John Semple Galbraith Papers, 1945-1994 (MSS 41)

A native of Glasgow, Scotland, John Semple Galbraith was born on November 10, 1916. His family emigrated to the United States in 1925, and he received his primary and secondary education in Ohio. He graduated from Ohio's Miami University with a bachelor's degree in 1938, and pursued graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where he obtained a master's degree in 1940 and a Ph.D. in history in 1943. Shortly after his graduation, Galbraith joined the U.S. Air Force and served as an historian until 1946.

In 1948 Dr. Galbraith began his long career at the University of California. In that year he took a teaching position in the Department of History at UCLA. At Los Angeles he sat on numerous committees, including the Budget Committee of the Academic Senate (1961-1962) and the Los Angeles Division of the Academic Senate (1961-1964). He served as chairman of the Department of History between 1954 and 1958. Galbraith took an active interest in the growth of the UCLA Library, and selected works for the collection in the area of British Empire history, his academic specialty.

The early 1960s were years of major expansion for the University of California system, and Dr. Galbraith was involved in the development of campuses in Southern California. In July of 1964 he was appointed Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs, at the new San Diego Campus. After the resignation of UCSD Chancellor Herbert F. York, U.C. President Clark Kerr named Galbraith as York's replacement.

Galbraith quickly became a popular and respected administrator. He continued the UC San Diego tradition of finding outstanding people to fill academic and administrative posts. Along with his wife Laura, Galbraith involved himself in a wide array of San Diego community affairs, and thereby helped promote better relations between the university and the city's political and social leaders.

Dr. Galbraith, like other UC San Diego chancellors, had ambitious plans for the campus. Among his highest priorities was the development of the university library. Because of his background as an academic historian, he understood the importance of large and comprehensive collections for scholarly research -- especially for research in the humanities. He had discussed this subject with President Kerr prior to assuming the chancellorship, and Kerr had assured Galbraith that UC San Diego would eventually have the third great library in the U.C. system, with an acquisitions rate equal to those in Berkeley and Los Angeles. However, Kerr was slow in fulfilling this commitment, and this prompted Galbraith to postpone his UCSD inauguration, originally scheduled for September 1965, to November of that year.

The library issue and other administrative matters created friction between Galbraith and Kerr. On February 18, 1966, Galbraith and UCSD Vice Chancellor Robert Biron submitted their resignations to the U.C. President. Precipitating the resignations was Kerr's failure to add to the Regents' agenda the approval of the design of the UCSD Medical School. Although the resignations were later withdrawn, relations between Kerr and Galbraith improved little.

Like other college campuses in the 1960s, UC San Diego witnessed the growth of what would eventually become a nation-wide student movement organized, in part, as opposition to U.S. military involvement in Indochina. In November, 1967, during Dr. Galbraith's administration, one group of students, who had set up an informational table in Revelle Plaza, began flying the North Vietnamese flag in protest of the U.S. military effort. The flag angered Leucadia assemblyman John Stull, and Stull demanded that Galbraith have the flag forcibly removed. Galbraith, after consulting with the U.C. legal counsel, declared that the university had no legal basis for removing the flag. Stull then called for Galbraith's suspension, among other measures. However, Galbraith successfully defended his stance on the issue, and he argued that the university administration, as well as the students, must abide by the rule of law.

Dr. Galbraith had never planned on an administrative career, and in 1968 he resigned the UCSD chancellorship to return to teaching and scholarship. In that year he accepted the prestigious Smuts Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge University in England, and the following year he returned to UCLA to teach history.

After his return to UCLA, Dr. Galbraith served on a number of important committees. Among them were the University Committee on Educational Policy (1969-1970), the Coordinating Committee of Graduate Affairs (1969-1970), the University Task Force to Reconsider the 1966 Growth Plan (1970-1971). In September 1977 Dr. Galbraith was chosen as the faculty representative on the U.C. Board of Regents, and he served on the Board through the Spring of 1978.

Galbraith was also active in the U.C. system's library development. He was not, however, happy with the direction that development took; one of his greatest disappointments was the University's decision to create a centralized library system with regional storage facilities at Berkeley and Los Angeles and greater reliance on inter-campus loans (the so-called Salmon Plan). Galbraith felt that such a plan would hinder the process of "browsing" the stacks -- a process he saw as important to scholarly research. In a short pamphlet titled "An Historian's Viewpoint on University Libraries" (La Jolla: Friends of the UCSD Library, 1968) Dr. Galbraith had expounded his theory of the "shoe-leather" school of scholarship, in which the scholar found important sources of information not only through catalogs or indexes but also by walking the stacks of the library. Such an approach would be hindered when large portions of a library's collection were stored off-site, accessible only through catalog records and inter-campus loans. Therefore Dr. Galbraith felt that the new plans for the U.C. library system were detrimental to library research at all but the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

Dr. Galbraith returned to UC San Diego in 1984, where he taught British Empire history until his retirement in 1987. He continued his involvement in university-wide affairs, and both he and his wife became important supporters of the Friends of the UCSD Library.

During his career, Dr. Galbraith succeeded in combining important scholarly work with an active involvement in administration and university policy-making. His many publications include The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor (1957), The Reluctant Empire (1963), Mackinnon and East Africa (1972), Crown and Charter (1974), and The Little Emperor (1976). His studies took him to England, Africa, Canada, and Australia, where he conducted research and lectured. He received many prestigious fellowships and grants, including a Ford Foundation Grant (1955-1956), a Social Science Research Council Fellowship (1959-1960), the Smuts Visiting Fellowship (1968-1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973-1974), and a Distinguished Fulbright Professorship (1980). In February 1977 he was elected as a member of the London Athenaeum, and in May 1978 he was chosen as a UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer. John S. Galbraith died in 2003.