UCLA Extension Alumni

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School which later evolved into San José State University. The branch was transferred to the University of California to become the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the ten-campus University of California system after the University of California, Berkeley.

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 124 NCAA team championships while in the Big Ten and the Pac-12 Conference, second only to Stanford University's 128 team titles. 410 Bruins have made Olympic teams, winning 270 Olympic medals: 136 gold, 71 silver and 63 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.

, 16 Nobel laureates, 11 Rhodes scholars, two Turing Award 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 1 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. 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, Director of the 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. However, David Prescott Barrows, the new President of the University of California in 1919, did not share Wheeler's objections.

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.

As part of the pro-Palestinian protests, students set up encampments on UCLA grounds. The university provided the encampment with private security and metal barricades "to prevent violent confrontations between ..protesters." As a safety measure, several days after the establishment of the encampment, students put into place a voucher system for entry whereby one could only enter the encampment if they knew someone already inside who could vouch that they would not incite violence or undermine the encampment's safety. This measure, which produced periods in which no one was let in, was cited as justification for referring to the encampment as a “Jew Exclusion Zone” by some students on campus. However, many Jewish students, including those affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), were active within the encampment.

From the establishment of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment on April 25 to the night of April 30, many individuals, including non-students, mobilized counter-protests in support of Israel, which aimed to dismantle the encampment via intimidation and physical aggression. Over $50,000 was raised via GoFundMe to assist these efforts, enabling counter-protestors to purchase speakers and a Jumbotron, on which they played videos showcasing the events of October 7 on a loop in Royce Quad. During the nights, counter-protestors played an Israeli children’s song known to be used to torture Palestinian prisoners, overlaid with recordings of a baby’s cry, on repeat. Counter-protestors also placed or attempted to place biohazards in and around the encampment, including a backpack filled with mice. In the days immediately preceding April 30, counter-protestors made multiple attempts to break into the encampment.

On April 30, violent clashes were reported on the UCLA campus between pro-Palestinian protesters and groups of counter-demonstrators supporting Israel. After engaging in sound/ music torture for several hours, counter-protestors began physically assaulting the students inside the encampment by throwing fireworks and wooden planks at them, pepper- and bear-spraying them, and beating them with planks 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.” This 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 inflicted by counter-protesters. Some of these injuries were severe, with a doctor from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center stating, “One patient had a heart injury from the severity of the hits they sustained to the chest, while another would require surgery because of the damage done to part of a bone in their hand.” Another student “was left with stitches on his forehead and 14 staples in the back of his head.” The next day, UC administration sent campus administrator Darnell Hunt into the encampment to attempt negotiations, but refused to concede to any of the protestor’s demands—including a demand for amnesty for students involved in the encampment—and no settlement was reached between campus administration and the encampment's leadership. On the night of May 1, 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. Contemporaneous media reports indicate that rubber bullets were used by the LAPD, but the precise number of individuals impacted by these munitions was not clear, though some claims of injury arising from rubber bullets were based on older photographs or were otherwise misleading. 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.

In June 2024, three Jewish students filed a lawsuit against UCLA, alleging “that the university played a role in preventing them from accessing the campus freely during protests, when they were blocked from entering the pro-Palestinian encampment erected by protesters.” The students were represented by Becket Law. In July 2024, United States District Judge Mark C. Scarsi ordered that UCLA must “create a plan to ensure Jewish students have equal access to campus” as a result of the lawsuit.

Campus

The new UCLA campus in 1929 had four buildings: Royce Hall and Haines Hall on the north, and Powell Library and Kinsey Hall (now called Renee And David Kaplan Hall) on the south. The Janss Steps were the original 87-step entrance to the university that lead to the quad of these four buildings. Today, the campus includes 163 buildings across 419 acres (1.7 km²) in the western part of Los Angeles, north of the Westwood shopping district and just south of Sunset Boulevard. In terms of acreage, it is the second-smallest of the ten UC campuses. The Channel Islands are visible from the UCLA campus.

Architecture

The first buildings were designed by the local firm Allison & Allison. The Romanesque Revival style of these first four structures remained the predominant building style until the 1950s, when architect Welton Becket was hired to supervise the expansion of the campus over the next two decades. Romanesque Revival was chosen as an alternative to Collegiate Gothic to parallel the climate of Southern California to the warm, sunny weather of the Southern Mediterranean.

Becket greatly streamlined its general appearance, adding several rows of minimalist, slab–shaped brick buildings to the southern half, the largest of these being the UCLA Medical Center. Architects such as A. Quincy Jones, William Pereira, and Paul Williams designed many subsequent structures on the campus during the mid-20th century. More recent additions include buildings designed by architects I.M. Pei, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Richard Meier, Cesar Pelli, and Rafael Vinoly. To accommodate UCLA's rapidly growing student population, multiple construction and renovation projects are in progress, including expansions of the life sciences and engineering research complexes. This continuous construction gives UCLA the nickname "Under Construction Like Always".

One notable building on campus is named after African-American alumnus Ralph Bunche, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an armistice agreement between the Jews and Arabs in Israel. The entrance of Bunche Hall features a bust of him overlooking the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. He was the first individual of non-European background and the first UCLA alumnus to be honored with the Prize.

The Hannah Carter Japanese Garden is located a mile north of campus, in the community of Bel Air. The garden was designed by landscape architect Nagao Sakurai of Tokyo and garden designer Kazuo Nakamura of Kyoto in 1959. The garden was donated to UCLA by former UC regent and UCLA alumnus Edward W. Carter and his wife Hannah Carter in 1964 with the stipulation that it remains open to the public. After the garden was damaged by heavy rains in 1968, UCLA Professor of Art and Campus Architect Koichi Kawana took on the task of its reconstruction. The property was sold in 2016 and public access is no longer required.

Filming

UCLA has attracted filmmakers for decades with its proximity to Hollywood. It was used to represent fictional Windsor College in ''Scream 2'' (1997). In response to frequent requests for filming at the campus, UCLA has instated a policy to regulate filming and professional photography.
"UCLA is located in Los Angeles, the same place as the American motion picture industry", said UCLA visiting professor of film and television Jonathan Kuntz. "So we're convenient for (almost) all of the movie companies, TV production companies, commercial companies and so on. We're right where the action is."

Academics

College and schools

College and schools of the university - with the year of their founding - include:

Undergraduate

* College of Letters and Science (1919)
* School of the Arts and Architecture (1939)
* School of Education & Information Studies (SEIS) (1881)
* Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS) (1945)
* Herb Alpert School of Music (2007)
* School of Theater, Film and Television (1947)
* School of Nursing (1949)
* Luskin School of Public Affairs (1994)

Graduate

* School of Education & Information Studies (SEIS) (1881)
* School of Law (1949)
* Anderson School of Management (1935)
* Luskin School of Public Affairs (1994)
* David Geffen School of Medicine (1951)
* School of Dentistry (1964)
* Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health (1961)

Healthcare

The David Geffen School of Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Dentistry and Fielding School of Public Health constitute the professional schools of health science. The UCLA Health System operates the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, a hospital in Santa Monica and twelve primary care clinics throughout Los Angeles County. In addition, the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine uses two Los Angeles County public hospitals as teaching hospitals—Harbor–UCLA Medical Center and Olive View–UCLA Medical Center—as well as the largest private nonprofit hospital on the west coast, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center is also a major teaching and training site for the university.

The UCLA Medical Center made history in 1981 when Assistant Professor Michael Gottlieb first diagnosed AIDS. UCLA medical researchers also pioneered the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to study brain function. Professor of Pharmacology Louis Ignarro was one of the recipients of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the signaling cascade of nitric oxide, one of the most important molecules in cardiopulmonary physiology. The '' U.S. News & World Report'' Best Hospitals ranking for 2021 ranks UCLA Medical Center 3rd in the United States and 1st in the West. UCLA Medical Center was ranked within the top 20 in the United States for 15 out of 16 medical specialty areas examined.

Research

UCLA is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and had $1.72 billion in research expenditures in 2024, ranking it 7th nationally.

Rankings

National

The 2024 ''U.S. News & World Report'' Best Colleges report ranked UCLA first among public universities and tied for 15th among national universities. ''The Washington Monthly'' ranked UCLA 22nd among national universities in 2021, with criteria based on research, community service, and social mobility. The ''Money Magazine'' Best Colleges ranking for 2015 ranked UCLA 26th in the United States, based on educational quality, affordability and alumni earnings. In 2014, ''The Daily Beast''s Best Colleges report ranked UCLA 10th in the country. The ''Kiplinger'' Best College Values report for 2015 ranked UCLA 6th for value among American public universities. ''The Wall Street Journal'' and ''Times Higher Education'' ranked UCLA 26th among national universities in 2016. The 2013 ''Top American Research Universities'' report by the Center for Measuring University Performance ranks UCLA 11th in power, 12th in resources, faculty, and education, 14th in resources and education and 9th in education. The 2015 ''Princeton Review'' College Hopes & Worries Survey ranked UCLA as the No. 5 "Dream College" among students and the No. 10 "Dream College" among parents. The National Science Foundation ranked UCLA 6th among American universities for research and development expenditures in 2021 with $1.45 billion. In 2017 ''The New York Times'' ranked UCLA 1st for economic upward-mobility among 65 "elite" colleges in the United States.

Global

The ''Times Higher Education World University Rankings'' for 2024-25 ranks UCLA 18th in the world for academics, No. 2 US Public University for academics, and 15th in the world for reputation. In 2020, it ranked 16th among the universities around the world by ''SCImago Institutions Rankings

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