Letter from the editor

Welcome to the first issue of your alumni magazine. And it will be yours. We promise that @UCSD will be a magazine for all alumni although not necessarily all about alumni.

This is our first issue, but it is not the first publication to come from the University or the Alumni Association. Denys Horgan edited Perspectives for the University from 1986 until the final issue last summer. This thoughtful and thought-provoking magazine covered UCSD’s burgeoning research programs and gave the University a platform to publicize its successes in medicine, the sciences and the arts.

In the decade before that, the Alumni Association published its own eight-page newspaper, the Alumni Quarterly. Thomas C. Shepard, the then-president of the Alumni Association, wrote in that first issue, winter, 1978: “We consider the Quarterly to be an instrument of two-way communication.”

The message is still the same, even if the audience is considerably larger. Unlike its predecessors, which reached 18,000 at most, @UCSD will be mailed to all 90,000 alumni three times a year. And it will go out with a promise to serve and inform you. We can make that promise because of the commitment of Jim Langley, vice chancellor of external relations and Win Cox, associate vice chancellor for communications. They believe that a publication by the Alumni Association and for the alumni is what you deserve and they worked to bring it about.

@UCSD will continue to tell you about the high level of research and its applications in the community as in the article on strokes. We will keep you abreast of UCSD’s seemingly endless expansion with the article on Eleanor Roosevelt College’s new campus. We will reacquaint you with your teachers as in the interview with the ever-ebullient Tom Bond, former chemistry professor and provost of Revelle. We hope to engage you in campus issues, this time tackling the ongoing debate about sports at UCSD, a definite water-cooler topic for alumni if ever there was one.

We want to share with you BUT we also want you to share with us. We invite you to respond to our articles with letters to the editor, either posted or emailed to alumnieditor@ucsd.edu. We also want you to vent, praise or question us, either by mail or by going to www.alumni.ucsd.edu/magazine and joining in the discussion boards. We want you to suggest articles or, as in the case of Roger Showley, ’70, in our Looking Back feature, sometimes to write for us. We also promise to keep you up to date with your classmates in Class Notes. And here is where we have to take a deep breath and admit our joyful embarrassment.

We sent each of you a postcard requesting a class note and we received over 1,800 replies. Yes, that’s one thousand eight hundred! And I can honestly tell you they are all fascinating. They would also (at 30 notes a page) fill some 60 pages. So if you don’t see your note, look for it online or in the May and September issues.

And please look for those May and September issues because we’ll be there, that’s a promise.

Raymond Hardie, Editor
alumnieditor@ucsd.edu