David Risling, the “father of Indian education,” spent his career opening the doors of higher education to Native American students. He is credited with co-founding one of the few full-fledged Native American studies departments in the U.S. (Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis photo)
Looking Back
History in the making
Hear in their own words from professors, administrators and coaches as they tell the story of the rapid and dynamic evolution of UC Davis since World War II.
Over the past 16 years, several hundred retired faculty members have been asked by the UC Davis Emeriti Association to sit in front of a camera and reminisce about the part they played in developing the campus. These conversations focus on creating a major research, university department by department and college by college.
To date, more than 330 individual interviews have been produced by the UC Davis Emeriti Association. About half of those have been organized into 23 documentaries. (The video list on this Web site will grow longer over the summer as we add more documentaries and selected individual oral histories.)
Project editor Verne Mendel, professor emeritus of neurobiology, physiology and behavior, received a campus Dickson Award in 2007 to construct the documentaries.
“This was our centennial project: to show how UC Davis evolved,” says Mendel, who took over the emeriti video project in 1996. He has produced and edited all but 67 of the 336 individual videos as well as the longer documentaries. Mendel continues to interview emeriti faculty as part of his ongoing commitment to the oral history project.
Assisting Mendel in the centennial project have been a number of emeriti professors, including Alex McCalla, who wrote the narratives that pull together the history of the academic units and scripts for each individual emeritus faculty interview. McCalla, a professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics, is president of the emeriti association.
The video narrator is Bob Leighton, a professor emeritus of veterinary medicine.
The project’s assistant editors include Bill Breidenbach, Jim DeVay, John Goss, John Fetzer, McCalla and Don Chakerian.
How UC Davis evolved
- Administration
- Athletic Program
- College of Agricultural and Environmental Science
- School of Veterinary Medicine
Take a look back at UC Davis' history