Once upon a time, the University of California was just two buildings in rural Berkeley. A century and a half later, it’s grown into an educational and economic behemoth spanning 10 campuses, six health centers, three national laboratories and hundreds of programs and research centers in every corner of the state.
In her fourth book, “California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Miriam Pawel sets her sites on telling the history of the UC system — placing a focus on the tension between “the sometimes shaky marriage of access and excellence.”
This is playing out now as UC weighs how to respond to tremendous pressure from the Trump administration to not pursue diversity and access as a value, as well as whether to reinstate the SAT and ACT, which it eliminated because it put Black and Latino students at a disadvantage.
Current events regarding free speech, federal research dollars, loyalty tests and the war on undocumented immigrants “echo throughout the arch of this book and the history it recounts,” Pawel says. “Unlike comparable elite institutions,” she writes, “the UC has played its most consequential role in the lives of those not born to privilege.”…