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Introduction (continued)
The University of California Regents realized early on that Merced would be an ideal place for a new university. With projections anticipating a near doubling of Merced's population between 1980 and 2006 (today there are 250,000 people) and a lack of educational opportunities in the county and Central Valley at large, the Regents identified a future need for higher education in the area.
"The Central Valley didn't really have any kind of opportunity for people to go to the University of California locally," said Tom Lollini, Associate Vice Chancellor of Design and Construction at UC Merced. "Merced was selected among 18 sites because it's geographically in the center of the San Joaquin Valley, and it was the desire of the local community to have a university there." Since the university opened its doors in 2005, approximately 50% of the incoming freshmen have been first-generation university students.
Thanks to a gift from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Regents acquired 7,030 acres of land two miles from Merced's city limits. Two thousand acres of this site would be reserved for the UC Merced Campus. In 1999, the Regents hired the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP to prepare the master plan for UC Merced.
"When we first got to the site, we climbed over the barbed wire trying to figure out where the 2,000 acres of land were," said Ellen Lou, Director of Urban Planning at SOM San Francisco. "There were just miles and miles of golden rolling hills, lots of cows, one barn, and one tree."
SOM would also eventually design the first two buildings on campus—the Library & Information Technology Center and the Central Plant.
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