UCSD to Open Major Downtown Extension Program

A major new downtown educational center is being established by UC San Diego Extension, which offers non-degree enrichment courses for the San Diego community.

Using leased classrooms from the California Western School of Law building downtown, UCSD Extension will offer more than 30 evening courses beginning in mid-September. The classes will be designed particularly to appeal to people working or living in the downtown/center city areas of San Diego.

In addition, the program will offer during its first week a series of special evening lectures on subjects ranging from sports to nuclear weapons as a way to introduce campus resources to the community.

“UCSD believes in (the center city) and wishes to become a part of the new development and energy so evident here in recent years,” Mary L. Walshok, dean of the extension program, said in a prepared statement announcing creation of the new center.

The extension program serves nearly 30,000 San Diegans each quarter at the main La Jolla campus with nearly 250 courses. It previously ran a small number of classrooms at Roosevelt Junior High School in Balboa Park but ended that satellite campus five years ago due to physical limitations of a junior high.

“Finding an appropriate site has always been difficult,” Walshok said. “The new location is ideal . . . it offers comfortable classroom space, ample parking, security and the types of amenities our students like--a coffee shop, bookstore and library study area.”

The initial course offerings will concentrate on business and management, including financial accounting for non-accountants, effective writings and presentations, effective management principles and practice, investment strategies, estate planning and construction law. There will also be some courses in art, behavioral science, career planning, languages--including accent improvement for the bilingual professional--and in legal writing.

“We are initially offering classes that we think the market downtown will want to take at a downtown facility,” extension official Catherine Todd said Monday. The selection was based on telephone surveys as well as impressions of extension instructors who have frequent contacts with downtown professionals, Todd said.

Todd said that the new downtown center should not overlap with adult education courses offered by the San Diego Community College system, except perhaps in a few language and other specific courses.

“Most of our extension audience already have undergraduate degrees and most are looking (to extension) for state of the art information in their fields, or for simply added knowledge,” Todd said. “And we are not a degree-granting arm, as opposed to junior college students” who often are seeking undergraduate or technical degrees.

Todd said that extension officials would like to pursue coordinated extension programs with the community college system but that no specific plans exist as yet.

Introduction to Resources

As a way of kicking off the new downtown center, UCSD Extension will offer a four-day “Celebration of Learning” from Sept. 14 to 17 using well-known campus professors both to highlight course offerings and to make more San Diegans aware of what the La Jolla campus has to offer.

Lectures will include a history of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; the history of Hollywood child stars; a history of the nuclear arms race; an introduction to sherry; the myths of aging; health and fitness for weekend athletes; and vanishing animals of the world. The four-day festival is co-sponsored by several downtown companies, including The Hahn Co. and San Diego National Bank.

UCSD Extension, in cooperation with the Museum for Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, will also offer two lectures later this fall at the Lyceum Theatre at Horton Plaza on photography and film-making.