Walter Munk is professor emeritus of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was president of the Academic Senate during the turbulent days of the late 1960s.

"I came to Scripps in the summer of 1939. I was a junior at CalTech. I had a girlfriend who was spending the summer with her grandparents in La Jolla.

"(After college) I joined the U. S. Army. ... A group at Scripps had formed to join with the Navy to study antisubmarine warfare. I had a master's in oceanography and they asked me to join them. I had served in the Army for two years, so I left and joined Scripps. It was one week before Pearl Harbor that I came from Washington (State) to La Jolla. If the call had come any later, I never would have gotten out. But I began work at Scripps to study Navy problems and I have worked on them all my life.

"Roger Revelle was still in the Navy after the war. He was one of the founders of the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation grew out of that. ONR (support) kept Scripps going after the war, but also oceanography in general in the United States. The government did not fund much scientific research prior to the war. It has been very much a postwar development.

"The 1950s were a good time for Scripps. ... Back then Scripps was not a global seagoing research institution. There was only one ship, the E. W. Scripps. Our seagoing reputation was established during this period under Roger Revelle. It was a very exciting time. Every time a ship went out to sea it came back with so much new information. It was on a Scripps vessel that we learned how the Earth is created, which led to plate tectonics.

"Revelle always emphasized that an institution should begin with a good graduate program first, and good faculty. UCLA began as a teachers' college, you know, and it took many years for it to grow from there. But we started the other way. Roger thought it was a better strategy to start at the top."