In one of the biggest physical and social changes in school history, UC San Diego will create its first “front door,” a grand entrance meant to appeal as much to the public as students and ease crowding on a campus where enrollment could hit 40,000 this fall.

Plans are being drafted for a gateway that will blend art, culture, entertainment, dining, education and research — the same mix that helps funnel people from Westwood Village to UCLA.

UCSD will exploit public transit, placing everything from an outdoor theater to an art-filled plaza to a consumer-oriented design building next to the Blue Line trolley station that’s being built on campus, near Geisel Library. The school also will add a massive student center nearby, and, in a bit of whimsy, it is proposing to hang 20 play swings on cables attached to the bottom of the depot.

“Anybody who comes to San Diego should have this campus as a destination in addition to Balboa Park or the Gaslamp district,” said UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla.

He describes the idea as a nuanced plan to help UCSD deal with historic growth, cultivate deeper support from the public, and infuse life into a campus that students and faculty jokingly call the University of California for the Socially Dead.

Khosla’s chief goal is to persuade people to use the three Blue Line trolley stations that will open on and near the university in late 2021. The school added nearly 11,000 students over the past decade, further jamming its crowded parking and traffic systems. Enrollment could rise another 2,000 to 3,000 by 2022. Traffic also has risen sharply at UCSD’s health sciences complex on the east side of Interstate 5. The center now employs 8,600 people.

The school further wants to use light rail to deepen its ties to downtown San Diego, where a small satellite campus is being built, and to Mexico, where research opportunities abound.

As it ends its 59th year, UCSD also says that it wants and needs to strike a more welcoming tone with the public.

The school annually receives more than $1.1 billion in public money, largely in the form of research grants from the government. But in recent decades, the public has mostly shrugged as the state slashed aid to the University of California system.

UCSD executives and faculty say the public indifference can be traced, in part, to the university’s image; many people regard the school as a rich, imposing, walled-off world that doesn’t have a lot of time for visitors.

“The notion that the university is a public space did not animate the development of this campus,” said Mary Walshok, dean of UC San Diego Extension. “All you have to do is look at the roadways, parking and design of the buildings. It’s always been faculty-centric, and then student learner-centric.

“Pradeep is introducing the community into the mix.”

‘Grand’ Plan

The chancellor is doing so by pushing the idea that UCSD can remain one of the nation’s top 10 research universities while hosting the broader community and tourists, something done at schools like UCLA and Harvard.

Work will soon get underway on the Pepper Canyon Amphitheater and Public Realm project, the gateway that’s being built at the Blue Line station at Pepper Canyon, near Geisel.

The grand plaza, which doesn’t yet have a price tag, will feature a large open-air amphitheater that may call to mind Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park.

Nearby, noted visual artist Ann Hamilton will create a 400-foot long “walkway of words” whose slightly raised letters will spell out inspirational quotes from such revered figures as Roger Revelle, who helped found the campus, and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, a member of the faculty during the school’s early years. Hamilton calls it a “field of language.”

She also is developing the proposed 20 play swings, which would hang low to the ground and move very slowly. The swings are considered to be interactive artwork.

The plaza will be flanked by $761 million in new buildings, including Design and Innovation whose broad windows will allow trolley riders to see faculty and students create such things as biomedical devices, wearable monitors and furniture.

“To see eyes looking at you matters,” said Scott Klemmer, co-founder of the UCSD Design Lab.

“One pair of those eyes may give you a job offer, or help finance your startup, or help buy your first product off Kickstarter, or convince you what you’re doing isn’t solving real problems. This is very energizing.”

The design building would include a major restaurant that faces onto new housing for 1,400 students. A short distance away, UCSD will build a 350,000-square-foot student center that could include six buildings, highlighted by a 115-foot tall stand-alone tower that will serve as a gathering spot for alumni.

Early architectural renderings of the pavilion suggest that it will have some of the interactive flash of the L.A. Live entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles. In the not-so-distant future, a museum and a major auditorium might be built nearby.

All of these projects will begin construction between this summer and 2023.

The pavilion is meant to become something that students and faculty say UCSD has always lacked — a lively downtown from which all things flow.

One of its spokes will link directly to the grand plaza and trolley station. There also will be better linkage to the Conrad Prebys Music Center. And there will be smoother guidance to Ridge Walk, a pathway on the west side of campus where massive housing and academic buildings are rising like a city skyline.

The university is responding to student’s request to make it easier to find their way around the sprawling main campus.

The campus layout “feels ad-libbed,” said Derek Morris, an environmental engineering major. “The paths don’t flow together well. It’s like you have to make a conscious decision to go from one path to the other. It isn’t natural.”

The ‘island effect’

Khosla is UCSD’s eighth chancellor, but the first to broadly promote main campus as a tourist destination and social hang out. He’s pressing skeptics to fall in line.

“I’m sure there are forces out there who are concerned about ... people coming on the light rail and inhabiting our campus,” Khosla told the Union-Tribune. “And, look, some of that will happen given the level of homelessness in San Diego.

“But we can’t be afraid of that and close the campus to everybody. That would be a disaster.”

He also wants to make UCSD feel like less of an urban island, which will be tough to do, given its geography, layout and history.

The university was founded in 1960 in La Jolla, on a coastal mesa that was meant to be secluded. Much of that property was occupied by Camp Matthews, a Marine Corps base where more than 1 million Marines received marksmanship training.

The main campus was placed between the ocean to the west, the newly unfolding Interstate 5 to the east, and the biotech companies and science institutes that would arise to the north. Housing and retail have crept in from the south.

There are no places where passing motorists or pedestrians can deeply see into the campus, which school officials say is one of the reasons many people don’t realize that UCSD is home to the La Jolla Playhouse.

By comparison, much of San Diego State University can be seen from Interstate 8. And SDSU placed a large digital billboard along the freeway to announce campus events.

During its early history, UCSD also had tense relations with its neighbors and the rest of San Diego. The friction mainly grew out of the anti-Vietnam war activism that roiled the campus and angered much of the region’s conservative military community. One incident in particular shocked people; in `1970, student George Winne, Jr., set himself on fire at UCSD while sitting next to a sign that read, “In God’s name, end this War.” He soon died.

The tensions didn’t begin to greatly ease until the early 1980s, when Richard Atkinson became the school’s chancellor. He courted the public and the business community, generating support that helped him double enrollment to 18,000 and accelerate the school’s rise as a research power.

But problems still popped up, including a polarizing one that appeared in 1987.

Atkinson whipped up opposition to a plan that would allow the Mid-Coast Blue Line extension project to cut through a corner of main campus. The university felt that it hadn’t been properly consulted, and that vibration from the trolleys could affect sensitive scientific instruments in labs. Some people also simply didn’t want a trolley intruding on campus life.

Atkinson’s successor, Robert Dynes, disagreed and he didn’t hide his feelings.

“I came from a culture in the east where serious campuses were easily accessible to students and the public ,” said Dynes, a physicist who is still on the UCSD faculty. “NYU, Columbia — they’re urban campuses that have substantial programs that benefit them and the community.

“For UCSD, this (trolley project) is a natural evolution of the campus.”

Full speed ahead

The Pepper Canyon project comes at a time of great opportunity and daunting challenges.

The Blue Line extension will link main campus with the Downtown Innovation and Cultural Club, a UCSD Extension satellite that will open at Park and Market in mid-2021.

The satellite will heavily focus on the public, offering everything from concerts, dance classes and films to science fairs for girls and weekend workshops.

“We don’t want to replicate UCSD, we want to create experiences that make people curious — and fall in love with the university,” Walshok said.

Some of those people will enroll at UCSD, and they’ll take the trolley north to a campus that is choking on growth.

Students complain that campus commuter buses are too crowded, there isn’t enough room to sit in some dining halls, the food courts in the student union are a mob scene, Geisel Library is creaking from foot traffic, and there never seems to be enough parking at a 1,158-acre school spread over numerous sites.

“Commuter (students) come here at 5 a.m. to get a spot,” said Surabhi Kalyan, who majors in bioengineering. “They sleep in their cars for a few hours because that’s what they need to function. “

Kathryn Greenberg, who also majors in bioengineering, agreed, adding, “We need more campus housing.”

UCSD currently houses 15,300 students, nearly as many as the University of Texas at Austin, a far larger school. And more dorms are on the way. Campus planners say UCSD will house 22,100 by fall 2023. That’s roughly the population of Ramona.

But enrollment will rise, too.

The school currently has just under 39,000 students. Campus planners say the figure will swell to 42,400 in 2035. But the university has been adding about 1,000 students a year, suggesting that it could hit 42,000 within 3 to 4 years.

UCSD is pushing to become ever larger.

In mid-May, the UC Board of Regents approved UCSD’s plan to build a $185-million engineering center, reviewed plans for the creation of a seventh undergraduate residential college, and heard a proposal for the construction of the Future College Living and Learning Neighborhood, a $645-million complex that would house 2,000 students.

The last proposal could trigger some concern — the 1.4 million-square-foot complex crowds the edge of campus now occupied by the La Jolla Playhouse.

Khosla is expecting a sunny outcome, both for campus growth and the university’s new grand entrance.

“I have never seen so much support for UC San Diego,” Khosla said. “Ever.”