Category: campus on the hill

goodbye berna

oh this makes me so sad. after Feza now also Berna is leaving.
santa cruz will be even more empty. there really aren’t many
people in this place i feel a deeper connection with.
i will miss these new friends tremendously.
a party at Berna’s place, with “good luck Berna” cake and all,
and a collective salsa dancing session.

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This morning there was a the service for the Chanchellor, some people at the party attended. Speeches emphazising the good work that the Chanchellor had started, mainly her program for diversity, without however disguising that it didn’t went all that far. Especially Angela Davis’ words seemed to have been impressive. more here

on the hill

IMGP3948.JPG The desolation of the place. UCSC campus in summer is the next bit of evidence i have that these American-style campuses don’t work. Okay, i admit, there’s a bit of dishonestly in that claim: UCSC doesn’t count as a typical american campus. As a result of the experiment in decentralisation – i.e. the project of dropping a number of buildings randomly in a forest, in the name of having self-managed small communities (in colleges) – every attempt at creating some kind of beating heart is even more of a serious struggle against social geography than on the classic campus model with a central square.

Please don’t get me wrong, you know that self-managed small communities are not part of things i consider problematic. The problem is that, without any real decentralisation of power – especially in the case of the University of California system, where decisions affecting the SC uni are not only taken by the governing board on campus but also between the different UC governing bodies – this decentralisation of the students smells like nasty fragmentation. Then there’s the physical geography: the fact that the campus is on the top of a hill outside of town in a way that does not challenge the expression “ivory tower” further than the adjective used.

IMGP3951.JPG Anyway, we went to campus to today. We worked a bit, so we’re not complaining, and we ended up doing other beautiful things – there is no doubt that this is a beautiful place. But it continues to alienate me with respect to my work, it is as if i need to find all the force and courage to work despite the environment, when i know of so many environments that push me to sit down at a corner of a table or a sofa in midst of life’s joys and tragedies and business. You see, when Virginia Woolf wrote “think we must”, she was thinking of all of these places daily life takes us through, busses and streets and… But not easy to catch a bus here these days.

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IMGP3952.JPG Dinner at our house. We have a new house-mate who will stay with us for a little while, Mihui, a high school friend of Cynthia’s. She’s taking refuge from the east coast; came to California, where she also grew up, to recover. Undergraduate at Harvard (bad start), law school at Columbia (got worse), working for a judge in court (Boston, New Orleans) (it gets tougher) and working for a big law firm (L.A., New York) (total burn-out). The remedy: hanging out in the house, having tea and conversation sessions with all of us, reading bad chick lit (like Mr. Maybe) with covers she tries to hide when she’s reading in public spaces, and feeding us court stories which leave us with stomach pains from laughing laughing laughing…

if there’s a black list, i wanna be on it

Yesterday evening we got a phonecall in the house, from some charity organisation to sollicit (financial) support for “our troops”. Strange to get such a call at home, especially when the only answer i could come up with on the phone is: the only thing about “our troops” we support at this stage, is immediate withdrawal, like NOW. Was it really a charity that called us? Does this mean our house now features in the TALON database?

Technologies and mentality of surveillance and control are spreading at such a speed that sometimes one can only make fun of them. Time to play. This morning: a funny follow-up mail on the War on Terror teach-in at Santa Cruz two weeks ago. The message let us know that, while the Pentagon eventually got the UCSC protest against military recruitement on the campus out of TALON, a conservative blog writer published all the kids’ names and emails and guess what – they all received death-threats. Okay, not a very funny game, but it does get better. The message included a letter from UC Davis to the Pentagon, concerning their upcoming teach-in against the war. (and note that i’m not the only one connecting the surfing “fun-loving” culture of this place with a profound lack of political passion and activity…)

———————————————————————————-
Lt. Col. Gary Testut
Threat and Local Observation Notice Database (TALON)
Pentagon
Washington, DC

Dear Lt. Col. Testut,
We, faculty and students of the University of California at Davis, would like to Call your attention to an upcoming teach-in at our campus titled “Connecting the Dots: The War on Terror and You.” In particular, we urge you to consider designating our teach-in a “credible threat” in your TALON database.

As you may be aware, the different campuses of the University of California compete vigorously with each other to attract students, faculty, and research funds. Your designation of protests at UC Santa Cruz as a “credible threat” bestows considerable prestige on that campus. In the interest of fairness, we believe you owe it to us to seriously consider our teach-in for the same honor.

Though you have never made public what criteria you use to judge what constitutes a “credible threat,” we are certain that, by any criteria you may be secretly using, our activities here at Davis constitute a threat at least as credible as any in Santa Cruz.
• Demonstrations: our students have held numerous, vibrant, and well-attended demonstrations, including demonstrations against military recruiters on campus.
• Radical student groups: our campus takes just as much pride in promoting freedom of speech and scholarship that Santa Cruz does, and you will find student political groups here from across the entire political spectrum.
• Diversity: our faculty and student body include many people of color and foreign nationals, including people from the Middle East.

Furthermore, there are factors which we believe make our activities at Davis a more credible threat than anything in Santa Cruz:

Our campus not only has the same mix of freedom of speech, anti-war groups, and immigrants and minorities, but we also host significant military research. This combination of immigrants, freedom of speech, and military research should be enough to conjure up a credible threat in the mind of even the most complacent TALON investigator.

Finally, please note that Santa Cruz is the site of one of the world’s best surf breaks. No matter how passionate their students may be about political causes, if the surf is up they will run for their boards, giving your recruiters ample opportunity to present their message to the non-surfing student body. Here at Davis, having no such diversions, our students are more serious and focused. Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest opportunity.

altares

Anzaldua-poster.jpg A quick trip to the library this evening, meaning a brisk walk through the ancient forest and the cold that lingers in between the redwoods, and i find myself visiting the Gloria Anzaldúa Memorial Altares Exhibit at the McHenry Library much longer than usual. I remember my first visit to that library very well. A moment of exhilaration — if other spaces seemed small and closed upon themselves, the library held such a promise of openings to other worlds. And then there was the shock of finding out that Gloria Anzaldúa had died, already a little while ago (15th of March 2004). Ever since all visits to the library are made of a moment of pauzing among her books, objects from her alters and quotes from her writing. When i get back to Santa Cruz, i realized today, the exhibit will be gone.

From a woman who understood the power of words and used them wisely.
“Through the act of writing you call, like the ancient chamana, the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body… the ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic. The writer, as shape-changer, is a nahual, a shaman.”

I didn’t know that she used to live in Santa Cruz, near the Lighthouse. Maybe that’s where the picture is taken, or maybe the rock is a part of Natural Bridges. As i was looking for an image of the poster of the exhibit, I came across an online altar with condolences, and i was very much struck by this comment:

“Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua–another feminist, Lesbian, writer of color dying long before her time. Joining the ranks of other great women. How long before the health of sisters becomes a priority instead of just another problem to be lived and solved by minorities?” (Judith K. Witherow)

8th of March

It was the 8th of March yesterday and for the very first time since long, there was no 8th of March gathering to go to. Unsettling. Can’t think of a greater contrast with last year, when i had to decide whether to be in Belgium or in Istanbul for the 8th, and ended up being around for the preparations of Istanbul, and flying in to do 8th of March stuff in Leuven and Antwerpen. Can’t help thinking of the Belgian Women’s Day (11th of November) two years ago when María and i decided to take a break and not go (imagine, being able to make the decision not to go, yet another possibility in places where Women’s Day means something) where we got into the dream of coming to this place, and how disconnected i feel from that dream now.

But it ended up being sweet – Berna and Feza invited us to go to the screening of Darwin’s Nightmare with film-maker Hubert Sauper in the grand Del Mar cinema theater. Hubert just got back from the Academy Awards where those stupid penguins (of course the animals are not stupid, it’s the film) won instead of the fish. An impressive film about globalization, its big structural mechanism and its little agents who most often know well what they are doing, what is happening to them, but see little alternative. The images are still running around in my head, a film to be seen and digested slowly. Maybe i’ll write something more about it later.

There was a march on the 7th, Marcha Laboral – Custodians March for Justice. It was on campus at 6.30 pm, so custodians could join and we could we could march to the residence of the Chancellor, Denise Denton, to demand that the custodians’ wages are raised at least to the level of those in neighboring colleges (Cabrillo, Monterey) now – and then later we can go on to discuss living wages. There is no excuse, the financial scandals (of excessive spending on top wages) the university got itself involved makes it quite indecent not to do so. One custodian was talking about how she works on this campus since 15 years and earns only $ 4 more than when she started. And then everybody is hit by the high PG&E bills this winter – raising the wages now would amount to nothing more than very basic dignity.

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Try to imagine how such a march looks like. A dark cold forest, for that is how campus looks like after 6 pm these days. There were more of us than last time, we were perhaps 80 (and yes, there are hundreds of students living in well-hidden residences all over campus, but most of them don’t come out for a march, that is how campus looks like these days). So there we marched through a dark cold forest, holding candles to light our way. And chanting for ourselves and for the ancient forest. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido never sounded more ghostly, and it so much more resembled some spiritual ritual instead of a political mobilization.

A great need to get my head around the difficulties (to think well, to write something that could make a difference, to do politics) and traps of campuses like these, and i take look at what Chris called the idiotic (and i think i agree) book of Baudrillard on America. Sadly enough his observation on the UCSC campus is not so far off:

“There is a science-fiction story in which a number of very rich people wake up one morning in their luxury villas in the mountains to find that they are encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstancle, a wall of glass that has appeared in the night. From the depths of their vitrified luxury, they can still just discern the outside world, the real universe from which they are cut off, which has suddenly become the ideal world. But it is too late. These rich people will die slowly in their aquarium like goldfish. Some of the university campuses here remind me of this.

Lost among the pine trees, the fields, and the riviers (it is an old ranch that was donated to the university), and made up of little blocks, each one out of sight of the others, like the people who live in them: this one is Santa Cruz. It’s a bit like the Bermuda Triangle (or Santa Barbara). Everything vanishes. Everthing gets sucked in. Total decentring, total community. After the ideal city of the future, the ideal cosy nook. Nothing converges on a single point, neither the traffic, nor the architecture, nor authority. But, by that very token, it also becomes impossible to hold a demonstation: where could you assembly? Demonstrations can only go round and round in the forest, where the participants alone can see them. Of all the Californian campuses, famous for their spaciousness and charm, this is the most idealized, the most naturalized. It is the epitome of all that is beautiful.”

where’s the love?

Valentine has been all over the place ever since i arrived here in january. Red everywhere (mostly in shops of course), hearts, announcement of activities… i was sure i’d be ranting about love and capitalism and consumerism in this space today, but that was before we joined the Student Worker Coalition for Justice (SWCJ). Now i can write you about love and justice. SWCJ joined the AFSCEME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) union in a rally today to demand higher wages for the custodians cleaning and taking care of the campus. Where’s the love drew attention to the fact that wages of custodians on campus are less than in neighboring colleges, that these are not living wages at all, and that the university has a lot to account for with the scandal about manager’s wages and corruption plus the raise in tuition fees. (of course, the state and federal goverments also have a lot to account for, with the cuts in money for education – that wasn’t really mentioned). A big broken heart with messages from custodians and students was given to a representative of the Chancellor.

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Where’s the love action. Got Valentine’s Love or Exploitation?
Did you know that UC custodians make two dollars less than custodians at Cabrillo college and Montery State?
And, UC custodians earn wages that could not meet basic needs for a single adult with a child.
Also, student fees have gone up by 8-10%.
And what is the Chancellor doing about the rampant corruption amongst UC administrators.
Let’s have a happy valentine’s day by demanding that the Chancellor start implementing some justice and start paying a living wage to the workers on campus.

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Même s’il n’y avait pas beaucoup de monde, l’alliance entre les gardiens et les étudiants était beau et fort. N’empêche que une manif dans ce campus au milieu de la forêt m’a fait une drôle d’impression… Inevitablement j’ai du penser aux mots de Kristy – que cette université a été construit (avec le “mauvais example” de Berkeley en tête) de telle manière que la possibilité de révoltes soit reduite. Maria a fait un peu de recherche, et apparement c’est plus compliqué que ca, mais reste qu’il n’y ait pas vraiment de centre, pas de “coeur” au campus et que pour la manif on a marché de la bibliothèque jusqu’au batiment du recteur (un peu caché dans la forêt) avec seulement les redwoods comme nos témoins.