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Greetings from Jeff Elman, Dean
At the leading edge of John Muir College stands a three-story modernist building, Mandler Hall, positioned among the groves of Torrey and Monterrey pines on the western bluff of campus. Thousands of students have passed it on the way to classes at Peterson Hall or heading from Muir to Marshall College. For those who were psychology majors, they know it well. In this issue, we profile the people behind the name, George Mandler, and his distinguished wife Jean, whose careers were at the leading edge of their respective fields and whose influence on students and scholarship is extraordinary.
UC San Diego is a school of many firsts. I was fortunate to join at a time when UC San Diego conceived the first cognitive science department in the world. Joining me was Jean Mandler and we remember fondly the excitement and freedom of creating a new discipline from scratch. “Assembling the team” was an invigorating process, akin to a start-up enterprise that lures the most brilliant and skilled professionals to a novel endeavor.
I imagine George Mandler had similar feelings of excitement when called to start the Department of Psychology back in 1965, one of the early departments at UC San Diego. I commend George greatly for his leadership during the early years. The weight of responsibility was great for department founders and the stakes were high. Their ambitions to attract foremost professors could easily have fallen short. Today, it is easy to accept UC San Diego's success and reputation as a natural advancement, but it was hardly a foregone conclusion in the early years and was only achieved through leaders like George and Jean Mandler.
It is a pleasure to recognize and reflect on their accomplishments. They truly are visionaries that have made UC San Diego great.
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