Founding of University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley, was created by the state legislature as the first campus of the University of California system, formed from a small private college in Oakland and the state's agricultural, mining and mechanical arts institution. It moved to its present site above San Francisco Bay, in the town of Berkeley, in the 1870s. The university grew into one of the most prestigious public research universities in the world, with a strong tradition in physics, chemistry, engineering and the social sciences. Its Radiation Laboratory, founded by Ernest Lawrence, was a key centre of nuclear physics, and its faculty and alumni have won many Nobel Prizes. In the 1960s the campus also became known as a centre of the Free Speech Movement and student activism.

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