Analysis: Chancellor Henry Yang's vision created an innovation hub

By Henry Dubroff, Staff Writer

When Henry Yang arrived in Isla Visa in 1994, his first job was to settle down a UC Santa Barbara campus that has been roiled by change at the top.

Thirty years later, stability at the top has been the hallmark of one of the most successful universities in the UC system. 

I’ve gotten to know Chancellor Yang over the past two and a half decades and, yes, we jokingly refer to each other as “the other Henry.”

“Serving as the Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara has been the highest honor of my career,” he said in the announcement about his retirement. And it might also be true to say that he and his wife Dilling devoted a good portion of their lives to UCSB. 

Shortly after arriving, he devoted a year to a listening tour and from that evolved a framework for future academic excellence and community engagement that has proved to be enduring.

The University quickly realized it had an opportunity for excellence in the field of compound or hybrid semiconductors as well as materials. 

From that came Nobel prize-winning work by Herb Kromer and Alan Heeger and he helped recruit LED lighting pioneer Shuji Nakamura to join the faculty before he won his Nobel prize.  

The current Dean of Engineering Umesh Mishra built a successful company based on cooler-running chips that incorporate a compound called gallium nitride. 

Under Yang’s administration, computer science within the College of Engineering fostered an unprecedented level of collaboration and an applied approach to software development that helped produce companies like QAD and Appfolio.

In the early 2000s, Yang encouraged a budding relationship between UCSB and our upstart business publication and he saw the advantages of a pro-free enterprise media outlet as a way to connect the campus with the business community. 

We honored the chancellor with induction into our Hall of Fame a couple of years ago, but only after he agreed to accept on behalf of the entire University.

Being Chancellor has meant making some difficult decisions. Amid overtures from some in the community to establish an M.B.A. program at UCSB, Yang set a bar for funding that proved to be unreachable. 

The campus opted instead for a breakthrough technology management program. 

And the UCSB Yang will hand off to the sixth chancellor remains, like its East Coast counterpart, Princeton University, a campus that values academic excellence, pure science and institutes, like the Bren School of Environmental Management, instead of professional schools. That’s not bad company to keep.

Yang has been a resilient leader. 

The community was stunned by the Isla Vista murders a decade ago, but Yang undertook a personal quest to visit families, strengthen security in Isla Vista, and make things right.

A few years later came the Thomas Fire and deadly Montecito mudslides which shut Highway 101 and caused major disruption. 

And a few years after that came the trials of COVID which caused a campus shutdown and in the aftermath brought many changes to campus life and work.

The campus has benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for buildings and residences, a crowning achievement by any measure.

But it was what went on in those buildings that will keep extending Henry Yang’s legacy.

And as a professor and mentor, he’ll be having an impact on future students long after his retirement.

email: hdubroff@pacbiztimes.com

Editor’s note: UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang announced he will be stepping down from his post at the end of the upcoming school year. He is the longest-serving Chancellor in UC history, having held the title at UCSB since 1994.