The story
History
Agriculture and the land-grant university
In 1868, the University of California Davis was established as a land-grant university, and immediately founded a College of Agriculture as its first college as required by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts and the university's own Organic Act. UC operated a small farm at the Berkeley campus for several years after Ezra S. Carr became professor of agriculture, but he managed to alienate both the university faculty and the state's farmers with his attempt to directly integrate practical training in farming with courses on the larger historical, social, and political dimensions of farming and got himself fired in 1874. The faculty could not understand why students should earn credit towards degrees for hoeing or plowing, and the farmers could not understand how learning the social history of farming could make their children into better farmers.
Eugene W. Hilgard, Carr's successor, recognized that Berkeley's soil and climate were terrible for farming; as he himself explained, the campus site was situated "within the belt of extreme coast climate, accentuated by the direct impact of the cold summer fogs pouring through the Golden Gate". He switched from "practical" to what he called "rational" instruction in scientific principles of agriculture at Berkeley. He concentrated on things like soil science and fermentation that could be researched and taught in a university laboratory, supplemented by limited data gathering and experiments (but not hands-on teaching) at agricultural experimental stations in the field. Hilgard was originally disdainful of the idea of a university farm. He felt that for such a farm to teach effectively, it would necessarily have to be a model farm with examples of the best of everything, without any reference to local profitability, climate, or circumstances, and such a thing was clearly infeasible. However, in his last report as dean of the College of Agriculture before his 1905 retirement, Hilgard finally came around to the idea that a university farm "had become a pressing need" and was "much needed for proper and practical instruction in agriculture".
Founding of the university farm
Around the turn of the 20th century, Peter J. Shields, secretary of the California Agricultural Society, became aware that colleges of agriculture elsewhere had university farms which performed experiments and provided hands-on education in useful agricultural subjects, and that young people were leaving the state to study at such farms. Shields began to champion the cause of a university farm. He was later honored as the "founder" of UC Davis in 1962, when the Shields Oak Grove on campus was named after him, and again posthumously in 1972 when the campus library was named after him. However, local farmer and politician George Washington Pierce Jr. also fought aggressively in the California State Assembly for the creation of a university farm. Shields himself credited Pierce with ensuring that the site criteria in the University Farm Bill were so tightly formulated that they could be met only at the Yolo County town of Davisville. Unlike Shields, Pierce did not live long enough to see the promotion of Davis to a general campus and is now largely forgotten.
On March 18, 1905, the University Farm Bill was enacted, which called for the establishment of a farm for the University of California. The bill provided that the University Farm would "be typical and representative of the best general agricultural conditions in California", and authorized an appropriation of $150,000.00 to cover the cost of purchasing land and constructing appropriate buildings. A committee appointed by the Regents of the University of California took a year to select a site for the University Farm, a 779-acre portion of the stock farm of Jerome C. Davis, near a tiny town then known as Davisville. The regents officially took control of the property in September 1906 and constructed four buildings in 1907.
Short courses were first offered at the University Farm in October and November 1908. On January 5, 1909, the University Farm School officially opened for instruction. At its inception, the Farm School was an agricultural high school offering a three-year course for farm boys who were at least 15 years old. The original class in January 1909 consisted of 18 young men, as the original dormitories were not designed to accommodate girls. In 1913, the minimum age of entrance was raised from 15 to 18. As of 1913, the University Farm community was overwhelmingly male and rather immature. The first female students at Davis came from the College of Agriculture at Berkeley to visit the Farm for a few months in 1914. Women began to participate in the farmers' short courses in 1917 and then the Farm School admitted girls for the first time in 1918.
In May 1922, the Farm School was formally terminated after graduating its final class of 97 students and was replaced that fall with a non-degree vocational program offering a variety of one- and two-year courses. Students who completed the two-year vocational courses were awarded certificates.
From vocational certificates to bachelor's degrees
In 1916, the Farm's 314 students occupied the original 778 acres (315 ha) campus. The institution grew at a breakneck pace over the next four decades. By 1951, it had expanded to a size of 3,000 acres (1,200 ha). Along the way, it was renamed in 1922 to become the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture, and in 1938, it became the College of Agriculture at Davis.
Initially, no degrees were awarded at Davis. From the very beginning in January 1909, students in the College of Agriculture at Berkeley enrolled at Davis for a single semester to obtain practical training on an actual farm alongside the Farm School students, but had to return to Berkeley to earn their degrees. Because the non-degree program at Davis was so disconnected from the traditional degree programs on the main Berkeley campus, agricultural interests began to agitate to separate Davis and the entire College of Agriculture from the University of California. This forced the regents in 1922 to silence such proposals by initially authorizing a two-year undergraduate program at Davis. By sharing faculty members between Berkeley and Davis and hiring a few more faculty members, the university was able to provide almost all courses of a "complete undergraduate program" at Davis—that is, a four-year program leading to the bachelor's degree. The first class graduated from Davis in 1926.
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UC regularly appointed faculty members to joint positions at both Berkeley and Davis. This was possible because the two campuses are separated by only 53 miles (85 km), and the opening of a new bridge over the Carquinez Strait in 1927 greatly shortened the drive between them. Sharing faculty meant that the two campuses have always had an amicable relationship, in that Davis gradually developed its own strong identity while remaining proud of its older sibling. Thus, Davis did not suffer from the kind of "hang-ups" (i.e., inferiority complexes) which at Los Angeles culminated in a systemwide decentralization process from 1957 to 1960 in which the regents and the UC president delegated most of their powers and responsibilities to chancellors at the campus level. Davis still retains a few traditions from its early era when its identity was much more intertwined with Berkeley, such as the Bossy Cow-Cow cheer, a parody of Berkeley's Oski Yell.
In 1941, the state legislature authorized the creation of a school of veterinary medicine at Davis, but the school's launch was severely delayed by the entrance of the United States into World War II and it did not open until 1948. In 1943, the U.S. Army Signal Corps took over Davis to use the campus as a training facility. The Davis campus was not returned to civilian use until the end of 1944.
From 1926 to 1947, all Davis students earning bachelor's degrees had to travel to Berkeley for graduation. In 1948, "the regents agreed to decentralize graduations". In a ceremony at Davis that year, UC President Robert Gordon Sproul "awarded 101 bachelor of science degrees in agriculture", along with 195 certificates to graduates of the two-year vocational program.
In 1949, UC expanded the Davis campus to what is now West Campus by purchasing the 526-acre Straloch Farm to the west from its owner, Harry Hopkins. The farm came with an 86-acre private airport constructed by Hopkins in 1946. The University Airport is still the only one in the UC system.
Meanwhile, enrollment in the two-year vocational program was falling, as similar options were becoming more widely available elsewhere. In fall 1958, the campus administration announced that the two-year vocational program would be discontinued, and the last certificates were awarded in 1960.
Promotion to general campus
For much of its early history, Davis was treated as an offsite department of the main campus in Berkeley, and its chief administrative officer was a director who reported to the dean of the College of Agriculture at Berkeley. In 1944, the title became assistant dean and in 1951, the title was upgraded to provost. In May 1952, the university appointed Harry R. Wellman as its first vice-president—agricultural sciences in charge of a new Division of Agriculture, which included the existing statewide College of Agriculture at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Riverside; the agricultural extension field stations; and the county farm offices. The provosts at Davis and Riverside reported to the president through this new vice-president (rather than through the College of Agriculture).
Stanley B. Freeborn served as Davis's first provost from 1952 to 1958 and then as its first chancellor from 1958 to 1959 (in anticipation of its promotion to a general campus). However, Freeborn retired in 1959 after only one year as chancellor, then died the next year.
In October 1959, Davis was formally designated by the regents as a general campus and its chancellor was vested with the same autonomy as the chancellors at UC Berkeley and UCLA—meaning that like them, Davis's chancellor would now report directly to the university's president. The Board of Regents declared that Davis's College of Agriculture "will continue to be the University's major center of teaching and research in agriculture, which will remain a dominant emphasis". The board also suggested that the Davis campus should give "special attention" to "opportunities" to be of service to the state government due to its proximity to the state capital at Sacramento. Finally, the board set an enrollment target of 6,000 students by 1970.
Most of Davis's initial development as a UC general campus was supervised by its second chancellor, Emil M. Mrak, who served from 1959 to 1969. Mrak fondly recalled his bicycle-riding days as a child among the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley, and during his chancellorship, he worked hard to make the Davis campus into a bicycle-friendly place. When Mrak retired in 1969, the campus administration building was named Mrak Hall in his honor.
Davis's Graduate Division was established in 1961. This was followed by the creation of the College of Engineering in 1962. The School of Law opened for classes in fall 1966, and the School of Medicine began instruction in fall 1968. In a period of increasing activism, a Native American studies program was started in 1969, one of the first at a major university; it was later developed into a full department within the university.
2011 pepper spray incident and aftermath
During the Occupy movement against economic inequality, students at UC Davis organized the Occupy UC Davis protests in opposition to tuition hikes. On November 18, 2011, a campus police officer, Lieutenant John Pike, used pepper spray on a group of seated peaceful demonstrators when they refused to disperse, and another officer also pepper sprayed demonstrators at Pike's direction. The incident drew international attention and led to further demonstrations, a formal investigation, and Pike's departure in July 2012.
Documents released in 2016 through a public records request showed that the university had spent at least $175,000 to attempt to "scrub the Internet of negative postings" about the incident, in efforts that started in 2013. California newspaper The Sacramento Bee obtained a document outlining the public relations strategy, which stated: "Nevins and Associates is prepared to create and execute an online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor Katehi have received related to the events that transpired in November 2011". The strategy included an "aggressive and comprehensive online campaign to eliminate the negative search results" intended to achieve the "eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor". The university's strategic communications office, which has worked on the management of the reputation of the university and its chancellor, has had its budget substantially increased since the current chancellor took office – rising from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015. In August 2016 Katehi resigned as chancellor, and under the terms of her contract, will continue to be a full-time faculty member at UCD.
New chancellor
In February 2017, Gary S. May was named the seventh chancellor of UCD after a nationwide search. He officially began in the role on August 1. May, the former dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech, is the second African American to be named chancellor at any of the UC campuses (after former UC Irvine chancellor, Ohio State president and former UC system president Michael Drake) and one of only three currently serving African American chancellors/presidents of an AAU institution.
2022 UAW strike
In fall quarter of 2022, the United Auto Workers (UAW) led teaching assistants at UC Davis and other UC campuses in a strike that lasted several weeks. On December 16, 2022, the UCs reached a tentative agreement with the UAW.
2023 UC Davis serial stabber
In 2023, three people were stabbed over the course of five days, two of whom died. On Thursday, May 4, 2023, Davis Police arrested a former UC Davis student, Carlos Reales Dominguez, as a suspect for the crimes.
History
The University of California, Davis graduate division has a long history. Graduate education has been a major feature of the academic focus for over 80 years. This academic tradition began in the fall of 1925, when 12 students received graduate degrees from the College of Agriculture through a partnership with the graduate division of the University California at Berkeley. Over the years, the programs continued to grow, interact and collaborate. The first graduate degrees were awarded from the UC Davis campus in the fall of 1949.
In 1961, autonomous graduate divisions and graduate councils were established on all University of California campuses to provide focused oversight of their graduate programs.
From Wikipedia’s article on University of California, Davis, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3