University of California Merced

The University of California, Merced (UC Merced or UCM), is the tenth and newest of the University of California campuses. It is located in the San Joaquin Valley in unincorporated Merced County, California, near Merced. Established in 2005, UC Merced is the first American research university to be built in the 21st century. Most UC Merced students are from California with enrollment nearly evenly divided between Southern California, the Central Valley, and Northern California.
UC Merced claims to be the only institution in the United States to have all of its buildings on campus to be LEED certified. Its Triple Net Zero Commitment is expected to create zero net landfill waste and zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.

> History

As the San Joaquin Valley was the state's largest and most populous region without a UC campus, on May 19, 1988, the Regents of the University of California voted to begin planning for a campus in the region in response to increasing enrollment and growth constraints at existing UC campuses. On May 19, 1995, the Regents selected the heart of the Central Valley at the Merced site, mid-way between Fresno and Modesto, as the location for the University of California's tenth campus. An $11 million Packard Grant for 7,030 acres of land was donated by the Virginia Smith Trust, adjacent to Lake Yosemite, making it the largest acreage the University of California has acquired for one of its campuses.

The university planned to conserve 5,030 acres from the sensitive vernal pool habitations. A public golf course known as the Merced Hills Golf Course had been constructed at the site in the early 1990s. This course was shut down to make way for the new campus when the original site for the campus was made unavailable due to the discovery of fairy shrimp - an endangered species - on the originally proposed site. Since the construction of the golf course had negated concerns about wetland and vernal pool environment considerations, building the campus at this location was easier than fighting to save the original construction site. Two small bridges on campus date from the time of the golf course.
UC Merced established a satellite campus in Bakersfield, California in 2001 in its downtown University Square. The satellite campus advocated a UC education to prospective college-bound students of Kern County and the southern San Joaquin Valley before UC Merced opened its official campus in Merced. Classes and counseling were also provided at the Bakersfield center to newly admitted UC students. In 2011, UC Merced closed its Bakersfield campus in a cost-cutting effort. An administrative building was then planned to be located in downtown Merced.

The campus groundbreaking ceremony was held October 25, 2002, and the first day of classes was September 6, 2005. Four years later, on May 16, 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama gave the commencement address for the university's first full graduating class.

In 2010, the United States Census Bureau made UC Merced its own separate census-designated place. Later that same year, the new student housing facilities, The Summits, opened to provide two additional residential halls for incoming students. The two four-story buildings, Tenaya Hall and Cathedral Hall, are reserved primarily for incoming freshmen students. Three years later, another housing facility, Half Dome, was built next to the existing Tenaya and Cathedral Halls. Half Dome houses both freshman and continuing students.

In January 2015, UC Merced was nationally classified with the Carnegie Classification for community engagement, along with UC Davis and UCLA.
In November 2015, the University of California regents approved a $1.14 billion proposal to double the size of UC Merced, boosting its enrollment by nearly 4,000 students. The new space is expected to be built by 2020.

> Academics

>> UC Merced has 3 schools offering 21 undergraduate majors and 22 minors:[24]
1 School of Engineering
2 School of Natural Sciences
3 School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

The School of Medicine and School of Management are planned to be integrated on campus.

The site for the Science and Engineering Building 2, opened in 2014, is the most recent new building on campus. The Classroom and Office Building 2 is scheduled to open in 2016.

For graduate-level study, UC Merced Graduate Division offers programs in 11 emphases: Applied Mathematics, Biological Engineering and small-scale technologies, Cognitive and Information Sciences, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Environmental Systems, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Physics and Chemistry, Psychology, Quantitative and Systems Biology, Social and Cognitive Sciences, and world cultures.The various programs within the Graduate Division have produced PhDs and Masters-level graduates. Some have found work in faculty positions at different colleges and universities, while others have chosen to enter government service.

In 2011, the campus was granted accreditation by WASC.
In 2014, the School of Engineering received an ABET accreditation for the Mechanical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering programs.



> Campus


The campus is bounded by Lake Yosemite on one side, and two irrigation canals run through the campus. The campus master plan was developed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, its initial infrastructure by Arup, and its first buildings were designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Thomas Hacker and Associates, and EHDD Architecture. The library and central power plant have been classified as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold structures in terms of their high energy efficiency and low environmental impact.

The campus is located about seven miles (11 km) north of downtown Merced in the middle of a cattle ranch.
Rather than build on 40 acres (16 ha) of protected land east of Lake Yosemite, where endangered fairy shrimp hatch in vernal pools, the school has built on a 230-acre (93 ha) parcel of grazing land south of campus, under a revised layout. The revised plan covers a total of 810 acres (330 ha) rather than the original 910 acres (370 ha) proposed in 2000. The new design was expected to impact a total of 81 acres (33 ha) of native wetlands in the region compared to the 121 acres (49 ha) forecast in the 2000 footprint.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the University is a census-designated place (CDP) that was uninhabited at the 2010 census and covers an area of 1.126 square miles (2.916 km²), all of it land.




The library was the first building to open on campus. During the Fall 2005 semester, while construction of the Classroom and Science/Engineering buildings was still taking place, all academic courses were conducted in the library. Its official motto is "Not what other research libraries are, what they will be."
The Library building is named after Leo and Dottie Kolligian. Leo served as the Chairman of the UC Board of Regents in 1988 when the Board decided to explore building a 10th campus, in the San Joaquin Valley. The first floor of the library was dedicated by Ed and Jeanne Kashian. The McFadden-Willis Reading Room is located on the fourth floor and named in honor of the McFadden and Willis children by Christine McFadden. The Library also has a technology classroom dedicated by Doris Gonella in honor of her late husband Louis, The Gonella Discovery Room.

The library offers 10 public workstations for students, faculty, staff and visitors to access electronic resources. The library contains more electronic holdings than print holdings, consisting of about 70,000 online journals and 3,965,000 electronic books (including 3,150,000 HathiTrust full-text books), compared to 102,000 print books. In addition, the library provides access to 580 databases.
Kolligian is a Green library and has Gold LEED certification.