Robert Gordon Sproul

In 1913, he earned a BS in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, where his classmates included future Supreme Court justice Earl Warren.

The reason why the University of California occupies the high position it does throughout the academic world is that there has never been a time when its faculty could not boast of men who were finding their way along rough trails, illuminated only by the spark of genius, to the heights of scholarship.

Nor is the present faculty devoid of men who, in their respective fields, hold high the lamp of learning--Campbell in astronomy, Kofoid in zoology, and G. N. Lewis in chemistry, to pick out a few of the most obvious.

In a very real sense, such men are the University of California, and similarly elsewhere, for material development is futile without brains to use and to direct it and personality to irradiate it.

[3] In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, he struggled with student dissent (e.g., over conscriptions) and McCarthy-style accusations from the newspapers controlled by William Randolph Hearst about "communist influence" on campuses.

[1][2][3] Sproul's outstanding contribution during his 28-year administration was the multiple-campus expansion of the University to meet the demands for higher education in widely separated parts of the state while maintaining one institution governed by one board of regents and one president.

[8] Sproul started to speak of UC's missions as "teaching, research, and public service",[8] which remains true today.

Before and during Sproul's presidency, the University of California's bureaucracy was highly centralized in Berkeley, but that was no longer politically viable by the time he retired.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr succeeded Sproul in 1958 with a clear mandate for change from the southern regents.

[3]) At his death, the New York Times reported that the University of California owed its pre-eminence in science to Sproul, who transformed the school system from "a merely large institution" to "the biggest in the Western world... sprinkled with Nobel Prize winners."

Sproul Hall on the University of California, Riverside campus, home to the Department of Economics and the Graduate School of Education, is named for him.

[14] The research vessel R/V Robert Gordon Sproul, used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego is named after him.