I spent my first 26 years on the
East Coast—the first 17 of them in New York City and nine in the Boston area. Anyone who has lived in both knows how
dissimilar they are. New York is a
frenetic, stressful, 24-hour-a-day place. Boston is relatively staid and laid-back, rolling up its
sidewalks at 11 pm. After a youth
spent in New York's maelstrom, I really cottoned to Boston's relative tranquility.
For the next 56 years, my home has been in California—49 of
them in the Bay Area, the remaining seven, in two periods, in Los Angeles. LA is a turbulent, can-do city, full of
color and zest, having the tone of Hollywood. San Francisco is more decorous, having the tone of its
business district. After spending
my initial four years in California at a company in hurly-burly LA, I was glad in 1960 to
move to the more-measured north, where I took up a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley.
The campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles reflect the same north/south
differences, each adopting the flavor of its surrounding area. UCLA is a
pulsing, can-do organization; UCB is much more constrained. I was particularly well placed to make
an apples-to-apples comparison between the two, for while I was chairman of UCB's Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the early 1980s, I was recruited to be dean
of UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). Which campus did I
prefer? Read on.
An initial experience at UCLA quickly drove home its
difference from UCB. As the 1983
holiday season approached, my first at UCLA, I decided to give a party to
introduce myself to several of SEAS' constituencies—faculty, staff, alumni,
donors, industrial friends, etc.
At UCB, I knew that an expenditure for such an event would be limited to
a relatively small maximum amount per person, so I asked my Associate Dean how
much I could spend. He was
puzzled. What did I mean? Apparently there was no cap at UCLA
other than what reason might dictate.
(I believe that the UCLA Foundation could be counted on to subsidize
such events beyond whatever University-wide constraints may have existed, on
the assumption that they helped draw in donations.)
My wife Helen asked the Chancellor's wife to suggest a
caterer; when contacted, he said that as a ***special introductory offer*** to SEAS he would serve hors d'oeuvres and wine with
a wait-staff for only $25 per
person, but I would have to buy the wine separately. I blanched (remember that this was almost 30 years ago) and
quickly went back to the Associate Dean for a sanity check. "No problem," he said. "That's normal around
here." So I decided to go for
broke. I brought in roulette,
blackjack and craps tables and their croupiers, and gave everyone scrip to
gamble with, offering prizes to those ending up with the most scrip. I invited about 500 people. I strove for the sheer LA razzle-dazzle
I saw all around me, and people loved it.
I was exhilarated by the splash it made.
The party cost about $20,000, probably more than ten times
what I had spent on entertainment during my entire three years as chairman at
UCB. (In the University's current straitened circumstances, I doubt if anyone
could get away with that amount now, even at UCLA.) More telling, I can attribute some two to three million
dollars of contributions to SEAS over the next year or two directly to
contacts, relationships and the "go for it!" image I created at that
party. Not a bad return on
investment! Would that money have
flowed in anyway? I believe not,
for annual contributions to SEAS had traditionally been very much smaller. I was learning a Los Angeles truism,
that money begets money.
Other activities at UCLA had the same can-do attitude. When I had an idea that needed funding,
I had almost immediate access to the Chancellor. If he liked it, he would turn to one of his vice-chancellors and say, "Let's
find the money and get this done!" and we would be off and running. In contrast, I'd found the usual response to a novel idea at UCB, after working it through a deep hierarchy, was a list of reasons
why it couldn't or shouldn't be done.
Nothing is perfect, though—there's always a flip side. In this case, I felt that UCLA's
procedure for appointment and advancement of faculty members was deficient. At the time, and maybe even now,
initial appointments to the assistant professorship and biennial in-rank step
increases were approved by deans.
Fuller evaluations by a committee made up of faculty members drawn from
the campus at large were widely spaced—the first when a candidate was up for tenure,
as much as eight years after hiring, and later ones only for promotions between
ranks. Contrarily, at UCB every appointment, in-rank step-increase and promotion
case is stringently reviewed by a campus committee, which thereby imposes a
tough uniformity of hurdles that must be jumped by all faculty members
campuswide. In my view, UCLA's
largely localized screening procedure led to a weaker faculty, which had to
affect the quality of teaching and research and the recruiting of the best
students.
Another downside was personal: the impossibility of buying a
house near UCLA as good as the one Helen and I owned near UCB. Such a house would cost three times
what the Berkeley house was worth, at a time when prime rates were over
10%. Even the can-do UCLA couldn't
cut that problem down to size, so my fantasy stay in La-La Land ended after
three years, when I decided to return to Berkeley and UCB.
In my memory's coloring book, I have painted UCLA with
magenta, chartreuse and cyan, and used muted shades of gray with hints of
pastel for UCB. Perhaps the vastly
different approaches those colorings represent are what makes the University of
California system as a whole such a variegated power house. After all, what can be more
impressive than the fact that five of the nine UC general campuses are ranked
among the top ten public universities in the U.S., with UCB and UCLA ranked
first and second, respectively?
I count myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity of
working at both campuses. Did I
have a preference? Well, I loved
both the razzmatazz of being an administrator at UCLA and the cloistered serenity of my teaching and research
days at UCB. All said and done, it
was a draw—my times at the two campuses were equally great chapters in a
cherished academic career.