Veteran professors recount campus evolution

Ned Alpers has had the same office for 40 years: Bunche 5351.

The African studies professor first arrived at UCLA in 1968, when Young Research Library was still a blueprint, when former coach John Wooden led the basketball team into the NCAA Championship game with an undefeated record and when Charles E. Young was in his first year as chancellor.

He began back when U.S. foreign policy was entangled in a war in Vietnam, when the Civil Rights Movement was fervently animated and when student activism was surging across campuses.

Some professors, such as Alpers, have been here for 40 years. Then there’s comparative literature and Hebrew professor Arnold Band, who has been here for 50 years, and chemistry professor Robert Scott, who has been here for 60.

And along the way, they said they have come to witness striking changes on the campus ““ from within their academic departments to the student composition to the impact of current events on the university.

“The university today is radically different than the one I knew when I first came here,” Band said.

But then again, as Alpers still resides in the same office, it seems as though there are some things that have stayed the same.

A time for diversity

The 1960s were a period of important change. The Civil Rights Movement was infectiously building momentum across the country. Larger numbers of young people were seeking university degrees.

And soon the imprints of these movements were seen through the changing diversification of the student and faculty compositions on campus.

“The student body today cannot be compared to what it was then,” Band said. “The campus is certainly more multicultural.”

Alpers agreed, noting that there was also a diversification within racial groups.

“The population of Asian students has grown, but it has also become diversified. The same with Latino students, too,” Alpers said.

Another trend Alpers said he sees is in the education level of students entering the University of California, which he said has been negatively affected by the current state of K-12 education in California.

However, he adds that students seem to be more perceptive and keen in certain ways.

“Students today are probably “˜sma rter,’ but not as well-educated,” Alpers said. “If you go back to the 1960s, California had one of the best K-12 educational systems in the country, and now it has one of the worst.”

Activism, then and now

In 1985, Alpers watched as Dickson Plaza flooded with tents, as students protested the apartheid system in South Africa and urged the UC to divest from companies that did business with the country.

Twenty years later, he watched as student organizers mobilized again, rallying the UC Board of Regents to divest from companies with holdings in Sudan.

“Their efforts really represent such an incredible student energy,” Alpers said.

Student activism has remained a prominent mark on the campus through the years, though there are distinctions in the way that students approach each issue.

To Alpers, students approach the crisis in Darfur differently than they did the crisis in South Africa.

The anti-apartheid movement was a momentous global protest that allowed students at UCLA to use previous models of demonstration, such as divestment.

But for the situation in Darfur, there had not been a university model students could follow.

“There were only two other universities and one city council that had done this,” Alpers said. “And soon this became a UC-wide project.”

To him, the divestment efforts were unique in a way that it was not ethnically, religiously or politically exclusive.

“It reminded me of the anti-apartheid movement, in a sense that it was a non-sectarian movement,” Alpers said.

For Band, student activism against the Vietnam War was particularly memorable, a movement he said he believes is unrivaled by student demonstrations against the present-day Iraq War.

Band said there was much student unrest on campus against the war during the earlier period, since the military draft had brought the situation to a more personal level.

“Men were subject to the draft then. There was a great deal of resentment toward the war,” Band said. “The students now are less personally involved.”

He recalls the demonstrations on campus, as well as the presence of police, even in his classrooms.

Whenever he talked with his students, he said, he could feel the impact of the war on them and on their activities.

“It was a totally different kind of feeling than what you had today,” Band said.

Changes in the academic landscape

Back in the 1950s, the economics department was housed in Campbell Hall.

Then there was the speech department, Band said, which was eventually phased out.

“(UCLA) wasn’t a major university and didn’t have the research facilities it does today,” Band said. “Some of these subjects, major universities don’t have anymore.”

There have been many academic changes to the university, as these professors have seen ““ some majors have faded out, some have been started up and others have strengthened and grown.

In 1948, there were about 12 faculty members in the chemistry department. Today there are more than 50 members, Scott said.

Funding has also grown in his line of work, with more research grants being invested in the chemistry department.

Scott said when he first joined the UCLA faculty, the National Science Foundation was just starting up and there were fewer avenues of monetary support for scientific research.

Now, he estimates that the UCLA department receives approximately $10 million a year.

Band, like Scott, said he has seen tremendous growth in the size of his department.

When he arrived, he was one of the first six members in the Near Eastern Languages department ““ and he is the only one still at UCLA, though he retired in 1994 and now only teaches part-time.

In 1969, a decade after arriving, Band also helped found the comparative literature department at UCLA.

“The university has grown in areas which were felt to be important,” he said.

When Alpers came to UCLA, the university had already established itself as having one of the top African studies programs, and he said he believes the department has only grown stronger over the years ““ one of the reasons he has not left the university.

“I’ve never been tempted to go. Why? What’s the point?” Alpers said, laughing softly. “You know,” he adds, “forty years goes by very fast.”