UC Berkeley traces its founding to 1868, when the University of California was formed by merging the private College of California in Oakland with a new state land-grant institution, the Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Arts College. The university first operated on the Oakland site and moved to its campus in Berkeley in 1873. It is a campus of the University of California.
Berkeley lists 184 academic departments and programmes and about 400 degree programmes, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 19.4 to 1. Enrolment in fall 2024 was 33,070 undergraduates and 12,812 graduate students. The campus is headed by Chancellor Rich Lyons; the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost is Benjamin Hermalin.