Revelle’s Colleagues Recall ‘Statesman of Science’ : Eulogies: The driving force behind UCSD had the vision to see the benefits of research on a global scale.
Roger Revelle had a “fantastic, incisive mind” that led him both to consider science in its broadest terms, without regard to narrow disciplines, and to ponder the benefits science could bring to humanity, recalled many longtime colleagues and friends upon his death Monday.
That breadth of vision, they said, was central to his concept of a world-class research university in San Diego that would include a critical mass of renowned scientists, an idea that resulted in the establishment of UC San Diego.
Gov. Pete Wilson, who knew Revelle from Wilson’s days as San Diego mayor in the 1970s, said, “Roger Revelle is one person who can look back upon his life and say not only that ‘I made a difference,’ but say, ‘I made one hell of a difference.’ ”
“He had a great life to celebrate,” said Clark Kerr, a former president of the University of California, who worked with Revelle in the late 1950s to create UCSD. “And it deserves a celebration.”
Kerr called Revelle a “statesman of science” with an ability to generate ideas and excite others to follow up with new, creative research.
“He was just a genuine person,” said Glenn Seaborg, former chancellor of UC Berkeley and a Nobel Prize winner.
“Roger had the rather unique ability to take problems that were a little mushy in their definition, that had not really come to public attention, and put it all together, expressing it in a manner that made them understandable not just to the scientific community but to the public as a whole,” said Yale professor of physics D. Allan Bromley, a longtime close friend of Revelle who now serves as science and technology adviser to President Bush.
“Roger was as close to a Renaissance man as we have had in modern science. . . . He was always the sort of person you just love to meet anywhere you were on the planet.”
“He had a very good knack,” said John Knauss, top administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a graduate student of Revelle’s in the 1950s at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “He certainly could inspire people. He had that ability. He took very complicated ideas and brought them across. He was never condescending.”
But Knauss said Revelle had his foibles as a professor: “He would get stuck on an issue, and he would keep working it over in his own mind until he got it right. Meanwhile, the class would go on. Time meant nothing to him.”
Walter Munk, a professor at Scripps and an acquaintance of Revelle’s for more than 50 years, once recalled Revelle as “outstanding for his ability to change the whole nature of oceanography.”
Munk said Revelle was able to take a single idea and apply it to several disciplines. When appointed to chair a committee by President Kennedy on improving agriculture in Pakistan, Revelle offered ideas on using a canal to drain low-lying areas, which in turn led to ideas on improving the Pakistani educational system, Munk said.
“That was typical of him in the same way” he approached the greenhouse effect, where his observations on carbon dioxide became the cornerstone of further research, Munk said.
“He helped take Scripps from a station that worried about local canyons and fisheries to one that worried about worldwide oceanic processes and what was happening on the bottom of the ocean,” said William Nierenberg, who later headed Scripps.
“And he took the (Scripps) ships away from shore, at a time when they would often not go out of sight of shore, on long cruises, where Roger and the whole laboratory went along, and that set an important tone of the whole scientific gang on the deck, working together,” he said.
Nierenberg also praised Revelle for understanding the importance of expanding government support of basic scientific research in universities beyond strictly military applications, and for working to establish a strong government relationship with the geo-sciences.
“Without his work, I don’t think we would have oceanography as we know it today,” he said.
Revelle used the same combination of intellect and persuasion in his battle to establish UCSD, his colleagues said.
“There would not be this brilliant major university in San Diego today if not for Roger Revelle,” Seaborg said. “He was brilliant in his recruiting, some might say even a little overzealous, because his recruiting of top people in all fields was nothing short of spectacular. He was able to move people a little faster than they wanted to (be moved), in a nice way.”
UCSD chemistry professor James Arnold was one of the many world-class scientists Revelle persuaded to leave UC Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago and other academic locales for only the promise of a new San Diego campus.
“He was a man of great presence, very impressive, very charming, as well as a man of tremendous intellectual depth and range--and that combination was pretty irresistible,” Arnold said. He was “unlike most university administrators who were scholars once upon a time and who no longer had time for academic vision.”
UCSD Chancellor Richard C. Atkinson said the campus will remember Revelle “as truly the founder and guiding spirit of the university. . . . We shall miss him.”
Kerr recalled that Revelle, in his work to establish UCSD, fought at times with the La Jolla community because housing deeds still carried restrictive covenants prohibiting the sale of homes to blacks or Jews, which would present problems to a university recruiting a diverse faculty from around the world.
In addition, Revelle had battles with UC regents over his aggressive recruitment at existing campuses, where some department chairmen made their displeasure known to the governing board, Kerr said. UCSD was given “hundreds of overscale professor (slots), where UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz (established at the same time) were working on the assistant-professor level.
“Roger was not always diplomatic, he was not modest about what he had done, and he was always hard-driving,” Kerr said.
For those reasons, and because he was not considered particularly strong as a day-to-day administrator, Kerr said, the regents declined to name him chancellor, “which was a tragedy.”
“But Roger won big nevertheless. . . . After all, in the record book he will go down as the great name in the long history of the San Diego campus.”
Mayor Maureen O’Connor asked the city manager to lower the City Hall flag to half staff Monday in honor of Revelle.
“Roger Revelle was a one-of-a-kind San Diegan,” she said. “He may be gone, but his contributions will live on forever.”
