UC San Diego: A University Built on a Beach
Near La Jolla, California
The sprawling campus around you, the University of California San Diego, is one of the top research universities in the country, and it very nearly did not happen here. Its champion was Roger Revelle, the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Revelle believed San Diego deserved a great university, and when the University of California Regents needed convincing, he is said to have planned a beachside reception to win them over.
The Regents had authorized a San Diego campus in nineteen fifty-six, and construction was approved in nineteen sixty. The campus opened in nineteen sixty with just a handful of graduate students in physics, chemistry, and earth sciences, formally founded on the eighteenth of November nineteen sixty. The first class of undergraduates, one hundred eighty-one of them, arrived in the fall of nineteen sixty-four.
Scripps oceanography, already world famous, gave the new university instant scientific weight and helped attract star faculty. The first residential college was later named for Revelle himself. From a cluster of graduate students on a coastal mesa, it grew into a campus of tens of thousands, a genuine engine of Southern California science.
