<Begin Segment 15>

BN: So how did the move back to UCLA come about?

RD: Well, very simply. I didn't apply, I was invited. I was the first person invited, first graduate of UCLA's history department to be invited back. And I discovered when I got there, not everybody was in favor of that.

TI: And why was that? Why weren't certain people in favor?

RD: Well in one particular case, because he had a candidate of his own. And there were a number of divisions in the department. It wasn't as bad as Berkeley.

TI: But to go to the unprecedented step of the first time invitation back, grad student, there must have been a strong sentiment to get you back. I mean, I'm surprised there was still that dissention. If there was enough, that probably would have stopped the invitation.

RD: Well, all this is ex post facto. Nobody ever told me anything. I'm sure that Theodore Saloutos had something to do with it, I'm pretty sure that John Caughey had something to do with it, and these things get voted on. And that department, as I quickly discovered, quite often split on things. But it wasn't like the Senate, you couldn't just delay it. [Laughs] If you had a position to fill, you either filled it or you lost it, and nobody wanted to do that. So that's what happened.

BN: How big a department was it at that time?

RD: It was a good sized department. There were all kinds of special areas. Gustav von Grunebaum in Middle Eastern Studies, you know, didn't have any students, but they had a lot of support. It was a good sized department. For a long time, it had been essentially a farm club for Berkeley, and there were still people holding down jobs there when I came who had been planted there by people from Berkeley who shouldn't have been full professors anywhere. Not very many, but there were some. But it was becoming an important department. Not nearly as important as it is now. It was very much inferior to Berkeley in all things. That's not true anymore. There are some things that had done better there than at Berkeley, and some things that are done better at Berkeley, but it's a big department. Most people today, if they had to choose between going to UCLA or going to Berkeley would probably put more weight on whether they preferred to live in a place like Berkeley or in a place like UCLA than because of differences. Because there are no real differences in the pay, no real difference in the quality of students, but what do you like better? There are people who would prefer to live in Los Angeles, and there are people who prefer to live in Berkeley. And there are people who would prefer to live somewhere else and not in California at all.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.