Quarterback and kicker George Blanda set a record for grid-iron durability playing professional football for 26 years; Nolan Ryan topped that, tossing major-league fastballs for 27 years; and Archie Moore — his name now flapping in the breeze of history — traded punches as a professional heavyweight for no less than 28 years. Earlier this week, UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang announced his retirement after having clocked 30 years at the helm of the country’s biggest academic and economic juggernaut.
Now 83 years old, Henry Yang has set land speed records for being the longest serving Chancellor in both UCSB history and UC history.
Although recent years have been more than a little bumpy for Yang, he has presided over — and helped guide — an almost cellular transformation of UCSB, taking it from wild-and-wooly party school to an outpost of aggressive scientific scholarship and research. Before Yang — an engineer and scientist by scholarship — UCSB had tilted more towards liberal arts. Under Yang’s tenure, the campus’s reputation as an outpost of bacchanalian excess has remained largely intact — though more decidedly controlled — but that’s been largely offset by the academic rigor increasingly demanded of its incoming students. But even as the percentage of applicants denied admission has increased, UCSB focused — quietly but successfully — on attracting and retaining students of color and first-in-family members to attend a four-year college.