The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as the southern branch of the California State Normal School, which is now San José State University. The campus was transferred to the University of California to become its southern branch in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system after the University of California, Berkeley. It officially became independent from Berkeley on June 14, 1951, and set the precedent to further strip CAL's administrative oversight over University of California, Davis, University of California, Riverside, University of California, San Diego, and University of California, San Francisco.
UCLA offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students annually. It received 174,914 undergraduate applications for Fall 2022, including transfers, the most of any university in the United States. The university is organized into the College of Letters and Science and twelve professional schools. Six of the schools offer undergraduate degree programs: Arts and Architecture, Engineering and Applied Science, Music, Nursing, Public Affairs, and Theater, Film and Television. Three others are graduate-level professional health science schools: Medicine, Dentistry, and Public Health. Its three remaining schools are Education & Information Studies, Management and Law.
UCLA student-athletes compete as the Bruins in the Big Ten Conference. They won 126 NCAA team championships while in the Big Ten and the Pac-12 Conference, second only to Stanford University's 128 team titles. 436 Bruins have made Olympic teams, winning 284 Olympic medals: 141 gold, 74 silver and 69 bronze. UCLA has been represented in every Olympics since the university's founding (except in 1924) and has had a gold medalist in every Olympics in which the U.S. has participated since 1932.
, 19 Nobel laureates, 11 Rhodes scholars, 10 astronauts, 3 Turing Award winners, 2 Dan David Prize winners, 2 chief scientists of the U.S. Air Force, 1 Pritzker Prize winner, 7 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 U.S. poet laureates, 1 Gauss prize winner, and 2 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with it as faculty, researchers and alumni. , 61 associated faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 17 to the American Philosophical Society, 34 to the National Academy of Engineering, 49 to the National Academy of Medicine, 29 to the National Academy of Inventors, and 71 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
History
In March 1881, at the request of state senator Reginaldo Francisco del Valle, the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University) in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. The "Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School" opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. The facility included a demonstration school where teachers-in-training could practice their techniques with children. That elementary school would become the present day UCLA Lab School.Administrative/Biographical History, UCLA Lab School records (University Archives Record Series 208). UCLA Library Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. In 1887, the branch campus became independent and changed its name to Los Angeles State Normal School.
In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue (now the site of Los Angeles City College) in East Hollywood. In 1917, UC Regent Edward Augustus Dickson, the only regent representing the Southland at the time, and Ernest Carroll Moore, President of the Los Angeles State Normal School, began to lobby the State Legislature to enable the school to become the second University of California campus, after UC Berkeley. They met resistance from UC Berkeley alumni, Northern California members of the state legislature and then-UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who were all vigorously opposed to the idea of a southern campus.
The state constitution expressly protected the autonomy of the University of California from political interference, which meant the Legislature could not directly command the Board of Regents to create a southern campus. However, the state constitution did not prohibit the state legislature from passing legislation to create additional state universities. The supporters of the Los Angeles State Normal School used the possibility of that scenario to pressure the Board of Regents to voluntarily accept the normal school as UC's southern campus. In 1919, the California Legislature passed a bill formally transforming the Los Angeles State Normal School into the Southern Branch of the University of California, making it the first UC campus established after Berkeley.
On May 23, 1919, the Southern Californians' efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626 into law, which acquired the land and buildings and transformed the Los Angeles Normal School into the "Southern Branch of the University of California". The same legislation added its general undergraduate program, the Junior College. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year, offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Junior College students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College. While University of Southern California students criticized the "branch" as a mere "twig", Southern Californians continued to fight Northern Californians for the right to three and then four years of instruction. In December 1923, the Board of Regents authorized a fourth year of instruction and transformed the Junior College into the College of Letters and Science, which awarded its first bachelor's degrees in June 1925.
Under UC President William Wallace Campbell, enrollment at the Southern Branch expanded so rapidly that by the mid-1920s the institution was outgrowing the 25 acre Vermont Avenue location. The Regents announced the new "Beverly Site"—just west of Beverly Hills—in 1925. After the athletic teams entered the Pacific Coast conference in 1926, the Southern Branch student council adopted the nickname "Bruins", a name offered by the student council at UC Berkeley. On February 1, 1927, the Regents renamed the Southern Branch the "University of California at Los Angeles". In the same year, the state broke ground in Westwood on land sold for $1 million, less than one-third its value, by real estate developers Edwin and Harold Janss, for whom the Janss Steps are named. The campus in Westwood opened to students in 1929.
The original four buildings were the College Library (now Powell Library), Royce Hall, the Physics-Biology Building (which became the Humanities Building and is now the Renee and David Kaplan Hall), and the Chemistry Building (now Haines Hall), arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard on the 400 acre (1.6 km2) campus. The first undergraduate classes on the new campus were held in 1929 with 5,500 students. UCLA was permitted to award the master's degree in 1933, and the doctorate in 1936, against continued resistance from UC Berkeley.
Maturity as a university
During its first 32 years, UCLA was treated as an off-site department of the main campus in Berkeley. As such, its presiding officer was called a "provost". This remained the case even when it grew into a major institution in its own right. In 1951, UCLA was formally elevated to coequal status with UC Berkeley, with both institutions headed by chancellors who reported on an equal basis to the president of the UC system. Raymond B. Allen was the first UCLA chief executive to be granted the title of chancellor. In November 1958, the "at" in UCLA's name was replaced with a comma, a symbol of its independence from Berkeley.
The appointment of Franklin David Murphy to the position of chancellor in 1960 helped spark an era of tremendous growth of facilities and faculty honors. This era secured UCLA's position as a proper university in its own right and not simply a branch of the UC system.
Recent history
On June 1, 2016, two men were killed in a murder-suicide at an engineering building in the university. School officials put the campus on lockdown as Los Angeles Police Department officers, including SWAT, cleared the campus. In February 2022, Matthew Harris, a former lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, was arrested after allegedly making numerous threats of violence against students and faculty members of UCLA's Philosophy Department.
In 2018, a student-led community coalition known as "Westwood Forward" successfully led an effort to break UCLA and Westwood Village away from the existing Westwood Neighborhood Council and form a new North Westwood Neighborhood Council, with over 2,000 out of 3,521 stakeholders voting in favor of the split. Westwood Forward's campaign focused on making housing more affordable and encouraging nightlife in Westwood by opposing many of the restrictions on housing developments and restaurants the Westwood Neighborhood Council had promoted. In 2022, UCLA signed an agreement to partner with the Tongva for the caretaking and landscaping of various areas of the campus. This included land use for ceremonial events and educational workshops and outreach events.
Spring 2024 pro-Palestine encampment
On April 25, 2024, an occupation protest began at UCLA to protest the administration's investments in Israel amid the Gaza war. On April 28, clashes occurred between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters as Stand With Us rallied on the campus, in a protest organized by the Israeli American Council.
Beginning on April 25, counter-protests in support of Israel emerged aimed at dismantling the encampment. On April 30, violent clashes were reported on the UCLA campus between pro-Palestinian protesters and groups of counter-demonstrators. After playing Israeli children's songs alongside a baby's cry for several hours (a tactic used to torture Palestinian prisoners), counter-protestors began physically assaulting the students inside the encampment with fireworks, wooden planks, capsaicin sprays, and pipes. Police were called shortly after the attack began, but refused to intervene until hours after the first firework went off, telling multiple 911 callers: "You can't continue calling unless you have an emergency." The attack continued for four more hours before California state highway patrol officers arrived to disperse the crowd of counter-protestors at around 3:00 AM, making no arrests.
Over 20 students had to be hospitalized due to injuries of various severities inflicted by counter-protesters. On May 1, UC administration unsuccessfully sent campus administrator Darnell Hunt into the encampment to negotiate an end to the encampment. The same night, police swept the Palestine Solidarity Encampment and arrested more than 200 pro-Palestinian student protestors. The UCLA chapter of Students For Justice in Palestine claimed five students were shot in the head with rubber bullets during the sweep, but the LAPD denied that rubber bullets were used. Varying, sometimes contradictory, media accounts exist on the manner and extent to which rubber bullets were used during the sweep. Several months later, two counter-protestors were arrested for their role in the April 30 attack. LA County District Attorney George Gascón declined to charge other individuals identified as attackers against the encampment and individuals inside the encampment.