State Normal Schools , founded in 1862 as the
California State Normal School, is the oldest campus of the CSU system. The California State University system is the direct descendant of the
Minns Evening Normal School, founded in 1857 by
George W. Minns in
San Francisco. It was a
normal school, an institution that educated future teachers in association with the
high school system and the first of its kind in California. The school was taken over by the state in 1862 and moved to
San Jose. 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. , founded 1887, became
California State University, Chico. Later, other state normal schools were founded at Chico (1887) and San Diego (1897); they 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. By the end of the 19th century, the State Normal School in San Jose was graduating roughly 130 teachers a year and was "one of the best known normal schools in the West." 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.
State Teachers Colleges , established in 1901, eventually became today's
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. 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. 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 government agencies, which meant their budgets were subject to the same stifling bureaucratic financial controls as all other state agencies (except the University of California). 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. These developments had the "tacit approval" of the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but had not been expressly authorized by the board and also lacked express statutory authorization from the state legislature. 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 rallied to protect their independence from the Regents. After losing a
second campus to UC, the state colleges' supporters arranged for the
California state constitution to be amended in 1946 to prevent it from happening again. They had three main objectives: (1) a systemwide board independent of the rest of the state government; (2) the right to award professional degrees in engineering and the doctorate in the field of education; The state legislature was limited to merely suggesting locations to the UC Board of Regents for the
planned UC campus on the Central Coast. In contrast, because the state colleges lacked autonomy, they were vulnerable to
pork barrel politics in the state legislature. As early as 1932, the Suzzallo Report had noted that "the establishing of State teachers colleges has been partly the product of geographic-political considerations rather than of thoughtful determination of needs". In 1959 alone, state legislators introduced separate bills to individually create nineteen state colleges. Two years earlier, one bill that had actually passed had resulted in the creation of
a new state college in
Turlock, a town better known for its
turkeys than its aspirations towards higher education, and which made no sense except that the chair of the Senate Committee on Education happened to be from Turlock. In April 1960, the
California Master Plan for Higher Education and the resulting Donahoe Higher Education Act finally granted autonomy to the state colleges. The Donahoe Act merged all the state colleges into the State College System of California, severed them from the Department of Education (and also the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction), and authorized the appointment of a systemwide board of trustees and a systemwide chancellor. The board was initially known as the "Trustees of the State College System of California"; the word "board" was not part of the official name. In March 1961, the state legislature renamed the system to the California State Colleges (CSC) and the board became the "Trustees of the California State Colleges." As enacted, the Donahoe Act provides that UC "shall be the primary state-supported academic agency for
research" and "has the sole authority in public higher education to award the doctoral degree in all fields of learning". In contrast, CSU may only award the doctoral degree as part of a joint program with UC or "independent institutions of higher education" and is authorized to conduct research "in support of" its mission, which is to provide "undergraduate and graduate instruction through the master's degree." As he saw it, the problem with such "
academic drift" was that state resources would be spread too thin across too many universities, all would be too busy chasing the "holy grail of elite research status" (in that state college faculty members would inevitably demand reduced teaching loads to make time for research) for any of them to fulfill the state colleges' traditional role of training teachers, and then "some new colleges would have to be founded" to take up that role. The language about joint programs and authorizing the state colleges to conduct some research was offered by Kerr at the last minute on December 18, 1959, as a "sweetener" to secure the consent of a then-wavering Dumke, the state colleges' representative on the Master Plan survey team. was founded in 1965. Dumke reluctantly agreed to Kerr's terms only because he knew the alternative was worse. If the state colleges could not reach a deal with UC, the California legislature was likely to be caught up in the "superboard" fad then sweeping through state legislatures across the United States. A "superboard" was a state board of higher education with plenary authority over all public higher education in the state—the number of states with superboards went from 16 in 1939 to 33 by 1969. Dumke was determined to prevent UC and the state legislature from reducing the state colleges to mere UC "satellites", the dark fate they had narrowly escaped in 1935. At least under Kerr's terms the state colleges would finally have their own systemwide board, and to Dumke, that was the most important thing. Most state college presidents and approximately 95 percent of state college faculty members (at the nine campuses where polls were held) strongly disagreed with the Master Plan's express endorsement of UC's primary role with respect to research and the doctorate, but they were still subordinate to the State Board of Education. In January 1960, Louis Heilbron was elected as the new chair of the State Board of Education. A
Berkeley-trained attorney, Heilbron had already revealed his loyalty to his
alma mater by joking that UC's ownership of the doctorate ought to be protected from "
unreasonable search and seizure." Heilbron set the "central theme" of his chairmanship by saying that "we must cultivate our own garden" (an allusion to
Candide) and stop trying to covet someone else's. Under Heilbron, the board also attempted to improve the quality of state college campus architecture, "in the hope that campuses no longer would resemble
state prisons.") Although the state colleges had reported to Sacramento since 1921, the board resolved on August 4, 1961 that the headquarters of the California State Colleges would be set up in the Los Angeles area, and in December, the newly-formed chancellor's office was moved from Sacramento to a rented office on
Imperial Highway in
Inglewood. This location gained the unfortunate nickname of the "imperial headquarters".
Buell G. Gallagher was selected by the board as the first chancellor of the California State Colleges (1961–1962), but resigned after only nine unhappy months to return to his previous job as president of the
City College of New York. Dumke succeeded him as the second chancellor of the California State Colleges (1962–1982). As chancellor, Dumke faithfully adhered to the system's role as prescribed by the Master Plan, Dumke retorted that his critics' ambitions to turn the state colleges into "baby Berkeleys" were "unrealistic". The final compromise was that the system would become the California State University and Colleges. Alex Sherriffs, then serving as an education advisor to Governor Reagan, later explained that he was among those who fought the name change because "most of the campuses are not, by any definition I've ever seen, a university. A university ... includes several colleges and is heavily engaged in scholarship and research. It gives the doctoral degrees". Governor Ronald Reagan signed Assembly Bill 123 into law on November 29, 1971 and the board was renamed the "Trustees of the California State University and Colleges". In accordance with the new systemwide name, on May 23, 1972, the board of trustees voted to rename fourteen of the nineteen CSU campuses to "California State University," followed by a comma and then their geographic designation. The five campuses exempted from renaming were the five newest state colleges created during the 1960s. For example, CSUSF drew the humorous response "
Gesundheit," and was frequently confused with
CCSF,
USF, and
UCSF. Over Dumke's objections, state assemblyman
Alfred E. Alquist proposed a bill that would rename the San Jose campus back to San Jose State. This was the first time CSU had owned its own headquarters building. Second,
W. Ann Reynolds succeeded Dumke as CSU's third chancellor, and brought a dramatically different management style to the CSU system. , in
Arcata, became the third Cal Poly campus in the CSU system in 2022. Meanwhile, various problems with the 400 Golden Shore building forced the chancellor's office to move to a new building after only 22 years. The solution was to trade spaces with the parking lot across the street to the north, a site with better soil conditions. Near the end of 2022, the CSU actively opposed the proposed expansion of the California Community Colleges' right to confer a limited number of four-year bachelor's degrees. The community colleges involved noted how ironic it was for CSU to be pushing back against them, in light of CSU's long-running battle with UC over the right to award the doctorate. The Cozen report found that CSU's legal department and Title IX coordinators were severely understaffed. The strike, which consisted of 30,000 CSU faculty members and affected all of CSU's 23 campuses, was set to be held for five days, with faculty members seeking a 12% pay increase. The strike, which ended after less than a day, resulted in a tentative agreement with two 5% pay increases (one retroactive to July 1, 2023 and one planned for July 1, 2024) as well as extended parental leave, more increases for lower-paid faculty, and more benefits. Support for the agreement among faculty has been mixed. In 2025, collapsing enrollment at Cal Maritime Academy forced its merger into Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, bringing the number of CSU campuses to 22. The Vallejo university was split into two branches, the Solano campus and
Cal Poly Maritime Academy. == Governance ==