UCSD at 25: A Dream That Became a Top Research University

A generation ago, Roger Revelle liked to climb to the top of dusty Torrey Pines mesa overlooking the Pacific Ocean and gaze out on the landscape of a university firmly established only in his own mind.

Where military Quonset huts stood, Revelle, then director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, envisioned a campus where the best and brightest faculty he could lure to San Diego would conduct research and pass on their expertise in “a beautiful place . . . perhaps the nicest place for a university you could think of.”

The University of California, San Diego, has not turned out exactly the way Revelle planned it, but in 25 years the school has altered more than just the 2,000 acres covered by eucalyptus and chaparral. San Diego’s economic, social and educational landscape have all been changed by the school Revelle founded but never led.

On Monday, UCSD celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Nov. 18, 1960, founding with an all-campus birthday party and formal convocation.

“It really is quite an extraordinary story,” said Robert M. Rosenzweig, president of the Assn. of American Universities, which represents 54 American research universities. “They really have put in place there a university of quite extraordinary quality. It’s one of the really good stories in American higher education.”

In 25 years, UCSD has been home to eight Nobel laureates, five of whom still teach there. It boasts 47 members of the National Academy of Sciences, a membership that places the university behind Harvard University, Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, but ahead of such heavyweights as Yale University, the University of Chicago and Princeton University.

In federal fiscal year 1983, UCSD received $155 million in federal research grants and contracts--the sixth-highest amount in the country. The funds comprise more than 25% of the school’s $500-million budget. It boasts the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, arguably the best research center of its kind in the world, and an increasingly prestigious medical center.

Once a small school of science and engineering, the university has become San Diego’s third-largest employer behind the Navy and General Dynamics, with a monthly payroll of $22 million. In addition, it helps attract--and spawn--the high-technology and biotechnology firms that now crowd Torrey Pines Road and Sorrento Valley.

According to a 1984 survey by the American Electronics Assn., San Diego has the fourth-highest number of electronics and information processing companies in the country. Part of the city’s allure, said Jane Signaigo-Cox, vice president of the San Diego Economic Development Corp., is UCSD.

“A lot of the activity we connect with (UCSD) is the opportunity for research and development there,” she said. “The other thing that is of interest to high-tech companies and those in the biological field is the opportunity to work with professors at the university on some of their projects.”

Dr. Ivor Royston, associate professor of medicine at UCSD, founded Hybritech Inc., a successful Sorrento Valley biotech firm, after joining the UCSD faculty in 1977 to continue his research. The firm produces monoclonal antibodies used in detecting and treating cancer.

“What attracted me to San Diego was UCSD and the opportunity to be part of a new cancer center that was being developed at that time,” he said. “Without my credentials at the university and being a university scientist, I don’t know if I could have persuaded the venture capital companies to put up the money to start Hybritech.”

(The university’s allure is not always enough to make San Diego successful. Two high-tech consortia, the Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp. and the Software Productivity Consortium, turned down the city in the past two years and located in Austin, Texas, and Fairfax County, Virginia.)

For all its prestige, UCSD’s reputation still lags in California, where UC Berkeley and UCLA are still mentioned as the system’s top campuses, officials said.

“You can walk into a high school in Sacramento and say ‘UCSD’ and nobody knows about it,” said Chancellor Richard C. Atkinson. “But you can walk into a meeting of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., and say it, and everybody knows about it.”

“I consider UCSD to be the best-kept secret in American higher education,” said Bruce Darling, vice chancellor for university relations. “The reason I say that is that its reputation hasn’t caught up with its reality.”

In part, that is because of UCSD’s youth, officials say. “Images of places take a long time to build,” Atkinson said. “In a university environment, tradition takes time. It just takes time for people to understand this place.”

But it is also because the school still has improvements to make. It has no student union or faculty club, Atkinson said, and inadequate athletic facilities force some of its 14,425 students to play intramural games at 1 a.m.

Atkinson admitted the university must broaden its scope in the social sciences and humanities, and Revelle said the school desperately needs professional schools in architecture, government, law, pharmacology and others.

“A great university has to do more than get a lot of research grants,” said Walter H. Munk, professor of geophysics at Scripps, who has been at the university since its inception. “It has to become a center of enthusiasm and learning in the humanities, and we’re trying awfully hard to do that.”

“We have done a heck of a lot in 20 years,” said Mark Diamond, a senior majoring in engineering and computer sciences. “But we are not in the top 10 . . . and people who go here know that.”

It was Revelle who initially established the emphasis on science and engineering. As director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a post he had held since 1951, Revelle began to notice that graduate students at the facility lacked background in the basic sciences.

In 1955, he proposed that a graduate school of science and engineering be established, to aid not just Scripps students, but aerospace industries beginning to develop in San Diego after World War II.

After an offer from the City of San Diego to donate 50 acres of public land adjacent to Scripps for a campus, the University of California Regents in 1958 approved establishment of the Institute of Technology and Engineering in La Jolla. Revelle was named dean.

The institute took shape only on paper, because at about the same time, a state commission on higher education called for the establishment of three new UC campuses, including one in San Diego. Revelle and other influential San Diegans began to push for it.

They encountered strong opposition from Regent Edwin W. Pauley, a Los Angeles millionaire who “really didn’t want to have a campus down here,” Revelle said in 1981.

Insisting that jet noise from Miramar Naval Air Station made the La Jolla site too noisy, Pauley flew the regents to his private island off Hawaii and arranged to have Marine jets roar over at low altitude to demonstrate his claim. The regents also commissioned a consultant’s report that said the site would cost millions in extra soundproofing.

But Revelle and his allies arranged to have the Navy alter flight patterns and produced an architect’s report concluding that the aircraft noise would not be a problem for patients at a proposed hospital closer to the Navy base.

The regents approved the campus in May, 1959, but many believe the battle cost Revelle the chancellorship. Herbert F. York was named the first chancellor in 1961.

“It didn’t help,” Revelle said. “I don’t know what cost me the chancellorship. But certainly Mr. Pauley was a powerful opponent.”

Revelle also bucked a longstanding covenant among La Jolla real estate agents, who would not rent or sell homes to minorities and Jews. “I told them we could have either an anti-Semitic covenant or a university, but we couldn’t have both,” he said.

In the early years, said former Chancellor John S. Galbraith, longtime La Jollans regarded the new university and its faculty with a mixture of fear and mistrust. When anti-war protests began in the midst of their predominantly conservative, homogenous community, the suspicions grew stronger, he said.

“The initial response to the university from the La Jolla community would be accurately described as mixed,” Galbraith said. “They saw people on the campus who were to them quite foreign, and maybe dangerous, and perhaps subversive.”

Twenty years later, “the university is now regarded by the community, including La Jolla, as a jewel. It’s regarded as a great asset to the community,” he said.

Demand from UCSD employees is at least partly responsible for high real estate values in University City, said Nancy Harral, a Realtor and member of the board of directors of the San Diego Board of Realtors. A four-bedroom home that sold for $42,000 13 years ago would sell for $203,000 now, she said.

Revelle set about building UCSD in a simple but unorthodox fashion--from the top down. Instead of allowing graduate schools to evolve from its undergraduate programs, Revelle hired scholars he identified as future superstars from around the country to teach and do research with graduate students. He offered them a system that would break a large university down into smaller colleges to give faculty more control over decisions.

He offered his prospects competitive salaries, spiced with the opportunity to participate in the founding of a new university. “We never talked about money because one of my policies was not to pay anybody any more than he was getting,” Revelle said. “If you could fill him with ideas, then a person would stay and try to fulfill them.”

“The early years were really the most exciting,” Munk said. “It’s fun to start something and see it go.”

Early UCSD professors included Harold Urey, who won the 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Maria Goeppert Mayer, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics. Mayer was the second woman, after Marie Curie, ever to win the prize.

“They always took the attitude that they were better than everyone else and they could recruit the best,” Atkinson said. “And they did.”

The early emphasis on science and engineering lingers today. “I think there are in fact numerous outstanding departments in the social sciences and the humanities, and they don’t get the credit they deserve because the sciences have stood out for so long,” said Steven Hahn, an associate professor of history.

In fact, UCSD faculty members have won a Pulitzer Prize for music and a Tony Award for lighting design in the past two years.

UCSD held its first commencement in 1967, just a year before anti-war turbulence began to rock UC campuses.

Before that era was through, UCSD weathered confrontations over the reappointment of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse and demands from minorities including Angela Davis to establish a college emphasizing minority affairs. One student died when he set himself ablaze in Revelle Plaza in 1970 to protest the Vietnam War.

Under Govs. Ronald Reagan and Edmund G. Brown Jr., money and support for the state’s public universities eroded, Atkinson said. “The university was sort of floundering, not getting very good support from the state,” he said.

But Atkinson and Munk see that turning around in the 1980s. The Deukmejian Administration has shown more support than its predecessors for public higher education, Atkinson said.

A $30.4-million UCSD fund-raising campaign under way will help establish a new $6-million Aquarium and Ocean Science Center, a school of international relations and Pacific Basin studies and a new Institute for Research on Aging, among others.

And while college enrollments in most other parts of the nation are dwindling, California and UCSD are forecasting a decade of growth. Revelle predicts UCSD’s student population will double by the year 2000.

“After all,” he asked, “where can you get a better education for less money than the University of California at San Diego?”