UCLA History: Fundraising

The issues of the sale of the Japanese Garden and the construction of the hotel/conference center both point to fundraising and gifts to UCLA.  The recent history of UCLA - UCLA: The First Century - has a section on the early days of fundraising.  (See an earlier blog post on the book.)

In the book is the undated photo on the left of Dean Neil Jacoby of the business school promoting his idea of a building for the school.  The book, incidentally, incorrectly gives his dates as dean as 1948-73.  In fact, when yours truly arrived on campus in the summer of 1968, Jacoby was no longer dean although he remained a faculty member.  The deanship had been recently assumed by George Robbins and then later by Harold Williams, all before 1973.  (Jacoby managed, however, to be both dean and a member of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors simultaneously during his actual term as dean.)

In any event, Jacoby first went to the local business community in a fundraising effort for the new building. The private universities screamed about UCLA - which got state support - competing with them for private funds.  Various accords were reached over time - described in the book - limiting the ability of UC and UCLA to solicit private funds. In the end - not reported in the book - Jacoby went around the university bureaucracy that controlled priorities for capital projects and took his case for the building to the Regents. By the time I arrived in 1968, the structure had been built.  (It is now the Luskin School of Public Affairs.)

Of course, nowadays UC campuses fund raise at will.  However, one suspects that in the era when fundraising was restricted by the deals with the privates - gifts in kind - such as the Japanese Garden got around whatever constraints there were.