San Francisco State University

• 1. Introduction

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  San Francisco State University began not with a grand campus or a state charter, but with six students. On the first day of what would become the California State Normal School in 1862, only six people showed up. From that nearly empty room, the institution that would grow into SF State has since produced 21 Pulitzer Prize winners, 16 Academy Award winners, and 49 Emmy Award winners. It sits on a 144.1-acre campus less than two miles from the Pacific, and in Fall 2024, more than 22,000 students walked its grounds. But the path from six students to a major research university ran through earthquakes, wartime, student strikes, name changes, and more than a century of argument about what a public university is actually for.

• 2. From Normal School to State University

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  The institution's roots reach back to 1857, when the San Francisco Board of Education established the San Francisco Weekly Normal School, also called Minns' Evening Normal School. By 1866, enrollment had climbed to 384. The school's growth masked a structural problem: it was not producing enough teachers. In 1867, Ellis Holmes, principal of Girls' High School and Normal School, convinced the city to attach a year-long teacher-training program to his school's curriculum, specifically for girls who wanted to pursue education careers. That program is the direct ancestor of SF State.

  When the California State Normal School relocated to San Jose in 1871, Girls' High became the only publicly supported teacher-training institution in the city. By 1895, the teaching program had separated and been renamed the San Francisco City Normal School. Funding shortfalls forced it to close in 1898. A coalition of teachers, students, and supporters lobbied the California State Legislature, and on the 22nd of March 1899, lawmakers approved the creation of the San Francisco State Normal School with an appropriation of $10,000. Frederic Lister Burk became the first president and selected the school's motto, Experientia Docet. The school rented space on Powell Street between Clay and Sacramento Streets, and 31 women enrolled in that first year.

  The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the Nob Hill location, scattering the school temporarily to the Grant School in Oakland. Ten days after the earthquake, Burk had already identified a new site at Laguna, Haight, Buchanan, and Hermann Streets. There the school would remain for decades, until the campus overcrowding of the 1930s forced a longer-range rethinking. By that era, the institution had to accommodate about 3,000 students in facilities designed for 1,500. In 1939, SFSU President Alexander Roberts and student body president Clifford Worth explored undeveloped land near Lake Merced, which at the time was mainly sand dunes dotted with trees. Worth lobbied the state Legislature himself, and on the 12th of July 1939, the state committed to purchasing 57 acres from the City of San Francisco. The Lake Merced campus opened for classes in Fall 1953 and was formally dedicated in October 1954.

• 3. Strikes, Occupations, and Student Power

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  In Fall 1965, students at SF State launched the Experimental College, a self-organized effort to teach courses outside the traditional curriculum. The original version drew over 2,000 students to its offerings and ran until 1969. That same era produced far more dramatic confrontations. In 1967, 1968, and 1969, waves of demonstrations swept the campus. The most significant was the Third World Liberation Front strike, which ran from the 6th of November 1968 to the 20th of March 1969. It stands as the longest student strike in American history.

  Also in 1969, Richard Oakes led a group of SF State students in the occupation of Alcatraz Island, one of the most visible acts of Native American protest of the era. The president navigating the TWLF strike was S. I. Hayakawa, who served from 1968 to 1973 and would later enter the U.S. Senate. The demands of that period left lasting institutional marks: the College of Ethnic Studies, born from those negotiations, became a permanent fixture of the university's structure.

  Decades later, the pattern of student action continued. In May 2016, four students held a ten-day hunger strike from May 2 to May 11, protesting the underfunding of the College of Ethnic Studies since 2008. One student was hospitalized. President Leslie Wong agreed to commit nearly $500,000 to the college and to meet a portion of the demands, ending the strike. In the spring of 2024, about 500 people attended a rally on April 29 calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza war. An encampment followed, and it ended on May 15 after protesters reached a divestment agreement with university leaders.

• 4. The Many Names Problem

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  SF State has carried more names than most institutions would dare accumulate. It started as the San Francisco State Normal School in 1899, then became San Francisco State Teachers College in 1921 when it began offering bachelor's degrees. By 1935, State Teachers Colleges across California had been formally authorized to offer four-year liberal arts curriculums and were collectively renamed State Colleges, so the school became San Francisco State College. Master's degrees were added in 1949. The college joined what became the California State College system under the Donahoe Higher Education Act in 1960, and in 1972, when the state renamed the system "The California State University and Colleges," the school was rechristened California State University, San Francisco.

  That name proved immediately unpopular. When spoken aloud, the acronym CSUSF prompted the humorous response "Gesundheit" and was frequently confused with the Community College of San Francisco, the University of San Francisco, and the University of California, San Francisco. The awkward name lasted only two years. In 1974, the institution settled into San Francisco State University, the name it still carries.

  In 1983, Chia-Wei Woo became the 11th president, the first Chinese-American to head a major American university. His tenure followed that of Paul F. Romberg, who in 1978 had secured a permanent federal lease for 25 acres of shoreline in Tiburon for just $1. That Romberg Tiburon Campus eventually expanded to 53.7 acres and became home to the only marine and environmental science lab on San Francisco Bay.

• 5. Campuses Beyond the Main Quad

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  The Sierra Nevada Field Campus sits more than 200 miles north of San Francisco, near Yuba Pass, at an elevation of about 5,522 feet. The 7.1-acre site was originally called Camp Leonard, after SFSU's fifth president J. Paul Leonard, when it was established in 1949 as a training facility for recreation leaders. A children's camp was added in 1951. Basic plumbing arrived in 1953. The first three-unit college course was taught there in 1961, and in 1970, under William Hammerman's leadership, the site transitioned into a college-wide field campus. It now operates from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, offering 35-40 different courses each summer. There is no cell service and essentially no internet access. Students sleep in tents with mattresses, or bring their own vehicles.

  The Downtown Campus has migrated across San Francisco several times. SF State maintained facilities in downtown since the 1950s. A downtown center at 425 Market Street gave way to a location in the Westfield San Francisco Centre at 835 Market Street, which opened in 2007 with nearly 47,000 square feet of classroom space. A newer, smaller campus on the fifth floor of 160 Spear Street opened in 2022, spanning approximately 15,850 square feet.

  The Romberg Tiburon Campus in Marin County has faced an uncertain future. In 2025, the university announced the campus would close due to financial struggles. A fundraising campaign raised $3.2 million, delaying the closure, but no final decision has been announced.

• 6. Libraries, Poetry, and the Student Press

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  The J. Paul Leonard Library contains one of the more unusual storage solutions in American higher education. Approximately 75% of its circulating collection sits in a 45-foot-tall library retrieval system installed between 2008 and 2012, during a renovation that added more than 140,000 square feet to the building. The system can store approximately one million items and eliminated the need for traditional book stacks, freeing floor space for other uses. The library building itself was constructed in three phases, in 1953, 1959, and 1971.

  Sharing the building's fifth and sixth floors is the Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library. Its core collection was assembled by Adolph Sutro, a former mayor of San Francisco, who wanted to leave the city a public research library. His heirs deeded it to California with the stipulation that it never leave San Francisco city limits. The state formally received it in 1913, and it opened to the public in 1917. Notably, half of the Sutro collection survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. The collection includes 125,000 rare books, antiquarian maps, archival materials, and the largest collection of genealogical records west of Salt Lake City.

  The Poetry Center was founded in 1954 with a $100 gift from W. H. Auden. Together with the American Poetry Archives, established in 1973, it holds the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of poetry on tape. Students have published Transfer Magazine, featuring student literature and art, since 1950. Creative writing graduate students have published Fourteen Hills, an international literary journal, since 1994. The Experimental College's revival in 2017 means students can still design and teach their own one-unit courses today, carrying on the tradition that drew more than 2,000 students in the 1960s.

• 7. The Gators and the Mascot Vote

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  The search for a mascot began in 1921, when collegiate sports at SFSU had grown popular enough to need a team name. The student newspaper of the time, the Bay Leaf, solicited suggestions. Students proposed an alligator they called "Golden Gater," a nod to the Golden Gate. A student vote confirmed the choice. The name was finalized in 1931, but repeated misspellings in the newspaper eventually made "Golden Gator" the standard form. In the early years, two female students were selected each year to serve as alligator mascots. The name was eventually shortened to Gator, and in 2023, the mascot received a formal name: Alli Gator.

  The Gators compete in NCAA Division II and are members of the California Collegiate Athletic Association, fielding 12 sports. The football program, which ended in 1995, produced 13 NFL players. Mike Holmgren began his collegiate coaching career as the team's offensive coordinator in 1981. Among baseball alumni are two All-Stars: Bud Harrelson, who played shortstop for the Mets, and Tommy Harper, who played outfield for the Brewers and Red Sox. SF State Wrestling sent a competitor to a national championship meet every year from 1963-64 through 2016-17, and the program claimed an NCAA Division II team championship in 1997.

  Project Rebound, a program far removed from athletics but equally rooted in student life, was started in the Sociology Department by John Keith Irwin in 1967. Irwin had himself spent five years incarcerated in 1950. The program provides special admissions and support for formerly incarcerated students and has expanded to 20 of the 23 California State University campuses as of June 2025. In November 2024, the American Society of Criminology honored it with the President's Award for Distinguished Contributions to Justice.