University of California, Berkeley

THE UNIVERSITY OF California, Berkeley, is the premier public research university in the United States, with 97 percent of its academic programs being among the top 10 in the country. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, and Cal, the university's academic excellence is sustained by a $2.46 billion endowment. Berkeley was founded in 1868 and is the oldest of the 10 University of California campuses. During the 1930s, the leadership of university president Robert Sproul helped Berkeley to establish itself as a leading research university, and by 1942 the American Council on Education ranked Berkeley second only to Harvard in the number of distinguished academic departments. A reorganization of the University of California system in 1952 resulted in the naming of Clark Kerr as the first chancellor for the Berkeley campus. Since then, there have been nine other chancellors; the current chancellor is Robert Birgeneau, who has filled this role since 2004.

Berkeley is a comprehensive university offering over 7,000 courses in 130-plus academic departments organized into 14 colleges and schools, offering nearly 300 degree programs. The university awards over 5,500 bachelor's degrees, 2,000 master's degrees, 900 doctorates, and 200 law degrees each year. With 33,558 students and 1,950 faculty, the student-faculty ratio is 17 to 1—among the lowest of any major university. Berkeley is the most selective school in the UC system and is one of the most selective universities in the country. For the 2006–07 academic year, 4,157 freshmen matriculated at Berkeley, from an applicant pool of just under 41,750 applicants. Graduate admissions vary by department, although in 2006 the university's doctoral programs admitted 1,058 students from a pool of 14,263 applicants.

Collectively, Berkeley's 32 libraries tie with University of Illinois for the fourth largest academic library system in the United States, surpassed only by the U.S. Library of Congress, Harvard, and Yale. In 2003, the Association of Research Libraries ranked Berkeley as the top public university library in North America and third among all universities. As of 2006, Berkeley's library system contains over 10 million volumes and maintains over 70,000 serial titles.

The scholarly achievements and excellence of the faculty and alumni have helped to build and maintain [Page 1020]Berkeley's excellent reputation. Berkeley scientists invented the cyclotron, discovered the antiproton, isolated the polio virus, created the Unix computer operating system, and discovered numerous transuranic elements including seaborgium, plutonium, berkelium, lawrencium, and californium. During World War II, Ernest Orlando Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley contracted with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb, and Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Berkeley faculty have a no less distinguished record in fields outside the physical sciences: they include 221 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows, 83 Fulbright Scholars, 28 MacArthur Fellowships, 384 Guggenheim Fellows, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 132 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 92 Sloan Fellows. Berkeley counts 61 Nobel laureates among its faculty, researchers, and alumni—the sixth most of any university in the world; 20 have served on its faculty.

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