From Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Miriam Pawel, a sweeping history of the largest higher education institution in the world: the University of California system, a pioneer of civic policy, civil rights, and upward mobility since its founding—and a look at what it can teach us about equality in America.
 
 The largest higher education institution in the world, the University of California system is a $44 billion behemoth: Constitutionally independent and protected as a public trust, its 150-year saga has mirrored and propelled every significant social, political, cultural, and economic trend since the Civil War. Among its 2 million living graduates are the builder of the cyclotron and inventor of the wetsuit, pioneers of the internet and feminist theory, governors and U.S. Supreme Court justices, and countless others who have won every major award in every field and broken every color and gender barrier the nation has erected. In the words of 1956 UC Berkeley graduate Joan Didion, the system is “California’s best idea of itself.”
 
 Yet the University of California stands out from comparable elite schools not for its stature but because it has made upward mobility its explicit mission from the start, transforming the lives of those not born into privilege through progressive policy from admissions and housing to race and gender equality. Today, more than 40 percent of undergraduates on UC campuses are the first in their family to attend college. More than half pay no tuition. Four of its campuses each educate more Pell grant recipients than all the Ivy League colleges combined. In FIAT LUX, Miriam Pawel explores the outsized impact such a radical institution has had on American public policy, framing her expansive history around the narrative stories of five principal characters and their extended families for whom the UC System has played an integral role. Touching on California’s complex history of immigration, “the Great Divergence” of the 1970s, and the staggering state of modern inequality both in California and across the nation, FIAT LUX will provide a sweeping analysis not only of the roots of such an institution but what they can teach us about public policy, higher education, and the modern grasp of the American dream.