Giving to the Department of History

UCLA's History Department is one of the most highly acclaimed in the nation, with a faculty internationally renowned as teachers and scholars. It is also the largest History Department in the United States, with over 70 permanent faculty, 1,500 undergraduate majors and almost 200 graduate students in residence.

During the past decade, two UCLA professors – Joyce Appleby and Lynn Hunt – served as presidents of the American Historical Association, while Joyce Appleby and Gary Nash served as presidents of the Organization of American Historians. Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship – the “genius award” – while eleven UCLA historians are among the 250 historians elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

During the 1990s the National Research Council ranked the UCLA History department sixth nationally, following only Yale, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. During the previous decade, UCLA had improved from eleventh place, and in so doing passed Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the rankings. This is particularly impressive since UCLA is the “youngest” among the ranks of elite research universities.

Yet the department has not achieved this prestige by neglecting our undergraduates. Senior faculty teach freshman survey courses, and every history major has the opportunity to take two or more small seminars. In 2002 UCLA gave degrees to 490 undergraduate History majors, compared to much smaller numbers at our competitive institutions: Yale (218); Princeton (119); UC Berkeley (210); Harvard (96); Columbia (150); and Stanford (87). We are proud that so many UCLA students find history an attractive major,and many others take History electives: last year the department taught 26,200 undergraduates - more than any other UCLA department! 

THE CASE FOR SUPPORT

Being in the front rank of History Departments nationwide means that the UCLA History Department is competing with the very finest departments in the country for faculty and graduate students while teaching vast numbers of undergraduates. Declining state resources (now amounting to less than 20% of UCLA's budget) now jeopardize the Department of History's ability to serve its undergraduates and to maintain its excellent reputation. State budget crises in the early 1990s were successfully overcome, in part through generous donations from alumni and friends, but current cutbacks are more severe and the need correspondingly greater.

UCLA does not yet have the endowment support that older, private universities have acquired over a century or more. For example, Harvard has 29 endowed chairs in history while Yale has 25. UCLA has only six in the History department – all established since the 1980s. In recent years, several generous donors have recognized the excellence of the Department and its faculty by announcing their intention to bequeath further endowed chairs and several graduate fellowships. Increased gifts from alumni and friends of UCLA are necessary to retain the Department's exceptionally high standing and to enhance its excellence in the new century.

Several recent large gifts have come from the ranks of our own emeritus professors and staff. Emeritus Professor Gary Nash and his wife, Associate University Librarian Cynthia Shelton (UCLA History Ph.D.), have given $400,000 to endow a Gary Nash Fellowship in Early American History, while Professor Emerita Nikki Keddie has recently announced a bequest of $350,000 to establish a Keddie Endowment Fund.