UC to Open Grad School Focusing on Pacific Rim

Recognizing the importance of booming economies in nations ringing the Pacific Ocean, the UC Board of Regents Friday approved the creation of a Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego.

The school, the first in the United States to focus primarily on Pacific Rim nations, will train students for business, government and academic careers that require knowledge of the culture and politics of nations as diverse as Chile, Japan and Australia.

When it opens in the fall of 1987, the school will be the first with the international relations specialty in the University of California system and the first new graduate school created by the university since 1967.

“Nearly all of the schools of international relations in this country are on the East Coast . . . and are Atlantic Ocean-oriented,” UC President David P. Gardner said after the regents meeting at UC San Francisco’s Laurel Heights facility. “For a public university in the West to put such a school into being is a major move.”

Other Programs

On the West Coast, only USC and the University of Washington have international relations schools, neither of which focuses primarily on the Pacific, said Prof. Peter Gourevitch, head of the UC San Diego committee that planned the graduate school. The Pacific Rim nations include countries on the western side of South America, Central American countries, Mexico, the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, Japan, China and other Asian and Southeast Asian countries, Australia and New Zealand.

Pacific Rim countries have become vitally important to the U.S. and California economies. Since 1980, total U.S. trade with those nations has exceeded trade with other regions of the world, including Western Europe. Eighty-two percent of California’s $80-billion annual trade is with Pacific Rim countries, which provide almost 85% of the state’s imports and take 78% of its exports.

When it is fully staffed in 1992, the school will employ 35 faculty, enroll 400 students and have an annual budget of $5 million to $6 million. Much of the financing is expected to come from private sources.