Letter from the Editor

Our September issue is one of beginnings: The beginning of a new academic year and the beginning of a new Chancellor's tenure. We also cast two backward glances to when the first class of '68 started its studies here 40 years ago, and to the '70s when Professor Ken Bowles and a group of brilliant young students and researchers helped launch the revolution in personal computing.

Judith Morgan's evocative piece on the first days of UCSD, "In The Beginning," describes a campus of three buildings, with no dorms or eating facilities but a preponderance of sand, cactus and eucalyptus. "The first four-year class was the class of '68. They went through hell," retired Revelle Provost Tom Bond said in the January issue of @UCSD. "Everybody had to take advanced physics," Bond said, referring to the tough curriculum. "I think only about 30 percent of them graduated."

But it was not just the curriculum that was tough. The archive photos in the article also show a place undergoing a brutal metamorphosis. The former Marine base, which had trained a million men, had become a vast construction site devouring concrete, steel and glass. (Although some might claim that its designation as a construction site is still applicable 40 years later!) We wonder what those first students thought of their rather Spartan experience amid the noise and dust of cranes, drills, welders and cement mixers. We would love to hear from them and perhaps this article and the celebration of their pioneer status will stimulate memories that they will share.

The experiences of that pioneer class are a far cry from the campus that will greet Marye Anne Fox on her first day as chancellor. Today there are 600 buildings with eight major projects currently under construction, and 25 more in the planning stage. Six colleges provide dormitory space for 6,217 students. Eleven dining halls and 15 restaurants offer
students a menu that ranges from burgers to burritos and sushi to salads. Designated as a growth university, UC San Diego projects a student population of 30,000 in 2020. How do you accommodate this growth while trying to enhance the student experience? How do you re-engage alumni, who've been away from campus for years? Chancellor Fox mulls over these challenges and others in her wide-ranging interview starting on page 22.

This issue is also a celebration of another beginning. UCSD's Pascal language challenged the hegemony of mainframe computers, by helping to launch a revolution in personal computing. But perhaps even more important was the working environment that Professor Ken Bowles created. Unencumbered by the burden of hierarchy, professors, graduates and undergraduates all toiled together to create an atmosphere of free exchange. Writer Christine Foster describes their yearly meeting on the drawbridge at Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland. And there is something quintessentially UCSD about that yearly pilgrimage, a whimsical slap in the face to the status quo. No toasts in great halls followed by grandiloquent speeches, but an egalitarian free flow of ideas. A blueprint for the modern hi-tech workplace.

That noisy building site in 1964 was a place for beginnings. A place for creativity. A place for innovation.

It was then. And it is still now.

Raymond Hardie, editor
alumnieditor@ucsd.edu