The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Fall 2001, Volume 47, Number 4
Gregg Hennessey, Editor

Images from this article

During its brief … history, UCSD has made substantial contributions to international scholarship and has fundamentally changed San Diego. As the county’s second largest employer, the university pours almost a billion dollars a year into the local economy and has pushed the city toward a level of cultural and intellectual sophistication previously unimaginable to long-term dwellers.   Nancy Scott Anderson, 19931

As the academic year 2000-2001 drew to a close, so too did the University of California, San Diego’s fortieth anniversary celebration. The most important single date to be recognized during the year was November 18, 1960, when the university’s Board of Regents acted officially to establish a full-service branch of the institution on the Torrey Pines Mesa of La Jolla. From that point forward, a remarkable transformation occurred as an active military base — the Marine Corps’ Camp Matthews — and a sizable parcel of the City of San Diego’s pueblo lands, began to make way for what soon became a leading institution in scientific research as well as a home to numerous other academic and artistic disciplines.

It took almost no time at all for UCSD to emerge as a fixture of the regional community, responsible in many important ways for the blossoming of post-World War Two San Diego. The new school provided the first opportunity for many of the county’s college-bound students to enter the UC system. With its emphasis on hiring a top-notch faculty composed in no small part of world-renowned scientists, the university’s presence helped to attract a number of companies engaged in kindred nuclear, electronic, oceanographic, space-related, and biological research. The advent of the campus also gave impetus to a vast wave of commercial and residential development, most notably University City and the “Golden Triangle.” It should therefore come as no surprise that the San Diego Chamber of Commerce had long and vigorously advocated the establishment of a main branch of UC somewhere within the city limits, for its directors clearly understood how well such an enterprise could serve the region.

Before that defining moment could occur in the fall of 1960, the Board of Regents, the state legislature, the Navy and Defense Departments, UC faculty members and a host of constituencies in and around San Diego put in years of hard work to breathe life into the new campus. For their part, the university’s leaders had to decide where precisely to locate the school and how to structure it. They needed to determine which research and teaching disciplines to emphasize, how to design and build the physical plant, when to begin to admit students, and who would comprise the first generation of administrators and instructors. San Diegans had difficult choices of their own to make: which lands to offer the university, how to realign and further develop streets and highways in the area, and where to build new housing and other urban amenities. Not least among concerns on the minds of key players on both sides of the table was whether La Jollans in particular would lay aside old prejudices in order to welcome a culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse professoriate into their midst.2 And these were only some of the contentious issues the participants in the long start-up process had to settle. At times it appeared as if the parties to the decisions had completely exhausted their reserves of good will, creativity and ability to compromise, pushing the entire enterprise to the brink of failure. But San Diegans’ desire to accommodate a general campus of the university proved strong enough to overcome the obstacles, and one by one the pieces fell-or were shoehorned-into place. San Diegans and university officials alike perceived a mutuality of interests between them that in the end neither side was prepared to deny. And the relationship has prospered over the years, although not without severe strain from time to time.

Given the nature of the University of California’s legal mandate and heritage, San Diegans had every reason to expect the university to serve a multiplicity of their needs. As a state school beholden in part to the provisions of the federal Morrill Act of 1862, state law imposed upon UC the obligation to offer much more than courses of higher education to those who were qualified to matriculate as regularly enrolled students. Although the language of the Morrill Act and of the California state legislature’s Organic Act of 1868 that created the university, may seem quaint to us today, those laws contain the seeds of the ideals that now encompass UC’s activities, as enumerated by Nancy Anderson:

The University of California produces research and educates students, maintains huge contracts with government and industry, and runs presses, institutes, libraries, nuclear laboratories, research units, off-campus extensions, museums, and theaters. It supports post-graduate programs, and hospitals, fields sports teams and marching bands, fills art galleries and concert halls, constructs buildings, delivers babies, buys land, launches ships, lobbies politicians, grows crops, advises Presidents, and analyzes war and peace.3

And it does all of those things (with the possible exception of fielding a marching band) right here in San Diego.

In fact, UC began operating semi-officially in La Jolla in 1905, when the president of the university allowed the head of the Department of Zoology, William Ritter, to spend part of his time working in San Diego. (Until 1927 the university had only one full-service campus, Berkeley.)4 Ritter had come to town in 1903 at the invitation of the popular physician, Dr. Fred Baker; the two joined forces with a handful of interested San Diegans to establish the Marine Biological Association of San Diego. The association’s principal activity was to drum up support, financial and otherwise, in order set up a “marine biological station” somewhere in the area. In 1912, the Regents of the University of California assumed ownership and control of the association’s laboratory, which had moved to La Jolla after operating for two years in temporary quarters in the Glorietta Bay boathouse of the Hotel Del Coronado. Thanks to several generous gifts and bequests by members of the Scripps family dating back to the inception of the association in 1903, the university named its new acquisition the Scripps Institution for Biological Research.5 Over the ensuing years the renamed Scripps Institution of Oceanography [SIO] developed an outstanding reputation for research in the marine sciences.

As Patricia Schaelchlin has pointed out, the association’s Marine Biological Station established itself as “the cornerstone of La Jolla’s educational community, and its second economic base” after it first set up shop on Alligator Head in Scripps Park in 1905. Its aquarium and museum quickly became popular attractions, featuring exhibits and activities that delighted tourists as well as area residents.6 When the lab moved to its current site along La Jolla Shores in 1907 the expanded aquarium remained a locus of contact between the university scientists and the public.

From the very outset the founders of the Marine Biological Association created a mode of reciprocity between city and institution that has endured — in a rather evolved form, to be sure — to the present day. William Ritter, the association’s founding scientist, intended that the laboratory aspire “to equal and surpass the greatest one in the world…” by performing pioneering field and lab-based research of the highest quality, thus vastly advancing humankind’s knowledge of nature. That he desired the enterprise to focus its mission exclusively on studying “the waters of the Pacific adjacent to the Coast of Southern California” probably helped to endear him and the lab to the influential citizens of San Diego.7 In any event, while Ritter clearly had everything to gain by capturing the hearts, minds and monetary contributions of San Diegans, local businessmen and philanthropists joined the association for worldly reasons of their own. One especially clear sign of this was the motivation behind the interest that the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and leading residents took to underwrite the association’s expenses: they hoped such a first-rate intellectual enterprise would help to put forlorn, isolated San Diego “on the map.”8

An impressive roster of San Diegans, including John D. Spreckels, his attorney Harry L. Titus, George W. Marston, Elisha Babcock, Julius Wangenheim, Chamber of Commerce secretary H.P. Wood, Union editor James MacMullen, Homer Peters, U.S. Grant, Jr., Dr. Fred Baker, and of course E.W. and Ellen Browning Scripps, engaged themselves in forming the association.9 The Chamber of Commerce created a committee to oversee fundraising, generate publicity, and otherwise “boost” the enterprise — a sure indication that the town’s businessmen envisioned some bottom-line benefits to San Diego at a point in the not-too-distant future.

As early as 1904, the governor of the state, the president of the university, and members of the university’s board of regents began to take an active interest in the fledgling Marine Biological Association, which led directly to UC “affiliation,” an important step along the road to the ultimate absorption that occurred in 1912. Until that time, the laboratory depended almost entirely on the largesse of local citizens both to construct its buildings as well as for its ordinary operating expenses. With regard to its real estate needs, the City of San Diego provided the five-acre Alligator Head site free of charge and later took steps to deed it over to UC. But by 1907 the lab had outgrown it. In the meantime, E.W. Scripps had set his sights on a city-owned pueblo lot comprising 170 acres a short distance beyond the north end of what we today call La Jolla Shores. He arranged for the city to hold a public auction to sell the property, at which Harry Titus offered the sole bid of $1,000 in the association’s behalf for a parcel that some have estimated to have been worth thirty to fifty times as much even then. With the land secured, Ellen Scripps volunteered $10,000 to build a road connecting the lab to La Jolla on the south and Del Mar to the north; according to Raitt and Moulton, the Scrippses at the same time “intimated that they were prepared to give as much as $200,000 toward the further development of the biological work at La Jolla.”10 Over the ensuing years they made this offer good, and then some.

The conception, birth and early growth of what became the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and thus the University of California’s initial foothold in San Diego embodied an element utterly characteristic of the unique history of San Diego’s urban development during much of the rest of the twentieth century. The idea was born of a booster, Fred Baker, who was motivated by the typical booster’s self-interest — in this case his own amateur passion for malacology — as well as a sincere desire to attract favorable attention, investment and prestige to his adopted home town. Baker’s fervent promotion of the idea attracted the attention of the town’s leading businessmen and philanthropists, most of whom were dedicated boosters in their own right. Their principal organization, the Chamber of Commerce, took up the idea and made it operational, placing it squarely in the midst of a dozen or more pet projects all intended to help pull San Diego out of an economic and demographic depression that had hung on since the late 1880s.11 Success came slowly and in rather small increments for San Diego’s boosters back then, but in this matter, at least, a certain momentum began to build, and the abiding relationship that emerged between San Diego and the University of California suggested bigger things to come.

The relationship during the pre-UCSD era, however, did not always enjoy smooth sailing, for example while World War I raged in Europe. Even when SIO joined with several federal agencies to support the war effort, some La Jollans “violently” attacked Director Ritter for allegedly harboring pro-German sympathies, while others suspected lab employees of spying for the enemy.12 During the World War II years, similar issues arose in a rather more serious vein when the Institution’s director, Harald Sverdrup, was denied security clearance to work on Navy-sponsored research projects with his colleagues from SIO. Sverdrup, born in Norway, was a leading expert in underwater acoustics that the Navy was anxious to apply to anti-submarine warfare; despite his strong anti-fascist sentiments and professed loyalty to the United States, some of his own faculty accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer. One of his former students, Roger Revelle, finally managed to overcome the allegations against Sverdrup sufficiently to obtain a partial clearance, but as Naomi Oreskes has pointed out, this incident undermined Sverdrup’s position as a leader of American oceanography.13

Perhaps as early as 1917 (the evidence is not sufficiently clear to affirm this date), but certainly by 1920, the university took steps of an entirely different nature to provide valuable services to the San Diego community through its University Extension programs.14 Since then UC Extension and its local successor, UCSD Extension, have offered training and professional certification programs, agricultural advice, arts and cultural enrichment, and tens of thousands of courses of all descriptions to members of the public not otherwise enrolled as students of the university. Service to the larger public by means of knowledge diffusion, “the notion that the University would actually travel to the people,” lay at the heart of Extension’s mission.15

In its earliest days in San Diego, UC Extension operated on a shoestring budget, depending upon the generosity of local institutions such as the public library for office space. Some of the course instructors were on the faculty of the university’s “southern branch” (this became UCLA in 1927); they generally commuted between Los Angeles and San Diego by train. Those who taught classes in the natural sciences came from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Most, however, were local, coming from the State Normal School, the city school system, or from the ranks of San Diego’s business and professional populations. The enterprise served 485 enrollees in 1921, which it could only accomplish by making frequent use of volunteer labor to carry on its essential business activities. According to its first volunteer class-organizer, Miss Ida Crump, even in these limited circumstances UC Extension’s operations in San Diego “function[ed] more successfully than any other…in the State” thanks to the efforts of a committee composed of between thirty and forty educators, bankers, artists and interested citizens. Even so, Miss Crump asserted that under this makeshift regime some things had not been well cared for, “thus minimizing the splendid program planned for San Diego.”16

In 1920, Extension courses in San Diego included such subjects as “Scientific Motherhood,” English, business, journalism, and agriculture. Perhaps most important and best attended were continuing education and graduate-level courses for San Diego’s teachers, 227 of whom enrolled in Extension courses in 1924. Over the next two years, an expanded curriculum embraced “Educational Tests & Measurements,” “Commercial Correspondence for Business Men and Women,” history, commercial law, parliamentary law, French, Spanish, music, and drama. One of the drama courses, “Play construction,” was held in the offices of the Chamber of Commerce. It also fell to the Extension to teach classes in “Americanization” in order to help “assimilate the foreign born element.” Students received good value for their money: six dollars bought fifteen hours of instruction.17

Demand for technical and professional courses grew steadily during the early 1920s. Druggists asked for classes in beginning chemistry and pharmacy for their young employees in the hope that such would both encourage and qualify the apprentices to complete a “regular course” at a “legitimate college.” The commanding officer of the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park made a similar request in behalf of the several hundred pharmacists mates then in training there. The electricians of the city, the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the San Diego Realty Board also looked to UC Extension “for all of their educational work,” as did the local membership of the American Institute of Bankers.18

Not content simply to let the public come to them, Extension workers actively marketed their programs via direct mail, bulletin-board postings, and newspaper advertisements. They even went so far as to solicit the interest of Admiral Roger Welles, commandant of the 11th Naval District. Cora Fay Perrine, Miss Crump’s successor (who was also the first paid professional to run the San Diego office), read one day in the newspaper that Welles — San Diego’s first “naval mayor” — soon expected a permanent population of more than ten thousand bluejackets, to whom he hoped to offer “the highest educational facilities right here in San Diego.” With that in mind, Mrs. Perrine urged the directors in UC Extension’s head office to approve of courses in engineering mechanics, materials, and mathematics, to be taught by Dr. George McEwen, head of the Bureau of Research at SIO.19

As lively an undertaking as it appeared to be, Extension workers seemed to struggle for funding from the university as a regular part of their existence. Although course tuitions raised a substantial amount of money, they did not always meet expenses, leaving the San Diego committee to face demands to reduce costs while maintaining the number of courses on the schedule. Moreover, the San Diego bureau often found itself competing with Berkeley and Los Angeles for the services of qualified instructors. Both of these problems were well within the scope of the more or less constant turmoil that characterized the entire Extension Division. As the University of California evolved and grew during this period, its top leadership redefined the role of Extension several times over, all the while coping with perennial budget crises. Even with a solid record of success in support of its claims, the San Diego office felt constrained to protest against proposed curtailments. Here the class organizer pointed out that cutbacks in graduate courses would unfairly deprive local citizens — in this particular instance “869 city teachers who [were] in a position to take advantage” of the program.20

Beyond the interests of discrete groups such as teachers, pharmacists, bankers or sailors, San Diegans expressed a positive need for the benefits UC provided. Enrollments ticked steadily upward, reaching 1,009 for academic year 1926-27 and 1,732 three years later. As class organizer Cathryn Corbett pointed out in 1929, Extension services had a beneficial effect on the city, and made San Diego participants “conscious of the fact that we are a part of the State University and not merely a little local group.” This was all the more reason the head office should send the best qualified, most prestigious instructors, for it would help keep the level of community interest high, giving the people of San Diego something they did not already have.21

The committee of volunteers saw UC Extension as a useful means to elevate the level of culture in San Diego as well. In a reminiscence recorded in 1938, Julius Wangenheim, a UC alumnus, founding member of the Marine Biological Association, committee member and UC regent in the 1920s, recalled that the town “didn’t have very much in the way of culture,” and so “it meant a great deal to us and it was an important day when some of those great men from the University of California came down here to talk to us….We were hungry for cultural pleasures which such institutions as the state university could expend.” Wangenheim especially appreciated lecture/performances from such artists as Charles Mills Gayley (“Gayley the Troubadour”) and courses from world-famous UC scholars such as the those offered by Henry Morse Stephens on the French Revolution, Mortimer Clapp on the history of literature, and Garrett Mallory Borden on art.22

After 1930, the exigencies of the Great Depression caused the activities of the University Extension in San Diego to slow down considerably. Enrollments dropped off sharply — 799 in 1930-31, and down to 380 the next year. Lewis Leslie, who had taught a course in international relations in 1930, lamented that by then, nobody but teachers were interested in taking Extension classes any more. Since the city’s young people felt pressed to leave for other places as soon as they were able, said Leslie, only the retired folks, “who have not yet been awakened to the opportunities offered by the University Extension” were left. Unless Extension could reach this group, there was little future in it. Indeed, the San Diego office closed down shortly thereafter, and it was not until 1937 that members of the UC Alumni Association and others began to call for the reinstatement of a full-time operation.23

In her history of UC Extension, Kathleen Rockhill notes that the war years were not a banner period for the division: “Organizational formalization and stability became dysfunctional when Extension could not respond to the massive demands for training occasioned by World War II.” Although Extension was supposed to have administered the Engineering Science Management War Training Program [ESMDT], the division’s acting director Boyd Rakestraw was plagued by “myopia, extreme caution, and legalistic preoccupation with details,” to the point where the Engineering Division took the program under its own control, leaving Extension out entirely.24

Extension’s retrenchment should not be taken to mean that UC had suddenly retreated from the life of San Diego region, for during the war the university operated a War Training Center in cooperation with the U.S. Office of Education. The Center offered college-level instruction in order to help allay “shortages of engineers, chemists, physicists, and production supervisors essential to the war program.” The ESMDT program alone prepared more than 100,000 Californians for “higher echelon industrial positions.” The training was free of charge, coeducational, and all-inclusive, both in terms of the industries it served as well as the experience of the students — it was intended to include everyone “from top executive to the newest hire.” It was also supposed to prepare discharged service men, the physically handicapped, older men in less essential industries or in retirement, women anxious to help in the war effort and other adaptable persons for employment in these essential industries. Most of the ESMDT classes took place in the workplace itself, establishing a mode of cooperation between industries and the university that continued after the war and helped redefine the direction Extension would take from that point forward.25

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography took a leading role in research for the Navy during the war, which had a great deal to do with the shape of some of the most important of San Diego’s postwar transformations. According to Nancy Anderson, SIO scientists and technicians were joined by colleagues from around the country to work at San Diego’s UC Division of War Research [UCDWR], which at one point employed “600 physicists, electrical and electronic engineers, psychologists, oceanographers, marine biologists, mathematicians, chemists, and structural and hydromechanics experts….” Roger Revelle, who first came to SIO as a research assistant in 1931, had been called up for active duty in the Navy before the U.S. officially joined the war. He took charge of research at UCDWR and later “became project officer for all of [the Navy’s] Bureau of Ships’ oceanographic contracts. He made certain,” said Anderson, “that San Diego got its share.” As mentioned earlier, Revelle’s heroic efforts resolved serious problems that arose in the Navy — SIO collaboration when some SIO Faculty members expressed “[p]ersonal distrust, rooted in scientific and intellectual achievement” for the Institutions’s director, Harald Sverdrup, leading to Sverdrup’s loss of security clearance. Only after Revelle managed to clear Sverdrup’s name was the scientist allowed to make his significant contribution to the American war effort.26

By war’s end, many of the UCDWR scientists had left San Diego for their pre-war homes and jobs in a process emblematic of the nation’s vast and rapid demobilization. This only added to San Diegans’ fear that a scaled-down Navy and starkly reduced war industries would severely depress the local economy. Having collaborated successfully on so many crucial wartime projects (SONAR, offensive and defensive submarine warfare, and ocean wave forecasting prominent among them), the Navy and the university acted to maintain their partnership thereafter. Together they established the Marine Physical Laboratory to carry forward some of the underwater acoustical research they had started during the war as UCDWR. Roger Revelle now directed a branch of the bureau that became the Office of Naval Research in 1946, from which position he “helped direct prized resources…, and in short order, the Navy became Scripps’s primary customer as many classified wartime projects were transferred to San Diego.”27

In 1944, the Chamber of Commerce engaged Day & Zimmermann, a consulting firm based in Philadelphia, to survey the city’s productive resources for the purpose of postwar planning. The project’s stated goal was to identify all possible opportunities for commercial and industrial expansion, not only for the sake of growth per se, but to cushion the economic shock of the dreaded demobilization and war-industry cutbacks already underway. As the shock set in, San Diego’s business community coped with it, at least up to a point, by following some of Day & Zimmermann’s recommendations. San Diegans re-ignited the tourist sector through major investment, most notably by developing Mission Bay; by 1950 the city’s income from tourism exceeded its pre-war level. The city undertook to recapture and improve the harbor’s commercial capacity from the Navy. The Chamber’s World Trade Department sought to increase regional exchange with Mexico and other countries on the Pacific rim. Tuna fishing, agriculture, and even manufacturing rebounded significantly within five years of the war’s end. The Chamber of Commerce also continued to exert extraordinary efforts to maintain a strong naval presence in and around the city, and at this they mainly succeeded. Although historians may debate the depth of hardship caused San Diego by the cessation of hostilities, concern for the region’s economic future never slackened within the minds of the city’s business and political leaders.28

Day & Zimmermann included a survey of the local educational institutions in its report, noting in its discussion of San Diego State College that the city’s future development would “demand more scientific training leading to a [Bachelor of Science] degree.” With regard to UC, the consultant suggested that the university “consider” continuation of certain courses in engineering, science, and management training “in connection with the postwar activities” of San Diego State. And though it mentioned SIO as “one of the few institutions of its kind in the world,” nowhere did the report discuss the need for graduate training in any field by the schools in the area. Absent too was any sense that recent and anticipated population growth might escalate the pressure for expanded undergraduate-level education in the humanities and social sciences.29

Forces had long been at work, however, to locate a full-service UC campus in San Diego, although none too effectively so far. Nancy Anderson cites 1924 as the year that city’s businessmen initiated their campaign for such. Thirty years later, John J. Hopkins, president of General Dynamics Corporation, expressed interest in a university to Mayor John Butler around the same time he acquired and expanded Convair (successor to Consolidated Aircraft, the biggest defense contractor in San Diego during the war). Hopkins was also at work on a plan for his new General Atomic division to establish a large nuclear research facility on a city-donated tract on Torrey Pines Mesa. In these acts and ideas the reality of UCSD began to take root. Within months, the Chamber of Commerce appointed Convair’s vice president to chair its campaign to help complete the work that the state legislature had begun earlier in 1955, to found UCSD either by expanding SIO or “creating a complete new branch.”30

What a revealing Cold War moment this was. One of the nation’s great emerging defense conglomerates, whose primary business in San Diego at the time was research, development and manufacture of ICBMs, needed a great university virtually on-site to train its physicists and engineers. San Diego, the nation’s preeminent urban-military complex, needed the business and wanted the prestige. Roger Revelle, now director of SIO and a spearhead of the movement for UCSD, wanted the new university to be “like a cathedral: ‘the center to which all men turn to find the meaning of their lives and from which emanates a wondrous light, the light of understanding.'”31 What a remarkable alignment of forces.

All the while, UC Extension continued in its quiet way to provide abundant valuable service to the San Diego Community. The division recovered from its wartime paralysis thanks in part to provisions of the G.I. Bill that encouraged both people on active duty in the military as well as those separated from the services to enroll in university-sponsored continuing education programs. In 1946, 1,006 San Diegans took Extension courses; the number grew to 1,869 in 1949. By the early 1950s, enrollments in Extension programs in San Diego exceeded six thousand per year, and all signs pointed toward a steadily increasing demand. During this period, UC conducted an experiment in the city, teaming up professionals in the public school system to create an improved curriculum for adult education. According to Extension’s director in San Diego, the ensuing service to the community — and to the university — was “certainly of a higher order than would result under any less closely cooperative form of interaction.” Extension officials in San Diego repeatedly affirmed the idea that UC had a clear responsibility to work with the community in order to help its residents adjust to rapidly changing conditions, especially with regard to in-service training in the growing high-technology industries. At the same time, the division should strive to expand its “cultural offerings.”32

Extension had its own part to play in the unfolding drama of the birth of UCSD. Since its inception in 1946, the Extension’s San Diego engineering program had emanated from Los Angeles, with advisors, teachers and class organizers commuting to San Diego as needed. The dean of UCLA’s College of Engineering, L.M.K. Boelter, attended some of the pivotal meetings in the fall of 1955 with the Chamber of Commerce, Convair executives and other representatives from the community, where they discussed the shape the new campus might take. There Boelter learned that Convair expected to expand its engineering staff by 750 per year for the next several years. Now Convair’s parent company General Dynamics “order[ed] Convair to increase manifoldly [sic] its support of educational activities, particularly at the graduate level….” Moreover, “several executives from the San Diego Division of Convair… specifically requested a resident technical representative of the University in order to effect a much closer liaison between industry and the University.” In response, the dean proposed that Extension install a full-time “Assistant Professor-Principal Extension Representative” at San Diego to deal with the changing conditions and help UC’s clients in their labors.33

The language of mutuality seemed to permeate discussions between San Diegans and UC officials as negotiations and planning for the new campus progressed — mutual interest, mutual accommodation, mutual benefit. As UC president Clark Kerr put it in a memorandum to the regents during the summer of 1960, “We believe that San Diego needs the University and the University needs San Diego. Let us…resolve to proceed — as rapidly as need is demonstrated and resources are available — to develop a full range of University services in that area.”34 It took the parties to this immense undertaking five years to hammer out the details, which included a number of enormously complicated real estate transactions, city-planning decisions, disputes among the regents, disputes between the regents and the academic senate, municipal elections, resolutions in the state legislature, military decisions in Washington, a question of whether the university should be named for La Jolla or San Diego, and countless other power plays of all descriptions. But they made the deals and the dust did eventually settle, so that by 1961 the newly appointed chancellor Herbert York could accede to his position and express his hope that “the university and the community [would] be mutually stimulating.”35

San Diegans had good reason to expect much from the university. From now on the state government would budget tens (and later hundreds) of millions of dollars each year to run the school, the majority of which would flow directly into the region’s economy. Several departments within the federal government as well as companies large and small would similarly bestow multimillion-dollar research grants on the campus’s distinguished faculty. State controller Alan Cranston asserted correctly that UCSD would “help solve the area’s employment problem,” not only by virtue of on-campus jobs, but by attracting an even “larger percentage of new industry than it does now.”36 And these were only some of the monetary advantages that would accrue. Societal and cultural benefits had yet to be counted.

UC Extension had long before established a much-loved tradition of cultural enrichment in San Diego, presenting programs of lectures, concerts, and theater to the public on a nearly year-round basis. Many of the performances featured world-famous scholars or artists; others took the form of workshops or master classes, enabling San Diegans from grade-school age through adult to perform with or under the guidance of topnotch professionals. In almost all cases, admission to such events was either free or very inexpensive. So popular was the 1963-64 UCSD-sponsored chamber music series that it sold out two months in advance of its first concert. This surprised San Diego Union arts columnist Alan Kriegsman who noted that “the powerful new avidity” now in evidence might mark the end of local patrons’ habitual sluggishness. Kriegsman was sure that the promised influx of UCSD students and faculty would “become a prime factor in the San Diego cultural scene.”37

With the coming of UCSD, departments from all around the new school joined in reaching out to the larger community. Here the university carried on a practice begun in 1903 by UC scientists from the Marine Biological Station. Even with the campus in its embryonic stage (only a few hundred graduate students in academic year ’63-’64, and no undergraduates at all until the fall of ’64), faculty and administrators presented ninety lectures around San Diego. In that year alone they spoke to service clubs, church groups, middle schools and high schools, parent-teacher organizations, business associations, professional societies, and others.38

One university/community cultural collaboration from those early days — the partnership between UCSD and the La Jolla Playhouse — did a great deal to cement San Diego’s reputation as a center for theater arts. Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer founded the Playhouse in 1947 as a summer venue for film actors to perfect their skills on stage. The group first became involved with UC when La Jolla-San Diego County Theater and Arts Foundation board member Roger Revelle pressured the regents to donate a parcel of its Torrey Pines property to the foundation in 1954 for use by the Playhouse. Ten years later the regents agreed to loan the foundation $100,000 to help build a first-class theater on its land. To Mrs. Edward Longstreth, the foundation’s president, these events signified a real coming of age for San Diego, for it would “[make] us a city where everything doesn’t have to go on in a high school auditorium.” Peck, a native of La Jolla, saw the partnership as an opportunity for San Diego to “entertain,…enlighten and elevate” while building a national image as a cultural center. It would certainly augment the already prestigious Old Globe in Balboa Park, and it would also provide a home for part of the year for UCSD’s own nascent Theater Department. Many prominent San Diegans envisioned the theater project as a cultural treasure, a tremendous enhancement to the city’s image, and a potential draw to tourists, all of which promises the La Jolla Playhouse and its Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts ultimately fulfilled. Unfortunately, as Nancy Anderson points out, it took nearly thirty years to accomplish this because the process “got bogged down in internecine battles, land development, lawsuits, and money.”39

Who in those days did not have high hopes for UCSD and what it could do for the San Diego region? Leaders in business, industry, civic affairs and the news media joined with top campus administrators to predict an exceedingly prosperous future while singing each other’s praises. Together, they all said, UCSD and San Diego would build a thriving regional economy, create “one of the greatest educational cultural centers in the world,” give birth to scientific discoveries that would change the world, and at last bring the city’s century-long search for an image to a brilliant conclusion. They would harness some of the best minds on earth to educate the youth of Southern California, to turn them into first-class citizens, the natural leaders of the next generations. And for the most part, they made these dreams come true as they built an institution very much in keeping Roger Revelle’s vision of a “cathedral,” although it was never easy.

UCSD opened its doors to undergraduates in the fall of 1964, at practically the same moment that widespread unrest broke out on the Berkeley campus in the form of the Free Speech Movement. San Diegans surely worried lest something similar happen in their own territory. While such crippling turmoil never came to San Diego, demonstrations materialized nevertheless at UCSD eight months later. In this instance, twenty-two students — among them a few of UCSD’s first class of freshmen — and two faculty members, carried out what Chancellor John Galbraith described as a “quiet and orderly” march around Revelle Plaza, carrying signs protesting the landing of U.S. troops in the Dominican Republic. According to Galbraith, the protesters broke no university rules. If one is to believe the editorial that appeared in the next day’s San Diego Union, bearded demonstrators now besieged the campus, engaging in “ideological warfare.” Worse, they “milled around in the manner of the rioters who brought the parent university at Berkeley to a state of anarchy.” Local chapters of the American Legion and the Federation of Republican Women joined forces with the Union to offer scathing criticism of what they considered to be a pathetic, immoral and unpatriotic exercise in free speech. They excoriated Galbraith for his craven acquiescence in what he mistook for “academic freedom.” It is interesting to note how differently an independent newspaper, the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, saw the matter. Its editor disagreed with the protesters’ point of view but supported the idea that the university was a place where people should be able to speak their minds freely. He went on to chide the Union and its publisher in no uncertain terms:

“A good university ought to generate more protest than that. If the young don’t protest, who will? If nobody protests, we might all learn to think like James S. Copley.”40

The tiny demonstration and the hackles it raised around San Diego revealed a measurable degree of disharmony between campus and community that grew more open and notorious as the Johnson administration escalated the war in Southeast Asia. Many more students and professors, along with a cadre of “outside agitators” expressed their opposition to the war vocally; at the same time, a number of causes associated with the New Left took root at UCSD. A chapter of Students for a Democratic Society did exist on campus and both the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee had their moment in the sun, but UCSD never held a candle to the unrest that occurred at Berkeley and elsewhere around the country. Most aggravating to conservative San Diegans as well as to the increasingly right-wing Board of Regents was the presence of Professor Herbert Marcuse and his graduate student Angela Davis. The former enjoyed a nationwide reputation as the preeminent philosopher of the New Left, while the latter was one of its most articulate and compelling firebrands. Marcuse and Davis openly championed students’ as well as the faculty’s rights to question authority; the very idea incensed area residents. At one point the American Legion went so far as to offer to “buy out” Marcuse’s employment contract, a suggestion that the administration firmly rejected.41

While right-leaning residents of San Diego perceived UCSD as a hotbed of left-wing radicalism, Nancy Anderson points out that such was hardly the case — both the campus and the community were deeply fragmented ideologically. Chancellor William McGill found himself constantly walking a tightrope over what must surely have looked to him like a pit full of hungry crocodiles: a hostile Ronald Reagan-led Board of Regents, demanding, disgruntled and disunited on-campus constituencies; and angry off-campus groups such as the American Legion. The “freshman” chancellor faced up to the challenges with remarkable aplomb, and made equally remarkable efforts to restore good feelings between UCSD and the communities beyond the confines of the campus. Before departing for the presidency of Columbia University in 1970, McGill sent some of the school’s most familiar professors (e.g., Harold Urey, Roger Revelle, Walter Munk, and others) to offer a series of public lectures. He also set up a “People to People” program to facilitate informal encounters among students, faculty and local citizens, and prompted the Extension Division to expand and popularize its offerings. These acts appeared to help restore a sense of amity and respect between San Diegans and UCSD.42

By the mid-seventies scholars and administrators at UCSD reaffirmed their engagement with the larger community. Chancellor William McElroy enumerated several public service activities he felt the university should support, in particular a major project “to explore binational regional planning for San Diego-Tijuana.” Another initiative came from Clifford Grobstein, who had been named vice chancellor for university relations in 1974, after he resigned his position as dean of the medical school. His office proposed to launch a program called the UCSD Research and Development Clearinghouse. Among its several functions, the Clearinghouse would “develop a profile of public and private organizations in the UCSD impact area that can benefit from UCSD’s research capability.” Then it was to “develop mechanisms for effective matching and coupling of campus research capability and off-campus needs.”43

Grobstein had experienced a long trial-by-fire as dean of UCSD’s medical school between 1967 and 1973. That arm of the university had been founded with the highest aspirations for providing direct, essential services to the region’s communities, especially those, which until then had less than satisfactory access to quality health care. Governor Brown placed it at the top of his list of priorities back in 1960 — after all, San Diego was the largest metropolitan area in the state without a medical school. As plans developed, UCSD would take over the county hospital and once that business was settled the Veterans Administration would build a huge new medical center right on the UCSD campus. The university pursued the same recruiting practices for the medical school it had used to obtain the first cadre of faculty for the other departments: it sought the biggest names in the field it could find. This caused considerable tension among physicians around San Diego, many of whom hoped at some point to become permanent faculty themselves. As circumstances unfolded, many of these practitioners found themselves out in the cold, and resented the stiff competition that the imported superstars presented, and this was only one of many areas of friction around San Diego that the medical school’s start-up generated.44

Once safely removed from that maelstrom, Grobstein turned to a matter he felt needed consideration — a major overhaul in the university’s approach to its role as a public problem-solver. Here he found “multiple signs of disjuncture,” inside as well as outside the institution. He concluded that faculty were hiding behind the walls of their ivory tower, “reluctant to turn attention to public problems because they believe they will be badgered into activities of lesser intellectual interest than their own. They vigorously oppose organization of their effort in terms of practical objectives, asserting that expansion of knowledge for its own sake will provide the best long-range answers.”

The university’s research function naturally sought “fundamental knowledge,” but the larger mission demanded a similarly energetic search for “need-oriented knowledge.”45 Here was the philosophical mandate for the UCSD Research and Development Clearinghouse, which received a cool reception when Grobstein proposed it, and disappeared from sight soon after.

Even so, campus officials continued to seek ways to make UCSD more responsive to community issues, especially those of the business and industrial community. From time to time the chancellor hosted consultative meetings between administrators, faculty, and representatives of the region’s productive enterprises. At one such event held in 1980, the participants explored the research and training needs of local businesses and industries and led discussions on the subject of UCSD’s graduate, undergraduate and Extension programs of potential interest to the businesspeople in attendance. At other times, professors and provosts acted as if the university was itself a hi-tech chamber of commerce. In 1981 for example, the provost of Revelle College contacted the research director of a Japanese telecommunications company to cultivate the company’s interest in opening a division in San Diego. The language of the letter was pure “boosterese”:

As you know, Southern California is on the frontier of advanced technology. San Diego, in particular, is an area where major growth in research and development is taking place. Under the leadership of Chancellor Atkinson, who was the former Director of National Science Foundation [sic], our university is playing an increasingly important role in this growth….The quality of life is high. We can build something nice together in a pleasant environment, and in doing so enhance the friendship between our two countries.46

Here a high UCSD official was doing exactly what the industrial development committee of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce had been doing for a hundred years, working to “upbuild the city.” And why not? Who, after all, stood to benefit if the venture succeeded? The company might, by virtue of the intensity of the R&D atmosphere in the vicinity. Its employees might indeed enjoy a higher “quality of life” in San Diego than elsewhere. The city’s merchants and service providers might add the newcomers to their customer base. And the university might obtain new research grants, or attract new faculty and graduate students with interests related to the company’s field of endeavor. Finally, the transaction might contribute to the formation of whole new enterprises, as has been the case with more than 150 businesses such as Qualcomm, whose founder, Professor Irwin Jacobs, “rolled downhill from UCSD” to start the company. To be sure, such boosterish activity was more worldly — more capitalistic — than idealistic, but it suggests that the university had gone some distance toward relieving the disjuncture between pure knowledge and public service so much on the mind of Clifford Grobstein a few years earlier.

As the campus culture began to mature during the 1980s and into the ‘nineties, some faculty and administrators expressed their perception that the university should do much more to engage in critical issues related to the life of the region. Without discounting the value of the contributions made by the physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists to San Diego’s economic development, some at UCSD felt disconnected from a community they had come to care about as their own roots in that community deepened. One by one, as individuals and not on any organized basis, professors in the humanities, social sciences, and “hard” sciences realized that San Diego possessed a unique history, culture and identity. They began to understand as never before that its neighborhoods and the people who lived in them deserved careful study, that indeed there were many questions about the social, cultural and economic dynamics of the region they wanted to ask. The time had finally come to invest their own as well as UCSD’s intellectual capital somewhere beyond the confines of the campus and the research and industrial parks that surround it.

When UCSD Extension opened for business in the fall of 1972, one of its primary missions was to serve as part of a system-wide “extended university” to provide greater access to the public by offering programs “to enable the economically less advantaged — minorities in particular — the opportunity to attend and earn a University of California degree.” Extension still carried on its historical functions related to continuing education and cultural enrichment, but it operated as its own entity under a new decentralized regime. Decentralization also meant that the Extension Division on each UC campus became self-supporting, making it necessary to establish a variety of direct connections with the community, not the least important of which are economic. Thus when Mary L. Walshok accepted the office of dean of UCSD Extension in 1982 she directed an intensive marketing campaign toward UCSD’s usual clientele — the elite establishments in the area whose employees needed continuing professional education in fields “like engineering, business, nursing, computer sciences, and management of technical and scientific enterprises.”47

Over time, however, Walshok realized that by moving away from a more general audience that included less-advantaged constituencies, her division would almost certainly fail to address a host of issues in the community where a connection with the university might make a meaningful difference in the quality of people’s lives. As successful as UCSD Extension’s post-1982 initiatives have been, for example UCSD CONNECT and San Diego Dialogue, these did not satisfy the growing interest on campus in matters closer to the grass-roots of the region.48 Studying these circumstances more closely and consulting with concerned colleagues in many different disciplines, Walshok came to understand that research universities — even those as elite as UCSD — have the power to bestow enormous social benefits not only upon the world at large, but “in their own backyard.” The university needed to extend a challenge to its faculty to engage in research in its own community, to develop socially useful regional and civic knowledge — to discover it, teach it, publish it and put it to work.49

The field of regional studies has begun to attract advocates and practitioners at UCSD in the last few years. As recently as 1997, its graduate students in history had turned out no more than five dissertations on San Diego’s past, and advanced research in regional matters in other disciplines was similarly scant. Since then, however, scholars in the departments of history, anthropology, communication, ethnic studies, sociology, health care and political science have started to fix their gaze on topics closer to home, as have some in Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Institute of the Americas. The Urban Studies and Planning program has assembled a consortium of researchers whose earlier interests lay elsewhere, but now focus on San Diego. For the most part these advances have been the result of individual or smaller-scale team efforts rather than a major institutional initiative. Even that may change as the UCSD Civic Collaborative — a highly innovative project of the Extension that got its start in 1998 — seeks to close the gap between academic and civic knowledge.

In 1999, the Civic Collaborative surveyed the entire faculty in order to attain a better understanding of how this remarkable population (approximately 1,500 at the time) viewed questions related to personal, professional and institutional engagement with the community. Responses revealed that UCSD has taken great strides in the right direction but still has a long way to go. In reviewing the survey’s results, renowned analyst Barbara Lee concluded that while many of the respondents may have “overestimated” their scholarly involvement in the community, nevertheless seventy-six percent of those who returned the survey claimed their professional work was in some way community-oriented. Lee also found “considerable feeling that engagement with the community is necessary and personally satisfying,” despite the fact “there are many barriers to community involvement, such as time pressures and the lack of academic rewards.” Interestingly, Clifford Grobstein identified those same obstacles in 1975.50

More than fifteen thousand undergraduates are registered at UCSD in the current academic year, along with two thousand graduate students and a thousand more in the medical school. The total budget amounts to $1.4 billion, and the campus employs in excess of ten thousand people. The campus ranks fifth in the nation (and first in the UC system) in research funding, and more than a dozen of its departments rate among the top ten nationally. UCSD holds seventh place in the United States for “excellence among all state-supported colleges and universities,” according to a recent survey by U.S. News and World Report. Much of what Roger Revelle envisioned nearly a half-century ago — his great cathedral of learning — has come to pass.

“UCSD and You,” a publication celebrating UCSD’s fortieth anniversary, documents two hundred fifty programs and “forty gifts of service” to the community that the school offered during the past academic year, covering a wide range of activities. In his introduction, Chancellor Robert Dynes affirms one more time that “Teaching, Research, and Public Service are the three missions” of the campus.51 Long before there was a UCSD, the University of California made a significant investment in San Diego with the same three missions in mind. The ways and means by which the university has attempted to carry out those missions have changed dramatically over the years, and one may certainly debate their effectiveness. But look at San Diego then and now and at the university too. In some amazing ways they really have grown up together.

 


 

NOTES

1 Nancy Scott Anderson, An Improbable Venture: A History of the University of California, San Diego (La Jolla: The UCSD Press, 1993), 1. Anderson offers a superb blow-by-blow description of the start up processes in the chapters that follow her introduction.

2 Mary E. Stratthaus, “Flaw in the Jewel: Housing Discrimination against Jews in La Jolla,” American Jewish History, Sept. 1996, V84 (N3) 189-219; also, Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 53-4. In 1965, the Los Angeles Times noted, “Since UC first announced it would expand SIO into a full-scale university there has been curiosity about the reaction of the San Diego community, known for its conservatism, to the presence in large numbers of liberal professors….” William Trombley, “UC San Diego Enters its Second Year of Growth,” 3 October 1965.

3 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 4.

4 The California State Legislature established the university’s “southern branch” at Los Angeles in 1919, which graduated its first class of four-year students in 1925. By 1927 it had grown sufficiently to be renamed “the University of California at Los Angeles.”

5 The most complete account of this story appears in Helen Raitt and Beatrice Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: First Fifty Years (The Ward Ritchie Press, 1967), 3-91.

6 Patricia A. Schaelchlin, La Jolla: The Story of a Community (La Jolla: Friends of the La Jolla Library, 1988), 126-128.

7 William Ritter, the Institution’s founding scientist, in “A General Statement of the Ideas and Present Aims of the Marine Biological Association of San Diego,” 1905, quoted in Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 31.

8 Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 9; 12-13. In a letter to the Chamber of Commerce’s executive secretary, H.P. Wood, dated May 20, 1903, newspaper magnate E.W. Scripps suggested that if the people of San Diego “should voluntarily make a beginning to the [Marine Biological] museum, the University people might gladly take it up and a state appropriation follow….” Scripps also noted that his brother and sister owned land in Pacific Beach and at La Jolla, and that “they would be willing to give temporary use, if not absolute deed, to property for a site….” Letter in Minutes of the Weekly Board of Directors Meetings of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, 1903, 445.

9 This distinguished group, in the words of Raitt and Moulton, “constitute[d] a virtual social register of San Diego in those days (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 20-21).”

10 Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 45-49.

11 According to U.S. Census figures, San Diego’s population in 1890 was 16,169; in 1900 17,700. Useful discussion of San Diego’s post-1890 doldrums may be found in Elizabeth MacPhail, The Story of New San Diego and Its Founder Alonzo E. Horton, 2nd edition (San Diego History Center, 1989), 98-128; Clarence A. McGrew, City of San Diego and San Diego County: The Birthplace of California, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The American Historical Society, 1922), 129-160; Richard Pourade, The Glory Years: The Booms and Busts in the Land of the Sundown Sea (San Diego: Union-Tribune Publishing, 1964), 215-251. For a nearly all-inclusive list of the interests of the Chamber of Commerce at this time, see A.J. Shragge, “Radio and Real Estate: The U.S. Navy’s First Land Purchase in San Diego,” in Journal of San Diego History 42:4 (Fall 1996), 240-242. For a detailed discussion of boosterism and its significance in San Diego’s history, see A.J. Shragge, “Boosters and Bluejackets: The Civic Culture of Militarism in San Diego, California, 1900-1945 (Ph.D. diss, UCSD, 1998). Cogent definitions of boosterism and the “booster ethos” appear in Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 113-116; Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Ct., Greenwood Press), 3-11, 199; John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1-98; and Sally F. Griffith, Home Town News: William Allen White and the Emporia Gazette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6-7.

12 Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 91.

13 Naomi Oreskes, “Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb: The Loyalty Case of Harald U. Sverdrup,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, Vol. 31, Issue 3 (September 2000): 309-369.

14 See “UC Extension Rolls Reach 100,000 Here,” San Diego Union, 21 January 1962, 41: 1-2. According to this article the Extension had “enrolled its 100,000th San Diego student since it opened an office here in 1917.” I have not yet been able to document this date beyond this mention in the newspaper. Another perhaps more reliable source, a letter from R.G. Edwards to Leon J. Richardson (Director of Extension), dated February 14, 1927, noted that “the inception of extension work in San Diego [goes back to] 1919….” Letter in CU 18, box 43, folder 43:6, Document 980, University of California Archives, Bancroft Library.

15 Kathleen Rockhill, Academic Excellence and Public Service: A History of University Extension at California (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 19-20.

16 Document 980: “San Diego Office: Recommendation of Miss Crump” July 8, 1921, in CU 18, box 43, file 43.5, University of California Archives, Bancroft Library.

17 Document 980: “San Diego Office: Recommendation of Miss Crump”, July 21, 1921, folder 43.5; “The San Diego University Extension Association”; “Secretary in Charge of Correspondence Instruction to Mrs. Ethel Bailey, San Diego Public Library,” June 28, 1920; “Announcement of Classes Offered in San Diego,” January 1922, all in CU 18, box 43, file 43.4, University of California Archives, Bancroft Library. See also, “University Extension Service is Popular,” San Diego Union, 1 January 1924, 4.

18 Document 980, continued: Cora Fay Perrine, Representative, Extension Division, to Dean Franklyn Theodore Green, October 19, 1923; Perrine to Boyd D. Rakestraw, n.d.; Perrine to J.L. Richardson, July 20, 1923; all in file 43.5.

19 Document 980, continued: Perrine to Mrs. Hazel Murphey-Smith, October 24, 1922. See also, “San Diego Woman Noted for Educational Organization Under Island Government,” San Diego Union, 27 December 1933, 5.

20 Rockhill, Academic Excellence and Public Service, 89-121; Document 1110: Director, UC Extension to E.B. Tilton, Asst. Superintendent of San Diego Schools, March 12 and 17, 1926; and Doc. 980, M. Edith Henderson to L.J. Richardson, March 11, 1926; all in CU 18, box 43, folder 43.3.

21 “Report of the UC Extension Division in San Diego, May 1928,” folder 43:6; “San Diego 1929-1930,” folder 43.7; Cathryn Corbett to Boyd Rakestraw, April 20, 1929, folder 43.6; and Corbett to Rakestraw, March 26-29, 1929. This last item was a memorandum that in its plea for the best possible instructors noted dissatisfaction with a course in real estate law taught by Judge Edgar Luce, one of the city’s leading figures.

22 “Recalls Early Extension Activities,” in “San Diego Issue: Extension News,” December 16, 1938. CU 18, box 45, folder 45.30.

23 Ruth Lobaugh (Executive Secretary, Southern District) to Boyd Rakestraw, April 12, 1930, CU 18, box 43, folder 43.7; Harry Clark (Deputy City Attorney) to Rakestraw, May 4, 1937; George Brereton (Under-sheriff, San Diego County) to Rakestraw, both in box 45, folder 45.30.

24 Rockhill, Academic Excellence and Public Service, 115-117.

25 Day & Zimmermann, “Report on the City and County of San Diego Industrial and Commercial Survey…to San Diego Chamber of Commerce, Volume 2,” 78-79, 21 February 1945; Rockhill, 123.

26 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 21-25; Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 137-144; Oreskes, “Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb,” Abstract.

27 Bruce Linder, San Diego’s Navy: An Illustrated History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 151. Also, Raitt and Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 144-146; Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 24-25.

28 Day & Zimmermann, Vol. 1, 45-48, 89, 91, 95; and San Diego Chamber of Commerce, “1950 Annual Business Survey.” Nancy Anderson’s view of San Diego’s postwar economy is far less sanguine: “By the mid-fifties the city was in a post-war economic decline dismal enough to recall E.W. Scripps’ ‘broken down boomtown (An Improbable Venture, 38).'”

29 Day & Zimmermann, Vol. 2, 75-79.

30 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 38-40. Unfortunately, in 1924 San Diego lost out to a better bid from Westwood, which became the site for UCLA.

31 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 37.

32 “Final Report, August 11, 1950,” by Melvin W. Barnes, in CU 18, box 60, folder 60.1; “Annual Report, 1955-56,” June 15, 1956, in folder 60.2. Also, Rockhill, Academic Excellence and Public Service, 126.

33 L.M.K. Boelter to Baldwin M. Woods, Vice President U.C Extension, October 21, 1955, in CU 18, box 60 folder 60.12; and P.P. O’Brien and Boelter to President R.G. Sproul, November 22, 1955, in folder 60.2. It is interesting to note how eager UC officials were to please their counterparts in industry. According to a report from a local Extension/community steering committee held in 1949, the Naval Electronics Laboratory and Convair “depended” on Extension classes to upgrade their employees. This the committee deemed to be a “valuable community service, and therefore [these classes] are regularly given even though they do not pay their own way….” Melvin Barnes to Baldwin Woods, “Report for the Steering Committee,” March 21, 1949, in CU 18, box 60, folder 60.3.

34 Clark Kerr, “The Expansion of University Services in San Diego,” 21 July 1960, 3. RSS 1, Chancellor Subject Files, box 51, folder 7, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, UCSD Library.

35 San Diego Tribune, 23 February 1961.

36 “University Spends Big on Campus.” La Jolla Sentinel, 31 December 1961; “West’s First Major Science City Envisioned,” San Diego Union, 2 July 1961; “UC Hailed as Area Aid by Cranston,” San Diego Tribune, 25 July 1962.

37 Alan M. Kriegsman, “Music Notes: U.C. Fills the House.” San Diego Union, 13 October 1963.

38 Steve Glazier, “UCSD Speakers’ Bureau Presents 90 Lectures.” La Jolla Journal, 9 July 1964.

39 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 223-225. Also, Charles Davis, “UC to Lend $100,000 to Help Theater.” San Diego Union, 18 April 1964; Michael O’Connor, “UC Regents to Hear Plan for Theater,” Union, 25 March 1965.

40 “Galbraith Says Protest Within Rules.” San Diego Union, 10 May 1965; “Angry Placard or the Flag?” Editorial, Union, 8 May 1965; “Protest in La Jolla.” Editorial, Oceanside Blade-Union, 12 May 1965.

41 William J. McGill, The Year of the Monkey: Revolt on Campus, 1968-69 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 10-60; Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 114.

42 Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 122-126.

43 McElroy to David S. Saxon (President, UC) “Public Service Activities,” 16 July 1975; also Clifford Grobstein, “UC and Public Problem Solving,” 19 November 1975. Both in RSS 1, box 51, folder 4, Mandeville Department of Special Collections

44 San Diego Union, “Health Unit Backs School,”18 January 1961, B1:4; VA Hospital Plan Hinges of UC Site OK,” 31 January 1964, 19:1; “UC Regents Get Proposal to Run County Hospital,” 20 November 1964, B1:8; “Pediatrics Dept. Chief at UCSD Tells Plans,” 8 July 1969, B3:6; “San Ysidro Medical Clinic to Open,” 18 August 1969, B:36; “Life Sciences Thrive Here,” 11 January 1972, X20:1. Also, see Anderson, An Improbable Venture, 154-163.

45 Grobstein, “UC and Public Problem Solving.”

46 William McElroy, invitation to twenty-two community representatives, 30 January 1980; and Chia-Wei Woo to Dr. Norioshi Kuroyanagi, 23 December 1981. Both in RSS 1, box 51, folder 3, Mandeville Department of Special Collections.

47 “The Extended University at UCSD: Plans and Prospects,” May 16, 1973. In RSS 1, box 75, folder 4, Mandeville Department of Special Collections; also Rockhill, Academic Excellence and Public Service, 185-86, 193-96, 217, 221-22.

48 Created in 1985, CONNECT acts as a “university-based provider of accelerated support services for high technology business and university entrepreneurs.” Since 1991, San Dialogue has addressed “regional policy issues [e.g., cross-border development, smart growth, and school reform] by bringing together the unique competencies of academics, business, government and civic leaders.” Quotations taken from www.connect.org and www.sddialogue.org.

49 Mary L. Walshok, interview with author, 24 August 2001. Also, Walshok, Knowledge Without Boundaries: What America’s Research Universities Can Do for the Economy, the Workplace, and the Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), passim.

50 Barbara Lee, “UCSD Faculty and the San Diego Community: Report of a Survey,” 1999; Grobstein, “UC and Public Problem Solving,” 1975.

51 Office of University Communication, “UCSD and You,” 16 November 2000.


Abraham J. Shragge II was born and raised in San Francisco, and has lived in San Diego since 1982. He earned his B.A. in history at UC-Davis and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern U.S. History from UC-San Diego in 1998. He spent fourteen years in business before entering the graduate program at UCSD. He has taught history at San Diego City College, MiraCosta College and UCSD. He is presently Coordinator of Public Programs with the UCSD Civic Collaborative, engaged in projects including the compilation and publication of a Directory of San Diego County Historical Resources, creation of a San Diego Regional Studies Network, a San Diego Ex-Prisoners of War Oral History program, and teaching at UCSD.