A Crash Course on UCLA’s Fascinating History

Happy 104th birthday, UCLA! With 104 years’ worth of history, there’s some UCLA history that even the most spirited Bruin might not know. For example, you might know that UCLA was established as a sister school to UC Berkeley, but you might not know that UCLA was initially built on the site of a different school. 

Learn about the full history of our 104-year-old school: 

UCLA began as a dream; Los Angeles residents spent years lobbying for a local branch of the University of California (UC) before Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626 into law on May 23, 1919. The law transformed the Los Angeles Normal School into the Southern Branch of the UC, later known as UCLA.

However, the campus established in 1919 was not the UCLA campus we know and love today. Within a decade, enrollment overwhelmed the 25-acre Vermont Avenue location. The UC Regents selected a site just west of Beverly Hills in 1925 to build a new campus, which opened as the new Westwood campus in 1929– aka our Bruin home now. 

The UCLA campus in 1929 only had 5,000 students and four buildings: Royce Hall, Haines Hall, Powell Library and Kinsey Hall (now called Renee And David Kaplan Hall). Over time, the campus grew to serve 45,000 students in 163 buildings across West LA.

UCLA has grown tremendously in the 104 years since it was founded, and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store for us!