The picture of the Quonset huts, which provided the background for the article “In the Beginning” by Judith Morgan, is the most thought provoking image I’ve seen since leaving UCSD in 1979.

I took several classes in the Quonset huts. No matter how curious a setting it was, the early faculty lit up the Quonset huts with constant “sparkling interchanges of ideas.” Professor Bennetta Jules-Rosette was the first Black professor I had ever met and modeled the “scholarship of teaching and research” for me, and it changed my life. She even added me to her field-based research team in Zambia and became my dissertation adviser. Another Black Professor, Charles Thomas (one of the fathers of Black Psychology), helped me understand the importance of bridging the gap between “town and gown,” most particularly since UCSD was so far from my native barrio of National City. Professor Jack D. Douglas helped me understand my own social history as an individual from a working class, historically undereducated, low-income ethnic group. Professor Beryl Bellman simply believed in my work that led us to a collaboration where we designed and implemented a pre-Internet intranet for over a decade (at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla), which led to numerous publications that provided insight into the earliest forms of computer mediated communications. Our work has been heralded as one of the most innovative “technology projects” ever funded by the U.S. Department of Education. So you might say I received a rather exciting “Quonset hut education.”

Armando A. Arias, Jr., ’76, Third College,
B.A. ’78, M.A., ’79, C.Phil.,’81, Ph.D.