History
UCSB traces its origins back to the Anna Blake School which was founded in 1891 and offered training in home economics and industrial arts. The Anna Blake School was taken over by the state in 1909 and became the Santa Barbara State Normal School. The campus was on the Riviera, portions of which house today's Riviera Theatre. By 1913, the Riviera neighborhood was established and housing for up to 40 faculty and students built. (This housing is today's El Encanto Hotel.) 1921, a liberal arts program was authorized and the school was renamed again to Santa Barbara State College. Growth was so rapid that a new campus was needed. When the 1925 Earthquake destroyed Dibblee's imposing stone mansion, Punta Del Castillo, on the cliff overlooking the harbor, land was available, and, by 1932, it had been purchased for the college. Remains of the mansion were cleared and the stone was used to build the retaining wall on Cliff Drive. The first building was completed in 1941. Intense lobbying by an interest group in the City of Santa Barbara, led by Thomas Storke and Pearl Chase, persuaded the State Legislature, Governor Earl Warren, and the Regents of the University of California to move the State College over to the more research-oriented University of California system in 1944. The State College system sued to stop the takeover, but the Governor did not support the suit. A state initiative was passed, however, to stop subsequent conversions of State Colleges to University of California campuses. From 1944 to 1958 the school was known as Santa Barbara College of the University of California, before taking on its current name. When the vacated Marine Corps training station in Goleta was purchased for the rapidly-growing college, Santa Barbara City College moved into the vacated State College buildings.
Originally, the Regents envisioned a small, several thousand-student liberal arts college, a so-called "Williams College of the West", at Santa Barbara. Chronologically, UCSB is the third general-education campus of the University of California, after Berkeley and UCLA (the only other state campus to have been acquired by the UC system). The original campus the Regents acquired in Santa Barbara was located on only 100 acres (40 ha) of largely unusable land on a seaside mesa. The availability of a 400-acre (160 ha) portion of the land used as Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara until 1946 on another seaside mesa in Goleta, which the Regents could acquire for free from the federal government, led to that site becoming the Santa Barbara campus in 1949. Originally, only 3000–3500 students were anticipated, but the post WWII baby boom led to the designation of general campus in 1958, along with a name change from "Santa Barbara College" to "University of California, Santa Barbara," and the discontinuation of the industrial arts program for which the State college was famous. A Chancellor, Samuel B. Gould, was appointed in 1959. All of this change was done in accordance with the California Master Plan for Higher Education.
In 1959, UCSB Professor Douwe Stuurman hosted the English writer Aldous Huxley as the university's first visiting professor. Huxley delivered a lectures series called "The Human Situation".
In the late 1960s and early 1970s UCSB became nationally known as a hotbed of anti-Vietnam War activity. A bombing at the school's faculty club in 1969 killed the caretaker, Dover Sharp. In the spring 1970 multiple occasions of arson occurred, including a burning of the Bank of America branch building in the student community of Isla Vista, during which time one male student, Kevin Moran, was shot and killed by police. UCSB's anti-Vietnam activity impelled then Governor Ronald Reagan to impose a curfew and order the National Guard to enforce it. Weapon-carrying guardsmen were a common sight on campus and in Isla Vista during this time.
In 1995, UCSB was elected to the Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research universities, with a membership consisting of 59 universities in the United States (both public and private) and two universities in Canada.
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—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“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)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)