THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES: CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OVER TIME
This research provides an overview of the creation and development of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). This overview covers the development of the institution over time, as well as some of the issues affecting the functioning of the university.
The first constitution of the State of California provided for the establishment of a state university. This provision of the constitution led to the creation of the University of California in 1853. Eventually, the university evolved into a system of branch universities, a development that made possible to creation of a branch of the University of California is Los Angeles in 1931. The Los Angeles campus was developed from a predecessor campus of the state normal (teachers) college system. That campus had been absorbed by the Regents of the University of California in 1919. The normal school had been established in Los Angeles in 1882. From 1919 through 1931, the former normal college was known as the Southern Branch of the University of California.
The university, as it is known and understood in the last-quarter of the twentieth century, is the current manifestation of a process which began to evolve in the Middle Ages. The universities of the Middle Ages did not have libraries, nor did they have laboratories. An institution without such facilities in the mid-1980s would not, in most instances, qualify for classification as a university. These differences are but two of many illustrations of how the evolutionary process has changed and continues to change the shape and the character of the university. In the twentieth century in the United States, for instance, many universities have become major partners with government and private corporations in the conduct of research activities which are not directly related to the function of teaching.
Through the Morrill Land G...