San José State traces its roots to a normal school, a college for training teachers, that opened in San Francisco in 1857. The state took it over in 1862 and moved it to downtown San Jose in 1870. It is the founding campus of the California State University system.
The main campus covers about 154 acres, roughly 19 city blocks, and enrolls about 37,000 students. Its teams are the Spartans. The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library on campus is shared by the university and the city’s public library system.