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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.
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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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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… |