Berkeley. Schmerkeley. California’s most important educational institution is UCLA.

Now would be a good time for Californians to recognize this, and not only because the school in Westwood is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. UCLA’s rapid rise is also a California triumph that offers a thorough rebuttal of all our excuses for not supporting our most vital institutions.

Like California itself, UCLA’s impact is so broad and diffuse that it can be hard to appreciate. While we Angelenos often take the place for granted—it’s our local UC and feels like it’s been around forever—UCLA is actually one of the world’s youngest elite universities. Even by the standards of Southern California, it’s young: the Automobile Club, the Department of Water and Power, Ralphs supermarkets, USC, Caltech, Occidental College, and Pomona College are all decades older.

But despite its late start, UCLA may come closest to meeting the essential California challenge: Being the best while still also being accessible. It has come to embody the American dream of what college could be—it receives more applications each year than any U.S. university, nearly 140,000, from all 50 states and 149 countries.

While its academics and research rival those of the Ivy League, UCLA educates far more poor kids than other elite American colleges. Some 35 percent of undergraduates receive Pell grants (a rate twice that of the Ivies), and one-third of graduates are the first in their families to earn a four-year degree. UCLA leads the UC system in educating transfer students—those who enter UCLA as juniors, often after spending two years in community colleges.

Yes, I can hear the howls from the Bay Area. Simmer down. Sure, Stanford is great, but it has a smaller, richer student body—enrollment of 17,000 compared to UCLA’s 45,000—and an admissions rate so low that it’s now more exclusive than the Bohemian Club. And while Berkeley retains its academic prestige, UCLA has more students, better sports teams (117 NCAA team championships and counting), and more academic options, including a world-class medical center.

My own loyalties on UCLA vs. Berkeley comparisons are conflicted. Zócalo Public Square, the publication that produces this column, partners with UCLA on public events, though I write this wearing a Cal T-shirt given to me by my two siblings, who are both Berkeley alums. But what all Californians should appreciate, regardless of school affiliation, is this: UCLA became what it is today in the face of relentless hostility from Berkeley.

Before UCLA, Berkeley was the University of California, and the university’s leaders, and their powerful friends in Sacramento, had little interest in creating a second campus in Southern California—as Marina Dundjerski shows in her smart history, UCLA: The First Century.

A 75-ton granite boulder, Founders’ Rock, was installed in October 1929 at UCLA’s new Westwood campus. Courtesy of UCLA Archives.

By 1915, more Berkeley students were from Los Angeles than San Francisco. But in Berkeley, the University of California president, the regents, and the faculty resisted establishing even the two-year school that would become UCLA, arguing it would weaken the University of California’s prestige.

Nevertheless, in 1919 the Los Angeles newspaperman Edward Dickson, a regent and Berkeley graduate, successfully fought to open a two-year campus on Vermont Avenue. It had no degree-making power, and the snobs up North wanted to keep it that way. They even complained that UCLA’s early mission—producing teachers, from a student body in which women outnumbered men 6-to-1—was unworthy of UC’s academic standards.

But Dickson and other traitorous Berkeley alums persisted, developing a four-year, degree-granting college despite the objections of UC President David Barrows. “If something in the nature of an academic rival, laying siege to the State Treasury for the limited funds which are available for higher education, is to be established at Los Angeles,” Barrows wrote to San Francisco Chronicle publisher and fierce UCLA opponent M.H. de Young in 1923, according to Dundjerski’s book, “not only will higher education suffer in the State, but the prospects of our union as a people will be grievously hurt.”

The North-South clash grew so bitter that UCLA’s first head, Ernest Carroll Moore, complained that he “felt most of the time as if I had drunk kerosene.”

UCLA nevertheless expanded rapidly not because of deep official support, but because of the people of California, who kept enrolling, whether there was room for them or not. The end of World War I and women’s suffrage inspired Californians to head to universities.

By 1926, UCLA was already the fifth largest liberal arts college in the nation. (Berkeley would remain first, but not forever). In 1929, having overgrown its first home, the school moved into a new campus in Westwood, with the taxpayers of L.A., Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Venice providing funds via bond measures. This expansion occurred against some Berkeley resistance, though the project’s Berkeley-trained engineer did name some Westwood streets—Le Conte, Hilgard, Gayley—for his NorCal professors.

In some sense, that has been the heart of the UCLA story ever since. Even without the support of Northern California, UCLA kept getting bigger and better.

The stock market crash arrived five weeks after classes started in Westwood in 1929, and state appropriations for higher education were slashed 25 percent in the Depression. But UCLA nevertheless accommodated a surge of new students and faculty. After the war, the regents and the UC president resisted the establishment of professional schools like law and medicine, but UCLA started them anyway.

And even during research cutbacks, UCLA kept growing an academic operation that ultimately sent the first internet message, advanced AIDS research, and produced the nicotine patch.

The indignities from the North never really stopped. It wasn’t until 1951 that UCLA got its first chancellor. In 1960, new chancellor Franklin D. Murphy created a furor by insisting that the phones be answered “UCLA” rather than “University of California” as part of his fight against the “desire up there to keep this little brother from getting too big and keep it from gaining its own strength and visibility and self-confidence.”

Murphy and his successor, Charles E. Young, who led UCLA from 1968-1997, weathered Governor Ronald Reagan’s political turn against the university and 1978’s Proposition 13 revolution, which created a new tax and budget system that produced a massive disinvestment in public universities. And even in the face of the anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action politics of the 1980s, UCLA kept working to diversify, transforming from a student body that was 67 percent white in 1980 to one that was 64 percent non-white in 1991.

UCLA’s budget now relies on the federal government, private fundraising, and higher tuition (including the full rates charged to its larger numbers of out-of-state and international students). It has grown to $7.5 billion today (from $160 million in 1967), even as state funding has shrunk to less than 7 percent of all revenues.

“The one central notion that carries throughout UCLA’s history,” writes Dundjerski in her UCLA history, “is that the institution was built on risk.”

Unfortunately, California has forgotten this important lesson about risk. We still produce transformational plans for health care, education, energy, and infrastructure—but we tell ourselves we can’t accomplish them because of our existing rules, or powerful Sacramento politicians, or because of our lack of money.

But none of that stopped UCLA.

Certainly, UCLA’s diversity was dealt a setback by the passage of the anti-affirmative action measure Prop 209 in 1996; this century’s budget crises forced some cuts; and its admissions standards have gotten more exclusive (which is one reason why UCLA was a target in the highly publicized admissions scam). But UCLA’s ambitions seem undimmed.

Its enrollment management wizard, Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, is using everything from smartphones to Starbucks meetings to connect to prospective students in poor communities as early as middle school. And its current leadership has launched a public program of “Grand Challenges”—aimed at shifting the L.A. region to 100 percent local water and renewable energy, and to cut the burden of clinical depression in half by 2050.

The next 100 years will require even more risk-taking. California needs millions more college graduates. To do that, UCLA must grow far bigger, turn more of its record number of applicants into graduates, and reduce the costs of attending—all without sacrificing excellence.

Such a transformation will require far greater flexibility, and probably formal independence, from meddlesome regents, budget-cutting governors, and any other interfering Northerners. Our greatest university should be free to become all we need it to be.

Then maybe Berkeley can follow its lead.

The post Berkeley Is Great. But UCLA Is Greater appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thank you, Berkeley.

Recent headlines should remind Californians of yet another way we are lucky. Our state has the world’s best scapegoat: you.

You—our most distinguished public university and all the people, institutions, and neighborhoods surrounding it—do far more than research and educate. You serve the vital social purpose of being a convenient punching bag for angry people of all manner of ideological preoccupations.

The right and the center can pin all of California’s liberal sins, real and imagined, on you. And the left sees a reactionary threat in everything, from your fundraising, to police action on or near campus, to the presence of law professor John Yoo, who defended torture under President George W. Bush. Sometimes you’re denounced as dangerously permissive, and other times you’re frighteningly authoritarian.

And when it comes to higher education’s struggles, legislators on both sides of the aisle blame you for everything: You’re too arrogant, and you charge too much and you let in too many out-of-state students—even though the need to pocket that higher out-of-state tuition is the direct result of the legislature’s systematic disinvestment in you and your sister university campuses across California.

Yes, California as a whole takes a lot of critical blows. But can you imagine how more bloodied the rest of our state would be if we didn’t have you around to absorb so much abuse?

In recent months, as a furious world chokes on its own populist vomit, it’s been deeply reassuring to see you play your familiar role as California’s sacrificial lamb with your practiced aplomb.

First, you suffered widespread condemnation from President Trump and the media—both for your decision to cancel a speech by the Breitbart News provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous, and for the anarchist, anti-fascist violence (from arson to window smashing) that prompted the cancellation. And you didn’t gloat or demand apologies—because no one is ever sorry for slurring you—when Yiannopoulous was subsequently disgraced for defending pedophilia.

You and the Berkeley police have patiently dealt with pro-Trump provocateurs who hold rallies near campus to start fights—as well as the anti-Trump counter-protesters who took the bait recently. And most recently, you’ve taken incoming from the left for permitting the right-wing diva Ann Coulter to speak on campus, before you got roasted by the right for canceling her appearance because you couldn’t guarantee her safety.

You can’t win in any of these fights, of course, which is why you’re such an easy target. And yet you endure—which is precisely what makes you so valuable to California. And I want you to know that, while Californians are unlikely to thank you publicly, many of us are quietly grateful to you for keeping so many cranks and extremists focused on you, and away from our own neighborhoods and campuses.

What I marvel at is your ability to relish your role as whipping post, without complaint or counter-attack. I know folks in working-class places like Bakersfield think they’re the most hardened Californians, but the truth is they’re not even half as tough as you, California’s leading scapegoat.

When I think of you, I can’t help but recall the work of the late Rene Girard, one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers and a professor at your rival Stanford (so I’ll understand if you take him with a grain of salt). Girard wrote that modern society has become addicted to scapegoating; we take our anger out on sacrificial lambs just as cruelly as ancient societies did, most famously in a certain Crucifixion. (Yes, Jesus really loves you, Berkeley, and not just because you’re home to the Graduate Theological Union.)

Most pointedly, Girard said, this scapegoating has value—in bringing people together and reducing the scale and damage of violence. He wrote: “When human groups divide and become fragmented, during a period of malaise and conflicts, they may come to a point where they are reconciled again at the expense of a victim.”

Indeed, you, as scapegoat, are a protector of many vulnerable people. Just look at the rest of the country and the world, where elected leaders and voting publics are scapegoating whole classes of people—migrants, Muslims, Mexicans. We haven’t had the same level of scapegoating in California, and one reason for that is you take such a heavy helping of the racists’ rage.

You’re such a good scapegoat because you’ve had so much practice. You were the largest public university in the world by 1912, and your city has been a pioneer in everything from domestic partnerships to curbside recycling to Alice Waters’ cooking—and leaders always take heavy fire.

Politicians love to hate you. Ronald Reagan built the most successful American political career of the last half-century on scapegoating you; he ran for governor declaring he would clean up “the mess at Berkeley” and made you a leading symbol of “a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap” in the country. In 1969, he made great show of sending the National Guard into People’s Park.

Of course, his successor, Jerry Brown, liked to poke you, too, even though he was a graduate. Things were so bad between you two during his first tenure that his gubernatorial papers ended up at USC. Pretty much every governor since then has taken swipes, both rhetorical and budgetary, at you.

If I were you, on the business end of so much blame-shifting, I’d be tempted to point to the reality: that Berkeley itself is not so different from the rest of California. The city has a mix of the beautiful and the gritty, and for all its supposed radicalism, it contains the regular chains—Starbucks, McDonald’s—of every university town. And your university is mostly just a collection of kids from all over our state and our world.

But you won’t make this argument because you know that perception is reality, and there’s no use in fighting a stubborn perception. After all, that was a central insight of Bishop George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher for whom you are named. Berkeley suggested that the objects we see in the world are really just ideas, made real only by the minds of those who perceive them.

Since the scapegoating of Berkeley isn’t really about you, there’s not much you can do about it. Except steel yourself for more.

Girard, the Stanford philosopher, argued that as humans experience more conflict and identity-based backlash, scapegoating increases. “We easily see now that scapegoats multiply wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identity—communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on,” he wrote.

I’m sorry, Berkeley. Times being how they are, California is going to need you to shoulder even more of the blame.

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