The 24.5-acre campus for the now-defunct Marymount California University, in Rancho Palos Verdes, officially has a new owner — UCLA.
Escrow on the $80 million sale closed this week, giving UCLA the former MCU campus and an 11-acre student townhouse complex in San Pedro, known as the Villas, real estate company Berkadia announced in a press release.
The 35-acre land acquisition, UCLA said, is the largest in the more than century-long history of the university and will allow it to expand enrollment while also tackling student crowding.
“We are certain UCLA will be an outstanding steward of the campus,” Brian Marcotte, president of shuttered MCU, “for the cities of Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro.”
MCU, a private Catholic college, shut down in August after five decades on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Administrators cited rising costs and declining enrollment as reasons for the closure.
MCU initially announced the closure in April, just six months after the college signed an agreement to merge with Saint Leo University, a larger Catholic campus in Central Florida. At the time, officials from both colleges touted the merger as mutually beneficial.
But when regulatory hurdles extended the timeframe on the merger, the two universities parted ways and MCU had no choice but to shutter, officials said. The last day for MCU’s 500 students and 140 employees was Aug. 31.
About a month later, UCLA announced its interest in the MCU properties.
“While there was intense interest from developers in purchasing and building on these properties,” UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a September statement, “we were able to reach an agreement with MCU largely because of our commitment to carrying forward a tradition of higher education on the sites.”
MCU was founded in RPV in 1968 but had roots dating to the 1930s, serving as a small liberal arts college throughout its history. It offered an associate degree, nine bachelor’s degrees and a master of business administration degree.
It also served a diverse population.
Nearly three-quarters of its students were people of color, with Hispanic or Latino students comprising 46% of the overall population.
But financial difficulties, compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, ultimately led to its closure.
As for UCLA, its new Palos Verdes Peninsula property — of which the sale closed on Wednesday, Jan. 25 — will be the university’s third academic campus outside of Westwood, joining ones in Downtown L.A. and Culver City.
The university also more than 200 UCLA Health patient facilities and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s Institute for Carbon Management, which is researching carbon removal technologies at AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles.
As of September, UCLA was still in the early stages in developing a future use for the MCU campus and its student housing in San Pedro. Block, in a statement at the time, said he hoped some programs could begin operating on the sites as soon as this year.
UCLA also hasn’t determined what it will call the new campus, officials said on Friday, Jan. 27.
“In partnership with the Academic Senate,” he said, “we will establish a faculty-and-administration-led task force to determine what kinds of academic programs the spaces might best support and how we can best use them to advance institutional goals.”
