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TWO THE APPRENTICESHIP YEARS THE SANTA BARBARA YEARS Our family arrived in Santa Barbara on October 1, 1964, ready for a change, excited about the city and its strikingly beautiful environs, and prepared for a new and promising professional opportunity. We bought a small but pleasant home in the Goleta Valley up the coast from Santa Barbara, in a neighborhood with safe streets and younger children with whom our own could easily play and conveniently make friends. We were only minutes away from the beach, shopping, and Santa Barbara’s exceptionally attractive downtown, with its Spanish-style architecture and historical buildings. And the campus was six minutes away, also by car. The city was blessed with a theater for stage productions, a small but respected Museum of Art, a well regarded symphony orchestra, and cultural institutions, such as the Music Academy of the West and the Museum of Natural History. Together with adjoining Montecito, Santa Barbara had some of the most attractive homes and gardens that could be found anywhere, many with sweeping vistas of the coastline. The Channel Islands and Pacific Ocean were to the south and the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north, and all of this with an annual mean temperature of 72 degrees. The local newspaper possessed high journalistic standards and helped foster a sense of pride and community in this remarkable place tucked away on the southern California coast just 90 miles north of Los Angeles. Had we died and gone to heaven? The Santa Barbara campus of the University of California where I was to 30 work for nearly seven years held an important place in our family’s life and memories. It was not in the city but in the Goleta Valley 9 miles up the coast and on the coastline, in an unincorporated section of the county of Santa Barbara. The valley was a less elegant residential enclave than Santa Barbara or Montecito, but pleasant enough and growing with the nearby campus, providing housing and a commercial center for students, faculty, and staff. Origins of the University of California–Santa Barbara The university’s Santa Barbara campus had its origins as a state teachers’ college . Founded in 1909, it was sited within the City of Santa Barbara and served the higher education needs of a small number of students from this part of California and did so admirably. Episodic efforts were made over several years to encourage the University of California’s acquisition of the college but to no avail, as the university was looking not to compete with the state’s growing number of colleges but to settle on and carve out its own distinctive role and mission. In 1943 the state enacted legislation proposing the transfer of all college properties and personnel to the University of California should the university ’s constitutionally independent Board of Regents find favor with the proposed arrangements. The board initially divided on the issue but finally agreed in 1944 to accept the legislature’s offer. Following World War II, the campus was closed, and this newest of the university’s campuses was moved to an old Marine Corps base in Goleta. It was a spectacular site but one seemingly defined more by the wooden barracks it inherited than by the beautiful coastline on which it was located. Its views were of the Pacific to the east, south, and west and the mountains to the north; the area in between was blanketed with citrus, walnut, and avocado groves and fruit orchards interspersed with small tracts of housing. The Santa Barbara campus, like the Davis and Riverside campuses but unlike those at Berkeley or Los Angeles, was at the outset to have a more limited academic role within the university: its student body was to be confined to undergraduate students with an enrollment ceiling of 2,500. Its emphasis was to be on the liberal arts, “the Williams College of the West” as some came to think of it. Professional schools were not contemplated nor was promotion of the faculty—many teachers had transferred to UC along with the college’s properties—beyond the first of six steps on the university’s professorial scale, because the college’s academic standards for appointment and promotion were not judged to fit the University of California’s. These were expedient rather than strategic decisions as UC was sorting out how its future and that of California’s growing community college and state college systems were to...

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