The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university. Major publications generally rank most UC campuses as being among the best universities in the world. In 1900, UC was one of the founders of the Association of American Universities and since the 1970s seven of its campuses, in addition to Berkeley, have been admitted to the association. Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 71 Nobel Prizes as of 2021.
The California State University is a public university system in California, and the largest public university system in the world. It consists of 23 campuses and 7 off-campus centers, which together enroll 457,992 students and employ 56,256 faculty and staff members. In California, it is one of the three public higher education systems, along with the University of California and the California Community Colleges systems. The CSU system is officially incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University, and is headquartered in Long Beach, California.
Laura D'Andrea Tyson is an American economist and university administrator who is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She served as the 16th Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Tyson was the first woman to hold each of those posts. She remains the only person to have served in both posts.
Barbara Bluestein Simons is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher. She is the founder and former co-chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.
Wheaton College is a private liberal arts college in Norton, Massachusetts. Wheaton was founded in 1834 as a female seminary. The trustees officially changed the name of the Wheaton Female Seminary to Wheaton College in 1912 after receiving a college charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It remained one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States until men began to be admitted in 1988. It enrolls 1,669 undergraduate students.
France Anne-Dominic Córdova is an American astrophysicist and administrator who was the fourteenth director of the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was the eleventh President of Purdue University from 2007 to 2012. She now serves as President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.
Carol Tecla Christ is an American academic administrator. In March 2017, she was named the 11th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, the first woman to hold that position. She succeeded outgoing Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks on July 1, 2017.
Dale Raymond Corson was an American physicist and academic administrator who was the eighth president of Cornell University.
Catherine Filene Shouse was an American researcher and philanthropist. She graduated in 1918 from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She worked for the Women's Division of the U.S. Employment Service of the Department of Labor, and was the first woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee in 1925. She was also the editor of the Woman's National Democratic Committee's Bulletin (1929–32), and the first woman to chair the Federal Prison for Women Board.
Susan Westerberg Prager is an American legal scholar and administrator. Prager served as the 11th Dean and President of Southwestern Law School for eight years from 2013 to 2021, and was the first woman in the history of the law school to serve in the post.
Charles Edward Young, nicknamed Chuck Young, is an American retired university administrator and professor. A native of California, Young led the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for 29 years as chancellor and the University of Florida for more than four years as president. He now lives in Sonoma, California.
David S. Saxon was an American physicist and educator who served as the President of University of California system as well as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation.
The history of the University of California, Los Angeles traces back to the 19th century when the institution operated as a teachers' college. It would grow in size and scope for nearly four decades on two Los Angeles campuses before California governor William D. Stephens signed a bill into law in 1919 to establish the Southern Branch of the University of California. As the university broke ground for its new Westwood campus in 1927 and dissatisfaction grew for the "Southern Branch" name, the UC Regents formally adopted the "University of California at Los Angeles" name and "U.C.L.A." abbreviation that year. The "at" would be removed in 1958 and "UCLA" without periods would become the preferred stylization under Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy in the 1960s. In the first century after its founding, UCLA established itself as a leading research university with global impact across arts and culture, education, health care, technology and more.
The UCLA College of Letters and Science is the arts and sciences college of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It encompasses the Life and Physical Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Honors Program and other programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. It is often called UCLA College or the College, which is not ambiguous because the College is the only educational unit at UCLA to be currently denominated as a "college." All other educational units at UCLA are currently labeled as schools or institutes.
Jennifer Tour Chayes is dean of the college of computing, data science, and society at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she was a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012.
Luana K. Ross is a Native American sociologist of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located at Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Montana in 1979, her master's degree from Portland State University, and her doctorate in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1992, before serving as faculty at the University of California at Davis and UC Berkeley. Since 1999 she has been a faculty member for the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She has also been an Adjunct Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington since 1999. In January 2010, she was appointed president of Salish Kootenai College, effective in July of that year. She resigned from the position in 2012.
Molly Easo Smith is an Indian-American professor and scholar of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, and academic administrator.
Rosemary Park was an American scholar, academic leader, advocate for women's education and the first American woman to become president of two colleges and vice chancellor of a major university. During her career Park served as the 5th president of Connecticut College from 1947 to 1962, the 6th president of Barnard College from 1962 to 1967 and the first female vice chancellor in the University of California system at UCLA from 1967 to 1970.
Susan Poser is the current and first female president of Hofstra University, having succeeded retiring president Stuart Rabinowitz on August 1, 2021. Before being named to the Hofstra post, she was chief operating officer, provost, and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
