[3] Plans for the creation of this public university were first developed at the 1849 Constitutional Convention, but when the State of California was established in 1850, it lacked the funds necessary to create such a school.

Missionaries sent west by the Home Mission Society of New York, however, created the College of California and eventually transferred its ownership to the State in 1855.

[4] The Board of Regents began admitting women to the University of California in 1871, and the first woman to graduate was Rosa L. Scrivner, with a PhB in Agriculture.

[7] They are on the National Register of Historic Places and are visually unified by a Mediterranean landscape of olive and stone pine trees.

Its neoclassical design is inscribed with the phrase "To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.