miscellaneous

UCLA in the 1960s UCLA offered various sensitivity training courses in the 1960s and 1970s, featuring T-Groups and the like.  Today, sensitivity training is typically aimed at particular issues such as racial or sex discrimination.  At the time, it was more generally aimed at self understanding, which was thought to make management executives more effective.  The technique, which could resemble group therapy, was controversial.  What was then the School of Business Administration – now the Anderson School – was a center for such course offerings and research.   Because of the “touchy-feely” element, it was satirized by radio commentator and humorist…

This contemporary photo shows the location of the UC Extension office in downtown LA in 1931.  As is evident, the original office building is no longer there.  But if you click on the link below, you can read the extension catalog for May 1931 which featured a variety of courses on business, languages, history, and “Radio Telephony and Talking Moving Pictures.”  At the time, the extension service was run out of Berkeley with representation for the LA programs from UCLA. We had earlier posted similar catalogs:http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/05/ucla-history-extension-in-1930.html http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-earlier-posts-scroll-to-bottom-we.html http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/06/ucla-history-uc-extension-in-september.html Link below to the May 1931 edition:

Suzanne M. Bianchi, a UCLA sociologist who helped alter perceptions of working mothers during three decades investigating changes in American family life, died Nov. 4 at her home in Santa Monica. She was 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her daughter Jennifer Browning. An expert on gender, work and families, Bianchi was best known for her research examining the amount of time mothers spent with their children. Most surprising was the finding she reported in 2000 that despite a dramatic influx of women into the workforce, the amount of time spent with children was relatively unchanged… She began her…

The Daily Bruin is reporting that the union representing TAs may strike along with the larger AFSCME one-day strike on Wednesday, November 20. Excerpt below: University of California teaching assistants, tutors and other unionized academic student workers will go on strike on Wednesday in solidarity with another UC workers union. Many discussion sections for undergraduate coursework scheduled for Wednesday could be cancelled, said Cody Trojan, a recording secretary for UC Student-Workers Union Local 2865 and vice president of academic affairs for the Graduate Students Association. Unionized teaching assistants will not show up to class to teach their sections, Trojan added….

Aerial view of Bel Air looking towards (new) UCLA campus in 1929.

Photo of “wheelchair veterans” of World War II from the book UCLA: The First Century.  The text on page 105 reads:“In 1948, UCLA reportedly enrolled the largest number of  ‘wheelchair scholars’ of any university in the country.”

From the LA Times: Samuel Goetz was 14 when the Nazis rounded up Jews in his hometown of Tarnow, Poland, and killed thousands of them — his parents included — in the gas chambers at Belzec in southeast Poland… An early advocate of Holocaust education in the United States, Goetz became a prime force behind the creation of a Holocaust studies chair at UCLA, the first at a public university in the United States. An optometrist for 50 years, Goetz, 85, died of pancreatic cancer Oct. 24 at his Los Angeles home, said his wife, Gertrude… During the ’70s, the…