The University of California (UC) is California's system of public research universities. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. The system is the state's land-grant university. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-system public postsecondary education plan, which also includes the California Community Colleges and California State University systems.
The ten campuses have a combined enrollment of 299,407 students, with 26,100 faculty members and 192,400 staff members, and more than 2.5 million alumni. Nine campuses enroll undergraduate and graduate students, while UC San Francisco enrolls only graduate and professional students in the medical and health sciences. The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco is legally affiliated with the University of California and shares its name, but operates autonomously.
The University of California manages or co-manages three national laboratories for the United States Department of Energy: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The university is governed by a Board of Regents, whose autonomy from the rest of the state government is protected by the Constitution of California.
The University of California was founded on March 23, 1868, in Oakland after acquiring the assets of the College of California. It moved to Berkeley in 1873. The university also affiliated with independent medical and law schools in San Francisco. Over the following decades, it established branch locations and satellite programs elsewhere in the state, while Berkeley remained its only campus.
Beginning in March 1951, the University of California began reorganizing its administration to separate the Berkeley campus from the university-wide administration. UC president Robert Gordon Sproul remained the system's chief executive, while Clark Kerr became Berkeley's first chancellor and Raymond B. Allen became the first chancellor of an independently administered University of California, Los Angeles. However, the reorganization faced resistance from Sproul and his allies and was not completed during his presidency. After Kerr succeeded Sproul as UC president, the university was reorganized as a multicampus system between 1957 and 1960. Chancellors were appointed at additional campuses, and the campuses received greater administrative autonomy.
Eight of the campuses are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 75 Nobel Prizes as of 2025.
In 1849, the state of California ratified its first constitution, which contained the express objective of creating a complete educational system including a state university. Taking advantage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, the California State Legislature established an Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in 1866. However, it existed only on paper, as a placeholder to secure federal land-grant funds.
Meanwhile, Congregational minister Henry Durant, an alumnus of Yale, had established the private Contra Costa Academy, on June 20, 1853, in Oakland, California. The initial site was bounded by Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets and Harrison and Franklin Streets in downtown Oakland (and is marked today by State Historical Plaque No. 45 at the northeast corner of Thirteenth and Franklin). In turn, the academy's trustees were granted a charter in 1855 for a College of California, though the college continued to operate as a college preparatory school until it added college-level courses in 1860. The college's trustees, educators, and supporters believed in the importance of a liberal arts education (especially the study of the Greek and Roman classics), but ran into a lack of interest in liberal arts colleges on the American frontier (for post-secondary degrees, the college was graduating only three or four students per year).
In November 1857, the college's trustees began to acquire various parcels of land facing the Golden Gate in what is now Berkeley for a future planned campus to the north of Oakland. But first, they needed to secure the college's water rights by buying a large farm to the east. In 1864, they organized the College Homestead Association, which borrowed $35,000 to purchase the land, plus another $33,000 to purchase 160 acres (650,000 m2) of land to the south of the future campus. The association subdivided the latter parcel and started selling lots with the hope it could raise enough money to repay its lenders and also create a new college town. But sales of new homesteads fell short.
Governor Frederick Low favored the establishment of a state university based upon the University of Michigan plan, and thus in one sense may be regarded as the founder of the University of California. At the College of California's 1867 commencement exercises, where Low was present, Yale University professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. criticized Californians for establishing a polytechnic school, instead of a real university. That same day, Low reportedly first suggested a merger of the already-functional College of California (which had a liberal arts focus, land, buildings, faculty, and students, but not enough money) with the nonfunctional state college (which had a polytechnical focus, money and nothing else), and went on to participate in the ensuing negotiations.
On October 9, 1867, the college's trustees reluctantly agreed to join forces with the state college to their mutual advantage, but under one condition—that there not be simply an "Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College", but a complete university, within which the assets of the College of California would be used to create a College of Letters (now known as the College of Letters and Science). Accordingly, the Organic Act, establishing the University of California, was introduced as a bill by Assemblyman John W. Dwinelle on March 5, 1868, and after it was duly passed by both houses of the state legislature, it was signed into state law by Governor Henry H. Haight (Low's successor) on March 23, 1868.
However, as legally constituted, the new university was not an actual merger of the two colleges, but was an entirely new institution which merely inherited certain objectives and assets from each of them. Governor Haight saw no need to honor any tacit understandings reached with his predecessor about institutional continuity. Only two college trustees became regents and a single faculty member (Martin Kellogg) was hired by the new university. By April 1869, the trustees had second thoughts about their agreement to donate the college's assets and disincorporate. To get them to proceed, regent John B. Felton helped them bring a "friendly suit" against the university to test the agreement's legality—which they promptly lost.
The University of California's second president, Daniel Coit Gilman, opened its new campus in Berkeley in September 1873.
Section 8 of the Organic Act authorized the Board of Regents to affiliate the University of California with independent self-sustaining professional colleges. "Affiliation" meant UC and its affiliates would "share the risk in launching new endeavors in education". The affiliates shared the prestige of the state university's brand, and UC agreed to award degrees in its own name to their graduates on the recommendation of their respective faculties, but the affiliates were otherwise managed independently by their own boards of trustees, charged their own tuition and fees, and maintained their own budgets separate from the UC budget. It was through the process of affiliation that UC was able to claim it had medical and law schools in San Francisco within a decade of its founding.