University of California, Merced

The University of California, Merced (UC Merced) is a public research university in Merced, California and is the tenth and newest of the University of California campuses. Established in 2005, UC Merced is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". UC Merced enrolls 8,847 undergraduates and 696 graduates with 63.8% of students receiving Pell Grants, and more than 99% of UC Merced students coming from California. UC Merced's undergraduate education is ranked 97th among U.S. national research universities by U.S. News & World Report.

History
The creation of a UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley was delayed for almost three decades as a result of the slow-motion air pollution disaster at UC Riverside. In approving the 1960 UC master plan, the Regents of the University of California were already mindful of the worsening smog at the hot and dry Riverside campus. Their concern turned out to be a valid one: smog would bring UC Riverside to its knees within a decade and cause UC President David S. Saxon to float the idea of closing Riverside. The Regents were also concerned about smog in the hot and dry San Joaquin Valley, and this was a factor behind their decision to delay action on a future campus in that region.

By the 1980s, the San Joaquin Valley was the state's largest and most populous region without a UC campus. On May 19, 1988, the Regents voted to begin planning for a campus in the region in response to increasing enrollment and growth constraints at existing UC campuses. On May 19, 1995, the Regents selected Merced, midway between Fresno and Modesto, as the location for the University of California's tenth campus. In 2001, the university used an $11 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to acquire a 7,030-acre site adjacent to Lake Yosemite, just north of Merced, from the Virginia Smith Trust, the largest acreage the UC system has acquired for one of its campuses.

The university originally planned to conserve 5,030 acre to protect sensitive vernal pool habitats. A public golf course known as the Merced Hills Golf Course had been constructed at the site in the early 1990s. This course was shut down to make way for the new campus when the original site for the campus was made unavailable due to the discovery of fairy shrimp – an endangered species – on the originally proposed site. Since the construction of the golf course had negated concerns about wetland and vernal pool environmental issues, building the campus at this location was easier than fighting to save the original construction site. Two small bridges on campus date from the time of the golf course.

UC Merced established a satellite campus in Bakersfield, California in 2001 in its downtown University Square. The satellite campus advocated a UC education to prospective college-bound students of Kern County and the southern San Joaquin Valley before UC Merced opened its official campus in Merced. Classes and counseling were also provided at the Bakersfield center to newly admitted UC students. In 2011, UC Merced closed its Bakersfield campus in a cost-cutting effort. An administrative building was then planned to be located in downtown Merced.

The campus groundbreaking ceremony was held October 25, 2002, and the first day of classes was September 6, 2005. Three years and eight months later, on May 16, 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama gave the commencement address for the university's first full graduating class.

In 2010, the United States Census Bureau made UC Merced its own separate census-designated place. Later that same year, the new student housing facilities, The Summits, opened to provide two additional residential halls for incoming students. The two four-story buildings, Tenaya Hall and Cathedral Hall, are reserved primarily for incoming freshmen students. Three years later, another housing facility, Half Dome, was built next to the existing Tenaya and Cathedral Halls. Half Dome houses both freshman and continuing students.

In January 2015, UC Merced was nationally classified with the Carnegie Classification for community engagement, along with UC Davis and UCLA.

On November 4, 2015, 18-year-old student Faisal Mohammad stabbed and injured four people with a hunting knife before being shot to death by a campus police officer.

In November 2015, the University of California regents approved a $1.14 billion proposal, known as the 2020 Plan, to double the capacity of UC Merced, boosting its enrollment by nearly 4,000 students. The new buildings are expected to be completed by 2020. In April 2019, funding was completely cut off for UC Merced's student-run newspaper.

UC Merced claims to be the only institution in the United States whose buildings are all LEED certified. Its Triple Net Zero Commitment is expected to create zero net landfill waste and zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.

Organization and governance


As with all UC campuses, UC Merced is headed by a chancellor. Carol Tomlinson-Keasey held the position from 1999 until she resigned on August 31, 2006. She returned to teaching and research in psychology in 2007 and later died of breast cancer in 2009. On September 21, 2006, the Regents named Roderic B. Park, a former interim chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, as the acting chancellor for UC Merced. Park remained acting chancellor until Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang, Dean of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Baskin School of Engineering took office in early March 2007. Kang held the position from 2006 to 2011, when he stepped down so he could return to research and teaching.

After a nationwide search, on May 24, 2011, the Regents of the University of California named Dorothy Leland, then president of Georgia College & State University, to be the university's newest chancellor. On May 13, 2019, Leland announced that she would be stepping down from her position, effective Aug 15, 2019. UC Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Nathan Brostrom is currently serving as interim chancellor.

The campus takes advantage of the surrounding environment by investigating issues relating to environmental systems of the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada, and of its youth by having programs in genetic research conducted in state-of-the-art research labs. It also benefits from proximity to Silicon Valley and other major universities. Research in fields like language acquisition and cultural issues is facilitated by the highly diverse ethnic makeup of the Central Valley.

UC Merced operates on a semester system rather than the quarter system for its academic term. The Berkeley campus is the only other UC campus on a semester system.

Academics


UC Merced has 3 schools offering 23 undergraduate majors and 25 minors:


 * School of Engineering
 * School of Natural Sciences
 * School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

The site for the Science and Engineering Building 2, opened in 2014, is the most recent new building on campus. The Classroom and Office Building 2 opened in 2016.

The UC Merced Graduate Division offers 18 graduate programs:
 * Applied Mathematics (M.S., Ph.D.)
 * Bioengineering (M.S., PhD)
 * Chemistry and Chemical Biology (M.S., Ph.D.)
 * Cognitive and Information Sciences (Ph.D.)
 * Economics (Ph.D.)
 * Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (M.S., PhD)
 * Environmental Systems (M.S., Ph.D.)
 * Interdisciplinary Humanities (M.A., Ph.D.)
 * Management of Complex Systems (M.S., PhD)
 * Master of Management Professional Degree (M.M.)
 * Materials and Biomaterials Science Engineering (M.S., PhD)
 * Mechanical Engineering (M.S., PhD)
 * Physics (M.S., PhD)
 * Political Science, (Ph.D.)
 * Psychological Sciences (Ph.D.)
 * Public Health (Ph.D.)
 * Quantitative and Systems Biology (M.S., PhD)
 * Sociology (PhD)

Graduate degree holders have found work in faculty positions at different colleges and universities, while others have chosen to enter government service.

In 2011, the campus was granted accreditation by WASC. In 2014, the School of Engineering received an ABET accreditation for the Mechanical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering programs.

The university is also home to the CCBM Summer Internship Program, an undergraduate research fellowship for non-UC Merced students sponsored by the NSF CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines.

Rankings
UC Merced was tied for 40th "Top Public School" and tied for 97th in the 2021 rankings of "Best National Universities" in the U.S. by U.S. News & World Report. Also in the same rankings, it was ranked 5th in "Top Performers on Social Mobility", 171st in "Best Value Schools", and tied for 145th in "Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs" at schools whose highest degree is a doctorate.

Admissions and enrollment
UC Merced received 25,368 undergraduate applications for admission for the Fall 2019 incoming freshman class; 18,263 were admitted (72.0%).

Undergraduate enrollment in Fall 2019 was 51.7% women, 47.5% men and 0.8% unknown; approximately 99% were from California.

Research institutes

 * Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI)
 * Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI)
 * University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar)

In 2007, UC Merced researchers obtained nearly $7 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. Grant funding for research has reached over $168.9 million in 2013.

Campus


The campus is bounded by Lake Yosemite on one side, and two irrigation canals run through the campus. The campus master plan was developed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, its initial infrastructure by Arup, and its first buildings were designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Thomas Hacker and Associates, and EHDD Architecture. The library and central power plant have been classified as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold structures in terms of their high energy efficiency and low environmental impact. The campus is located about seven miles (11 km) north of downtown Merced in the middle of a cattle ranch.

Rather than build on 40 acre of protected land east of Lake Yosemite, where endangered fairy shrimp hatch in vernal pools, the school has built on a 230 acre parcel of grazing land south of campus, under a revised layout. The revised plan covers a total of 810 acre rather than the original 910 acre proposed in 2000. The new design was expected to impact a total of 81 acre of native wetlands in the region compared to the 121 acre forecast in the 2000 footprint.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the university is a census-designated place (CDP) that was uninhabited at the 2010 census and covers an area of 1.126 square miles (2.916 km$2$), all of it land.

Kolligian Library
The library was the first building to open on campus. During the Fall 2005 semester, while construction of the Classroom and Science/Engineering buildings was still taking place, all academic courses were conducted in the library. Its official motto is "Not what other research libraries are, what they will be."

The library building is named after Leo and Dottie Kolligian. Leo served as the chairman of the UC Board of Regents in 1988 when the board decided to explore building a 10th campus, in the San Joaquin Valley. The first floor of the library was dedicated by Ed and Jeanne Kashian. The McFadden-Willis Reading Room is located on the fourth floor and named in honor of the McFadden and Willis children by Christine McFadden. The library also has a technology classroom dedicated by Doris Gonella in honor of her late husband Louis, The Gonella Discovery Room.

The library offers 10 public workstations for students, faculty, staff and visitors to access electronic resources. The library contains more electronic holdings than print holdings, consisting of about 70,000 online journals and 3.965 million electronic books (including 3.15 million HathiTrust full-text books), compared to 102,000 print books. In addition, the library provides access to 580 databases.

Kolligian is a Green library and has Gold LEED certification.

Athletics
UC Merced's recently established an intercollegiate athletic program presently competes in the California Pacific Conference of the NAIA. It fields officially sponsored teams in men's and women's basketball, men and women's cross country, women's soccer and women's volleyball; men's soccer and men's volleyball began competition during the 2013–2014 season. UC Merced hopes to join the NCAA in the near future. The school's goal is to compete at the NCAA Division II level as part of the California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA).

On November 13, 2006, the university opened its gymnasium. The Joseph Edward Gallo Recreation and Wellness Center, named after the rancher and dairy farmer who donated money for the facility's construction, features an "NCAA-sized basketball court, workout facilities, room for performances, wellness and fitness education and the Rajender Reddy Student Health Center". At the opening of the facility, In November 2010 the university announced its intentions to join the NAIA for the 2011–2012 academic year, in the NAIA's California Pacific Conference.

Student life


Approximately 2,100 students currently live on campus in the Valley and Sierra Terraces and the Summits, which includes Tenaya and Cathedral Halls, 4.2 miles (6.8 km) away from the city of Merced. The most recent addition is Half Dome Hall which completed the UC Merced's first residential square. The Summits includes cleaning services, study lounges, a market, and a game room. Student housing, as well as the dining commons, are closed during winter break. Much of the student life in the Residence Halls is led by the Resident Assistants (RAs) and Lead Resident Assistants (LRAs) through various programs and activities.

Due to the United States housing bubble and the high cost of bond-funded student housing ($13,720 on-campus compared to $7,000 off campus), many students choose to live in new housing subdivisions outside of campus. The Cattracks transit system serves student-dense developments.

The university's Campus Activities Board (CAB) engages students in campus-wide activities such as the annual Treats N' Beats, CAB Cinema, Enchanted Ball, and more. Past guests that have been brought to these campus activities by CAB include Sage the Gemini, J. Holiday, and George Lopez.

Additionally, many students visit nearby Lake Yosemite which includes recreational swimming, fishing, and water skiing. Merced has several artistic venues which host plays, concerts, and art shows. These include The Mainzer Theater, The Partisan, Merced Multicultural Arts Center, and Playhouse Merced. Castle Air Museum is within close driving distance from Merced. Merced is known as the "Gateway to Yosemite" and it is common for students recreational use Yosemite National Park where they may hike, snowboard, rock climb, and camp overnight.

Student publications include The Prodigy, student newspaper, Bobcat Radio, student radio station, The Undergraduate Research Journal (URJ), The Undergraduate Historical Journal, and literary journals The Kumquat and Imagination Dead Imagine.

Student governments
The founding graduate students, who joined the Graduate School of UC Merced in early 2004, initiated the Graduate Student Association (GSA) in that year, before the university officially opened its doors to undergraduate students in the fall of 2005. The constitution and by-laws were prepared by them. They were then approved by all the graduate students.

The undergraduate students of UC Merced have initiated and established their own student government. The Committee on Constitution and By-Laws was established in fall 2005 and was responsible for writing the constitution for the Associated Students of UC Merced (ASUCM). Elections for the ratification of the constitution were held in April, 2006. The constitution was approved by a majority of the student body, officially establishing ASUCM, which serves as the official representative and voice of students.

Clubs
There are approximately 200 student run clubs, including: RadioBio, Bobcat Band, The Prodigy, Bobcat Radio, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), Bobcat Model United Nations (MUN), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Sports Shooting, Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE), Merced Pre-Law Society, Business Society, National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), American Women Making A Difference, Black Student Union (BSU), Lambda Alliance, Society of Women Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Math Society, Amnesty International, American Medical Student Association, Colleges Against Cancer, Chinese Student Association, Circle K International, Economics Club, Hermanas Unidas de UCM, Korean American Coalition (KAC), Hmong Student Association (HSA), Nikkei Student Union (NSU), The UC Merced Historical Society, Dance Coalition, Distinguished Ladies, Student Transfer Outreach and Mentor Program, Democrats at UC Merced, HHM (Hip Hop Movement), Society of Freethinkers, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Martial Arts Club, Microfinance Project Student Association, Muslim Student Association, NORML, Persian Student Association of UC Merced (PSAUCM), Pilipino American Alliance (PAA), Anime Club, League of Legends Club at UC Merced (UCMLoL), College Republicans at UC Merced, South Asian Student Association, Merced Indian Graduate Student Association (MIGSA), Taekwondo (TKD), Rotaract, UCM Symphonics Acapella Group (UCMSA), UNICEF at UC Merced, Best Buddies, Project Smile, rock climbing, Yosemite Leadership Program, bakery clubs, archery clubs, and frisbee golf clubs.

Greek life
Conference Fraternities
 * North-American Interfraternity
 * Omega Delta Phi ΩΔΦ, Alpha Psi chapter
 * International Fraternities
 * Sigma Chi ΣΧ, Lambda Delta chapter
 * Kappa Sigma ΚΣ, Rho Omicron chapter
 * Pi Kappa Phi ΠΚΦ, Kappa Mu chapter
 * Pi Lambda Phi ΠΛΦ,

Women's Fraternities and Sororities
 * National Panhellenic Conference
 * Delta Delta Delta ΔΔΔ, Epsilon Kappa chapter
 * Delta Gamma ΔΓ, Eta Rho chapter
 * Kappa Kappa Gamma ΚΚΓ, Eta Xi chapter
 * Phi Mu ΦΜ, Eta Sigma chapter
 * Latina-Based Sororities
 * Lambda Theta Nu ΛΘΝ, Alpha Pi chapter
 * Kappa Delta Chi ΚΔΧ, Beta Lambda chapter
 * Mult-Cultural Sororities
 * Sigma Theta Psi ΣΘΨ
 * Professional Co-ed Fraternities
 * Delta Epsilon Mu ΔΕΜ, Theta chapter
 * Phi Delta Epsilon ΦΔΕ, CA Lambda Premedical chapter
 * Alpha Kappa Psi ΑΚΨ, Psi Upsilon chapter
 * Theta Tau ΘΤ, Mu Delta chapter
 * Alpha Phi Omega ΑΦΩ, Alpha Eta Gamma chapter
 * Phi Alpha Delta ΦΑΔ
 * Delta Sigma Pi ΔΣΠ, Tau Chi Chapter

Alumni
The UC Merced Alumni Association consists of more than 12,000 living members. The UC Merced Alumni Association is a non-dues organization. UCMAA membership is granted upon successful attainment of a UC Merced undergraduate or graduate degree. The association is led by a volunteer board of directors, which is staffed by the UC Merced Office of Alumni Relations.

As stated by the LA Times, "Although most UC Merced alumni are still in their 20s, 11% of them contributed to their alma mater — outstripping the giving rate of all other UC campuses except UC Santa Barbara (16%) and UC Berkeley (12%). UCLA's rate was 8%, and UC Riverside, the most comparable campus, was 4%."