page_title: California State University
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: California State University / History
caption_attribution_description: Students of the opening year of the newly constructed San Diego Normal School. The image was taken in the opening interior of the building The school would later expand and change names several times until deciding on the current name, San Diego State University.
context_page_description: The California State University is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 484,300 students with 26,858 faculty and 25,305 staff, CSU is the largest four-year public university system in the United States. It is one of three public higher education systems in the state, with the other two being the University of California system and the California Community Colleges System. The CSU System is incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University. The California State University system headquarters are in Long Beach, California.
  The California State University was created in 1960 under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, and it is a direct descendant of the system of California State Normal Schools. With nearly 100,000 graduates annually, the CSU is the country's greatest producer of bachelor's degrees. The university system collectively sustains more than 150,000 jobs within the state, and its related expenditures reach more than $17 billion annually.
context_section_description: Today's California State University system is the direct descendant of the Minns Evening Normal School, a normal school in San Francisco that educated the city's future teachers in association with the high school system. The school was taken over by the state in 1862 and moved to San Jose and renamed the California State Normal School; it eventually evolved into San Jose State University. A southern branch of the California State Normal School was created in Los Angeles in 1882. 
  In 1887, the California State Legislature dropped the word "California" from the name of the San Jose and Los Angeles schools, renaming them "State Normal Schools." Later Chico (1887), San Diego (1897), and other schools became part of the State Normal School system. However, these did not form a system in the modern sense, in that each normal school had its own board of trustees and all were governed independently from one another. In 1919, the State Normal School at Los Angeles became the Southern Branch of the University of California; in 1927, it became the University of California at Los Angeles (the "at" was later replaced with a comma in 1958). In May 1921, the legislature enacted a comprehensive reform package for the state's educational system, which went into effect that July. The State Normal Schools were renamed State Teachers Colleges, their boards of trustees were dissolved, and they were brought under the supervision of the Division of Normal and Special Schools of the new California Department of Education located at the state capital in Sacramento. This meant that they were to be managed from Sacramento by the deputy director of the division, who in turn was under the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (the ex officio director of the Department of Education) and the State Board of Education. By this time it was already commonplace to refer to most of the campuses with their city names plus the word "state" (e.g., "San Jose State," "San Diego State," "San Francisco State").
  The resulting administrative situation from 1921 to 1960 was quite complicated. On the one hand, the Department of Education's actual supervision of the presidents of the State Teachers Colleges was minimal, which translated into substantial autonomy when it came to day-to-day operations. According to Clark Kerr, J. Paul Leonard, the president of San Francisco State from 1945 to 1957, once boasted that "he had the best college presidency in the United States—no organized faculty, no organized student body, no organized alumni association, and...no board of trustees." On the other hand, the State Teachers Colleges were treated under state law as ordinary state agencies, which meant their budgets were subject to the same stifling bureaucratic financial controls as all other state agencies (except the University of California). At least one president would depart his state college because of his express frustration over that issue: Leonard himself.
  During the 1920s and 1930s, the State Teachers Colleges started to transition from normal schools (that is, vocational schools narrowly focused on training elementary school teachers in how to impart basic literacy to young children) into teachers colleges (that is, providing a full liberal arts education) whose graduates would be fully qualified to teach all K–12 grades. A leading proponent of this idea was Charles McLane, the first president of Fresno State, who was one of the earliest persons to argue that K–12 teachers must have a broad liberal arts education.
  In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was asked by the state legislature and governor to perform a study of California higher education. The Foundation's 1933 report sharply criticized the State Teachers Colleges for their intrusion upon UC's liberal arts prerogative and recommended their transfer to the Regents of the University of California (who would be expected to put them back in their proper place). This recommendation spectacularly backfired when the faculties and administrations of the State Teachers Colleges ralli
caption: Students of the opening year of the newly constructed San Diego Normal School.
exif: {}