Early in Gene Block’s tenure, during a trip to Asia, UCLA Vice Provost Cindy Fan observed something peculiar about the new chancellor.
“I was sitting across from him at a restaurant, and I noticed that his chopstick skills were perfect — probably better than my own,” said Fan, who leads the campus’s international studies and global engagement efforts.
High praise, given that Fan was born and raised in Hong Kong and Block grew up in New York’s Catskills, a region known mostly for knishes and borscht. Block, Fan recalled, told her his facility with the utensils was gleaned in part from having lived as an undergraduate in a house with Asian students where chopsticks were frequently used.
That ability to forge connections with and learn from others around the world has been a defining feature of Block’s chancellorship. When he steps down on July 31 after 17 years of service, he’ll leave behind a university that has blossomed from a highly respected national institution into a major player on the global stage.
“Since Chancellor Chuck Young’s era, UCLA has maintained an international profile,” Block said. As chancellor, Block saw it as his mission help strengthen and extend the university’s global reputation and institutional ties.
And that’s what he set about doing. Block made multiple trips abroad each year during his globe-trotting tenure, starting with the Pacific Rim, then Europe, then the rest of the world, including destinations rarely visited by past chancellors, from South Africa to Mongolia.
The fruit of those connections can be measured in the growth of UCLA’s international research partnerships and programs, the expansion and engagement of its alumni networks, opportunities on campus for international education, the introduction of global perspectives into the classroom and the engagement of students, alumni, families and donors from around the world.
And continuing along the trajectory Block set in expanding UCLA’s global reach remains a priority for the university and one of the five goals of its strategic plan.
“Being global is really part and parcel of being a world-class public research university,” Fan said. “Research and education are increasingly global, and international collaboration is the key to excellent research and teaching. We also want our students to be globally aware and have an appreciation of different cultures and perspectives. Chancellor Block really embraced that idea.”
Planet Westwood: Connecting with Bruins around the world
In taking up the chancellorship of UCLA in 2007, Block’s first focus was strengthening bonds and trust with alumni. With active alumni networks throughout the world, and former students holding up the blue and gold on nearly every continent, engaging international Bruins on a deeper, more personal level than previous leaders was a pivotal aspect of Block’s mission to bring Westwood to the world.
His secret sauce? Putting in the miles. “We had to show up, and we had to listen — that was the first thing,” he said. “Then, finding out what they were doing, what they needed from us and what we could give.”
Early in his tenure, Block began meeting with alumni in Pacific Rim and European cities annually, sometimes more than once a year. At alumni celebrations, forums, dinners and other events from Manila to Madrid, he made it his mission — often with his wife, Carol — to sit down with small groups of Bruins, listen to their stories and give them firsthand updates about the happenings on campus. His itinerary gradually expanded, but Block never failed to make time for these face-to-face exchanges.
“Our alumni have really appreciated that personal connection,” said Fan, who has traveled frequently with the chancellor. “They say they’re not aware of any other university president who has done this so often.”
Through these intimate conversations — which could range, Block said, from the latest Bruin sports heroics and international politics to business and fundraising — he built trust and goodwill. An alumni base that feels valued and connected to the mothership, the chancellor understood, is one that is energized and passionate about supporting the university’s mission and raising UCLA’s reputation throughout the world.
“Chancellor Block has been instrumental — and transformational — in his support of our alumni work,” said Julie Sina, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for alumni affairs. Sina noted that at the beginning of Block’s tenure, the UCLA Alumni Association had just four recognized international networks. Today, that number stands at 15.
Block brought that same personal touch to his visits with UCLA’s study-abroad students and incoming international students and their families, whom he invited to UCLA’s far-flung alumni events.
“These students were just so thrilled to be up close and personal with our chancellor because UCLA is such a big place, and as one of the 46,000 students on campus, it’s very hard to meet him,” Fan said. “But students actually got the opportunity to speak with him, take selfies with him. And that is just very special.”
Block’s travels also opened up opportunities for the chancellor to meet with foreign government officials and university leaders and to cultivate potential international donors with global perspectives — donors like Tadashi Yanai of Japan, who would go on to endow the campus’s Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, Hong Kong businessman David Mong, who has provided major support for the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and Jorge Paulo Lemann, a Swiss-Brazilian investor whose generosity has allowed exceptional graduate students from Brazil to study at UCLA.
Just as Block was promoting UCLA globally, he welcomed the world to UCLA. On campus and in Los Angeles, he met often with international alumni, consuls general and visiting dignitaries representing nations from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America, continuing to deepen ties, create partnerships and advance UCLA as a force in global higher education.
“It’s almost like a ripple effect,” Fan said. “Because he goes abroad and reaches out, people come here to reach out to us. It’s a very positive loop of relationships.”
Ambassador Block: A global leader in higher education
UCLA’s growing global profile received a significant boost when, in 2016, Block was elected chair of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, a network of 61 leading research institutions across Asia, the Americas and Australasia that collaborates to address some of the 21st century’s biggest challenges.
Over the past seven years, in addition to his duties on campus, he has helped guide APRU in tackling regional and global issues around economic development, science and technology, sustainability, environmental protection, education, urbanization and health. In 2019, he hosted the association’s Annual Presidents’ Meeting on UCLA’s campus, where 130 university leaders and guests from 16 countries gathered for a forum on migration and migrants’ rights keynoted by UCLA geography professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond.
In bringing the research expertise of faculty from UCLA and other APRU universities to bear on topics of concern to Pacific Rim populations, Block has not only grown the university’s collaborations and deepened its partnerships in the region — he’s helped broaden the scope and impact of APRU’s advocacy. It’s perhaps no surprise that other institutions wanted to get on board: During Block’s chairmanship, the association added more than a dozen new university partners.
“Chancellor Block has been the key person enabling the growth of the association,” Fan said. “He has developed strong relationships with the presidents of these universities. And every time the Association of Pacific Rim Universities has annual meetings, UCLA has had bilateral meetings with other universities, and the chancellor has been right there to meet with them.”
Fan has also been active in APRU, having co-chaired its international policy advisory committee, and she remains involved in its international mentoring program, launched during Block’s leadership, which cultivates women leaders at academic institutions throughout the Pacific Rim, including at UCLA.
While Block stepped down from his APRU role this month, the association has appointed him its “first ambassador” to continue his highly valued work and advocacy. And just last month, in recognition of his efforts on behalf of global higher education, he was awarded an honorary degree by the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The chancellor’s international visibility through these Pacific Rim–centered projects, Fan said, is part of the reason UCLA was asked this March to join the U7+ Alliance of World Universities, a geographically expansive network of over 50 universities working together on pressing local, regional and global issues — helping to expand UCLA’s international reach even further.
At the group’s recent meeting in Milan, Block and Fan met with higher education leaders from cities as varied as Toronto; Mannheim, Germany; and Ibadan, Nigeria.
“The meetings offer a fresh perspective on issues common to us all,” Block said, including prioritizing war refugee visas, developing lifelong education programs and investing in educational infrastructure in less wealthy nations.
UCLA scholars: Global collaborations that meet global challenges
Through his travels and service, Block built bridges to universities and research institutions around the world, creating new opportunities for global research and collaboration by UCLA scholars, from the hard sciences to the arts.
And the proof is in the pudding: UCLA now has active academic exchange agreements with nearly three dozen nations and has ongoing research and service projects in 142 countries — up from 94 countries just a few years ago — ranging from environmental partnerships in Cameroon and Colombia to medical collaborations in Ethiopia and Guatemala.
“UCLA is working across the world with people who are facing the same issues as we are,” Block said. “That is why so many of these projects and programs are so important: They point the way forward.”
UCLA’s new Promise Institute Europe, for instance, is advancing human rights and social justice internationally from The Hague. The Congo Basin Institute in Cameroon is working to protect biodiversity and combat disease and food insecurity across Africa. Architecture and urban design professor Hitoshi Abe has collaborated with Japanese colleagues to build resilience and limit damage from earthquakes and other disasters in urban environments. Physics professor Alvine Kamaha has worked with international colleagues to refine the scientific equipment needed to detect dark matter in the universe. And engineering professor Gaurav Sant and colleagues are partnering with Singapore’s national water agency to combat climate change using a technology they developed to remove carbon dioxide from seawater.
These and hundreds of other international research efforts initiated during Block’s tenure are tacking issues of widespread global concern — climate change, poverty, injustice, migration, health care and education among them — with the goal of contributing to the greater good of society and the world.
Beyond laying the groundwork for these collaborations, the chancellor has been instrumental in helping to streamline the process that allows scholars to come together and share ideas across borders — not always an easy task, and one that has often involved working around political and economic challenges. All told, more than 400 international agreements were signed over the course of Block’s chancellorship.
“We have negotiated agreements and memorandums of understanding to make it easier for our faculty to collaborate with universities in China, for example, and elsewhere in the world,” said Block, who stressed the need for this “common platform” path to international research, which improves on the piecemeal approach of the last century.
In addition, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational Affairs this year recognized UCLA as one of the top producers of faculty Fulbright scholars, with faculty conducting research internationally from Sweden and Morocco to Scotland and Botswana.
While these growing research connections to the global community continue to advance the greater good and enhance the university’s international reputation, they pay dividends in other ways, perhaps most notably by increasing the global perspectives faculty infuse into their teaching and preparing UCLA students with a global mindset who are poised to succeed in an increasingly interconnected, intercultural world.
Producing global graduates: International education at UCLA
In addition to teaching, part of equipping students with global tools involves providing a range of international activities in which they can participate, including research, internships and study-abroad programs. Today, nearly 20% of U.S.–based undergraduates at UCLA have engaged in education abroad programs, far above the national college average of 10%, with students pursuing global education in some 40 countries over six continents. UCLA consistently ranks among the top universities nationwide in the number of students it sends to study in other countries.
The benefits are hard to argue with. Research suggests that students who study abroad are more likely to complete their undergraduate education, are twice as likely to find employment within a year of graduating, earn higher salaries, have increased self-confidence and are better able to adapt to diverse work environments.
The chancellor and other campus leaders have continued to work to boost student participation in these programs — the goal is to reach 25% — and to make them accessible to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. At the same time, Block said he understands that for many low-income and first-generation students, especially those who work to support their education, going abroad just isn’t possible.
“When we think about global experience for our students, there are two components. One is to travel overseas, but for many of our students, that will not happen,” he said recently. “The next best, I believe, is having a student from overseas at UCLA.”
Over the course of Block’s tenure, the percentage of international students at UCLA has grown from roughly 7% to nearly 14%. Today, with 6,350 international students hailing from 106 countries — and an additional 6,000 international scholars — UCLA has become a prime destination for students and academics from around the world.
And just as the chancellor benefited as a university student from his exposure to international peers — and in more ways than chopsticks — domestic students who live and study with those from other countries develop an international outlook and intercultural competence that will help them become global leaders and experts of tomorrow, Block said.
Add to that an increasingly internationalized and transcultural curriculum at UCLA — offered through the UCLA International Institute’s centers and programs and other departments — as well as myriad language learning and area studies opportunities, the events and activities of International Education Week (in which the chancellor has often been featured as a speaker) and the fact that for three years running UCLA has had more graduate students awarded Fulbright–Hays fellowships for international research than any university in the nation, and UCLA’s commitment to educating global citizens becomes clear.
Looking forward: Continuing to expand UCLA’s global reach
Over 17 years, Chancellor Block’s vision and dedication have firmly positioned UCLA as a global leader in higher education, helping to foster a future where knowledge, innovation and understanding transcend borders. But as he steps down, he points out there is always room for improvement, and areas of the world where UCLA can continue to strengthen its engagement.
“I don’t think we dug as deeply as we might have into South America, for instance, maybe because we don’t get as many students from there as elsewhere — and Mexico deserves a lot more attention,” he said. In that area, he noted, UCLA may be well served by the connections of his successor, Dr. Julio Frenk, an internationally recognized global health expert who was born in Mexico and served as that country’s minister of health.
Block said he is also interested in seeing how countries in parts of the former Soviet Union continue to develop in terms of education and international collaboration, including Mongolia, whose capital he found the most surprising city in his journeys.
“Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia — it’s the coldest capital on the planet,” Block said. “Like Armenia and some other countries, Mongolia is putting its Soviet past behind it. It has limited higher education resources but great mineral wealth, and it is finding its way in the new world. What happens in countries like these will be fascinating.”
Block said he’ll continue to travel after stepping down, as an ambassador for the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and to maintain the personal and institutional relationships he has developed over his tenure. So, after many trips abroad, covering nearly every one of the world’s time zones, does the chancellor, who is also a renowned sleep scientist, have any advice on avoiding jet lag?
“For us aging individuals,” he said, “the trips abroad only get harder. Research from our laboratory and others shows that resynchronization of your circadian-clock timing system occurs more slowly as you get older.
“Ideally, one should travel more leisurely as they age. But when there is so much important work to do abroad, sometimes you need to break the rules.”
See UCLA’s interactive global map to discover how UCLA reaches, engages, educates and contributes to the international community. The map highlights the campus’s global projects and programs, study abroad opportunities, academic and research collaborations, international student information, and faculty interests.