Santa Clara University
The oldest university in California does not look like one. Walk through the palm-lined entrance and what you find at the center of campus is a mission church -- a whitewashed adobe replica dating to 1929, standing on the third site occupied by Mission Santa Clara de Asís since its founding in 1777. The university grew around that church the way a city grows around a cathedral, inheriting its art collection, its library holdings, and its architectural vocabulary. Everything at Santa Clara University speaks in the language of red tile roofs and covered arcades, Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles layered over a campus that has been continuously occupied for nearly 250 years. It is a place where Jesuit priests still teach in the same rooms where Ohlone people once lived, where Silicon Valley engineers walk past bell towers that predate American statehood.
From Mission to Classroom
In January 1777, Saint Junipero Serra established Mission Santa Clara as the eighth of twenty-one Alta California missions. Fray Tomas de la Pena chose a site along the Guadalupe River, erected a cross, and celebrated the first Mass. But the river proved treacherous -- floods and earthquakes forced the missionaries to relocate and rebuild multiple times, moving the church progressively westward. The first permanent wooden structure flooded almost immediately. An adobe replacement went up in 1784, suffered catastrophic damage in an 1818 earthquake, and was replaced six years later. The campus was built on the land of the Ohlone people, whose population had declined sharply from epidemics and the loss of natural resources that the mission system accelerated. In 1851, at the height of the Gold Rush, Jesuits opened Santa Clara College on the mission grounds. It was California's first operating institution of higher learning, beating the Methodist-run California Wesleyan College -- now the University of the Pacific -- by several months.
Firsts and Milestones
Santa Clara has a habit of arriving first. It awarded the state's first bachelor's degree, to Thomas I. Bergin in 1857, and its first graduate degree two years later. The California Historical Society was founded on its campus in 1871, organized by a group of politicians and professors led by Assemblyman John W. Dwinelle. In 1912, the college separated out its high school component -- now Bellarmine College Preparatory -- and became the University of Santa Clara, adding schools of law and engineering. Women were first admitted in 1961, making it the first Catholic university in California to go coeducational. The name changed again in 1985, to Santa Clara University, partly to avoid confusion with the University of Southern California. And in 2022, the school broke new ground with Julie H. Sullivan, the first layperson and first woman to serve as president.
Where the Valley Meets the Quad
Santa Clara's School of Engineering, founded in 1912, has grown in tandem with the industry that surrounds it. The campus sits in the geographic heart of Silicon Valley, and that proximity shapes everything. Students intern at companies within biking distance. Faculty collaborate with firms on projects ranging from nanotechnology to satellite engineering, including the O/OREOS nanosatellite mission. The $300 million Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, completed in 2022, spans three buildings and 270,000 square feet of STEM facilities -- robotics labs, virtual reality spaces, flex labs designed for the kind of interdisciplinary work that tech companies prize. The alumni list reads like a roster of Valley power: Brendan Eich, who created JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla; Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel; and a long line of entrepreneurs whose startups have shaped the digital economy.
Broncos on the Field
The athletic program punches above its weight. Santa Clara's Broncos compete in nineteen NCAA Division I sports as members of the West Coast Conference, and their soccer programs are nationally prominent. The women's team won NCAA championships in 2001 and 2020 under head coach Jerry Smith. Brandi Chastain, the defender whose penalty kick clinched the 1999 Women's World Cup, played at Santa Clara in the late 1980s. The fictional heroines of Bend It Like Beckham win soccer scholarships here. In men's basketball, the 1992-93 team -- led by a young Steve Nash, who would go on to win two NBA MVP awards -- famously upset second-seeded Arizona as a fifteen seed in the NCAA tournament. Football was discontinued in 1993, but Buck Shaw Stadium, named after a coach who later led the Philadelphia Eagles to the 1960 NFL Championship, remains as the home of Bronco soccer.
Power and Public Service
For a university of fewer than ten thousand students, Santa Clara's influence on public life is outsized. Its alumni include two governors of California -- Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom -- as well as Leon Panetta, who served as both Secretary of Defense and director of the CIA. Dee Dee Myers became the first woman to serve as White House Press Secretary. Janet Napolitano led the Department of Homeland Security before becoming president of the University of California system. Mike Espy was the first African American Secretary of Agriculture. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, housed on campus, has become one of the country's leading forums for ethical inquiry in technology, business, and public policy -- fitting work for a Jesuit institution planted at the center of an industry that increasingly grapples with questions of responsibility and power.
From the Air
Santa Clara University's 106-acre campus is at approximately 37.35°N, 121.94°W, just south of The Alameda (CA Route 82) in Santa Clara. From the air, look for the distinctive Mission Santa Clara church and the red-tiled roofs clustered around palm-lined walkways. Levi's Stadium (home of the 49ers) is visible roughly 1 nm to the northwest. Nearby airports include San Jose International (KSJC, 3 nm southeast) and Moffett Federal Airfield (KNUQ, 5 nm northwest). At 2,000-3,000 feet AGL, the campus stands out from the surrounding suburban grid as a coherent cluster of Spanish Colonial architecture.