:: Sources
|
|
 print-friendly
format
Los Angeles: Departments
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Chemistry/Materials Science
Chicana and Chicano Studies
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Classics
Communication Studies
Community Health Sciences
Comparative Literature
Computer Science
Cybernetics
Chemical Engineering
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Chemistry and Biochemistry
When the Los Angeles State Normal School
became the Southern Branch of the University in the summer of 1919,
appointment of the first chemist with a doctoral degree, William
R. Crowell, quickly followed and Chemistry 1A was established, much
as a copy of the Berkeley program at first. The chemistry department
was not organized until 1920, when William Conger Morgan was brought
in from Reed College as the first chairman.
The staff quickly grew to six by 1923 with the
addition of Hosmer W. Stone, G. Ross Robertson, Max S. Dunn, and
James B. Ramsey. This group, joined by only three others during
the next decade and a half, built a strong undergraduate program,
whose effectiveness was not diminished with the start of a modest
graduate program in the 1930s and awarding of the first M.S. degree
in 1935. The first Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1942 and although
a dozen years passed before the hundredth of these degrees was awarded,
only half that time was needed for the next hundred.
In 1965, the department had nearly 400 undergraduate
majors, more than 160 graduate students, about 50 postdoctoral research
workers, 40 faculty members, and 60 full-time nonacademic employees.
By the mid-1960s, an undergraduate advising office and an extensive undergraduate
research program had been developed in an effort to re-establish
more of the close faculty-undergraduate contact which characterized
the first two and a half decades of the department's history. A complete revision
of the curriculum accompanied the
introduction of the quarter system, the most unique feature being a new second year
organic and biochemistry course, with quantitative organic and biochemical
analysis in the laboratory.
The department's scholarly reputation was made
first in the field of physical-organic chemistry, primarily through
the efforts of William G. Young and Saul Winstein. This remained
a strong area and was supplemented by a spectrum of research programs
ranging from chemical physics to biochemistry. By the mid-1960s,
strong interdisciplinary ties existed through the activities of
Nobel laureate Willard F. Libby in space sciences and the Institute
of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the participation of several
of the biochemistry staff in the new Molecular Biology Institute.
source
to top
Chemistry/Materials Science
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Céesar E. Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Civil and Environmental Engineering
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Classics
A small department with the title "Classical
Languages" came into being in 1919 under the aegis of Arthur
Patch McKinlay. The earliest vital statistics to be found reveal
that in 1921-22 there were 48 students in six classes taught by
McKinlay. The Announcement of Courses for the academic year 1922-23
lists a second member of the department, Edwin Moore Rankin, lecturer
in Greek. The courses offered for that year comprise one page of
the announcement. Three courses in Greek appear: Beginning Greek,
Greek Prose Composition, and Introduction to Plato. No beginning
Latin was offered because this was an age when academic students
interested in the classics entered the University with a minimum
of two years of Latin in high school. Seven courses in Latin were
offered. Early students could select studies of Ciceronian prose,
Augustan poetry, Pliny's letters, Horace: Odes and Epodes, Catullus
and Livy, Tacitus and Plautus, and Latin prose composition.
A very important acquisition by the library at
Los Angeles for the field of classical languages was the collection
of Louis Havet of the Sorbonne, Paris, which was made during the
decade of the 1920s.
A sampling of enrollment figures shows that in
1940-41, at the beginning of World War II, there were 349 students
of classics. The number had increased in September, 1964, to 653.
By the mid-1960s, there were 12 members of the staff of the classics section
which was concerned with Greek and Latin; in addition, there were
five staff members in the Indo-European studies.
Although the department has continually expanded
its offerings in Graeco-Roman literature, composition, art, and
archaeology, it has also sheltered under its academic wing such
burgeoning fields as Near Eastern languages, which became an independent
department. By the mid-1960s, the Classics department fostered Indo-European
studies, which included Hungarian, Finnish, Celtic, Irish, and the
ancient languages of Sanskrit and Hittite.
By 1965, the undergraduate student could major
in Greek, Latin, or classics (i.e., Greek and Latin). The graduate
student could qualify for a master's degree in Greek, Latin, or
the classics. The doctoral candidate had a choice of classical literature,
classical archaeology, or classical linguistics for his field of
specialization.
Instruction also included the areas of the history
and culture of the Byzantine Empire, mediaeval and modern Greek,
mediaeval Latin, and the technical training of high school teachers
of Latin. source
to top
Communication Studies
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Community Health Sciences
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Comparative
Literature
Since its inception, the Department of Comparative
Literature embraced western and non-western traditions. The original
proposal for the department was written in the mid-1960s by Arnold Band,
who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard with an emphasis on Classical
Greek and modern Hebrew. He was joined in founding the department
by Ross Shideler, a scholar of Scandinavian literature, and PierMaria
Pasinetti, a recognized novelist and Italian specialist who studied
with Rene Wellek at Yale. The Department has grew considerably since
its inception to become a top-rated graduate program, enhanced by
strong student and faculty recruitment, and cooperative appointments
with other departments on campus.
The core faculty, represented a wide range of
languages, literatures, critical and research interested, includes
Sam Weber (French, German, continental philosophy, media and technology
theory); Katherine King (Classics, gender and sexuality in the ancient
and contemporary worlds); Shu-meh Shih (East Asian and Asian American,
postcolonial theory, the critique of modernity); Emily Apter (continental
and postcolonial theory, translation and the global market); Efrain
Kristal (Spanish, literature of the Americas, translation theory);
Kathleen Komar (German, feminism and theory); Arnold Band (Near
Eastern, Bible and Holocaust studies); Ross Shideler (Scandinavian
[Swedish], Symbolism & Decadence, Darwinism & Gender Studies);
Massimo Ciavolella (Italian, Renaissance studies, medical and social
history) and Ken Reinhard (English, psychoanalysis, Biblical hermeneutics).
Associated faculty share appointments with departments such as English
(Ali Behdad), Slavic Languages and Cultures (Michael Heim), Film
and Television (Teshome Gabriel), East Asian Languages and Literatures
(Pauline Yu), English and Caribbean studies (Jenny Sharpe). By the mid-1960s,
the department was also committed to regular course offerings in
classical Chinese literature (taught by East Asian Studies Professor
David Scaberg) and contemporary and classical Arabic literature
(taught by Near Eastern Studies Professor Michael Cooperson). Additionally,
planning was actively underway for future curricular collaborations
with History, Art, Art History, Architecture, Music, World Arts
and Cultures, Afro-Caribbean and African Studies, Southeast Asian
Studies, and Women's Studies.
Although the Core faculty played a central role
in advising students, the Comparative Literature Department drew
on many departments in its sponsorship of cross-literary and interdisciplinary
work. Faculty from throughout the university actively participated
in teaching, advising and examining degree candidates. Courses in
Comparative Literature at UCLA covered a wide range of primary texts
and critical theories. What distinguished the discipline from other
fields in the humanities is the emphasis on reading and working
in original languages; theoretical perspectives that questioned
the premises of national canons or what constitutes communities
of readers and texts; constructs that allowed for the comparative
study of literary movements, genres and aesthetic formalisms that
transcended national or chronological boundaries, and a deep concern
with a logic of the humanities that questioned universalist foundationalism
while attending to particulars of language, meaning and local knowledge,
and which investigated the grounds of comparability itself. source
to
top
Computer Science
There is no history currently available
for this department.
to top
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is one of twenty-six interdepartmental
majors in the College of Letters and Science at UCLA. Completion
of the curriculum leads to a Bachelor of Science Degree. The Major
was established in the early 1970s, and it is administered by a
committee of faculty from several departments of the College of
Letters and Science, the School of Engineering and Applied Science
and the School of Medicine.
The mathematician and engineer Norbert Wiener
coined the term cybernetics in his book Cybernetics, published in
1948. In brief, it is the study of control and communication processes
in living beings (humans and other animals), machines, or both functioning
together. As such, it is a synthesis of a multitude of traditional
disciplines in the life, mathematical, physical and engineering
sciences. The word cybernetics is actually an English transliteration
of the ancient Greek word for steersmanship. Plato associated cybernetics
with the "art of controlling (governing) society" in his
dialogs on Laws and the State. source
to top
|
