The incendiary story of conquest, racism, warfare, and historical amnesia at one of the world's most celebrated and ostensibly enlightened public universities. The University of California, Berkeley--widely known as "Cal"--is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation, a hub for progressive thought, and a symbol of the California dream. Much less known is the university's roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley's history and echo in the institution's decision-making up to the present day. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university's large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains, its role in the development of eugenics in the early twentieth century, its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project, and its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings. This book, above all, illuminates Cal's culpability in some of the darkest chapters of US history, as well as a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the role and legacy of higher education in America and beyond.