[24] 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.

[31] While Hastings remained independent, the Affiliated Colleges were able to increasingly coordinate their operations with one another under the supervision of the UC president and regents, and evolved into the health sciences campus known today as the University of California, San Francisco.

Because Los Angeles had become the state government's single largest source of both tax revenue and votes, its residents felt entitled to demand more prestige and autonomy for their campus.

[19] Upon becoming president in October 1957, Clark Kerr supervised UC's rapid transformation into a true public university system through a series of proposals adopted unanimously by the regents from 1957 to 1960.

California farmers lobbied for UC to perform applied research responsive to their immediate needs; in 1905, the Legislature established a "University Farm School" at Davis and in 1907 a "Citrus Experiment Station" at Riverside as adjuncts to the College of Agriculture at Berkeley.

In 1912, UC acquired a private oceanography laboratory in San Diego, which had been founded nine years earlier by local business promoters working with a Berkeley professor.

[52] The Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 established that UC must admit undergraduates from the top 12.5% (one-eighth) of graduating high school seniors in California.

UC does not currently adhere to all tenets of the original Master Plan, such as the directives that no campus was to exceed total enrollment of 27,500 students (in order to ensure quality) and that public higher education should be tuition-free for California residents.

In turn, other UC locations (with the exception of the Hastings College of the Law) were treated as off-site departments of the Berkeley campus, and were headed by provosts who were subordinate to the president.

Starting with the 1952–53 academic year, day-to-day "chief executive officer" functions for the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses were transferred to chancellors who were vested with a high degree of autonomy, and reported as equals to UC's president.

[64] The University of California continues to manage certain matters at the systemwide level in order to maintain common standards across all campuses, such as student admissions, appointment and promotion of faculty, and approval of academic programs.

[84] Blake House has sat vacant since President Dynes departed in 2008, due to the high cost of needed seismic strengthening and renovating its dilapidated interior (estimated at $3.5 million in 2013).

UCSD's University House was closed from 2004 to 2014 for $10.5 million in renovations paid for by private donors, which were so expensive because the 12,000-square-foot structure sits on top of a sacred Native American cemetery and next to an unstable coastal bluff.

[93] In May 2004, UC President Robert C. Dynes and CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed struck a private deal, called the "Higher Education Compact", with Governor Schwarzenegger.

A detailed analysis of the Compact by the Academic Senate "Futures Report" indicated, despite the large fee increases, the university core budget did not recover to 2000 levels.

[96] The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco ruled in 2007 that the University of California owed nearly $40 million in refunds to about 40,000 students who were promised that their tuition fees would remain steady, but were hit with increases when the state ran short of money in 2003.

Therefore, at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, their respective College of Letters and Science is by far the single largest academic unit on each campus.

The review may also include consideration of an applicant's enrollment in selective honor courses or programs, extracurricular activities, essay, family history, life challenges, and the location of the student's residence.

In the second phase, the university conducted a "comprehensive review" of the student's achievements, including extracurricular activities, essay, family history, and life challenges, to admit the remainder.

In 2006 the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) awarded the University of California the SPARC Innovator Award for its "extraordinarily effective institution-wide vision and efforts to move scholarly communication forward", including the 1997 founding (under then UC President Richard C. Atkinson) of the California Digital Library (CDL) and its 2002 launching of CDL's eScholarship, an institutional repository.

[165] One of their faculty members, Dr. Mitloehner, and a former student, Dr. Stackhouse-Lawson, has been criticized for taking money from Big Agriculture and allowing it to influence their reearch and work at the university.

[166] The University of California has a long tradition of involvement in many enterprises that are often geographically or organizationally separate from its general campuses, including national laboratories, observatories, hospitals, continuing education programs, hotels, conference centers, an airport, a seaport, and an art institute.

LLNL also has major research programs in supercomputing and predictive modeling, energy and environment, bioscience and biotechnology, basic science and applied technology, counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security.

Other work at LANL involves research programs into preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and US national security, such as protection of the US homeland from terrorist attacks.

The Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs have been involved in designing U.S. nuclear weapons from their inception until the shift into stockpile stewardship after the end of the Cold War.

Historically the two national laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore named after Ernest O. Lawrence, have had very close relationships on research projects, as well as sharing some business operations and staff.

UC entered into a partnership with Bechtel Corporation, BWXT, and the Washington Group International, and together they created a private company called Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS).

The NRS was established in January 1965 to provide UC faculty with large areas of land where they could conduct long-term ecosystem research without having to worry about outside disturbances like tourists.

UC Santa Cruz managed the UARC for the University of California, with the goal of increasing the science output, safety, and effectiveness of NASA's missions through new technologies and scientific techniques.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the UC hospitals became the cores of full-fledged regional health systems; they were gradually supplemented by many outpatient clinics, offices, and institutes.