era
With the rise of the anti-Communist Red ScareRed Scare
Durrell Blackwell Durrell Blackwell The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker revolution and...
in the late 1940s, the UC system became suspected of harboring un-American activities. The Regents on March 25, 1949 had adopted a policy which required all faculty and staff to swear a loyalty oath
Loyalty oath
A loyalty oath is an oath of loyalty to an organization, institution, or state of which an individual is a member.In this context, a loyalty oath is distinct from pledge or oath of allegiance...
that disavowed membership in the Communist Party. At a special session of the UC Academic Senate's Northern Section, Dr. Edward C. Tolman
Edward C. Tolman
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist. He was most famous for his studies on behavioral psychology....
argued that the policy violated academic freedom
Academic freedom
Academic freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.Academic freedom is a...
and should be rescinded. The Senate, however, voted to request that the controversial oath be "deleted or revised." By August 1950, 36 faculty of Senate rank and 62 non-Senate UC employees were dismissed for refusing to sign the loyalty oath, including three from UCLA: Dr. John Caughey, History; Dr. Charles L. Mowat, History; and Dr. David S. Saxon, Physics. (While the state Supreme Court, in 1952's Tolman vs. Underhill, decided that the Regents did not had the power to compel loyalty oaths, in a separate case decided the same day it affirmed the power of the Legislature to require loyalty oaths of all state employees, and ordered the faculty non-signers to be reinstated only on the condition they sign the state's oath.)
On Oct 21, 1950, William Worden, a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post, published "UCLA's Red Cell: Case History of College Communism," which documented the efforts and methods of leftist student activists to control meetings, propagandize the Daily Bruin
Daily Bruin
The Daily Bruin is the student newspaper at the University of California, Los Angeles.-Frequency and governance:When classes are in session, the Bruin is published Monday through Friday during the school year and once a week on Mondays in the summer quarter.It is overseen by the ASUCLA...
, distribute literature, file charges of racial discrimination, organize picket lines and incite riots. While Worden estimated that only one out of 400 UCLA students were involved in such practices, the only faculty member the California Un-American Activities Committee discovered to have been a member of the Communist party was a woman who played piano for physical education classes in the women's gym.
In response to these controversies, after Provost Dykstra died in 1950, the Regents sought to install someone who would dispel the "hotbed of Communism" stigma at UCLA. After an 18-month search, the Regents selected Dr. Raymond B. Allen, head of the Psychological Strategy Board
Psychological Strategy Board
The Psychological Strategy Board was a committee of the United States executive formed to coordinate and plan for psychological operations. It was formed on April 4, 1951, during the Truman administration. The board was composed of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,...
in Washington, D.C.. Formerly the president of University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
, he was noted for having purged three Communist staff there in the late 1940s. His philosophy of academic freedom:
- ...Academic freedom consists of something more than merely an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by the institution that employs him. It demands as well an absence of restraints placed upon him by his political affiliations, by dogmas that stand in the way of a free search for truth or by rigid adherence to a 'party line' that sacrifices dignity, honor and integrity to... political ends. -Raymond B. Allen
Allen was also selected because he held an MD and had organized the schools of medicine and dentistry at UW. As the UCLA Medical Center, the largest single building project in UC history at that time, was being constructed, three allied schools of Nursing, Dentistry, and Public Health were also initiated.
Up until the mid-50s, postwar construction had been financed on tax surpluses accumulated during World War II and the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
. After those surpluses ran out, further construction was financed on state bond issues. However, the state at that time would not finance student housing, and UCLA comprised 17,000 students with only Hershey Hall (originally constructed in 1930 as a 129 bed women's dorm) accommodating any students on campus. So the Regents floated a loan from the federal government to build Dykstra Hall and Sproul Hall on the hill west of the athletic fields. They opened in 1959 and 1960, respectively. The UCLA Faculty Club assessed their membership $100 apiece and floated a loan from the Regents to build the Faculty Center, which was completed in 1959. Ackerman Union was also built from a Regents loan paid for by fees self-assessed by students in this period.
Early research apparatus
For the first two decades of its existence, UCLA was oriented towards teaching and the liberal arts. With the establishment of graduate studies and professional schools, UCLA gradually became more oriented towards scientific research. The School of Medicine was developed primarily as a research institution, the first of its kind on the West Coast. SWACSWAC (computer)
The SWAC was an early electronic digital computer built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles, California. It was designed by Harry Huskey...
, one of the nation's first large computers, powered by vacuum tubes, was built at UCLA in 1950. IBM established the Western Data Processing Center at UCLA in 1956, an early support and regional training center for the use of computers for quantitative research. Other primitive computers obtained by the Center for Health Sciences and Department of Engineering were linked with SWAC to form an early Campus Computing Network.
The library was also built up to 1,500,000 volumes, twelfth largest in the United States, and specialized branch libraries began to be established in major buildings on campus.
The first "Golden Age" of UCLA athletics
Henry Russell SandersHenry Russell Sanders
Henry Russell "Red" Sanders was an American college football player and coach. He served as the head coach at Vanderbilt University and the University of California at Los Angeles , compiling a career college football record of 102–41–3...
, football coach from 1949–57, lead UCLA to 66 victories and a national championship in 1954 until his death in 1958, of a heart attack. John Wooden
John Wooden
John Robert Wooden was an American basketball player and coach. Nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood", he won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period — seven in a row — as head coach at UCLA, an unprecedented feat. Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games...
's basketball teams began to become known. They won four Southern Division titles and were PCC champions three times. "Ducky" Drake's track teams won the PCC and NCAA championships in 1956. Bill Ackerman and J.D. Morgan's tennis teams won five national championships between 1950 and 1956, and the first ever NCAA national championship in volleyball was awarded to UCLA in 1956.
The Pacific Coast Conference Crisis
In the Winter and Spring of 1956, the unfolding of a huge scandal involving payment of student athletes by booster clubs at Pacific Coast ConferencePacific Coast Conference
The Pacific Coast Conference was a college athletic conference in the United States which existed from 1915 to 1959. Though the Pacific-12 Conference claims the PCC's history as part of its own, the older league had a completely different charter and was disbanded in 1959 due to a major crisis...
universities threatened to break up the UC system. UCLA was fined $93,000 for its involvement and its football team was placed on a three year probation. Chancellor Allen wanted UCLA to independently break off from the conference, but President Sproul apparently kept him from doing this. Some alumni seriously wanted UCLA to break away from the Northern California Regents and the UC president entirely. The conflict continued until a 1957 UCLA Alumni Association proposal to the Regents was ultimately successful in moving both UCLA and Berkeley out of the PCC by 1959, effectively breaking up the conference.
Relations between the Pacific Coast universities involved remained hostile for at least a decade. Allen himself resigned as Chancellor in 1959, after he was passed over for the UC president's position when Sproul retired. UCLA Vice Chancellor Vern Knudsen was then appointed full Chancellor in the year before his retirement, after 38 years of service, after which Dr. Franklin David Murphy, dean of the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
Medical School, was chosen to be UCLA's next Chancellor.
The California Master Plan
Within the framework of the new California Master Plan for Higher EducationCalifornia Master Plan for Higher Education
The California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 was developed by a survey team appointed by the UC Regents and the State Board of Education during the administration of Governor Pat Brown. Clark Kerr, then the President of UC, was a key figure in its development...
, signed into state law in 1959, Chancellor Murphy worked to develop a long-range plan for further development and increased autonomy for UCLA. He rapidly increased the number of interdisciplinary institutes and specialized research centers, including various international area studies centers. He worked with the Regents to increase UCLA's library holdings at a faster pace than Berkeley's library so the two would reach parity. A School of Library Service was instituted in1960, followed by the School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1966. The quarter system was implemented in 1965.
Nobels awarded
In 1960, Dr. Willard F. Libby, professor of Chemistry, won the first Nobel Prize for science given to a UCLA faculty member, for developing radiocarbon datingRadiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" ,...
. (Alums Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for peace-keeping efforts in the Middle East, and Dr. Glen Seaborg won in 1951 for the discovery of plutonium at Berkeley.)
More building booms
Bond-financed construction boomed through the 1960s, the biggest building era in UCLA's history; Boelter Hall, the Neuropsychiatric Institute, Marion Davies Children's Clinic, Dickson Art Center, Engineering Reactor, Pauley Pavilion, Rieber and Hendrick residence halls, Knudsen Hall, Life Science Research Units No. 1 and No. 2., Melnitz Hall, six parking structures, Bunche Hall, Slichter Hall, Ackerman Union, University Research Library, Warren Hall, Rehabilitation, Dentistry, Public Health, and the Jules Stein Eye Institute were some of the additions made. Murphy suggested the idea of a sculpture garden in North Campus while this construction was being planned; Jacques LipchitzJacques Lipchitz
Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor.Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, son of a building contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire...
's "Song of the Vowels" was the first object acquired in 1965, for $75,000 raised by Regent Norton Simon and the UCLA Art Council.
The second "Golden Age" of UCLA Athletics
In 1964, Coach John WoodenJohn Wooden
John Robert Wooden was an American basketball player and coach. Nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood", he won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period — seven in a row — as head coach at UCLA, an unprecedented feat. Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games...
won the first of what would become a nearly uninterrupted series of 10 NCAA basketball championships before he eventually retired in 1975. Tommy Prothro coached the Bruin football team to its first Rose Bowl victory, against Michigan State, in 1966. Quarterback Gary Beban became the first UCLA player to win the Heisman Trophy
Heisman Trophy
The Heisman Memorial Trophy Award , is awarded annually to the player deemed the most outstanding player in collegiate football. It was created in 1935 as the Downtown Athletic Club trophy and renamed in 1936 following the death of the Club's athletic director, John Heisman The Heisman Memorial...
in 1967. More national championships were won in tennis (1965), track (1966), and volleyball (1965 & 1967), and numerous conference titles were won in other sports.
The Charles Young era
Chancellor Murphy resigned in 1968 to take over as head of the Times Mirror Company. Under his tenure, enrollment had increased to 29,000, $150,000,000 in new buildings were constructed, 1000 new faculty were hired, and UCLA's annual operating budget increased from $14,000,000 to $95,000,000. The Regents selected his right hand man, Dr. Charles E. Young, a graduate of UC Riverside who earned his doctorate and taught in Political Science at UCLA, to be the next UCLA Chancellor. At 36, was the youngest ever chief officer of a UC campus and the first graduate of UCLA to become Chancellor of the campus.Student unrest
The year before Murphy resigned, student unrest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam WarVietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
began to be felt at UCLA, when over 500 students, as part of a nationwide protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
, protested the recruitment of graduates on campus by Dow Chemicals
Dow Chemical Company
The Dow Chemical Company is a multinational corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. As of 2007, it is the second largest chemical manufacturer in the world by revenue and as of February 2009, the third-largest chemical company in the world by market capitalization .Dow...
, which produced napalm
Napalm
Napalm is a thickening/gelling agent generally mixed with gasoline or a similar fuel for use in an incendiary device, primarily as an anti-personnel weapon...
, an incendiary chemical used in the war. The protests escalated as the war continued.
On January 17, 1969, UCLA students and Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
members John Huggins
John Huggins
John Huggins was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party.-Biography:...
, 23, and Bunchy Carter
Bunchy Carter
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter was an African American activist who was killed on January 17, 1969. He is celebrated by his supporters as a martyr in the Black Power movement in the United States.- Early history :...
, 26, were slain in Campbell Hall by members of United Slaves
United Slaves
US Organization, or Organization Us, is a Black nationalist group in the United States founded by Maulana Karenga and Hakim Jamal in 1965. It was a rival of the Black Panther Party in California...
, a rival black power organization headed by Maulana Karenga, in a dispute over the leadership of the new African American Studies Center. Federal agents working under the FBI's COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
program infiltrated both organizations and provoked the conflict between them.
Later in 1969, the UC
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
Regents fired Angela Davis
Angela Davis
Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was most politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party...
, a radical feminist
Radical feminism
Radical feminism is a current theoretical perspective within feminism that focuses on the theory of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on an assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women...
and lecturer in the Philosophy Department, for openly identifying as a member of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
. Outraged faculty threatened to withhold grades if Davis was not reinstated, and nearly 2,000 students crammed into Royce Hall's auditorium when Davis delivered her first lecture despite the Regents' decision to remove credit for the class. The overflowing audience gave the 25-year-old professor a standing ovation. On October 22, Chancellor Young complied with a State Superior Court order overruling the Regents' decision by restoring course credit to Davis's class. Eight months later, the Regents again dismissed Davis from the UCLA faculty.
Student unrest at UCLA was further exacerbated when President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
ordered the invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard fired upon student protesters at Kent State
Kent State shootings
The Kent State shootings—also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre—occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970...
. Hundreds of student protesters marched through campus and vandalized several buildings, including an ROTC building, and part of Murphy Hall. Chancellor Young declared a State of Emergency
State of emergency
A state of emergency is a governmental declaration that may suspend some normal functions of the executive, legislative and judicial powers, alert citizens to change their normal behaviours, or order government agencies to implement emergency preparedness plans. It can also be used as a rationale...
and summoned the LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
on campus; 74 arrests were made and 12 people reported injuries. This demonstration and many others at UC campuses throughout the state caused then-Governor Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
to shut down the state's colleges and universities for the first time in California's history.
ARPANET developed
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
, the world's first electronic computer network, was deployed on the UCLA campus by student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420. Supervised by Prof. Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock is an American engineer and computer scientist. A computer science professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, he made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking...
, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
's lab at Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
, California. SDS 940
SDS 940
The SDS 940 was Scientific Data Systems' first machine designed to support time sharing directly, and was based on the SDS 930's 24-bit CPU built primarily of integrated circuits. It was announced in February 1966 and shipped in April, becoming a major part of Tymshare's expansion during the 1960s...
Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login". The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.
Turing Award
Turing Award
The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
laureate Vinton Cerf was a doctoral student in the computer science department under Kleinrock in the early 1970s and also worked on the ARPANET. He would later team with Bob Kahn
Bob Kahn
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American Internet pioneer, engineer and computer scientist, who, along with Vinton G. Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol , the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.-Career:After receiving a B.E.E...
in the writing of the seminal 1974 paper A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. This work proved foundational for their later development of the Transmission Control Protocol
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...
- TCP/IP protocol.
The 1980s and 1990s
In 1981, the UCLA Medical Center made history when an assistant professor named Michael Gottlieb first diagnosed an unknown affliction later to be called AIDSAIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
.
In 1984, UCLA hosted the gymnastics and tennis competitions for the Olympic games and served as an "Olympic village." Also in 1984, the Alumni Association donated the "Bruin Bear" stature on Westwood Plaza.
In 1987, Professor Donald Cram received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, for "host-guest chemistry."
In 1988, Dr. Kleinrock chaired a group which produced the report Toward a National Research Network. This report was presented to Congress and was so influential on then-Senator Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
that it proved to be the foundation for what would be passed as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991
High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991
The High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 is an Act of Congress promulgated in the 102nd United States Congress as on 1991-12-09...
, written and developed by Gore. Indeed, funding for the development of Mosaic
Mosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
in 1993, the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
browser which is often credited as leading to the Internet boom during the mid-1990s, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.,, On January 11, 1994, as Vice-President, Gore gave the opening speech for the The Superhighway Summit
The Superhighway Summit
The Superhighway Summit was held at UCLA's Royce Hall on 11 January 1994. It was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its implications." ...
held at UCLA's Royce Hall. In 2001, Gore joined the faculty of UCLA as a visiting professor in the School of Public Policy and Social Research, Department of Policy Studies, family-centered community building.
Student activism in the 1980s centered primarily on the South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
n government's apartheid policies, the U.S.'s Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
n policy, as well as the implementation of affirmative action in the state. In 1988 poor race relations on campus lead to student riots over the disqualification of Lloyd Monserratt
Lloyd Monserratt
Lloyd Monserratt , was born in Los Angeles, California, the eldest son of Ecuadorian immigrants Carlos and Olga Monserratt. His father was an architect and named his eldest son after Frank Lloyd Wright....
as student body president in a campaign that pitted a coalition of minority
Minority group
A minority is a sociological group within a demographic. The demographic could be based on many factors from ethnicity, gender, wealth, power, etc. The term extends to numerous situations, and civilizations within history, despite the misnomer of minorities associated with a numerical statistic...
students against the candidates put forth by members of the Greek system (this antagonism continues today).
In the 1990s, student activists tended to focus on university and statewide concerns, such as union recognition for graduate teaching assistants, the expansion of the Chicano Studies Center, Proposition 187, which denied social services to illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California.
Charles Young, the longest serving university chancellor in U.S. history, retired in 1997, the same year Prop 209 was implemented. The year before he left, ethnic minority enrollment at UCLA approached 60 percent. The university hosted 120 endowed faculty chairs, 6.7 million volumes in the UCLA Library, and operating expenses approached $2 billion. Extramural funding for research had increased from $66.4 million in 1968-'69 to $406 million in 1995-'96. Private fund-raising likewise flourished, from $6.1 million raised in 1968-'69 to $190.8 million in 1995-'96.
Activism and complications (2000-2006)
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
magazine named UCLA in its annual listing of the Top 10 Activist Campuses, reflecting the rallying spirit of its student bodies over the years.
The Bruin Republicans held the first affirmative action bake sale
Affirmative action bake sale
An affirmative action bake sale is a campus protest event used by student groups to illustrate criticism of affirmative action policies, especially as they relate to college and graduate school admissions...
protesting racial preferences in 2003, a practice which has been copied by other conservative student groups at universities across the country. In 2006, Andrew Jones, former Bruin Republicans president and Daily Bruin columnist, founded the IRS-recognized non-profit organization known as the Bruin Alumni Association
Bruin Alumni Association
The Bruin Alumni Association is a conservative group for alumni of University of California, Los Angeles. It has no official affiliation with the University of California or the official UCLA Alumni Association...
, though the organization is not affiliated with the university, with Bruin Republicans, or with any on-campus student organization. Its stated purpose is to expose the "Dirty Thirty" most liberal professors at UCLA. Controversy developed over Jones' offer of monetary compensation for students who recorded the lectures of faculty members for later exposure on his site.
Other recent activism includes a movement since 2004 to pressure the UC Regents
Regents of the University of California
The Regents of the University of California make up the governing board of the University of California. The Board has 26 full members:* The majority are appointed by the Governor of California for 12-year terms....
to divest from Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
because of the mass killings in the Darfur
Darfur
Darfur is a region in western Sudan. An independent sultanate for several hundred years, it was incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1916. The region is divided into three federal states: West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur...
region.
Between October 2005 and November 2006, an experienced hacker broke into a university database containing approximately 800,000 files of personal information. Names, Social Security Number
Social Security number
In the United States, a Social Security number is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary residents under section 205 of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent...
s, and basic contact information was contained in these files, but banking numbers were not. On November 21, 2006, the system administrators noticed unauthorized activity and blocked further access to the database. While it was not conclusive whether the hacker used these records to commit identity theft or fraud, it was determined that very few records were actually accessed and even fewer specifics were obtained.
In March 2006 the Regents voted in favor of divestment, becoming the largest university system yet to do so.
The UCLA Taser incident
UCLA Taser incident
The UCLA Taser incident occurred on November 14, 2006, when Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a fourth-year UCLA student, was stunned multiple times with a Taser by campus police, for allegedly refusing to be escorted out of the College Library Instructional Computing Commons lab at Powell Library...
occurred on November 14, 2006, when student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was stunned multiple times by campus police
Campus police
Campus Police or University police in the United States and Canada are often sworn police officers employed by a public school district, college or university to protect the campus and surrounding areas and the people who live on, work on and visit it....
for allegedly refusing to be escorted out of Powell Library
Powell Library
Powell Library is the main college undergraduate library on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles . It was constructed from 1926 to 1929 and was one of the original four buildings that comprised the UCLA campus in the early period of the university's life...
, following his refusing to present his BruinCard to a Community Service Officer
Community Service Officer
A Community Service Officer , provides support in crime prevention, investigation, and response where full police powers are unnecessary and assists police officers in upholding law and order.-History:...
.
Present day (2007-present)
On May 13, 2007 the Women's Water Polo team beat Stanford UniversityStanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
5-4. The victory gave UCLA its 100th NCAA championship title; it is the first school with this distinction.
In 2009, a student was slashed in the throat in a Chemistry class at UCLA. Damon Thompson of Belize was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The student was in a pool of blood but was saved by her teaching assistant who slowed down the bleeding.
See also
- Stephen W. CunninghamStephen W. CunninghamStephen W. Cunningham was the first graduate manager at the Southern Branch of the University of California, later UCLA, and a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 1933 to 1941.-Biography:Stephen W...
—First UCLA graduate manager and Los Angeles City Council member, 1933–41