History of the University of California, Los Angeles

In the first century after its founding, UCLA established itself as a leading research university with global impact across arts and culture, education, health care, technology and more.

[3] On March 24, the trustees of the existing normal school in San Jose arrived in Los Angeles, where they were given lodging in the Pico House, and received offers of twenty potential sites.

[3] This was followed by a formal dedication ceremony on September 9, 1882, with Governor Perkins, Governor-elect George Stoneman, and State Superintendent Frederick M. Campbell in attendance.

[7] They met resistance from UC Berkeley alumni, Northern California members of the state legislature, and then-UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who were all vigorously opposed to the idea of a southern campus.

[12]) Under UC President William Wallace Campbell, enrollment at the Southern Branch expanded so rapidly that by the mid-1920s the institution was outgrowing the 25-acre Vermont Avenue location.

[7] 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.

Proposition 10, a state bond measure passed that year with active campaigning by university students, provided $3 million for new campus construction.

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 continued resistance from Berkeley.

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.

[20] 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.

President Sproul created an Office of Veteran's Affairs at UCLA in 1945, which helped ease the transition from military life to academic existence.

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.

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.

)[28] On Oct 21, 1950, the magazine Saturday Evening Post published "UCLA's Red Cell: Case History of College Communism," an article by free-lance writer William Worden, which asserted that leftist student activists had tried to control meetings, propagandize within the columns of the Daily Bruin, distribute literature, file charges of racial discrimination, organize picket lines and incite riots.

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.

In the Winter and Spring of 1956, the unfolding of a huge scandal involving payment of student athletes by booster clubs at Pacific Coast Conference universities threatened to break up the UC system.

[34] From 1957 to 1960, Kerr decentralized the UC bureaucracy and pushed power and responsibility down to the campus chancellors; although the Regents had attempted to authorize such reforms back in 1951, the process had been repeatedly stalled by Sproul and his closest allies.

In 1960, Willard F. Libby, professor of Chemistry, won the first Nobel Prize for science given to a UCLA faculty member, for developing radiocarbon dating.

Murphy suggested the idea of a sculpture garden in North Campus while this construction was being planned; Jacques Lipchitz'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.

[40] 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.

On October 22, Chancellor Young complied with a State Superior Court order overruling the Regents' decision by restoring course credit to Davis's class.

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.

[41] 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.

[42] 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.

In 1981, the UCLA Medical Center made history when assistant professor Michael S. Gottlieb first diagnosed an unknown affliction later to be called AIDS.

[45] 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.,[46][47][48] On January 11, 1994, as Vice-President, Gore gave the opening speech for The Superhighway Summit held at UCLA's Royce Hall.

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.

Not only does this represent a huge step backward and a betrayal of students' trust, but it displays a startlingly low standard when it comes to treatment of sexual assault suspects.

"[70] In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights investigated UCLA and other universities for their compliance with Title IX and responses to sexual violence.