It was searingly hot on
that September day. Gusting Santa Ana winds crisped the thirsty
leaves of eucalyptus on Torrey Pines Mesa. But still they came,
181 intrepid—some thought them foolhardy—students, the
first undergraduates to enroll at the University of California,
San Diego.
A handful had dreamed of attending the University
of California, La Jolla, the name given this brave new campus by
the Board of Regents in 1959. Eighteen months later, after listening
to community debate, the Regents voted to scrap UCLJ for the more
inclusive UCSD.
The first chancellor, Herbert York, remembers the
first freshmen as young, optimistic and spirited, “a delightful
addition to a campus where planning and recruiting had been the
dominant activities.” Literature
professor Andrew H. Wright, who had joined the faculty a year earlier,
recalls how, after spending “studentless time planning for
the utopia that was to ensue,” he rejoiced to see “a
hundred and a half live human beings cross the plaza and take their
places as the first class.”
These freshmen were high-school standouts, all but 30 of them science
majors, and most from San Diego County. There were, as a registrar
told the press, “two boys for every girl.”While their
peers flocked to older institutions—schools shrouded with ivy
and strewn with football pennants—this pioneer class approached
a relatively barren mesa, cleaved by U.S. 101, at the northern edge
of the city.
A 1929, Spanish-style Flying A gas station (“the only gas between
Del Mar and Rosecrans Avenue”) and a one-room, truckers’ café filled
a small asphalt triangle. Before long, students and professors were
elbowing among truckers in what became the campus “greasy spoon”—the
only off-campus hamburger within walking distance.
Hwy. 101 was the popular route between Los Angeles and the Mexican
border. Cars flashed by at more than 50 miles an hour. A traffic
signal hung over the intersection with Miramar Road, and Herb York
recalls: “On Sunday nights, when a student or faculty member
pushed the light control button in order to walk across, northbound
traffic would back up all the way to Tijuana.” This bottleneck
led to the construction of the wooden pedestrian bridge that still
spans Gilman Drive.
 There were three academic buildings: B, C, and D. (Building A was
the steam plant). There were no dormitories. The first college was
memorably named First College, and so it remained until 1965, when
it was dedicated in honor of UCSD’s founding father, Roger
Revelle.
But the freshmen of 1964 had not
come for the facilities.
Part of the lure was the promise of an extraordinary faculty, recruited
by Revelle in a series of bold raids on the cream of American universities.
Jim Arnold, in his 30s, came from Princeton to build the chemistry
department; the dynamic, young physicist Keith Brueckner moved West
from the University of Pennsylvania and in turn became a master
recruiter; geneticist David Bonner left Yale to map a biology program
that soon was the University’s largest unit.
Part of the lure was the Pacific, anchored by the long pier of Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. Part of the University of California
since 1912, Scripps was now referred to as “the lower campus.”
Intellectual stimulation was a given, yet surely, there would be
time to surf?
But professors had spent years plotting what they viewed as an “ideal” curriculum:
interdisciplinary courses that they wished they had had to face as
freshmen. Tutorials and lectures bristled with tough love. There
were more required humanities courses for science majors and science
for humanities majors than at most American universities. It was
a place, one freshman sighed, “with liberty and calculus for
all.”
Soon after joining the news staff of The San Diego
Union, and just four years out of college myself, I was assigned
to cover this upstart
campus. My days were as varied and unpredictable as those of the
lone reporter on a small-town weekly. As the years passed, there
were groundbreaking ceremonies. There were floods. Actors Gregory
Peck, a La Jolla native, and Helen Hayes called in on their way to
performances in San Diego. The tradition of dropping a watermelon
from the top of Urey Hall to measure its splat was covered with scientific
rigor. The first orientation barbecue attracted the mayor of San
Diego, the lt. gov. of California, a clutch of proud parents and
the freshmen, wearing royal blue and bright gold beanies.
 In October, the ebullient physicist Herb York, a grown-up whiz
kid whom the Regents had named chancellor in a preemptive move
around
Roger Revelle, accepted the transfer of 500 acres of Camp Matthews’ land
from the U.S. Marine Corps; a deal he had helped negotiate. Forty
years later, York confesses that after receiving a ceremonial key
to the Matthews’ property, he had his secretary make a copy: “Then
I asked her to mix them up and I selected one to take home. The other
is in the UCSD library. Which is the real one?”
For a while, the first freshmen seemed more like 1950s clones than
1960s rebels, sporting their jackets, ties, beanies and beehive
hairdos. And San Diego smiled in approval. In 1967, when students
gave a mock protest in Revelle
Plaza to mark the 50th birthday of York’s successor, John
Galbraith (“We demand an ageless sage!”), it was a
front-page story. Galbraith was revered for putting his job on
the line, rather than accept the view of some Regents that UCSD’s
library should operate as a subordinate of UCLA.
From the earliest stirrings at UCSD, there was community outreach.
The folksy Nobel laureate, Harold Urey, recruited by Roger Revelle
as he faced an unwelcome retirement from the University of Chicago,
charmed overflow crowds at La Jolla High. Revelle himself lectured
to a sixth grade class, becoming so involved in the topic of trajectory
that he flung a blackboard eraser across the room, leaving an arc
of chalk dust and squealing youngsters.
San Diego was a small, homogenous city then: more military and
more conservative. In La Jolla, the average age was said to be
50. Pastimes included retirement parties, high-stakes golf, and
gin rummy at La Jolla County Club. Lights were dim in the village
by 10:30 p.m. After recitals or lectures at Sherwood Hall, there
was no place to linger over a cup of coffee—much less an
espresso. The Cove movie house was the only cinema, and its fare
was mainstream, certainly nothing arty or foreign.
That lull was nearing an end.
The voters of San Diego had welcomed this newcomer by deeding 1,000
acres of city land for a campus. Now, like a teenager meeting
a blind date, they were curious to see how it would turn out.
Would town and gown get along? What would they talk about after
the basic introductions?
The relationship, in fact, did not “turn out” for years.
There were highs and lows and occasional plateaus of wariness and
suspicion.
With the emergence of UCSD, San Diego began to feel
a rolling, mental tremor—a palpable shift of leadership,
innovation and daring. Old ways were challenged. Conversations
were less predictable.
From beach-town councils to City Hall, the overriding question
now became: “Why not?”
Also arriving on campus in 1964 were two hundred or so graduate
students from more than a dozen countries, all keen on pushing
the limits of aggressive science and mathematics. They included
a garrulous, 6-foot-4-inch math graduate from Germany, a native
of Berlin with an honors degree from the Technical University
of Hanover. Peter Preuss was 21 years old when he stepped from
the plane in San Diego; forty years later he is vice chair of
the Board of Regents.
Many graduate students came to UCSD by circuitous routes, but
Preuss’s
story has an extra twist. After he received a grant for a year’s
study abroad, his favorite professor sent letters of introduction
to colleagues in the U.S. The first response came from Stefan Warschawski,
a University of Minnesota department chairman: Yes, he would like
to work with Peter, but there was one problem. He was packing up
to leave the cold of Minnesota for a new type of campus being dreamed
up out West.
“
I believe it is called UCLJ,” the professor wrote. “There
are, as yet, no students.” Preuss followed his guru to California and moved into a studio
apartment in Pacific Beach. “I had a tiny little swimming pool that was truly full
when I got into it,” he says. His memories of UCSD include maneuvering
across the enormous mud puddle that became Revelle Plaza and studying a campus
master plan that showed a proposed “Sessellift” (chair lift) to
carry students between the upper campus and Scripps.
Histories and legend insist that social life was next to nil in
those days. Preuss disagrees.
“Graduate students were particularly well positioned,” he
says. “When
the faculty had parties, there were not enough of them and so they invited
us. And when the undergraduates had parties there weren’t enough and
so they invited us, too.” There were bus trips to sports events in
Los Angeles and Mexico. “When there was a soccer match against the
oceanographic institute in Ensenada, every foreign student went down.”
Because UCSD was isolated from the city, and public transportation
was limited to uneven bus service, students needed cars. Preuss
paid a professor $300
for an eleven-year-old Volkswagen and put 6,000 miles on it in four years.
The
best part, says Preuss in a scenario that still rings true: the Volkswagen
came with an “A” parking sticker. For the remainder of the year,
he parked free in the faculty lot.
Early on, Building B—later Urey Hall—became a hotbed of invention,
a launch pad for high-tech industries. Preuss had a small office on the ground
floor; one floor above was the office of a newly arrived professor from M.I.T,
Irwin Jacobs, who later launched the telecommunications industry in California
and, as a benefactor and citizen, became inextricably linked with the development
of UCSD and San Diego. One floor below was the chemistry department and the
fastest computer Preuss had ever seen.
“
It was probably not as powerful as my cell phone today,” he laughs, “but
in those days it was magical.”
By 1970, teaching part time and working on a Ph.D. he almost
finished, Preuss started a software company that became ISSCO
(Integrated Software
Systems
Corporation), the first to specialize in computer graphics.
As the 1960s shifted from beanies and
beehives to bare feet and no-bras, the paved sweep of Revelle Plaza
became
the campus crossroads,
the European open space, the backdrop for protests and the boosting
of causes. Students set up tables around its fountain, seeking
signatures on petitions to end the war in Vietnam, to close down
the campus to gain greater power for students, to save the Torrey
pines, to impeach contrary politicians.
Although those far more serious crowds worked this arena, one of
the noisiest assemblies made headlines in the spring of 1966. Hundreds
of migrating swallows discovered the fresh underpinnings of the
new humanities library, attaching their mud-daub nests with a passion
that stirred envy to the north at Mission San Juan Capistrano.
Philosophy professors debated with building maintenance men over
eviction. The nests were eventually hosed away —but the eggs
were allowed to hatch first.
 As tensions built on American campuses in the 1960s, some San Diegans
began rethinking their generous welcome of UCSD. Some decision-makers
at my newspaper believed that divisive issues would go away if
The San Diego Union did not cover them. A notorious episode took
place in 1965, a few months after the bruising Free Speech Movement
demonstrations at Berkeley.
The city desk received a phone tip that the first-ever protest
at UCSD was scheduled within the hour. The issue: anger over the
intervention of U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic. Outside
Urey Hall that afternoon, I counted no more than two dozen students—and
non-students—carrying hand-lettered posters and walking in
a silent, almost self-conscious circle.
I filed a story describing the scene and the participants. When
the article appeared in the paper the next morning, a scathing
three-word indictment had been inserted:
“
Some wore beards!”
An editorial and a cartoon went on to denounce the students’ anti-American
sentiments and compared the UCSD marchers to “the rioters
who brought the parent university at Berkeley to a state of anarchy.”
This led to a souring of town-gown relations. Chancellor Galbraith
tried, with little effect, in letters and at civic clubs, to explain
the University’s commitment to free inquiry and free expression.
Far more divisive anti-Vietnam War protests lay ahead.
But on vibrant campuses, controversies come and go; dreams are
expanded and refined.
Forty years later, Peter Preuss has not returned to live in Germany.
Irwin Jacobs has not resettled in Boston. And the students
of the 1960s have made their marks in the San Diego region
and around
the globe, forming a dynamic and influential network that,
I suspect,
not even Roger Revelle could have foreseen.
San Diego and UCSD turn out to be well matched. 
Judith Morgan is a travel columnist and author. Most recently
she wrote the biography Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel with Neil
Morgan. |
