San Diego universities: a look back

SDSU frat row, luring faculty to UCSD, paying faculty mortgages at UCSD, UCSD scientists using their jobs to build corporate equity

Author

By Various Authors

Publish Date

May 21, 2017

San Diego State in 1948. In 1944 the enrollment was 2000; with the return of the war veterans in 1946, it was 5000.

Starting at State

At faculty meetings he would administer avuncular homilies on absence from our offices during the period we were expected to assign for conferring with our students (“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that is not the sort of thing your children would expect of you”). He was very much a “straight shooter” who took sides against his own politically conservative instincts by persistently refusing to fire a member of the faculty for whose blood the town patriots were thirsting.

By John Theobald, Nov. 29, 1984 | Read full article

“The hardest thing in the world for a university is to start from not-so-good and upgrade.”

School Ties

“We have something on the order of five Latin Americanists,” Ritchie says. “Most [history] departments at most have two. But for us, it’s a major item. The twenty-nine-member department has no permanent specialist on Middle Eastern history. It has only one person who studies Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; only one who does research on Africa. It had no Japanese historian until last year, when it scored a great coup from the University of Wisconsin.”

Rats in the Ivory Tower

My first college teaching was at SDSU during 1978. Creative writing. I was thrilled but nervous, especially after realizing that students took as gospel everything I said. I had to issue a warning— “Don’t trust anything I say, please. Just file it away and test it against what else you hear and against your experience.” Students would gaze astonished at me, as though unable to assimilate the news that a professor could be wrong.

By Ken Kuhlken, Dec. 14, 1995 | Read full article

Sigma Phi Epsilon house. “In the fall there are probably about 12 groups of 20. We start them in here and we talk about the ritual aspect." (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

Escape from the Chicks and Beer Image

“Monday night the actual rush starts, but we can’t give out bids on Monday. That gives everyone a chance to get around and see where they want to go before someone says, ‘Hi, here’s your bid,’ and you’re stuck there. You can actually go somewhere else after you get a bid, but you might be more inclined to stay there without seeing any more houses. So there are no bids Monday night.”

By Ernie Grimm, Nov. 21, 1996 | Read full article

The University of California has lent a total of $40 million to 96 buyers who purchased property worth a total of $52 million.

Faculty Row

Economics professor Roger Gordon, who bought the most expensive of the homes on the list of those purchased by academics using university-sponsored financing, says he's since obtained private refinancing and no longer has a U.C. loan, which originally was in the amount of $1,095,000. "The UC mortgage program provides a minor subsidy, which helps a bit to attract people here," Gordon says. "But it is a small program compared with many other competing schools.

By Matt Potter, March 25, 2004 | Read full article

I Don’t Do Operational Stuff

"I think it would be foolish to think companies will be wide-eyed idealists that will let scientists pursue whatever interesting new finding they have," Bruce Jaffee, an outspoken UC Davis professor of nematology, told the Sacramento Bee last January when Davis first announced plans for the so-called "public-private" institutes. "Faculty work with these public/private labs, and they will have the best equipment and technicians and access to students' help," warned Jaffee.

By Matt Potter, Jan. 25, 2001 | Read full article