A brief history of the university, from Oxford and Cambridge to Harvard and Columbia, then from the University of Virginia to the University of California. The chapter focuses on the Morrill Act of 1862 (known also as the Land Grant Act) and on the influence of the German research university in the late nineteenth century. Considers the analysis of Laurence Veysey that the university was in some respects “incoherent” from the late nineteenth century on, given the competing constituencies made up of faculty, students, and alumni. Traces the twentieth-century history of the American university, especially the role of federal funding for research, the GI Bill after World War II, and then the Master Plan forged between Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, and Pat Brown, Governor of California, in 1960.

This chapter provides a narrative account of my time as Chancellor of UC Berkeley, beginning with issues around the governance of public universities and the place of student protest. It covers issues of personal security, debates over tuition and funding, the crisis caused by major budget shortfalls, the struggle between Governor Jerry Brown and President (of the UC System) Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona), football teams and academic performance, sexual assault among students, data science and the curriculum, the global strategy of the university, the plan for a Berkeley Global Campus, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, controversy about the role of civility on college campus, budget cuts, institutional restructuring and change, resistance to change among faculty, sexual harassment, and ultimately the tension between administrative leadership and faculty life. It also covers controversies over the visits to campus of Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro and a fullscale riot on campus. It concludes with accounts of progress in data science, biomedical research, and recovery from budget woes.