Berkeley. Schmerkeley. California’s most important educational institution is UCLA—and the contest really isn’t close.

Now would be a good time to recognize this, and not only because UCLA is celebrating its 100th birthday. The Westwood school’s rapid rise is a signature California story—and a rebuttal to all our excuses for not supporting our vital institutions.

While Angelenos treat UCLA like it’s been around forever, it’s one of the world’s youngest elite universities. Despite its late start, UCLA has come to embody the American dream of college—it receives more applications each year than any U.S. university.

While the academic performance of its students and the research work of its faculty rival those of the Ivy League, UCLA educates far more poor kids than other elite American colleges. Some 35 percent of undergraduates receive Pell grants. One-third of graduates are the first in their families to earn a four-year degree.

Yes, I can hear Bay Area howls. Sure, Stanford’s great, but it has just 17,000 students (UCLA has 45,000) and admissions more exclusive than the Bohemian Club’s. For all Berkeley’s prestige, UCLA has more students, better sports (117 NCAA team championships), and a world-class medical center.

Want to respond? We will print the best 650-word rebuttal we receive (email it to ebcommentary@bayareanewsgroup.com). Or, whichever side you’re on, weigh in by submitting a 150-word letter online here for the East Bay and here for the South Bay.

My own UCLA-vs-Berkeley loyalties are conflicted. Zócalo Public Square, where I work, partners with UCLA on events, though I write this wearing a Cal T-shirt from my two siblings, both Berkeley alums.

But here’s what all Californians, regardless of school affiliation, should appreciate: UCLA became great despite Berkeley’s relentless hostility.

Before UCLA, Berkeley was the University of California, and the regents, faculty and president opposed a second campus in Southern California, according to Marina Dundjerski’s history, “UCLA: The First Century.”

Nevertheless, in 1919 the Los Angeles newspaperman Edward Dickson, a regent and Berkeley graduate, successfully opened a two-year college on Vermont Avenue. It had no degree-making power, and the anti-SoCal snobs up north wanted to keep it that way.

“If something in the nature of an academic rival, laying siege to the State Treasury for the limited funds which are available for higher education, is to be established at Los Angeles,” UC President David Barrows wrote the San Francisco Chronicle publisher in 1923, “not only will higher education suffer in the State, but the prospects of our union as a people will be grievously hurt.”

UCLA’s first head, Ernest Carroll Moore, complained the clash was so bitter he felt “as if I had drunk kerosene.” But even without official support, UCLA expanded rapidly because Californians kept enrolling.

By 1926, UCLA was already the nation’s fifth largest liberal arts college. In 1929, the school moved into a new Westwood campus despite Berkeley resistance, though the project’s Berkeley-trained engineer named Westwood streets—Le Conte, Hilgard, Gayley—for his professors.

That has been the UCLA story ever since. Despite the scorn of Northern California’s cognoscenti, UCLA kept getting bigger and better. State appropriations for higher education were slashed by 25 percent in the Depression, but UCLA accommodated a surge of new students. After the war, UCLA established professional schools despite university opposition.

And UCLA kept growing despite 1978’s Proposition 13, which created a budget system that disinvested in UCLA. Today, just 7 percent of total revenues come from the state.

“The one central notion that carries throughout UCLA’s history,” writes Dundjerski, “is that the institution was built on risk.”

Unfortunately, California has forgotten the value of risk. We still produce transformational plans for education and infrastructure—but tell ourselves we can’t accomplish them because of our rules, or our politicians, or our lack of money.

None of that stopped UCLA.

UCLA’s next 100 years will require even more risk-taking. California needs millions more college graduates. UCLA must turn many more of its applicants into graduates, and reduce the costs of attending—all without sacrificing excellence.

Such a transformation may require independence from meddlesome regents and budget-cutting governors. Our greatest university should be free to become all it can be.

Then Berkeley can follow its lead.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.