Davis is the most populous city in Yolo County, California, United States. Located in the Sacramento Valley region of Northern California, the city had a population of 66,850 in 2020, not including the on-campus population of the University of California, Davis, which was over 9,400 in 2016. As of 2019, there were 38,369 students enrolled at the university.
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 University of California, Davis, is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institution was first founded as an agricultural branch of the system in 1905 and became the seventh campus of the University of California in 1959.
Students of the University of California at Davis who attend sporting events can join the Aggie Pack, the largest student-run university spirit organization in the United States. The Aggie Pack was started in 1992 as an attempt to increase attendance at games and events, and was successful. Membership is free and automatic for students, offers chances to win merchandise and food, and provides a very raucous encouragement to the athletes. Students band together as one large group, invent cheers, and support the UC Davis Aggies with their enthusiasm. In past recent years, the more energetic members of the Pack, known as Aggie Pack Extremists, tended to dress up in elaborate yale blue and gold costumes and dairy cow makeup. One Aggie Pack cheer is "Go Ags!". The Aggie Pack, as well as the crowd, sing the Aggie Fight song during sporting events.
The UC Davis Marching Band, organized in the fall of 2019, is the official University of California, Davis marching band. It is the successor to the student-run California Aggie Marching Band-uh!, which existed from the 1920s to 2019. In 2018, the Band-uh had roughly 250 members. It performed at home and away games to cheer on the UC Davis Aggies sports teams, marched in parades, and played at events on the UC Davis campus as well as in the surrounding Davis community.
Toomey Field is a track and field stadium in the western United States, located on the campus of the University of California, Davis in unincorporated Yolo County, California. The Woody Wilson Track is located in the stadium and it is home to the UC Davis Aggies track and field team.
The University Credit Union Center is an 7,600-seat indoor multi-purpose stadium on the campus of the University of California, Davis in unincorporated Yolo County, California.
UC Davis Health Stadium is a 10,743-seat multi-purpose stadium in the western United States, located on the campus of the University of California, Davis in unincorporated Yolo County, California. Opened as Aggie Stadium on April 1, 2007, it replaced Toomey Field and is the home to the UC Davis Aggies football and women's lacrosse teams. Plans call for the stadium to eventually be built out to 30,000 seats.
The California Aggie is a weekly newspaper distributed in the Davis, California area. It is staffed entirely by UC Davis students and is the official campus newspaper.
The Davis Men's Crew Club is a collegiate sports club representing the University of California, Davis in rowing. As a non-funded team, it is a member of the Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association (WIRA), whose participants are mostly of non-Pac-10 schools on the West Coast. Nationwide, the team is one of the most successful collegiate rowing club programs in the United States, making periodic appearances in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association national championships, the Eastern College Athletic Conference and, more recently, the American Collegiate Rowing Association national championships. Notable alumni include Seth Weil, who rowed in the USA men's coxless four at the 2016 Rio Olympics and who holds two world rowing championship first place titles in the men's four; as well as Carlo Facchino who holds a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest Pacific Ocean crossing from Monterey, CA to Honolulu, Hawaii with a time of 39 days, 9 hours and 56 minutes.
Jim Sochor was an American football player, coach, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at the University of California, Davis from 1970 to 1988 during which time compiling a record of 156–41–5 and won 18 consecutive conference championships, then a college football record. Sochor also served as the athletic director at UC Davis from 1989 to 1991. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1999.
The Causeway Classic is the annual college football game between the Sacramento State Hornets and the UC Davis Aggies in the United States. The teams exchange a Causeway Classic Trophy made from cement taken from the Yolo Causeway.
The Sacramento State Marching Band(SSMB) is the official marching band at California State University, Sacramento. To this day the band performs at all home football games and various away games during the football season. The SSMB also functions as the de facto student cheering section at athletic events, as it is the largest and loudest spirit organization of Sacramento State's campus. The SSMB also is present every year during the Causeway Classic against its arch-rival: UC Davis.
The UC Davis Aggies football team represents the University of California, Davis in NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The football program's first season took place in 1915, and has fielded a team each year since with the exception of 1918 during World War I and from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, when the campus, then known as the University Farm, was shut down. The team was known as the Cal Aggies or California Aggies from 1922 to 1958 when UC Davis was called the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture.
The UC Davis Aggies are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Davis.
The Department of Applied Science at the University of California, Davis was a cooperative academic program involving the University of California, Davis and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It was established in the fall of 1963 by Edward Teller, director of LLNL, and Roy Bainer, then dean of the UC Davis College of Engineering. The department was discontinued in 2011.
Gary Stephen May is the chancellor of the University of California, Davis. From May 2005 to June 2011, he was the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He served as the Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering from July 2011 until June 2017.
The Baggins End Domes, also known as The Domes or the Davis Domes, are a student housing cooperative at the University of California, Davis built by students in 1972. They are part of the Sustainable Research Area which includes the Student Farm and the Experimental College Gardens. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, there are 14 domes, featuring painted fiberglass-shell exteriors, the insides of which were coated with sprayed polyurethane foam, and "core-walls" with a kitchen on one side and a bathroom on the other. On January 25, 2011, an announcement was made by Student Housing that no new leases will be granted for the following academic year. The Sustainable Living/ Learning Task Force with faculty and students was initiated to investigate options.
Occupy Cal included a series of demonstrations that began on November 9, 2011, on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California. It was allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, San Francisco Bay Area Occupy groups such as Occupy Oakland, Occupy Berkeley, and Occupy San Francisco, and other public California universities. "Cal" in the name "Occupy Cal" is the nickname of the Berkeley campus and generally refers specifically to UC Berkeley.
The UC Davis pepper spray incident occurred on November 18, 2011, during an Occupy movement demonstration at the University of California, Davis. After asking the protesters to leave several times, university police pepper sprayed a group of student demonstrators as they were seated on a paved path in the campus quad. The video of UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying demonstrators spread around the world as a viral video and the photograph became an Internet meme. Officer Alex Lee also pepper sprayed demonstrators at Pike's direction.
