In 1866, the land which is now the Berkeley campus was first purchased by the private
College of California (established by Congregational minister Henry Durant in 1855).
However, lacking the funds to operate, the College of California merged with state-run Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts
College, forming the University of California on
March 23, 1868, with Durant becoming the
first president. The university first opened in Oakland in
1869. In 1873, with the completion of North and South
Halls, the university relocated to the Berkeley campus with 167 men and 222 women students enrolled.Through the middle decades of the 20th century, the Berkeley campus
enjoyed a golden age in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. During that period, with Professor Ernest O. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron, researchers affiliated with the campus discovered a great number of chemical elements heavier than uranium, the only ones
known at that time, garnering a number of Nobel Prizes for these efforts
along the way. Two of the elements, Berkelium and Californium, were named in honor of the university. Another two, Lawrencium and Seaborgium, were named in honor of faculty
members Ernest O. Lawrence and Glenn T. Seaborg.During World War II, Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in the hills above Berkeley
began to contract with the U.S. Army in efforts to help understand the
fundamental science needed to develop the atomic bomb (including the
then-secret discovery of plutonium by Seaborg). Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. The University agreed to manage the project
(without knowing its purpose) the same year, a relationship which has endured to the present (though not without its strains).
Room 307 of Gilman Hall, where Seaborg discovered plutonium, is now a National Historic Landmark. Two other University of California managed labs, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory and Los Alamos National
Laboratory, were established during this time period.During the McCarthy era in 1949,
the Board of Regents
adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath to be signed by all University of
California employees. A number of faculty members firmly took a stand against the oath requirement and were eventually dismissed.
They were reinstated with full honor and back-pay ten years later; one of them, Edward C. Tolman — the noted comparative psychologist — now has a building on the campus named after him (it houses the
departments of psychology and education).In 1952 the University of California became an entity separate from the Berkeley campus
as part of a major restructuring of the UC system, and each campus was given its own Chancellor, and greater autonomy.The University gained notoriety worldwide nearly a century after its founding for the student body's active protests against
United States involvement in the Vietnam War. This period of social unrest on campus could be traced to the Free Speech Movement, which originated on the Berkeley campus in 1964 and inspired the political and moral outlook of a generation.Today, the majority of students at UC Berkeley are less politically active than their predecessors and have political opinions
similar to students at most other American universities. However, a small number of outspoken radical groups continue to flourish
and thrive.