Santa Clara University - History

History

The first two colleges in California were founded in 1851, at the height of the Gold Rush, both in the town of Santa Clara. Santa Clara College, forerunner of Santa Clara University, was first to open its doors to students and thus is the state's oldest operating institution of higher education. The Methodist-run California Wesleyan College opened shortly thereafter and was the first institution to receive an official state charter. Santa Clara's Jesuit founders eventually accumulated the endowment required for a charter, which was granted on April 28, 1855. Santa Clara bears the distinction of awarding California's first Bachelor's degree, given to Thomas I. Bergin in 1857, and its first graduate degree, two years later.

Read more about this topic:  Santa Clara University

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
    Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

    Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)