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How we Started
There had been some effort to start engineering at Long Beach
State College in 1956. During this time, engineering was part of the
Physics Department. All capital funds and faculty positions were assigned to
this Department.
P. Victor Peterson, President of what was then Long Beach State College,
called upon Robert Vivian, Dean of Engineering at USC,
to start engineering in fall 1958. During this time, Herluf Nielsen and I
were teaching mechanical and electrical engineering, respectively, at USC.
In fall 1957, Dean Vivian asked us for a list of equipment to start an
engineering program. Carl Neidengard at Southwest City College provided the
"wish list" of equipment for civil engineering.
Herluf Nielsen, Carl Neidengard, Admiral Robert Goldman (1961), General
Jack Dudley (1960), General Harold Miller (1959), some part-time employees
of Hughes Aircraft and I were the inaugural faculty at Long Beach. One of
the hardest things we did was writing curricula. UC Berkeley would not
allow other state colleges or universities to start an engineering program
in specific disciplines. Colleges could only offer a general degree in
engineering. Even UCLA, a sister University of California campus to
Berkeley, offered a general degree in engineering. Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo was one of the first California State University campuses to offer
engineering.
Long Beach had an "upside down program." All laboratory work was done in
the lower division while the theoretical courses were included in the
upper division. We offered a single degree: a bachelor of science in
engineering. We provided sufficient courses in the major field so that
students could specialize in a particular discipline.
The Board of Education didn't know or care what we were doing. After
several years, the state colleges were placed under the State College
Board of Trustees. Once this happened, we were treated like a regular
college instead of a high school.
The Classrooms, Labs, and Offices
We started engineering on the lower campus in temporary
buildings left over from World War II. We stayed there until the first
engineering building was completed. Even after we occupied permanent
buildings, we continued using several of these temporaries for laboratories
and office space. The terrain around these older facilities was dirt which
turned into mud in the winter.
The first building contained the dean's office. We converted small
quiz section lecture rooms into office space to accommodate our
burgeoning faculty. The second engineering building provided some office
space, although we still made good use of the converted office space in
the first building.
The Development of our Curriculum
At first, I got the impression that the liberal arts faculty didn't
consider us as part of the academic community. We soon changed their minds
and many engineering faculty served on College committees.
As we moved into the second engineering building (since renamed the Vivian
Engineering Center, or VEC), we started to offer the master of science
degree in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. By the 1970s, we
were still not able to offer a doctorate degree in engineering except
through one of the University of California campuses.
In 1973, the electrical engineering department had 23 full-time faculty,
although several positions were occupied by part-time faculty from industry.
Civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering offered specific degrees.
We were accredited on our first application in 1964 because we had a
conventional engineering program of high quality. We had a new building
and equipment funds were allocated as a percentage of the cost of the
building.
Shortly after occupying the second engineering building in 1970, we added
chemical engineering. We added this discipline to the program because of
Dean Vivian, a chemical engineer.
Some of our lower division courses were included as part of general
education. We wanted to be a part of the College and also we hope to
attract a few liberal arts students and thereby, increase our full-time
enrollment.
Ocean engineering added as an option in Electrical Engineering. Later it
became part of Mechanical Engineering. Offices were finally allowed in
1970 to have an "outsider" phone. Only associate and full professors and
were allowed to have a full-size desk and a swivel chair. Also, one file
cabinet was allotted to each faculty member.
Acquiring Resources
The Board of Education Trustees allocated faculty and student assistants or
FTE (full-time equivalent students) to the rest of the College without
consideration of the needs of engineering. Liberal arts had funding to have
student readers whereas we used our money for maintaining equipment in the
laboratories.
Funds and supplies were always scarce even when we became governed by the
State College Trustees. We celebrated a great victory when the day came
that the Trustees recognized that engineering had its own needs and
uniquenesses apart from liberal arts. Certain restrictions were finally
lifted and we were allowed to departmentalize - only theoretical courses
were included in the upper division.
The State Board of Education only allowed department chairs to have
calculators. One of the first gifts to engineering was a vacuum tube
computer which was inoperable most of the time. The University had an IBM
1620 computer. Around 1973, a College-wide main frame
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