UCSB does not grace the national news cycle and for good reason — it is a medium-size campus with no medical, law, or business schools — it is not UC Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, or UCSD, and it never will be. With the exception of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill, Bank of America burning, and riots of the early '70s, Halloween in Isla Vista, and the mass murder of 2014 — UCSB seldom attracts headlines. Hence, universal outrage over Henry Yang’s proposed 4,500-person windowless dorm is a new chapter for the campus by the sea. Or is it?
During the late 1960s, after the Oil Spill and shortly before rioters burned the Bank of America, then-chancellor Vernon Cheadle proposed a grand entrance to the campus to accommodate increased future enrollment to 25,000 students and a projected daily vehicle count of 38,000. Like Yang his interest centered in part on the fact that money for the project came from outside the university.
Billionaire Charles Munger is offering $200 million for “Dormzilla,” conditional that it meets his windowless specifications. In Cheadle’s case, the State Division of Highways appropriated over $40 million to extend Ward Memorial Boulevard (State Route 217) through Goleta Slough, paralleling the campus and creating a new entrance. Cheadle and Yang are on a similar page a half-century apart.