Throwback Thursday, Week 6: Turn out for what?

Each Spring quarter, student voters must ask themselves the question: What has student government done for me? In 1983, Perfect Student Union president Stuart Holbrook asked this question during the Undergraduate Students Association Council debates. Holbrook debated against three other presidential candidates, though curiously enough, he wasn’t a candidate himself. He was standing in for […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 5: Admissions backdoor

What sets UCLA apart from USC, we tell ourselves, is that this campus provides education for all, while that other school does so for the privileged. Indeed, there is perhaps no greater insult to a public university’s stakeholders than it adopting the most-maligned practices of private institutions – namely, compromising the admissions of deserving students […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 4 – The story behind the Bruin mascot

If the year were 1925, this past weekend incoming freshmen would have gone to Grizzly Day instead of Bruin Day. Although UCLA started in 1919, the Bruin hasn’t always been the school’s mascot. For nearly seven years, UCLA’s athletic teams and even this newspaper were marked with the name “Grizzly.” Then in 1926, UCLA got […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 2: The ‘Southern Campus’ moves westward

I was on the roof of Kerckhoff Hall yesterday, and I just had to take the chance to look at how UCLA developed. It was hard to imagine that when UCLA moved to Westwood in 1929, there was no Bruin Walk, no grassy hills besides Janss Steps and I probably would have be able to […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 1: The longest dance

Bruins were dance marathon-ing for diseases years before UCLA professor Michael Gottlieb identified acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the AIDS epidemic was discovered. The Dance Marathon we know today debuted in April 2002 to raise money for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, but in 1979, the event began when Greek life revived UCLA’s annual […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 9: A steep climb for housing

Six weeks ago, I publicly complained about the trials of living in North Village when I threw it back to the conception of the Hill as we know it today. When Dykstra Hall debuted in 1959, UCLA reached the point of no return and committed to becoming a residential, rather than commuter, campus. Rieber, Sproul […]

Throwback Thursday, Week 8: An assassination in Westwood

An assassination took place in Westwood in 1982, but most students have probably never heard of it. Unless you’re Armenian, it’s unlikely that you know the names Hampig “Harry” Sassounian and Krikor “Koko” Saliba or the fact that they were involved in the assassination of Kemal Arikan, the Turkish consul general in Los Angeles, just […]