University of California, Berkeley

Based on Wikipedia: University of California, Berkeley

The University That Built the Atomic Bomb and Started the Free Speech Movement

In a single decade, the University of California, Berkeley gave humanity both the means to destroy civilization and the template for challenging it. The same institution that helped build the atomic bomb during World War Two became, twenty years later, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement that would reshape American political protest. This contradiction sits at the heart of Berkeley's identity—a place where the pursuit of knowledge has repeatedly collided with the most consequential questions of human existence.

Today, Berkeley enrolls more than forty-five thousand students on a campus wedged into the neighborhoods of a small city across the bay from San Francisco. It consistently ranks among the world's top public universities. But the statistics—the Nobel laureates, the Olympic medals, the research funding—only hint at why Berkeley matters. To understand this institution is to understand how American public higher education became an engine of both scientific discovery and social transformation.

Born from Federal Land and a Philosopher's Name

Berkeley exists because Abraham Lincoln signed a piece of paper while the Civil War raged. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 gave federal land to states to establish universities focused on agriculture and mechanical arts—what we might today call applied sciences. California's new university opened in 1868, inheriting both the land of a defunct private college and access to federal funding.

The name came from George Berkeley, an Anglo-Irish philosopher who lived in the eighteenth century. Berkeley—the philosopher—never visited California. He died in 1753, fifteen years before the city that would bear his name even existed. But a trustee named Frederick Billings suggested honoring the philosopher when naming the campus site north of Oakland, and the suggestion stuck.

The original class was almost comically small: ten faculty members teaching forty male students in Oakland in 1869. Women arrived the following year. The university moved to its permanent Berkeley location in 1873, once North and South Halls were completed. That first year on the Berkeley campus saw 167 male and 22 female students—a ratio that would persist, in various forms, for generations.

A Campus Designed by International Competition

The physical shape of Berkeley owes much to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Starting in 1891, she funded programs and buildings across the campus. Then, in 1898, she did something unusual: she sponsored an international architecture competition in Antwerp, Belgium, to design a master plan for the entire campus.

A French architect named Émile Bénard won. His vision—grand, Beaux-Arts, European in sensibility—would influence Berkeley's development for decades. By the 1920s, the campus had grown to include twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard, who adapted Bénard's concepts to the California landscape.

This physical grandeur reflected rising ambitions. The University Farm established near Sacramento in 1905 eventually became the University of California, Davis. The Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School, absorbed in 1919, became the University of California, Los Angeles—UCLA. Berkeley was becoming the flagship of a system, not just a standalone institution.

Where Elements Were Discovered

In the 1930s, a physicist named Ernest Orlando Lawrence built a device that would transform both Berkeley and modern physics. He called it a cyclotron—a circular particle accelerator that could smash atoms together at unprecedented energies. The machine earned Lawrence the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

The cyclotron made possible something remarkable. Using Lawrence's machines, Berkeley researchers discovered sixteen chemical elements—more than any other university in the world. When you look at the periodic table and see elements like berkelium, californium, lawrencium, and seaborgium, you're looking at Berkeley's fingerprints on the fundamental structure of matter. These elements don't exist naturally on Earth; they had to be created, atom by atom, in Berkeley's laboratories.

But the cyclotron's most consequential application came during World War Two. Glenn Seaborg—then a young Berkeley chemistry professor—secretly discovered plutonium, the element that would fuel nuclear weapons. Lawrence's laboratory began contracting with the United States Army to develop the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a Berkeley physics professor, was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942.

Think about what this means. The university that had been founded to teach agriculture and mechanical arts, in a state barely twenty years old, became central to the most destructive weapon ever created. Berkeley didn't just contribute to the atomic bomb—it helped found and manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bombs were designed, and later Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which continues nuclear weapons research to this day.

The Free Speech Movement and Its Aftermath

By the early 1960s, Berkeley had transformed physically and intellectually. It had become, in 1952, the flagship of a reorganized University of California system, with Clark Kerr as its first chancellor. Kerr would later become president of the entire system, and his vision of the "multiversity"—a massive, research-focused institution serving multiple functions—defined American higher education for a generation.

But Kerr's multiversity also contained contradictions that would explode into public view.

In 1964, Berkeley administrators tried to restrict political activities on campus—particularly those related to the Civil Rights Movement. Students had been using a strip of campus at the edge of Sproul Plaza to organize civil rights protests, and the administration decided this violated university rules.

On October 1, 1964, police arrested Jack Weinberg, a recent Berkeley graduate and chair of the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (known as CORE), for manning a civil rights table on campus. Students surrounded the police car. For thirty-two hours, they held the car in place while speaker after speaker climbed on its roof to address the crowd.

This spontaneous protest became the Free Speech Movement. Mario Savio, a philosophy student who had spent the previous summer registering Black voters in Mississippi, emerged as its most articulate spokesman. In a famous speech on December 2, 1964, he told students: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part... And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels."

The movement succeeded. Berkeley loosened its restrictions on political activity. But more importantly, the Free Speech Movement created a template for campus protest that would define the decade. Within a few years, similar movements against the Vietnam War would spread to campuses across the country, using tactics pioneered at Berkeley.

The Military's Presence

Here is another Berkeley contradiction: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement and became synonymous with anti-war protest also hosted one of the nation's first Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs. The ROTC—a program that trains college students to become military officers—arrived at Berkeley in 1917. That same year, the School of Military Aeronautics began training pilots, including Jimmy Doolittle, who would later lead the famous bombing raid on Tokyo.

In 1926, future Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz—the man who would command the Pacific Fleet during World War Two—established Berkeley's Naval ROTC unit. The list of Berkeley ROTC alumni includes Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, along with Army Chief of Staff Frederick Weyand and numerous other general and flag officers.

This military connection never disappeared, even during Berkeley's most radical years. The university that protesters saw as part of the military-industrial complex was, in fact, deeply embedded in it—and remains so today through its management of national laboratories.

How Berkeley Is Governed

Unlike most universities, Berkeley doesn't answer to a traditional board of trustees. Instead, the entire University of California system is governed by a Board of Regents—twenty-six members in total. Eighteen are appointed by the Governor of California to twelve-year terms, which means that any individual governor has limited ability to reshape the university's direction. Seven more serve by virtue of their state offices. A student regent and a non-voting student regent-designate round out the board.

This structure dates to the California Constitution of 1879, which granted the university unusual autonomy from both the legislature and the governor. The regents can set their own policies on most matters without seeking state approval.

Below the regents, each campus in the University of California system has a chancellor who serves as chief executive. Twelve vice-chancellors report to Berkeley's chancellor, and the deans of the fifteen colleges and schools report to the executive vice chancellor and provost—the chief academic officer.

Public funding now accounts for only about twelve percent of Berkeley's total revenues. The rest comes from federal research grants, tuition, private philanthropy, and various auxiliary enterprises. This shift—from majority public funding to majority private funding—has transformed Berkeley from a public university in the traditional sense to something more like a privately funded university with public oversight.

The Money Behind Berkeley

Berkeley has attracted an extraordinary roster of donors, many of whom never attended the university. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have given significant sums. So have Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum), Patrick and John Collison (founders of Stripe), and Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook). BP, the oil company, funded the Energy Biosciences Institute in 2007. Billionaires from Hong Kong and Russia have written large checks.

The Haas family—descendants of the founders of Levi Strauss and Company—have been particularly significant. The business school bears their name. Multiple generations have given to buildings, programs, and endowments across the campus.

Two recent fundraising campaigns illustrate the scale. The "Campaign for Berkeley," which ran from 2008 to 2013, raised 3.13 billion dollars from nearly 282,000 donors. The "Light the Way" campaign, which concluded at the end of 2023, raised over 6.2 billion dollars.

For comparison, these sums exceed the entire annual budgets of most American states.

What Students Actually Study

Berkeley organizes itself into fifteen schools and colleges containing 180 departments and 80 interdisciplinary units. The difference between a college and a school is that colleges typically serve both undergraduate and graduate students, while schools are generally graduate-only (though some offer undergraduate programs).

The undergraduate program offers 107 bachelor's degrees. The most popular majors are electrical engineering and computer sciences, political science, molecular and cell biology, environmental science, and economics. This list reflects both Berkeley's traditional strengths and the contemporary job market's demands.

To graduate, students must complete several requirements beyond their major. They need to demonstrate writing competency, complete coursework on American history and institutions, and pass an "American Cultures Breadth" class—a requirement unique to Berkeley that aims to expose students to the diversity of American society.

The Library System

Berkeley operates thirty-two libraries that together constitute the sixth-largest research library system in the United States by number of volumes held. This matters more than it might seem. A great research library isn't just a collection of books—it's accumulated evidence of what humans have thought and created.

The scale of such collections creates its own challenges. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, for instance, has been in conflict with Native American groups over the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects—a controversy that touches on questions of who owns the past and who gets to study it.

Athletics and Money

Berkeley's athletic teams, known as the California Golden Bears, compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference (known as the ACC)—which, despite its name, now includes a California school thanks to recent conference realignment. The teams have won 107 national championships, 196 individual national titles, and 223 Olympic medals, including 121 gold.

But athletics at Berkeley has become financially complicated. In 2012, Memorial Stadium reopened after renovations. The total cost, including a new student athletic center, came to nearly 600 million dollars. The university financed this with debt—445 million dollars for the stadium alone.

The annual interest payments consume about twenty percent of the athletics budget. Principal repayment doesn't begin until 2032 and won't conclude until 2113—nearly a century from now. Future generations of Berkeley students and alumni will be paying for a stadium renovation completed before most of them were born.

Controversies Old and New

Berkeley's relationship with the communities around it has grown increasingly fraught. Local residents filed a lawsuit arguing that the university's expanding enrollment violated the California Environmental Quality Act and that the area lacked infrastructure to support more students. Critics accused these residents of NIMBYism—"Not In My Backyard" opposition to development.

In 2021, a judge ruled for the residents. In March 2022, the California Supreme Court agreed, ordering the university to freeze admission rates at 2020-2021 levels. Within two weeks, state legislators had passed a bill exempting the university from the relevant environmental restrictions, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law. The housing shortage persists.

Other controversies have touched on research ethics. Animal rights groups have challenged the university's use of animals in experiments. Student activists have urged Berkeley to cut financial ties with various corporations. Faculty member Ignacio Chapela criticized the university's financial relationship with the agricultural company Novartis.

In 2014, the federal government began investigating Berkeley for its handling of sexual harassment complaints—part of a broader investigation into fifty-five colleges. Documents released in 2016 revealed patterns of documented harassment and firings of non-tenured staff.

In 2019, Berkeley was temporarily removed from the U.S. News college rankings for misreporting alumni giving statistics. The university had claimed an 11.6 percent alumni giving rate when the actual figure was 7.9 percent—a discrepancy that affected rankings dating back to at least 2014.

In 2024, protests over the war in Gaza resulted in police action on campus. In February 2025, the Trump administration's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced it would investigate Berkeley as part of a broader inquiry into antisemitism on college campuses.

Political Composition

Democrats outnumber Republicans on Berkeley's faculty by a ratio of approximately nine to one. This ratio is similar to that found in American academia generally, but it has drawn criticism from those who argue that intellectual diversity requires political diversity.

The university has increasingly emphasized STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—along with fundraising. The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, established in 2012 with support from billionaire mathematician Jim Simons, reflects this direction. So does the Innovative Genomics Institute, founded in 2015 with Berkeley's sister campus UCSF to develop CRISPR gene editing technology.

In 2020, an anonymous donor pledged 252 million dollars to help fund a new center for computing and data science. Such gifts shape what universities can become—and what they choose to prioritize.

The Berkeley Paradox

What does Berkeley mean? It means a public university that is mostly privately funded. It means a center of protest that remains tied to the military. It means a campus that discovered new elements and helped build nuclear weapons while also pioneering student activism. It means a place where Nobel laureates teach and where housing shortages force students to commute from distant cities.

Berkeley is not coherent. It contains multitudes, as the poet Walt Whitman said of himself. And perhaps that incoherence is the point. A great university isn't a corporation optimizing for a single metric. It's a community of people pursuing different questions—some of which turn out to be the most important questions of their era, and some of which turn out to be dead ends.

The university that employed J. Robert Oppenheimer also produced Mario Savio. The campus that trains military officers also trains activists who oppose military policy. The institution that struggles to house its students also raises billions of dollars from technology billionaires.

These contradictions aren't bugs. They're features. They reflect the contradictions of American society itself—its wealth and inequality, its military power and its democratic ideals, its scientific achievements and its ongoing struggles over who belongs and who decides. Berkeley doesn't resolve these tensions. It embodies them.

And that, perhaps, is why it matters.