# data[].attributes.headline
Rekindling friendships through volunteering: Pioneer alumni organize Crown’s 50th

# data[].attributes.subject
Rekindling friendships through volunteering: Pioneer alumni organize Crown’s 50th

# data[].attributes.body
The trio were a part of the first cohorts of students at UCSC, Lapsley and Nerton graduated in 1971 and Rose in 1972. Now five decades later, the self-named “Gang of Three” have spent countless hours planning events and raising funds for Crown College, becoming some of the most active members of  the UCSC alumni community.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For pioneer alumni Lisa Rose, Jim Lapsley, and Susan Nerton their love for UC Santa Cruz grew stronger after graduating from the university.

The trio were a part of the first cohorts of students at UCSC, Lapsley and Nerton graduated in 1971 and Rose in 1972. Now five decades later, the self-named "Gang of Three" have spent countless hours planning events and raising funds for Crown College, becoming some of the most active members of the UCSC alumni community.

Through volunteering their time and talents with Crown College, the trio not only found a cause to give back to, but also developed a deep friendship with one another that will last them a lifetime.

"It sounds so trivial, but it's fun," Nerton says. "And o nce you have fun one time you just want to continue to see your friends. It's really great working with people that you thoroughly trust. We can work together and there's mutual trust and respect."

The pioneer classes of UCSC were significantly smaller than the almost 20,000 students that attend the university today, leaving students with a strong, close-knit sense of community with each other and with the campus. Although Lapsley, Nerton and Rose weren't close friends when they attended the university as students, they knew of each other as fellow students.

It wasn't until 2017 during the 50th celebration of Crown College's opening that the trio worked together for the first time. They found themselves among a group of alumni wanting to modernize the Crown Library as a study space for students, and worked together to raise over $75,000. After this celebration, this group has continued to work together to support Crown students as part of Crown Provost's Advising Committee (CPAC).

" I never saw it coming," Rose says. "I didn't sign up for it at all. We have this joke that if you had asked people 50 years ago, 'who do you think's gonna plan your 50th reunion?' It wouldn't have been us."

Rose found herself roped into the role of an alumni volunteer much earlier than Lapsley and Nerton. In 2002, the year of Rose's 30th reunion, she was contacted by a Crown College staffer looking for photographs of her college years. Rose had worked extensively with film photography while attending UCSC, and frequented the dark room that once resided in the basement of the Harvey House.

She contacted fellow student photographers and found herself sifting through several hundred photos from her college years. " Thus began my volunteer career as a custodian of an unofficial photographic record of six early years at Crown College," Rose says.

Their main goals are to support current students, bolster alumni engagement, and elevate the campus they once walked as students themselves.

"Things have changed, everything's very crowded, and the college system that we knew has gone away," Lapsley says. "And at first, we were wanting to bring it back, but we realized we couldn't because the conditions aren't the same. What we can do is help Manel with some discretionary funds to help create a supportive community that can help students succeed."

These funds have allowed Crown to enhance academic advising and Core, to help our students adjust to the disruptions caused by the pandemic, and to launch two new service-learning programs in the areas of entrepreneurship and applied ethics.

Crown College's 50th reunion for the classes of '68, '69, '70, '71, and '72 is the first of its kind. The trio hopes that in bringing the pioneer classes together they can inspire more alumni to rekindle their relationships with each other, their campus, and their community.

"One thing that I hope will result from the upcoming reunion is that not only will old friendships be rekindled, but that new friendships will be made-much as what has taken place between Su, Lisa and me," Lapsley says.

They're hopeful that this year's Crown College 50th reunion will set the foundation for reunions of its kind in the future.

The "Gang of Three" is working to plan events familiar to pioneer alumni including folk dancing - an event that once took place every Friday at the Fieldhouse. Other events include guided bus tours of the UCSC campus, a Crown 50th reunion dinner, an Alumni brunch at the provost's house, and more. The 50th reunion will be held from April 21-24 as part of Alumni Week .
Lisa Rose, Jim Lapsley, and Su Nerton are just three of several alumni volunteers working together to plan Crown College's 50th reunion. Marilyn Shea-Stonum, Henry Chu, Roger Peters, Bill Allayaud, and Jennifer D comprise a core group of alumni planners and volunteers. If you are inspired by the Gang of Three's support of students, Crown College, and the campus, visit UCSC's Giving page to discover ways you can get involved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rekindling friendships through volunteering: Pioneer alumni organize Crown's 50th

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz pioneer alumni Lisa Rose, Jim Lapsley and Susan Nerton have spent three years planning Crown College's first-ever 50th reunion. With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing the reunion back multiple years, Rose, Lapsley and Nerton are excited to invite a five-year range of pioneer Crown alumni back to the campus they love.

# data[].attributes.body
Building community with underrepresented groups in STEM majors through early field-research opportunities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz is working to retain students in underrepresented groups in STEM majors by building community and providing early field-research opportunities

# data[].attributes.headline
Do everything with love | Giving to UC Santa Cruz

# data[].attributes.subject
Do everything with love | Giving to UC Santa Cruz

# data[].attributes.body
Harmon’s (Crown '98) recent bequest to UC Santa Cruz’s KZSC radio station illustrates a passion for contributing to causes that are important to her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tiffany Harmon pounded the pavement as an elementary school student, selling cookies, candy, and raffle tickets to raise money for her school's extracurricular programs. She diligently rang doorbells and set up stands. She worked hard to win her school's top-seller prize, but a fellow student always won. His dad would buy all the cookies.

One year, Harmon's mother felt so badly for her that she bought all the peanut brickle. Harmon won a tape deck recorder. She thought she would be excited-but all she saw was a super expensive recorder.

"It just didn't feel as rewarding having it handed to me," she says. "I learned an important lesson about the value of hard work and the sense of accomplishment it provides."

KZSC dj Tiffany Harmon is supporting the student radio station with a planned gift.

Harmon has been working hard, raising funds, and giving back since she was a child.

"It's in my soul, I'm a humanitarian at heart," Harmon says. "Whether it's volunteering, listening, networking, donating money-I want to help people and make a difference."

Harmon's recent bequest to UC Santa Cruz's KZSC radio station illustrates a passion for contributing to causes that are important to her.

Harmon came to UC Santa Cruz as a transfer student. Her path to the university took some time so she was 25 when she arrived on campus. She didn't know a soul-she didn't live in the dorms and was living by herself. She felt lonely and out of place. She knew she needed to make friends and create a community for herself.

She decided to take an Intro to Broadcasting course with the goal of meeting people and also to get a peek into her father's world. Harmon's father, William Wintersole, was an actor and radio personality.

She found her passion-and her people-at KZSC.

"I met the most incredible people. Some of whom are stellar, stellar friends today, we've been friends now for a long time. That's how I pulled myself out of depression. I am a social animal, we are social animals, and I needed to get some friends. I did that. The radio station helped me do that."

Harmon started working as a DJ on Saturday nights, and her show gained popularity. She's been a DJ at KZSC ever since-her show has been running for more than 26 years. Her current show "Joy in the Morning" runs from 9AM to 12PM on Thursdays.

Harmon credits the radio station for helping her develop a strong sense of community in Santa Cruz where she built a successful business, the Seahorse Swim School, teaching thousands of local children to swim. She counts a number of community leaders and business owners as listeners and friends.

She loves the unique character of the radio station and the opportunities it provides for herself and others.

"The beauty of KZSC - there's no judgment, it's a full cornucopia of people," she says. Pink hair, purple hair, polka dots. Nose piercings, no piercings. Gay, straight, they/them, not sure what gender you are. It's all good-we're all mixed up in a pot. And we're all here to shine. It's beautiful."

Harmon has been raising money for the student-run, community radio station through fundraising drives, herself giving in amounts related to the station's numbers-88.1FM-for years.

"When I give to the station, I like to do it for amounts like $88.10 or $881.0" she says.

She feels so strongly about supporting the station that she has included KZSC in her estate plans with a bequest of $8,810.

She's also thinking about future gifts to the radio station, and what those amounts might look like.

"Giving to all the things that have given to me is what I want to do," Harmon says. "I want to leave a legacy, be well known for making a difference. A legacy lasts forever, and serves more than yourself."
Learn more about planned giving at the UC Santa Cruz Planned Gifts site.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tiffany Harmon pounded the pavement as an elementary school student, selling cookies, candy, and raffle tickets to raise money for her school's extracurricular programs. She diligently rang doorbells and set up stands. She worked hard to win her school's top-seller prize, but a fellow student always won.

# data[].attributes.headline
Transforming the field of AI-driven Digital Artwork

# data[].attributes.subject
Transforming the field of AI-driven Digital Artwork

# data[].attributes.body
Young’s desire to reach different audiences through technology and his curiosity for using computers as tools for creative design eventually inspired him to withdraw from corporate tech to become an independent artist, where he now employs AI tools to create digital artwork.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alumnus David Young is transforming the field of AI-driven digital artwork

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Baskin Engineering alumnus David Young (Crown ’86, computer and information science) employs AI tools to create digital artwork.

# data[].attributes.body
When Izzy Connor (Crown ’25, astrophysics) steps onto the carpet at the Tokyo Olympics on August 7, it will be a milestone moment for the U.S. and also the highlight of years of both personal struggle and success.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Izzy Connor (Crown '25, astrophysics) steps onto the carpet at the Tokyo Olympics on August 7, it will be a milestone moment for the U.S. and also the highlight of years of both personal struggle and success.

Connor, who turns 21 on July 22, is a member of Team USA's rhythmic gymnastics group, a five-member squad whose sport combines elements of dance and gymnastics with equipment like hoops, balls, ribbons, and clubs in heart-stopping routines. Hoops fly through the air to land on outstretched legs. Balls spin from teammate to teammate as the group moves in a perfectly choreographed routine. It's a sport that requires hand-eye coordination, agility, stamina, and focus. Until now, U.S. athletes have never qualified for all three Olympic rhythmic gymnastics berths: two individual and one group.

"This is definitely an historic year for us," Connor said by phone from the Lake Placid Olympic Center where she and her teammates were practicing before heading off to Israel for the Rhythmic Gymnastics Grand Prix competition and then on to the Olympics.

Her achievement, however, did not come easily. Not only did Connor spend years training-even leaving her Manhattan Beach, Calif., home her senior year of high school in order to practice at the North Shore Rhythmic Gymnastics Center in Deerfield, Ill.-she also had to refocus her goals after the 2020 Olympics were postponed because of the pandemic. In addition, in 2018, she faced a bout of severe anxiety and subsequent depression that forced her to rediscover her love for her career.

"I strongly believe you don't fully start to know yourself or grow as a person until you've gone through something that breaks you," Connor said of that time. "That's when you start to grow and progress as a person."

She turned her pain into power, she said.

According to Connor, she got a relatively late start in her sport. She dabbled in rhythmic gymnastics when she was 8 and then, drawn by its focus on artistry and dance, returned to the sport at age 10. It soon became her passion.

She never considered going to the Olympics, however.

"I thought it was too much pressure. I was very insecure and anxious as a kid," she said. "I never allowed myself to dream big."

Instead, she set small goals. The small goals, however, turned into big achievements and, at 17, she was asked to join the USA's group national team and moved to Illinois to train. In 2018, however, she was hit suddenly with intense anxiety and panic attacks.

Connor struggled silently for a while and then, taking inspiration from decorated swimmer Michael Phelps, who has spoken openly about his depression, and also from four-time Olympic gold-medalist, gymnast Simone Biles, who has said regular visits to a psychiatrist and self-care helped ease her own anxiety, Connor decided to step out into the open and treat her anxiety like an injury that needed work to heal. She told her coach and her teammates of her struggles-they were very supportive, she said-and was able to find techniques that worked for her. Today, she considers herself healed and stronger than before.

In 2019, against the odds, the U.S. rhythmic gymnastics group secured a spot in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, only to face disappointment when the games were postponed.
Follow the team's journey on Instagram @izzy.connor
Now, however, Connor is heading toward Tokyo with the aim of helping the U.S. team succeed and is feeling good. When the games are over, she said, she plans to retire from her sport and take her spot at UC Santa Cruz, where she will study astrophysics at a campus she described as beautiful and peaceful. There, she said, she will also follow her second passion, which is writing. She hopes to pen articles about her experiences throughout her career as well as mental health advocacy as a way to help others.

"Though we sometimes seem superhuman, we athletes are human and experience the same emotions and struggles that everyone else does," Connor said. "The important thing is that things such as anxiety and depression don't need to stop you from doing what you dream about or define you. They should be normalized and addressed accordingly."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Izzy Connor (Crown '25, astrophysics) steps onto the carpet at the Tokyo Olympics on August 7, it will be a milestone moment for the U.S. and also the highlight of years of both personal struggle and success.

# data[].attributes.headline
Alumnus leads massive effort to ramp up COVID-19 testing

# data[].attributes.subject
Alumnus leads massive effort to ramp up COVID-19 testing

# data[].attributes.body
One of the world’s leading disease detectives, Joe DeRisi (Crown '92, biochemistry and molecular biology), has spent his professional life studying and fighting viruses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alumnus leads massive effort to ramp up COVID-19 testing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz alumnus Joe DeRisi is one of the leading scientists in the fight against the novel coronavirus, helming a massive effort to ramp up state-of-the-art clinical laboratory testing for COVID-19 throughout California, while pioneering large-scale testing in Bay Area communities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Valeria Jacqueline Alonso Blanco earns President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership

# data[].attributes.subject
Valeria Jacqueline Alonso Blanco earns President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership

# data[].attributes.body
The University of California honors her with a prestigious President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership, recognizing the impact of her advocacy and activism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Valeria Jacqueline Alonso Blanco (Crown, psychology, '18) has worked hard to help first-generation and undocumented students overcome obstacles and transfer to UC Santa Cruz. Now the University of California is honoring her with a prestigious President's Award for Outstanding Student Leadership, recognizing the impact of her advocacy and activism.

The full impact of this good news didn't kick in until she was invited to address the UC Board of Regents at a recent meeting, and saw the faces of her family members in the audience. "Knowing that they were very proud of me was what made this unforgettable," she said.

Blanco, affectionately known as "Jacque," is being honored for helping to create a more diverse pipeline of college-bound students. On top of her course load at UC Santa Cruz, she has worked hard to help prepare first-generation and undocumented students to transfer to UC campuses.

"Quite simply, Jacque's work has improved, and will continue to improve, the educational experience of first-generation, undocumented, and Latinx students throughout all of UC," UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal said at the Regents meeting.

"As a campus, we've discovered there is no one-size-fits-all support program when it comes to transfer students," Blumenthal continued. "It takes boots-on-the-ground work. It's about identifying the needs of individual students, and working to meet them, one student at a time. In other words, it takes programs just like the one Jacque has helped build. Jacque, thank you for all that you do. You are a credit to your family, to UC Santa Cruz, and to the entire UC system."

UC President Janet Napolitano presented the awards during the meeting. "Student activism and public service have been a hallmark of the University of California and its students for 150 years," Napolitano said. "This year's winners represent the best of that tradition."

Blanco is deeply involved with the Cultivamos Excelencia Hispanic Serving Institution Initiative at UC Santa Cruz, developing and implementing a program that prepares SJCC students to transfer to UC Santa Cruz. She also provides academic and emotional support to migrant youth in Watsonville through her work with UC Santa Cruz's Educational Partnership Center.

In her work, she has drawn extensively on her own undergraduate research as well as her experience as a first-gen student and a child of immigrants. Drawing from her life, she came to understand the essential role that families play in students' decisions to pursue higher education.

Later, at UC Santa Cruz, she realized that she was one of the few first-generation Latinx students who had the opportunity to pursue higher education "due to the many racial, economic, and cultural barriers found in the U.S. educational systems. It was this realization that motivated me to find ways to use the privilege I had of attending college."

"My freshman year, as a research assistant, I realized I could use research to build culturally relevant practices and strategies to increase enrollment and retention of underrepresented youth in higher education," she said. "I know many parents migrate to the United States for the same reasons mine did, and I hope the university can increase their efforts to change policy and give underrepresented students the opportunity they have worked so hard for."

After graduation, she plans to continue her work at Cultivamos Excelencia and the Culture and Achievement Collaborative. In the fall, she will apply to graduate school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Valeria Jacqueline Alonso Blanco (Crown, psychology, '18) has worked hard to help first-generation and undocumented students overcome obstacles and transfer to UC Santa Cruz. Now the University of California is honoring her with a prestigious President's Award for Outstanding Student Leadership, recognizing the impact of her advocacy and activism.

# data[].attributes.body
The 21-year-old from Kerala, India, is graduating with a double major in physics and mathematics, she speaks four languages, she has won numerous awards, and—oh, yes, she’s a published author of science-fiction novels.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 21-year-old from Kerala, India, is graduating with a double major in physics and mathematics, she speaks four languages, she has won numerous awards, and—oh, yes, she’s a published author of science-fiction novels.

# data[].attributes.body
Students, alumni, and community members are participating in a “Deep Read” on the bleak dystopian futures of Margaret Atwood in advance of the Booker Prize–winning author’s on-stage discussion during Alumni Weekend.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Due to ongoing COVID-19 public health measures, this event will no longer be held on April 5. Please check back for updates.

Margaret Atwood's imaginary Republic of Gilead is a futuristic nightmare, but many of her fans think it's uncomfortably close to their present-day 21st-century reality.

The novel has an enduring power to enchant and frighten readers, along with a metaphorical richness that makes it relevant and chilling to every generation.

Atwood's UC Santa Cruz appearance and the "Deep Read"

Gilead is a horrible place to visit and a worse place to live, yet fans can't get enough of it. Now, Atwood's California fan base has yet another reason to rejoice. The Booker Prize-winning author is scheduled to appear at UC Santa Cruz on April 5 at the campus's newly restored, 2,500-capacity Quarry Amphitheater, where she will be in conversation with Kate Schatz (Stevenson '01, women's studies and creative writing), bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide . The discussion, entitled "Futures," will be one of the highlights of this year's Alumni Weekend .

"Futures" is a fitting title for a dialogue that will engage Atwood's dark, dystopian visions, which take place hundreds of years from now. The Handmaid's Tale introduced the public to the fictional republic of Gilead, a theocracy ruled by a select group of men, who dole out corporal punishment and executions with hypocritical zeal, using their twisted interpretations of the Bible to justify their behavior. "Handmaids" are forced to bear the children and names of the brutal and barbaric colonels they are assigned to.

Women are treated like chattel, with the exception of specially designated "Aunts," who roam around with electric cattle prods keeping handmaids in line. Even the aunts are in constant danger, with other aunts waiting in the wings to undermine and betray them at all turns. Those who disobey wind up hanging from an enormous wall.

The Testaments will also be the focus of a new initiative by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz called the " ." Students, community members, and alumni will read The Testaments and gather on March 10 to discuss the book at the Hay Barn near the base of campus. This Testaments "salon" will include a panel of faculty from across campus, including:

Laura Martin (M.A. '08, Ph.D. '12, literature), arts and humanities lecturer and former THI fellow;

David Draper, a professor of statistics in the Deparment of Applied Mathematics and head of the College Scholars Program;

Marcia Ochoa, associate professor of feminist studies and interim provost of Oakes College; and

Andrew Mathews, associate professor of anthropology.

The program will include a giveaway of 1,000 free books to students and 200 free books to community members who sign up to participate in the Deep Read.

Future vision

It's no big surprise that news of Atwood's April 5 appearance on campus is already causing a stir.

"The event could possibly be the biggest of the academic year," said Irena Polic (Cowell '01, M.A. '03, linguistics), managing director of THI, which is presenting the on-stage discussion with Atwood and Kate Schatz.

"Atwood's work shows that humanities can look to the future," Polic said. "Humanities are often thought of as something that looks back through history, literature, and philosophies from ancient times. But the humanities can also project forward and inform-or perhaps warn us of-the way we imagine the future of our world."

The talk is part of THI's Baskin Ethics Lecture series, and will be open to the public and students. Tickets are $30 (free for the first 1,000 UCSC students to sign up) and may be purchased via the UC Santa Cruz events calendar .

Atwood's speech is part of a series of themed public presentations called "Questions That Matter," made possible by a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand the impact of humanities at UC Santa Cruz. Past topics include race and freedom, data and democracy, and the future of investigative journalism.

Discussing dystopia

In preparation for Atwood's talk 300 undergraduates who are enrolled in UC Santa Cruz's College Scholars Program have been immersing themselves in The Handmaid's Tale , The Testaments, and other dystopian fictions, including another popular Atwood work, the 2003 Oryx and Crake.

The scholar's program, which offers a supportive and engaging environment for a select group of first-year students, is already fostering intense dialogue across the campus. Participants in this program have been getting together with provosts at Cowell, Porter, Crown, and Merrill colleges to share their Gilead perspectives.

The Gilead books are rich material for discussion because they reflect, and seem to anticipate, world events and global trends, said Sean Keilen, provost of Porter College and professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Not such a "whacko" idea after all

Atwood never expected such fuss and intensive argument about Handmaid's Tale when she undertook this edgy, risky project.

"When I first started thinking about it, I thought it was such a whacko idea," she admitted in a 1986 interview. "I wrote it with some trepidation. It could have been the worst failure you could possibly imagine. I was afraid people would say it was silly. There was also the risk it would be thought feminist propaganda of the most outrageous kind, which was not really what I intended. I was more interested in totalitarian systems, an interest I've had for a long time."

The violence and paranoia of Atwood's dark world has been shocking readers for 35 years. But Atwood, in several interviews, has emphasized that this fictional world has the underpinnings of reality.

"I made a rule for myself," she once said. "I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not want to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior."

The Handmaid's Tale is a masterwork of story-craft, characters, setting, world-building, and nail-biting suspense. Atwood's books even have some blink-and-you-missed it examples of sly, satirical humor. For instance, several scenes in The Testaments take place in "the Schlafly Café," a dig at the right-wing leader Phyllis Schlafly, who was one of the inspirations for the character Serena Joy.

Exploring Gilead

"T hey understood the novel to be about how individuals are implicated into and possibly separate themselves from totalitarianism, an issue that they felt was well worth discussing," Christy said. "It was a lively discussion that showed this group of students really embraces their education as an engagement with the world, rather than just their classes or their majors."

"So are these books critiquing the past or the present, and where is she wanting us to look?" asks Martin, whose course is being sponsored by Porter College. Martin has also considered the political realities that were happening when Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, including "neo-liberalism and conservatism in the Reagan era. The Testaments was published in this post-crisis, reactionary moment of Trump."

At Crown College, students will focus on "the anatomy of power" when discussing Atwood's books, said Manel Camps, Crown College provost and associate professor of microbiology and environmental toxicology.

"The way I see it, this two-book series lays bare the mechanisms by which ideologies can be co-opted in order to establish control of a society, as in The Handmaid's Tale, and to consolidate that control ( The Testaments )," Camps said. "These mechanisms are common to a variety of oppressive regimes, regardless of their ideological slant."

But there is also a hopeful component in those books, with plotlines about bravery, heroism, sacrifice, and the flaws that could undermine the Republic of Gilead. Camps noted that The Testaments is a far more optimistic book than The Handmaid's Tale. Spoiler alert: this Booker Prize-winning sequel shows that the real and metaphorical walls around Gilead are not quite so strong after all.

After reading these books, students will come away with a close look at a repressive regime-but they will also see the blueprints for its implosion, Camps said.

"By exposing these mechanisms (of injustice)," said Camps, "Atwood is also revealing their vulnerabilities."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Due to ongoing COVID-19 public health measures, this event will no longer be held on April 5. Please check back for updates. Margaret Atwood's imaginary Republic of Gilead is a futuristic nightmare, but many of her fans think it's uncomfortably close to their present-day 21st-century reality.

# data[].attributes.body
Host Dr. Glenn DeGuzman engages in a fun and in-depth conversation about our panelist’s nerd identity (with Alex Belisario, Alfred Day, Brian MacDonald, and Dr. Emily Sandoval) and their personal and professional experiences with geek culture in higher education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Glenn DeGuzman:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now I'm your host, Glenn DeGuzman coming to you from Livermore, California, the ancestral homelands of the Ohlone people. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside and or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you'll find these conversations helpful to you and restorative to the profession. We release episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com or you can find us on Twitter, and now Instagram. Now I'm particularly excited about this episode because I'm bringing four student affairs professionals who in my opinion, have been leaders and influencers across the U.S. in nerd identity, geek culture and its impact and influence on college and university campus. I happened to be a huge fan of this. So I'm really excited to introduce the four panelists for today's episode.

Glenn DeGuzman:
I'm going to start with Al Day from University of California, Berkeley. We also have Alex Belisario from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Brian MacDonald from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Dr. Emily Sandoval from the University of Southern California. This is truly a West coast meetup, and I'm thrilled to have all of you joining me. So I'd like to start by having you all introduce yourselves. And and what do you do in higher education? And in the spirit of today's conversation, your background and your areas of interest tied to this topic. Let's go and start with Al.

Al Day:
Yeah, I'm happy to get started. I'm Alfred Day. Most people call me Al I am the Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Center for Support and Intervention at UC Berkeley. I've been involved in this work with these fine folks for over, almost over 10 years, about 10 years now. And I'm just really, really happy to be here as a as a DC comics fan. I'd like to think of us as the justice league of higher ed and geek ed stuff. Other people might say Avengers, but I would never say that.

Alex Belisario:
And you still don't hold it against me then after all this time,

Glenn DeGuzman:
Alex, why don't you introduce himself?

Alex Belisario:
Hi, I'm Alex Belisario. I use she her pronouns and I'm the Executive Director for College Student Life at UC Santa Cruz. And you know, there's a natural relationship between our work in higher ed and my interest in geeky pursuits. So as a college student, I had these interests as did my friends like scifi and video games. And as a professional, I feel like it helps to make connections with students and faculty and staff. I do still play PokemonGo when people ask that question. And so much of the stories that we get in Saifai in particular, give us a way to talk about real life situations. So it's a natural connection. And then I would also

Alex Belisario:
Say that there's just two superheroes everywhere who are working with college students right there, their outfits look a little different. They probably don't wear capes if they've seen the Incredibles, but they're out there

Glenn DeGuzman:
Totally hear you on that. Brian.

Brian MacDonald:
Hey everyone. Thanks Glenn for bringing us together. It's always awesome to see everybody here and to talk about this. My name is Brian MacDonald. I, use he/him pronouns. I work in residential life and student affairs at UCLA. I think for me, my interest is twofo ell, first I don't think, I think a childhood of watching too many horror movies has prepared me for a pandemic. So I have to definitely attribute my horror fandom to my likelihood of survival in 2020. But I think it's twofold. One, I think the role of fictional stories and characters have, they can inspire, they can guide us. They can provide hope they can provide leadership lessons and they can provide characters that we identify with when maybe there's not somebody in our real life that we can look to. And I also think we in education can learn a lot about community from fandom and how fandom forms and how it behaves. And specifically today, I think, you know, we need to pay very close attention to representation in these stories who's present and who isn't. And also I think a fandom and community comes with warning labels now in terms of too much nostalgia, toxic fandom. So those are things that are on my mind as we approach today's conversation.

Glenn DeGuzman:
And Emily.

Emily Sandoval:
Hello everyone. So my name is Dr. Emily Sandoval. I use she, her hers pronouns. I am the Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs at the University of Southern California. And I mean, my career has been in housing and residential life and student affairs in general. So for me, this intersection is very important because many superheroes are people with super powers spend a part of their hero's journey, trying to figure out their place in where they belong and what their talent is and how they can contribute that talent or share that talent with others or the world. Hopefully for the better. And I view the similarities with the college student's journey in college, you know, from entering their first year, trying to figure out where do they belong? What is my talent? What does my major what good can I do after college? I really played to that and I feel like I've been on my own hero's journey my entire life. I feel we all have been but very much. I've also learned to use my identity as a point of connection with the students and the professional staff that I work with.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Let's frame this conversation because I think for me, when I was growing up, I wouldn't have even understood this idea of nerd identity or Geek culture.

Glenn DeGuzman:
So can we start by, how do you define nerd identity or geek culture, and, and I'd like to hear, how did your interest in this topic emerging your personal life and eventually your professional field, Alex Al either one of you want to kick us off?

Al Day:
Yeah, I'd be happy to for, for me, you know, the idea of nerd identity is, is so inextricably tied up into who I was and my childhood, I lived, lived in the library Mercer County library. I, I was the kind of kid that even if I didn't call myself a nerd, everybody else did. So I just had to sort of decide at some point to either use it as an insult or as just sort of an acknowledgement of who I was for me, nerd identity is really it's about passion for, for a thing or a topic. And it doesn't have to be tied with anything in particular. My particular one is comics and Disney and things, but it really is that thing that, that you can talk about for hours, that your friends sometimes get sick of you, but it's just, it's very important to you and it can be, and should be anything.

Al Day:
We've talked about this a lot amongst the group. And we really wanted to find our identity as something that's inclusive about bringing people into a circle. I heard a podcast this weekend where somebody talked about being a kid and really being into like Harlequin Harlequin romance novels, and how even today, they didn't feel like they could embrace that as part of their identity. And for me, that's, that's what it is that, that thing that you just love and that you draw power from, and that helps you sort of make meaning out of life. It's very important to me.

Alex Belisario:
Yeah. I think we, we got our start as geeky kid almost 10 years ago. And it was because we found that we had some shared interests across professionals working in housing, but that, that really relates and resonates for folks who are going to school or thinking about going to school. And, and when we did our first presentation at Comicon in 2011, we used the Venn diagram to talk a little bit about, you know, your like deep interests and perhaps how comfortable you felt in social situations and your the time and energy and passion that you would put into things rather be if it would even be an obsession, we'll say, and like the difference between geeks and nerds and dorks. And it was even at that time it was becoming a little more acceptable to say that you had these geeky interests and that you could find people to be in community with. And I think it's even more so now, but I would say more like when we were younger for most of us, you were a little bit more of an outsider, a little more reluctant to share that for fear of the connotations that people would have about you based on their perception of your interests. So I think that being able to find that connection with each other, and then to talk about how that worked so nicely with our professional life and in

Alex Belisario:
Finding our connections with students it just strengthened our bond too. And so we've been able to bring lots of folks in over time, and I always have to give a shout out to our other two OGs, Tyler Miller and Ryan McRae, who, you know, really were like, Hey, we love comic con. We want to be able to give back, how can we do that? And then it was like, who else can we find that have all these same interests or similar interests, and then be able to move from there,

Glenn DeGuzman:
Alex, you raised a good point about tying and connecting to the college campus. And so can you, can somebody from the panel speak and tie your professional journey to geek culture how, how do you raise awareness or how have you been raising awareness and integration between like pop culture and student affairs and what did you, what have you learned about this intersection between these, these areas?

Al Day:
You know, it's, it's an interesting idea. Like I said earlier, like I gotta be me, it's the lens through which I see the world. I have without, without a judgment, used, Quoted Superman in job interviews. Like it, it is who I am. And so it's, it's sort of how I make meaning of the world and what I discovered years ago. And, and Brian was a part of this at a time when I was at Santa Barbara, when I made that part of myself public, when I was a resident director at UC Santa Barbara, students flocked to it.

Glenn DeGuzman:
I remember one, one weekend. I just took over a study room cause I just needed to, to rearrange comics. And so I just had the entire study room with tables and tables of comics laid out, which is funny. Cause it's my, my collection at the time was probably a quarter of the size of it is and the whole week, and I didn't get any organizing done cause I had student after student coming in and just asking me about it, conversations with students that I had never had before. And so that was sort of the start of it for me as a once, I sort of made this part of my self known students really responded to it. And from there it just became sort of my professional identity in a way that just created excitement for me and the work and, and, you know, created as I said before, it's an identity I can't pretend not to have, but it really allowed me access to not only to students in general, but to a group of students who quite frankly had not been engaged before.

Emily Sandoval:
Yeah. And I would add that intersection of identities it's been even evolving for me. And I think back to 2011 at our first Comicon and Alex, I don't know if you remember this. It was at the end of the panel and he had some students come up to us. I don't remember. I think they might've been high school students and they were just an awe sort of wait, you're geeks and your women and the awe their face. And I realized, you know, thinking back to 2011 where I was working at the time I was at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Polytechnic university, and even thinking before then when I was a resident, I remember hearing comments and there was one time I spent hours playing video games with my RAs. It was getting cute. And they're like, we just spent the past like two hours getting beat by our boss.

Speaker 3:
And she's a girl. I was like, woman, thank you very much at Cal Poly. It was interesting because they were just like, it's a Polytechnic university. Like by definition, I'm going to find a lot of geeks there. I did and did our first Geek Week there and it was wonderful, but they were just, I remember these young men talking to me, they're like, this is so cool. Like you understand what we're talking about, but you're so open about your passions and you're a woman. Well, yeah. And now, you know, in 2020, it's not weird anymore. At least in my circles that I run in and I've thought about how my office has evolved and where I am now. It's like every year I get a little more geek collectibles in my office. My office is geeked out now, you know? And I work at USC. No one's ever told me anything, but I mean, I have artwork. I have so many pop figures. It's not even funny. And it's, I don't even think about that anymore where people see me and now it's, Oh, I can easily talk to you and students come in in crisis or when they're coming to talk to you and it's not always the fun thing, but this is where my identity gets to cross over because we share a commonality, even though I may be 20 plus years older than the student

Glenn DeGuzman:
Alex, Brian, would you want to weigh in on that?

Alex Belisario:
Go ahead. Right. I know you've got stuff in your office too.

Brian MacDonald:
Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot, a lot to say on this particular question you know, 10 years ago and I should say too, that, you know, it's probably one of the professional highlights of my life, of these folks inviting me to participate in this group. And I Al I don't know if I should thank you or not that you were partially responsible for me going into my first Comicon in 2005. But you know,

Al Day:
Sorry for all that money you spent.

Brian MacDonald:
Yeah, yeah. For me, you know, a lot of my childhood and growing up in teenage years were very like fading in the back, not having community and sort of just trying to, to disappear in an effort to avoid screwing up or being embarrassed or any of those things. So for me, you know like just getting lost in science fiction and horror as a kid and having something that was an escape back then turn into such a powerful, not only community now, but something that I think we learned from quite a bit today probably talk later about horror and the pandemic, right.

Brian MacDonald:
It's very, very powerful it's redeeming, but it also comes with a lot of responsibility as we, you know, this call who I think have a history in fandom and geek culture, but also, you know, knowing the folks on here who have been advocating for social justice for so long to now sort of see those issues play out in fandom where I'm sure 10 years ago, maybe we would have hoped that fandom would have been a little less toxic. If you had told us 10 years ago, Hey, this thing's going to happen with these properties called game of Thrones and walking dead. And you know, it would've been hard to imagine back then. But as someone, I forget who to attribute this quote to, but everybody has seen Lord of the rings, but not everybody speaks Elvish. So there are still nerds out there. And for me a big part of the nerd geek equation is like community versus disconnection. Like I'm rewatching, freaks and geeks now, and it's sort of nostalgic and lighthearted and, you know, the, the, the nerds in the show have friends, but then you could watch Stephen King's Carry and you see the real, like outcast side of this in a really powerful way that I think is still relevant today.

Alex Belisario:
Brian, you, you mentioned that you've been going to Comicon since 2005, and I know you've been moderating panels on key culture, I think since 2012, but I think I've sat in the audience and heard you speak. And before this call, you commented on the power that emerges that, that relationship, that power, that in bridges, between fictional stories, characters on an individual, can you speak more to that?

Brian MacDonald:
Sure. And I know everybody on this call has characters who they turn to. You know, in tough times, I remember going through a pretty serious depression at the same time. I've, binge-watched a Firefly and then serenity. And I felt like I was a part of that crew. And it got me through some tough times. In this pandemic, you know, I think about Sigourney Weaver's character from the aliens franchise, Ellen Ripley, a lot as well as chief Brody from jaws in terms of like two people who are sounding the alarm bell of something that was really, really important that could save lives and no one listened. Right. and it's, I think it's worth noting too, that Ellen Ripley, that was one of the first Saifai horror characters, protagonists played by a woman. And I think it's just really important that we look at race, gender, and other identities.

Brian MacDonald:
And I think horror has actually pushed that in a long time. That's why it's a genre I returned to. Even when you look at the very popular all the characters that are in you know, Lovecraft country right now, and drawing, you know, history of George Romero's 1968 night of living dead, where he wasn't even conscious of the way he was altering the story by casting Dwayne Jones as Ben, he, he goes on record saying he just cast somebody who did the best job in acting, which is a really interesting meta analysis of, of George Romero. Right? But the fact that Ben gets after saving a bunch of white people's lives through that whole movie by a white sheriff, completely flipped that narrative and inspired stories. So I point to that, that character in that movie, as an example of, of such a powerful transcended moment in film, and that, you know, these characters for, especially a lot of fans out there who really invest in these characters, it really matters.

Brian MacDonald:
It matters in a very positive way. It also, you know, I, I'm not I miss the Harry Potter fandom, right. But you see the wrestling that folks are having with some of the J K Rowling's comments on trans folks and people reckoning with their fandom for for, for those comments, right? So these characters matter to people, they develop relationships, we've all cried when we've lost a character on screen. And I think it's because there is sort of a, there's a connection there that really matters to us.

Al Day:
And I just to bounce it off of that, I, I personally have never been a horror person until this new wave of, of horror is centered on black lives with get out and us. And most specifically Lovecraft Country that really speaking to the holder of the black experience in the United States has really, I don't know if it's made me a horror fan yet, but it's just really all of a sudden, the metaphor of horror makes sense to me in a way that it never did before, because like many other black people, I don't understand why people stay in the house.

Brian MacDonald:
Yeah. And I think on that note too, I mean, there's, I think there's value in looking at there's a censorship history in comics there's you could argue, I think a lot of us who grew up Gen X in the eighties were taught, rated R means it's bad or parental advisory on music means it's bad. But when you look back to these old horror movies or, you know, black Sabbath and other, other music that was sort of stifled, there was very positive social messaging in all of these platforms that were stifled under the guise of this is bad for kids. So I just think it's really, really good insights to that Al shared. With that show, it's really powerful.

Alex Belisario:
I think one of the other things we talked, we tend to talk about when we're all getting together is how thinking about geek or nerd identity can also go beyond that. So for me, like watching a lot of violence gives me nightmares and pictures in my head. So I tend to some of the perhaps less, less violent comics and things. So Phineas and Ferb I've been a long time of Perry. The Platypus is one of my superheroes. I tend to be a little bit shy. I'm not the biggest fan, always of public speaking. And the aliens and Toy Story also come up for me quite a bit. It's like the heroes that are behind the scenes. They're maybe not always in the front, but they're always trying to do good in, you know, in their way that they can and appreciating gifts and challenges.

Alex Belisario:
But one of the things we talked on at least once a year on our panels, it's like how these interests can be a gateway to finding the things that you're passionate about. So maybe it is watching get out and that inspires you to want to do more in the realm of social justice or to be out there. And maybe it's watching the X-Men and, you know, understanding how these folks with special powers who are misunderstood by society, find their community at a school together, you know, and the parallels for the kind of work that we do then just really flowing very nicely.

Alex Belisario:
Yeah. What are superhero narratives other than a story of using your privilege on behalf of others?

Glenn DeGuzman:
Right. Wow. So I'm gonna shift a little bit, Emily, you, you know, you're into you, you shared with me that you were into geek in the Sci-FI genre, but what was particularly interesting is that you also did your dissertation on geek culture in higher education engagement. What did your research during your dissertation journey tell you, especially around building community on college campuses, through geek culture.

Emily Sandoval:
Great question. Brian, I'm going to join you in blaming Al for this. Cause we were in a parking lot after our very first comic con panel 2011, and he looked at me like you- you're going to go get your dissertation. You're going to go back to school and write something on this. And I proud of Al for being back at school himself. So thank you to Al for planting that seed in my brain, but I was very grateful to find faculty members who took me seriously. So talking about geek identity culture, as it relates to sense of belonging connection on a college campus that's the focus of the study. And I probably enjoyed doing my research more than most people enjoy doing the research dissertation. I mean, you have to be passionate about it. But it's definitely a labor of love.

Emily Sandoval:
And I got to tell I was a qualitative study, which means I got to sit down with students and staff members at a university and talk about the importance of their identity as a geek and how they've been able to see that manifest throughout their college experience or just as an administrator. And it was wonderful conversations and approved it basically validated the why behind all of us doing our work in higher education, but specifically as geeks. So taking that old field of dreams, quote, if you build it, they will come. I say, if you provide them the space, they will come. So meaning a lot of the college campuses several campuses that I've worked at, and I don't know how it is that your respective schools, but sometimes it's like, okay about a program happened or programming event happened in one building that you'd only get the students from that one building there, others wouldn't ever come to that building well, until we hosted a magic, the gathering event, and we had people walk across campus, which is 20 minute walk from building to building to attend.

Emily Sandoval:
So I say, provide them the space, talk to students, find out what they're interested in and they will give, they will tell you what they think, you know, so creating spaces for Dungeons and dragons, having people actually make those connections, opening up your lounge spaces or your dining halls for just a board game night, people will show up. And that's why I say create the space and the students who were at universities that did that for them, meant the world to them because they felt seen and they felt heard, and they felt like they weren't alone, that there were other people who shared those interests, which also goes into representation. And I did my dissertation, my research in 2018. It's when I did most of my research. So just the representation for some of the students who identify as women the woman characters, there was one student who absolutely loved Carrie Fisher and fell in love with princess Leia.

Emily Sandoval:
I would also talk about the power of the character of Rey on a new generation of young kids. Aren't, we're seeing the force awakens. And I was like, where was Ray on my life? Although I did have Buffy. Buffy is where it starts from me. Buffy is my hero. But then going into, you know, black Panther and what that meant for our black African American students even into the Spiderverse which is my favorite Spiderman movie out there, the fact that there was an Afro Latino boy think Spiderman, like that was huge to see a cartoon movie where I was also hearing some Spanish, it was massive. So it's just understanding that for students. I mean, if it matters for us, it matters even more for students who are trying to find their footing on a college campus and the place where they belong and they feel most comfortable to be themselves. So that was what I discovered from that research. And since that research, I've had a book idea in my head for two years that I need to get off the ground. Cause I'm going to need contributing authors that is still in the works.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Alex, can you weigh in on that, especially around your insights on building community on college campuses. And I know that you've also been a big part of these social fiction conference, which has impacted many folks, including the folks on this panel. So you can speak a little bit to that.

Alex Belisario:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, going back to our earlier conversation around being able to share a part of ourselves then helps our students to be able to open up and share more of themselves. And one of the big activities that's happened at one of the colleges here is what's called the social fiction conference. And our residential staff created that back in 2009 and it was meant to give students and community members, because Al has come as well. Over the years, and Emily, the ability to look at social justice issues through the lens of Spotify gaming, manga, like any of the cool nerdy, geeky pursuits. So we have had cosplay, we've had escape rooms, we've had authors, we've had folks talking about climate change artificial intelligence, like, and, and our responsibility as consumers of that kind of media.

Alex Belisario:
And also as people who are going out into the world and hopefully creating positive change, like it's given us an opportunity to talk with students about that figure out what is of interest to them and then tailoring activities and programs that can help put it together. Right. So not telling anybody what to think or how they have to think. But have you thought about the fact that you, when you're consuming this video game, like, what is it saying about women or about people of color, about violence? Like, you know, having these conversations, we had this great debate in the last year, at the last social fiction conference about whether or not now I'm blanking on his name in the Avengers, the bad guy with the glove, like whether or not he was really bad. Right. What, what was he trying to do?

Alex Belisario:
Is he trying to save the universe by cutting the draw on the resources? Or is he just truly evil? Right. And so it was a really spirited debate that went on. And so that's really helped build community. I mentioned a little earlier that I do still play Pokemon, go and admit to it, even when people are like to pay stuff, do that. But you'll see groups of students when we can all be in person together who show up at different places across campus and they'll travel with each other and they come to know each other, Emily met some of them when she was up here, you know, they it starts with Pokemon go, but then it's like, Hey, are you in that class? Or, Hey, do you want to go eat something at the dining hall? And then there's community. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about the discord group is that particularly in the beginning, they were really good about making sure that if someone was coming, they were going to wait for that person. And if someone would jump into a raid early, they're like, well, good luck trying to solo for the rest of your life. Like you need to jump out and wait until everybody's here. And so that kind of stuff just really warms my heart. Like you, you can see how it is that they're trying to take care of each other and doing things in the best way that they can.

Emily Sandoval:
I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead. I'm not gonna lie. When I go up to UC Santa Cruz, one of my favorite things to do is play Pokemon, go with Alex and her staff and students. I look forward to that, but I will add that, you know, the social fiction conference. And then also just some of the students I interviewed in the lens of being a geek also allows us like Alex was saying to talk about openly, like, yeah, I may be a huge fan of Buffy, the vampire Slayer, absolutely adore. Like that is my top, one of my, one of my top fandoms. But you can also look at it at a critical eye and say who's missing and who's not there. And I think having those conversations also brings some real fruitful discussions about race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality that most geeks aren't, don't shy away from having, we've been having these conversations in our fandom for years.

Al Day:
It's, it's actually one of the hallmarks of fandom is the ability to engage in these conversations critically. It's one of the things I like about fandom is there's, there's no topic of any sort of scifi comics or, or any type of fan of that you can't argue about, but there's such a model built within fandom to have disagreement with sort of a level of civility. I'm going to sell anybody who's listening to this podcast or, or participating in this on why this shit matter to you is my, my, when we, when we all started presenting together, I was in res life. And now I'm out of Reslife. And I don't have one of the great things about being in ResLife. You have a lot of positive interaction with students. And so for me over the last couple of years, as I haven't had that, that positive sort of directly positive, my job now is a lot with students in crisis is I found so much joy in going into these spaces and talking to these things.

Glenn DeGuzman:
And if you're looking for a way to have a complex or complicated conversation with students using the lens of popular culture is an incredible way to get it done. When we, when we, when Wonder Woman came out and especially when Black Panther came out, because I'm the comic book guy on campus, I was involved in a lot of conversations and presentations about these. And I cannot tell you how much a joy I got out of my work with students with having these conversations, particularly with black Panther and particularly lately with, with with the unfortunate passing away of Chadwick Bozeman, that if you are looking for an opportunity to have students engage with, with critical thinking and also do it in a joyful way, this is it, the conversation you're talking about Alex with Thanos. So many of our conversations around Black Panther were around

Speaker 3:
Was Killmonger wrong though, because I kind of don't necessarily disagree with it.

Glenn DeGuzman:
And the ability to really jump into a space with students where they bring their joy and their, like you talked about right at Emily, like my experience was, Oh, okay. So we're going to have a presentation about SVSH issues. So everybody, we were gonna bring pizza and really talk about difficult things. But if you then say, okay, let's go through and find some pop culture, examples of the things we want to talk about with SPSH issues and bring it within the context of, Hey, that thing that happened Spike and Buffy, that wasn't cool, right? When you really look at it, let's, let's really dig into it. You'd be amazed. The people that show up that would never otherwise show up and the joy and complexity they bring to that conversation, I get joy. And then the other piece I'll talk about is not only for your students, I personally get joy out of every time. I'm able to interact with this group when we're presenting a Comicon. When we just talk to each other, because it isn't a passion of mine. And I don't care if we share the exact same passion, the thing I'm responding to is that you are passionate about a thing. And I just get so much joy and folks who are looking for ways to bring this to their campus in a way that students are going to leave feeling that their time was valued and that it was worthwhile for them. This, this is the secret sauce.

Emily Sandoval:
Yeah. And I'm going to add, even during the pandemic, it has been very unique. I mean, you all know, video game consults were like sold out the first couple of months when the pandemic hit, because that was a one way to stay connected. Cause people, zoom, fatigue is real and we're all tired of zoom. Students don't even love using zoom that much, but talking with their friends via online video game, playing, like that's been huge even to the point where during the summer, as a staff engagement, there was staff members who hosted an animal crossing like half hour, like let's visit each other's islands. And I tried really hard not to buy that. And I did, it's like just a to do list. I always have a fun to do list for like, Oh no, this is not good for my personality. So I've been trying to balance it out and get on my Mario cKrt, my smash brothers,

Al Day:
But it's a way that to connect like right now. And Glen you're, you're the center of this, our students that did come back to campus had to be by themselves in their rooms for the first two weeks. And we were trying to figure out how can we make that? How can we build community in that space when it's, we, I don't think anybody who's listening to this knows that is not the ideal way to introduce students to your campus community and figuring out ways to connect them and get them to know each other, this it's, these, these are the methods that are available to you. Not only, but also students are gonna block stuff.

Glenn DeGuzman:
So we're in this pandemic environment. How are you seeing students, staff, faculty connecting to pop culture in this environment? I mean, obviously everyone's going online. Are you seeing positive impact, negative impact? What are you seeing, in your conversations with others,

Emily Sandoval:
I'm seeing positive impacts in terms of, as I mentioned, like a video game playing, but their sense of community still out there. I don't know how we got so lucky, but like Netflix has released a lot of good content as well, but we could have a whole panel on just the umbrella Academy, season two and everything that happened in that season.

Emily Sandoval:
But there's been showed like Lovecraft country where you could binge them right now or watch them episodically, Watchmen exactly where people are coming together and then I'm looking on Netflix. Cause I have, you know, Netflix knows you like a certain type of genre. So I was like, Oh, I'll check this out and make sure it's like another chosen one, but it's still fun. So I think that's how we're seeing community around shows, video games, comic books, the media that's still being produced is still serving as a catalyst for people to come together in conversation around community and also with a critical eye and to talk about everything going on with the parallels of what's happening in the world with dependent the racial pandemic and what we're seeing in our pop culture media as well.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Interesting. I know that, you know, as a Alex, you're full disclosure, I to play Pokemon go, I'm a level 39, I'm getting up there. And I know that even with Pokemon go, they've shifted to sort of a, you know, a physical district social distancing format. And I find that very interesting because even when I'm on campus and I'm still, you know, walking between spaces or whatnot, I'm playing, I can see folks there they're playing, you know? And so, you know, there's this desire to continue to, to connect with their their, their chosen activity or the things that they're really connected and passionate to. So sort of powerful. I want to shift a little bit here and ask you if a student affairs practitioner or really anyone in education wants to explore this connection, connection, particularly around identity, belonging and community development, what type of advice would you give them? Because obviously there's been a lot of great points. But what advice would you give them to just begin their journey to connecting it?

Alex Belisario:
I think starting with the gateway, like if, if they know if they don't know and want suggestions, like Emily said, I think people, each of us right, would be very happy to give people suggestions and they would be completely different. There's a little bit of overlap, but I think there's lots of ways to, to get involved. So to figure out, you know, just try a little bit of this and that, like for me, I watched an episode of game of Thrones. Cause some friends were like, it's not that violent. The violence has a purpose. I know I watched half a minute and I was texting him going, are you kidding me? This person got beheaded in the first half minute. And so that wasn't speaking to me. And so it's fine. I, you know, I, I went through a whole season just to see and then realized that that wasn't it for me. But you know, Buffy the vampire Slayer absolutely. In there. A lot of the Disney animation is very fun and engaging for me. And so, you know, I have lots of staff members who are talking about Korean soap operas. That seems to be speaking to them at the moment. So figuring out what that gateway is, and then figuring out who is doing that,

Alex Belisario:
Who else is interested in it and building the community around that. And then as Emily said, right, you get other suggestions that are, are speaking to you. Cause that's in your algorithm. The more people that you can connect with who have a similar interest will have other interests and so on and so on. And so then you're in,

Emily Sandoval:
and what's unique is some of our gateways are still very relevant. So as a child, like when I say what made me a geek, it was star Wars, the original trilogy and Shira, and then mobile back, which was nothing like my 90, 85 shooter, but it was so much better. And it was so amazing and so well done when you talk about representation. So it is trying to find out if people say, well, I geek out about rappin' musicals. You know, I got about books. I was an English literature major. So like what makes you really excited? And then let's talk about that. And you could get someone talking about something they're excited about for another 30 minutes and they start asking questions that help them even think critically about why they connect.

Al Day:
Yeah. I mean, I think the key is really that internal excitement about a thing. One of the things we talk about a lot when we're presenting is, and this is, it goes to Brian's point earlier about toxic fandom. You know, here's a, here's a way to engage in it in a really sort of positive way is when you're sharing the thing you're passionate about, do it in a way that's bringing people into the circle instead of ex excising people from the circle, I'm a comic book fan. And I once had somebody come to me and say, Oh, I like Batman too. I've seen all the movies. Now my initial impulse was to be like, well, you haven't read the comic books. You're not, you're not a comic book fan. And a lot of fandom has that reaction where it's sort of like, you have to prove to someone that you're a fan of a thing.

Al Day:
And what we ask people to do is flip it. If you have something you enjoy, don't try to judge whether someone is a fan of someone says, Oh, I'm a big Batman fan from the movies. You're great. I love those movies too. Let me loan you a comic book. Cause you're PR if you love the movies, you'll probably love that. Or to Alex's point. I don't really like horror to not be like, Oh no, no, you're dumb for not liking horror, right? That is not a way to bring people into a circle. And that's the beginning of toxic fandom, which I think we all can agree is a terrible, terrible thing, but whatever you love, whatever you have passionate about. And I think everybody on this call knows, and I, what I have found is most people I've interacted with in the world have a thing that they're really into.

Al Day:
And Brian and I have talked about how a lot of us learned to push it down, but a thing that you love that you could talk about until the sun goes out, that's your thing, embrace it. And let other people know that you're into it. And if you get sort of some flack for it, those are toxic people that you don't really want to engage with. But I guarantee you, if you're in student affairs and you're interacting with students, there's a student out there who sees that. And there's a student out there who is going to be like, like Alex and Emily talked about, which I remember that moment at our first Comicon presentation. And I was just floored of women coming up to them and being like, Oh my God, you're geeks. But you're, and I think they said girls and just for them, and to see the two of you to me, I was like, if we never do another panel in our lives, that's why we're doing this.

Al Day:
I mean, I get, you all know me, I get super stoked about this. And this brings me a great deal of joy. But at the basis of its joy is so many people have repressed this part of themselves. And there's so much joy and satisfaction in it for them. That part of, I think what we collectively are trying to do is give you, give people the space to be open and say, Hey, you know what, no, I'm geeky about this. And like, I don't care if it's Harlequin romance books. I don't, whatever it is, just, you know, that's your thing. Talk about it, be it. And you'll find community somebody somewhere I grew up where I didn't know any other kids that, that like comics and that was a really lonely existence. So to find particularly black kids. So to find that community is so, so critical,

Glenn DeGuzman:
You know, I'm out. It's interesting because, Oh, go ahead, Brian.

New Speaker:

Brian MacDonald:
Stay on that thread. I can jump in after. Go ahead.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Well, I was going to comment on similar to many of you Al has been integral in getting me connected to this culture and really kind of exploring it. I know he took me to my first Comicon about eight, nine years ago, and it's now kind of rolled into my family. So my family role is to come upon and they've, they, you know, when I said, do you want to go to Disneyland and Comicon? They look at me funny, like Disneyland, no we're going to comic con, but I think in part because of the diversity of areas and topics and interests, because even today, when, you know now, obviously not this past year, but in the past when we go to comic con as a family, I don't see my family at comic con because we're all going to different things.

Glenn DeGuzman:
I'm really into Asian inspired anime, my kids, my daughter's in the art and the illustration section. And my son is really into Manga and gaming. And so it is a really fascinating thing when you speak about fandom and the different areas and subjects. So yeah, I want wanna I want to kind of turn Brian, you want it to weigh in on something, or did you, was there a topic or thought that you had?

Brian MacDonald:
Only that in addition to what everybody else said, I think you know, we've lightly touched on this, but unpacking like villains, I think is really important in a lot of these stories, both in terms of you know villains who weren't necessarily like people who have been villainized over time. So sort of unintentional villains that maybe some of us actually relate to from earlier stories. As well as like unpacking the negative experiences, you know led down, led folks down a certain path. I mean, we've mentioned Thanos, you've mentioned Killmonger. Those are all very relevant, but I think, you know right now there are some scary, like for me, climate change is as scary as Galactus. Like that's a real thing or like censorship, some of the things that we're seeing that we're now being told, like, if you want a federal grant, don't talk about critical race theory. Like these are real superhero moments that I think in addition to supporting our students, I think those of us who are, you know, for me, like 42 years old, like in more leadership decisions now that I I'm like, why does anyone trust me with this decision? I shouldn't be affecting lots of people's lives. I think that's something that many of us go through. And for those of us on this call, kind of remember a time where we worked these things out, these like these crazy disagreements within fandoms in person, but there's like these super powers that all of us have with access to the internet and phones and pushing that button is probably a power.

Brian MacDonald:
Many of us couldn't have, like, I can communicate my thoughts to the whole planet. What and I think we're reckoning with those now too. And where are the stories that can help us get through data privacy deep fakes all these sorts of things that are going to be affecting us for a very long time,

Al Day:
The rise of fascism, super villains and the presidency. I mean, I read those books in the nineties.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm looking at time, we're running out of time. Y'all and so what I want to do is I want to kind of wrap this up and give you all about 30 to 60 seconds. If you were to meet up with this question, if you were to meet up with a student affairs professional, or an educator really and wanted them to geek out and nerd out with you on something specifically that that's meaningful to you, what would you invite them to join you in your adventure? And let's go ahead and start with Emily put you on the spot here.

Emily Sandoval:
I would invite them to binge watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with me and, but both read the comic books. I'm actually just finishing the comic books that are tied to Joss Whedon, but just to talk about, you know, having that character in 1997, when it came out, yes, the movie was before that, I'm not going to talk to Sarah, Michelle Gellar, both of them Slayer and kind of what that meant. Like for me, I was a year older than the actual character of Buffy, which is why I connected so much with her, but the, the villains she fought and the metaphors that was to high school life to real life. And just the learning that could come from that as well as also taking a critical eye. I was actually not a spike mucky band, very much to what Al had mentioned before. Cause people look over that relationship violence aspect of it, but it's, there's so many important lessons that equate not just to high school students, but to college students as well. So I Geek out over Buffy

Alex Belisario:
I have so many things, but right now Lovecraft Country, Lovecraft Country did not come to play with you and your little friends. Okay. Love country is putting out some stuff that my whole life as a 51 year old black man, I would think nobody is, nobody's going to say this out loud about sort of taking the, one of the core texts of, of horror and Saifai fandom that everybody talks about and really sort of being like y'all know that's racist, right? Like, and really like not even doing it in phrases of analogy, but just blatantly being like, we're going to show you the racism inherent in this. The sci-fi tells you have love. We're going to show you the real experience of real life terror, that black people experience in the fifties and today. And, and we are not gonna play with this, this narrative. And we're also not going to have heroes that are pure good that never do anything bad. Some of the heroes in this shoe do awful irredeemable actions and it's complicated. There was an episode where at the end something, I don't want to spoil anything, but something really awful happened that I didn't know if I could come back for the next episode. Lovecraft Country did not come to play with you, your low friends or slim around the corner. Lovecraft Country is insanely good.

Brian MacDonald:
What's my budget, Glenn? I would say, you know, one of the, like I, despite like, you know, being public comfortable, public speaking and, you know, being tall and all that, like, I, I really tried hard not to stand out as a kid. And so while I've been able to like hack my brain to do certain things that make me look extroverted, I I'm still quite introverted. And there's certain things that still like will make me implode if I think about them. And one of them is like dance performance, all those things. However you know, I would say if you're now at, if you've now achieved some level of your life where you can invest in your fandom, you know, I invested in cosplay and I have a predator cosplay from the 1987 movie of the same name created by Stan Winston. And when I put that like mask and everything on, like, I can do things that I can't do when I'm just like this in a crowd. And so I would take somebody, I would find out what their fandom is and then I would immerse them in cosplay and provide them the joy of what happens when you walk through a big crowd, a hundred people want to take

Brian MacDonald:
Pictures with you and you can, you can correct things in fandom with cosplay. Probably one of my favorite things similar to what I was talking about with some of the course correction of HP Lovecraft stories is that people course correct things with cosplay and fandom that I think is really powerful. So that's what I would do. Thanks,

Glenn DeGuzman:
Brian, I've seen you in that Predator outfit and it's amazing Alex, take us home.

Alex Belisario:
It is amazing. And I just want to say to Al that I think that that notion of not all heroes are always good and perfect and not all villains are always bad is so important, particularly as we're going into this political time. I think that people are so ready to either hate someone or love someone and, and we're all flawed, right. Gifts and challenges, but that's so important. But what I have been into for the last several months is the Mandalorian. It it's a long, the Star Wars genre, but also my nieces and nephews love it and they can watch it. And so it's like getting a whole new generation and to Star Wars in a way that, because we're all at home, like we could be watching it at the same time. Even if we're not in the same place, I know I have a little baby Yoda as well.

Alex Belisario:
So I think that that is one of the things that really speaks to me. And again, this notion that some of the most powerful superheroes don't have to be real big, they can be real small and real quiet and it still has a giant impact. And then the other thing I would say in terms of being distant from each other, Emily and I participate with a group of people who play zoom trivia once a week, and that's modeled off of a pub that used to exist here and sadly went out of business during the pandemic. But it helps us to take all those genres and put it in there and test our, our knowledge with each other all in. Good fun.

Glenn DeGuzman:
That's incredible. That's pretty cool. So I'm looking at time, we've run out of time. I want to thank this panel, all of you for your time and just helping with this episode on Student Affairs Now if anyone in the audience wants to connect with any of the panelists, their contact information, their Twitter is on student affairs now.com. You can also receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to student affairs now, newsletter, which you can find on our website. We just launched. So I'm really excited about this. Please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share this on social, leave a five star review. It really helps conversation like this, reach more folks and build community so we can continue to make this free for everyone. If you have any topics that you want me to personally explore, please reach out. You can find my information as well on the website. Again, my name is Glenn Guzman. Thanks again to everyone on this panel. And I want to thank everyone also for watching and listening. Be safe, be well, take care.

When you collapse an accordion item and save, it will automatically display collapsed in front end

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Geeking Out in Higher Education - Student Affairs NOW

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Glenn DeGuzman:Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now I'm your host, Glenn DeGuzman coming to you from Livermore, California, the ancestral homelands of the Ohlone people. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside and or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

# data[].attributes.body
A stubborn strength propelled alumnus Dr. Ramon Resa, who went from working in the fields by the age of 3 to successful pediatrician with a practice in the Central Valley.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Five days a week, Dr. Ramon Resa climbs into his 2016 Ford pickup and drives the curving 16-mile route from his home to his pediatric practice in the town of Porterville, Calif. He drives past the River Island Country Club, the Old Success Quarry, and a sprawl of orange groves where fieldworkers cut sweet fruit from prickly branches.

The drive is only about 20 minutes long, but the memories it brings are decades old: Resa as a second-grader picking oranges from a shaky ladder in the very orchards he is passing. Resa riding in old Chevys that broke down as often as they ran. Resa living in a three-bedroom house with 14 siblings, some days having only rice and beans to eat.

"I think, wow, that's what I was doing," says Resa, 65, of his thoughts during his commute, "and now here I am going to the office I bought and the practice I started and then, at night, I can go home to my house with air conditioning and, if it's hot, I can jump in the pool."

As he talks, Resa's voice fills with the kind of awe that makes it seem as if even he doesn't believe his success. But talk to those who know the man who, at the age of 3, was helping pick cotton, and they'll tell you that despite poverty, racism, and self-doubt, Resa had a kind of stubborn strength that made him never forget his vow to pull himself out of the fields and to give his own children a better life.

Something to prove

Today, Resa (Crown '76, biology) is a successful pediatrician and motivational speaker. His two children have graduated from college. His daughter, Marina (College Nine '03, theater arts), is an actress and family- and pet-grief therapist. His son, Josh, is board-certified in pediatrics and has a fellowship in pediatric oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. A documentary film about Resa titled Ramon Rising is expected to be released this fall.

"I wanted to prove something to people," Resa says of his life, "and that is, if we are given the opportunity to have equal footing, we can succeed."

Resa was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to a single mom with four other children. For reasons he still doesn't know, Resa's mother gave away two of her children to neighbors and then left the young Ramon and his two older brothers in the Central Valley town of Goshen with the woman they called grandmother and her husband.

Life in this new household was precarious for the boy. Money was scarce and love was even scarcer. The tiny house pulsed with people, and life centered around survival, which meant everyone had to work in the fields.

"If I could stand, I was picking," says Resa. "My family had no concerns. I was picking cotton at the age of 3 and driving a truck at 10. They had no concern about us falling into ditches, climbing up ladders, or getting stung by wasps and bitten by black widows (while picking grapes). You were just there to help support the family."

School wasn't much better for the quiet boy. Resa, who stuttered, believed all his classmates, especially the Anglo kids, were smarter than he was and barely said a word. Then, one day, his second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lambers, knelt in front of the boy.

"I was just a dirty little Mexican kid who smelled and didn't shower because we didn't have hot running water, and she told me I should go to college," Resa remembers.

That single statement changed his life.

"Sometimes people just say the right thing at the right time," he says.

A new realization

But Resa's goal to escape poverty didn't come easily. His high school counselor told him he "wasn't smart enough" for college-prep classes and should take woodshop instead, and when Resa attempted to get out of the fields by applying for a summer job at a chain department store he was told there were no openings. A few days later, however, several Anglo classmates got jobs there.

Resa also suffered from bouts of depression and had to listen to his abuela tell him that since she'd taken him in, he owed it to her to get a job after high school to help support the family instead of going to college. On the day of his SAT test, she went off to visit a relative and was so late returning to drive him to the exam, he barely slipped inside before the doors were locked. Resa was so shaken, he says, he had to retake the test.

"They had no knowledge of what I was trying to do," Resa says of his guardians. "What I was doing was beyond the realm of understanding. No one had done it before. No one understood what it meant."

Then, one day, two men showed up at Resa's high school. One was older with what Resa described as "Albert Einstein hair," and the other was younger and familiar-looking. The older man was Roberto Rubalcava, who was then director of Educational Opportunity Programs (EOP) at UC Santa Cruz, and the younger man was Noe Lozano (Porter '74, psychology), a student on campus who was studying psychology and had gone to Resa's high school. They'd come to recruit promising underrepresented students to the nascent campus, promising to help them fill out applications and apply for financial aid.

It was, says Resa, the first time he realized he could go to a four-year university rather than the local junior college. A visit to the wooded UC Santa Cruz campus made him feel like he had arrived in a wonderland of forest, all-you-could-eat food, and new possibilities.

"I just remember him (Resa) being at Crown and he was exchanging his sheets, and he was excited because he never had any sheets before," recalls his wife of 43 years, Debbie Resa (Porter '76, art and biology). "He always only slept on a mattress with a blanket."

Stubborn strength

Resa had to adjust to having a checking account and to attending classes like organic chemistry that covered familiar topics for many students but, for Resa, who hadn't taken chemistry in high school, were as alien as if they were being conducted in ancient Greek. His future wife encouraged him, but self-doubt crept in.

Still, Debbie Resa says, her husband, who was also a quick learner, had a stubborn strength that kept him going.

"It's because for most of my life I've been told I'll never succeed and that I shouldn't bother trying to achieve goals that are beyond my reach," writes Resa in his 2011 memoir, Out of the Fields: My Journey from Farmworker Boy to Pediatrician. "I have a chip on my shoulder from being told over and over that I'm not qualified. I'm determined to prove wrong everyone who ever told me that."

Ernie Moreno (Crown '76, politics), who was Resa's high school friend and college roommate and who would go on to earn a law degree and own his own recruiting company, NextLevel Executive Search, remembers those early years on campus: The excitement of two farmworker kids having their own beds, the lack of Latino role models in professions like law and medicine, and the growth of pride in their heritage as they joined MEChA de UCSC (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) and marched in support of Cesar Chavez and fieldworker rights.

"The EOP office (on campus) went out of its way to make sure we felt like we (he and Resa) belonged," Moreno says. "The idea was that if you give smart, poor kids good teachers, they will excel."

Willingness not to give up

When Resa was accepted to UC Irvine's School of Medicine, he felt like he'd finally arrived.

But, according to him, hopes of being treated as an equal quickly evaporated. The U.S. Supreme Court had just decided the Bakke case, which upheld affirmative action and allowed race to be one of the factors in college admission decisions. At Irvine, Resa says, he overheard Anglo students saying the only reason he was at the college was because of the Bakke decision and, once, a white doctor at the student health center accused Resa of taking a medical-school spot that, he said, should have gone to his son.

For Resa, it was like carrying an extra weight on top of the workload that was a doctor-in-the-making's life. Sometimes he felt like quitting, he says, but his pledge that his children would never have to live in poverty like he did drove him forward.
He opened his pediatric practice in 1985, treating not only the children of teachers and lawyers but also of those who worked in the orchards, vineyards, and fields.

"What qualities got Ramon from where he was to where he is today?" says Jesse Gift, producer and director of Ramon Rising. "If you ask him, he'll tell you he was just lucky, that his second-grade teacher got him started on the idea of college and his fourth-grade teacher put him in the front row instead of where the Mexican kids sat in the back and told him he could do better. But I think it was his willingness not to give up."

Moreno, who says Resa never really talked about his chaotic home life, says there was just something in Resa's "innards" that drove him to succeed and that when poor, smart kids like he and Resa are given opportunities, they will shine.

Resa sidesteps the question of what set him apart from others in his household, why he was the one who wanted to go to college. But, ask him what he would say to his younger self and he pauses.

"I would say that I should understand that what was going on around me was not my fault. In any other environment, I would have been a totally different person," he says. "I would say the depression and the shame were brought on by the fact I thought I was going to be a farmworker and that's what we were told we were going to be. I would tell myself, you are an intelligent person, and you're going to accomplish a lot when you grow up."

For more information on the Ramon Rising documentary, visit RamonRising.film.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Five days a week, Dr. Ramon Resa climbs into his 2016 Ford pickup and drives the curving 16-mile route from his home to his pediatric practice in the town of Porterville, Calif. He drives past the River Island Country Club, the Old Success Quarry, and a sprawl of orange groves where fieldworkers cut sweet fruit from prickly branches.

# data[].attributes.body
Introductory physics students test their knowledge and get exposure to the wider world in a class project in which they create musical instruments to be donated to kids in need.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When it came time to complete her Physics 6B final project, UC Santa Cruz student Asia Stautz turned to an unlikely set of tools.

"I used a band saw, metal files, a nail gun, and wood glue," said the Crown College human biology major, showing off the end result: a cool-looking, handmade ukulele crafted out of recycled wood.

The instrument was a test of Stautz's knowledge of standing sound waves and musical acoustics, and had to be capable of playing a simple tune. But it also was a lesson in giving. The instrument-part of a class project designed by lecturer Stephanie Bailey-will later be donated to a small school in an outlying province in the Philippines.

The project, said Bailey from her office on Science Hill, was a way not only to test what her 250 introductory physics students-most of them life science majors-have learned, but also to expose them to the larger world.

"An objective of mine has been to incorporate service learning where you can take advantage or piggyback on the learning goals of the classroom and combine community service in a way that both enhances the educational experience of the students and also brings benefit to the community," Bailey said.

For Stautz, who hopes to become an obstetrician, the project meant long hours of planning and ingenuity. Without tools or materials, she talked her way into the campus woodshop, promising volunteer sweeping and cleanup hours in exchange for a chance to raid the scrap bin and use the shop's tools.

For Rachel Barocio, a Rachel Carson College molecular, cell and developmental biology major who plans to go on to graduate school, a discarded piece of PVC pipe was turned into a bronze-painted flute. It was, she said, an opportunity to use her artistic side.

"I enjoyed it (the project) because I consider myself a creative person, and, in sciences, there often can be a lack of creativity," she said.

According to Bailey, there has been no lack of creativity and sophistication in her students' designs, which range from a thumb piano to James Egan's drum/xylophone made out of PVC pipe.

A computer science major from Rachel Carson College, Egan said his inspiration came from a video posted by the famed Blue Man Group and that he learned more than just physics from his project.

"I learned it's good to start early and to prototype and plan," Egan said. "Then there's the 'measure twice and cut once' lesson and, one step beyond that, to glue once." He grinned.

Tatjana Beck, an ecology and evolution major at Rachel Carson College, found trial and error and a table saw to be important parts of her project. Testing materials like copper, aluminum, and PVC pipe, she finally settled on bamboo to create a vertical xylophone and then had to experiment with the wood's range of thick and thin to come up with something that could actually play a tune.

The fact the instruments have to be functional is important, not only for grades, but also for about 60 preschool through sixth-grade students at the Prestige Montessori School in Maasin City in Southern Leyte in the Philippines who will be receiving the finished products.

"The kids will love them," said UC Santa Cruz Physics Professor David Belanger who, along with his wife, Melca Belanger, built and now support the small private school.

Many of the schools in the area can't even afford books, according to Belanger. So the gift of musical instruments, along with knowing that they came from university students, will be a treat for the children, he said.

"I think we're all in positions to help others and make a difference," Bailey said. "I have this greater goal that I would like my students to leave the world a better place than they found it."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When it came time to complete her Physics 6B final project, UC Santa Cruz student Asia Stautz turned to an unlikely set of tools. "I used a band saw, metal files, a nail gun, and wood glue," said the Crown College human biology major, showing off the end result: a cool-looking, handmade ukulele crafted out of recycled wood.

# data[].attributes.headline
Shea-Stonum (Crown ‘69, history) has a vision for Crown’s future. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Shea-Stonum (Crown ‘69, history) has a vision for Crown’s future. 

# data[].attributes.body
When an alumna recounts her special memories from Crown College, it becomes easy to join the effort by Crown alumni to double the college’s endowment by 2021.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When an alumna recounts her special memories from Crown College, it becomes easy to join the effort by Crown alumni to double the college’s endowment by 2021

# data[].attributes.headline
Manel Camps appointed faculty director of UCSC Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development

# data[].attributes.subject
Manel Camps appointed faculty director of UCSC Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manel Camps appointed faculty director of UCSC Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UCSC has appointed Manel Camps, professor of microbiology and environmental toxicology and provost of Crown College, to serve as the director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development.

# data[].attributes.body
Dana Byrne is the kind of person who likes to get answers. So it was a natural fit for her to gravitate to chemistry as a field of study.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dana Byrne is the kind of person who likes to get answers. So it was a natural fit for her to gravitate to chemistry as a field of study.

"I'm a curious person," she said. "I've always asked questions, and I want to know why things work the way they do."

The 21-year-old from San Jose has distinguished herself by making the Dean's List for numerous quarters and maintaining an impressive 3.9 GPA. But she explains that she has good grades because she is an extremely hard worker in her classes.

"I'm glad I'm being rewarded for it here," she said.

Science has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. Both her parents are engineers and she comes from a big family of scientists on her mother's side.

At UC Santa Cruz, she has been fortunate to work in chemistry faculty member Yat Li's lab on a research project developing 3D-printed nanomaterials for energy storage devices. Byrne explained that her work consists of the synthesis, 3D printing, and testing of carbon-based electrodes for supercapacitors, known for their high-power density but typically lacking the long-term compact energy storage that can be provided by batteries. She is one of the few undergraduates who has been able to do this kind of work.

"I have certainly developed a very high regard for Dana's outstanding contributions to the lab research and her great potential as a scientist and teacher," Li said.

Byrne said she did the "dirty work" of testing and calculation while the graduate students in the lab did their own lab work. But she said she learned a lot.

"The experience is totally invaluable-way better than I could have asked for," Byrne said.

Byrne plans to pursue graduate study in chemistry at UC Berkeley this fall with the goal of earning a Ph.D. in five years. She is interested in optimizing materials to produce better technology and ultimately aims to work for a tech company.

While she loves the Bay Area and would prefer to remain, she anticipates that that may be difficult because the area is so expensive. She thinks she may end up some day in Seattle or Texas to join booming tech companies there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dana Byrne is the kind of person who likes to get answers. So it was a natural fit for her to gravitate to chemistry as a field of study. "I'm a curious person," she said. "I've always asked questions, and I want to know why things work the way they do."

# data[].attributes.headline
Outstanding Leadership in College Housing

# data[].attributes.subject
Outstanding Leadership in College Housing

# data[].attributes.body
Alex Belisario, senior director for college student life at Crown and Merrill colleges, has been honored with the Charles L. Miller Leadership and Service Award from the Western Association of College and University Housing Officers (WACUHO).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alex Belisario, senior director for college student life at Crown and Merrill colleges, has been honored with the Charles L. Miller Leadership and Service Award from the Western Association of College and University Housing Officers (WACUHO).

The award recognizes a current member of the association who has made significant contributions to WACUHO through their dedicated service and outstanding leadership.

"I'm honored to have been chosen for this award by an organization close to my heart," Belisario said. "WACUHO has been my professional home organization for over two decades, and I value working with a group committed to furthering the field of student housing."

In accepting her award, Belisario said, "I strive to be both kind and useful in my work, and I have found countless opportunities to do this as a part of WACUHO."

Belisario has held a number of positions on the WACUHO executive committee including newsletter editor, president elect, and president. She's been the historian for nearly a decade.

Together with a group of WACUHO colleagues, Belisario is a founding member of geekEd., a group of educational professionals who explore experiences of and issues related to students who identify as "geeks." The group has been presenting at various conferences since 2011, including San Diego Comic-Con International.

The Western Association of College and University Housing Officers is a professional organization dedicated to exceptional collegiate residential experiences by promoting meaningful connections and providing innovative, relevant professional development and services to its members.

Charles L. Miller was the 30th president of the association and exemplified the highest level of dedication to the profession, provided outstanding leadership and role modeling for seasoned veterans and new professionals alike.

"Alex's reputation as a strong leader and practitioner has brought many candidates for employment to UC Santa Cruz, many of whom were hired into career positions," said Sue Matthews, associate vice chancellor for Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services. "Her leadership on the campus with her staff and with her students, in particular, has been transformative."

Belisario has been with UC Santa Cruz since 1995, when she was hired as an area coordinator (now known as a coordinator for residential education or CRE) at Crown College. She went on to serve as a college programs coordinator and associate college administrative officer. She was appointed the college administrative officer for Crown and Merrill Colleges in 2004 and now holds the title of senior director, college student life for Crown and Merrill colleges.

Belisario has served the campus by helping to develop and implement campus conduct dabases. She is also working with the group that has created the campus's first online diversity and inclusion introduction, which will be launching for the incoming fall class.

"I came to UC Santa Cruz because I love the college system. The support and homebase it offers students is unique and not offered at most institutions," she said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Staff member honored for outstanding leadership in college housing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alex Belisario, senior director for college student life at Crown and Merrill colleges, has been honored with the Charles L. Miller Leadership and Service Award from the Western Association of College and University Housing Officers (WACUHO). The award recognizes a current member of the association who has made significant contributions to WACUHO through their dedicated service and outstanding leadership.

# data[].attributes.body
Julie Packard helped found the Monterey Bay Aquarium and has served as the aquarium's executive director since it opened in 1984.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Julie Packard helped found the Monterey Bay Aquarium and has served as the aquarium's executive director since it opened in 1984.

Based on a lifelong passion for science and nature, she has led the aquarium to become a global force for ocean conservation. She chairs the board of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, a global leader in deep ocean science and technology, and she is deeply engaged in ocean conservation strategies through her work as a trustee of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She served as a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, which published a blueprint for improving governance of America's ocean waters, and more recently served on the California Parks Forward Commission to develop a sustainable path for California's state parks.

Packard was the 1998 recipient of the Audubon Medal for Conservation. In 2009, she was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation's most prestigious honor society, and was named a California Coastal Hero. In 2010, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in recognition of her "tireless career commitment to marine conservation."

Says Packard, "I am hugely grateful for the opportunities UC Santa Cruz gave me as an undergraduate to spend time with top research scientists and be able to do science, not just hear about it."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Julie Packard helped found the Monterey Bay Aquarium and has served as the aquarium's executive director since it opened in 1984. Based on a lifelong passion for science and nature, she has led the aquarium to become a global force for ocean conservation.

# data[].attributes.body
Mark begins his narrative with the time he arrived on campus at UC Santa Cruz, and enrolled in Crown College with a plan to major in science. “I started at Crown as a chemistry major,” he says; "then something happened..."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This profile is the sixth in our series Beyond the Forest, which examines the lives and careers of UC Santa Cruz grads who have found their own paths using the humanities as their foundation.
On a sunny afternoon the view is impressive from the 19th floor of the Ordway Building at 1 Kaiser Plaza in Oakland CA - whether looking South over shimmering Lake Merritt, East to the brown Oakland hills dotted with homes, or West towards the blue San Francisco Bay, reflecting the sunlight.

A more interesting view may be found inside the headquarters of Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest nonprofit managed care organization, where the walls are lined with black and white photographs - not of hospitals, but of shipyards, including those in nearby Richmond, CA, where the Kaiser shipbuilding company built 747 transport ships during World War II. These were the Liberty Ships that carried vast numbers of troops and supplies to Asia and Europe. In these shipyards, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser developed innovations that helped the nation build more ships, in much less time, at a quarter of the cost of what had been the norm.

One of the hundreds of Kaiser Liberty Ships launched from the shipyards in Richmond, CA, 1943. Used with the permission of Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources.

Kaiser also used a novel workforce, and that's what makes these photographs so compelling. It's the people - workers during a change of shifts. Several things stand out: they are well dressed, focused, confident, and even joyful.

Look closer, and you notice that there are women in the crowd; prior to the war, women would not have been hired in such physically demanding roles. There are also African-Americans, mostly men who likewise would not have been hired into skilled manufacturing jobs before the war, but also women who served superbly as welders and in other demanding roles. These photographs are a stunning display of the social and economic transformation, through the engagement of a talented and dedicated workforce, that was needed for the massive effort required to win the war.

Workers at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, CA, leaving their shift. Used with the permission of Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources.

I'm here at the headquarters of Kaiser Permanente with Cari Napoles, Director of Development for the University of California, Santa Cruz Humanities Division, to meet Mark Zemelman, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. Mark is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus and he graciously agreed to meet with us to discuss his time at UC Santa Cruz, the experiences he had and the values he developed there, and how they led him, eventually, to find his mission in health care.

Zemelman's pursuits are a summary of some of the most important social and political movements of the last half century: civil rights, social diversity, environmental protection, and the provision of affordable high-quality healthcare. Mark used his education at UC Santa Cruz to explore these issues, forge a career, and make his impact over the course of four decades. The path he followed can serve as a model for anyone wishing to make a difference in the world, engage themselves, and learn, through studying the humanities, how to discover and forge a meaningful career.

A Chemist Becomes a Historian

Mark begins his narrative with the time he arrived on campus at UC Santa Cruz, and enrolled in Crown College with a plan to major in science. "I started at Crown as a chemistry major," he says; then something happened: "One of the great things about Crown, and about UC Santa Cruz in general, is that they wanted to make sure that you were well-rounded. It was required that all first-year students at Crown take a year - a whole year - of William Hitchcock's western civilization course. Hitchcock was an amazing professor - when he left UCLA to come to UC Santa Cruz, they had to replace him with four professors."

Clearly, the year-long course - and especially Hitchcock - made an impression on the chemistry major: "He would get up, put his hands behind his back - he never used a note - and each lecture he would start off with, 'Ladies and gentleman: as we were discussing last time...' He constantly weaved theories of cultural and political evolution into his histories of the Greeks, the Romans... He spoke 4 or 5 languages, and would show, for example, how an idea expressed in Latin compared to a similar idea in German. One of the truly great classicists."

Mark adds, "I continued doing chemistry classes, but by the end of Hitchcock's year-long course, I had changed my major to history."

He continues, "That led me to work with Jonathan Beecher," now Emeritus Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. "Jon Beecher taught intellectual history and he particularly loved Utopian Theory. In fact he wrote a book on Charles Fourier ( Charles Fourier: The visionary and his world, UC Press 1986), who started up one of the utopian experiments in the U.S."

During the 1970s, the UC Santa Cruz political science faculty included several Marxists, who advocated a deterministic view of history. In contrast, Mark tells us, "the history people - Bill Hitchcock, Jon Beecher, John Dizikes, Larry Vesey - they had a different view. Bill Hitchcock described his view as the 'great man theory of history' - that people make a difference. His point about history is that it's not deterministic; it's not just going to unfold in a certain way."

It was an important topic, following the social and political upheaval in the 1960s when traditional views of American history were called into question, and many were advocating for change, political reform and social justice. Those UC Santa Cruz history professors focused on what Mark calls, "a progressive and humanistic study of history; how common people - immigrants like Emma Goldman and natives like Randolph Bourne - influenced American politics, through writing, organization, and labor unions."

From this historical foundation, Zemelman found his way into the realm of legal theory and our system of justice. "One of those professors introduced us to John Rawls and his watershed work, A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1999), which is still very influential on the progressive side of the judicial system."

Mark explains, "His theory is that the purpose of law in a democracy is to try to distribute equality as broadly as possible in relation to politics - that all people, regardless of their social status, should have equal power with respect to exercise of their vote, political assembly, and so forth."

Mark continues, "That understanding of the historic and philosophic foundations of law - the theory of society as a social contract and the justice system as the foundation of political democracy - that was the intellectual foundation I developed at UC Santa Cruz. When I went to law school, I took that with me."

So Zemelman, even as he continued studying chemistry, began to consider law school. He just wasn't quite ready, however; he says, "I took a break. My junior year I needed to make money, and I wanted to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn't altogether sure."

It was a time for experimentation and exploring new paths. He explains, "That year, I worked in the research department of a high-tech company. I was still curious about chemistry; so I worked on making high-tech ceramics - in the early days of chips."

He reflects, "Let's see, what else did I do? I volunteered to work at a hospital. I was just testing out ideas. I did some professional photography, and I interned at the National Institutes of Health for a couple months. I did not like working in a windowless lab with toxic chemicals all day," he says with a laugh.
Continue reading this article on This article is the first of two parts: this first part tells about Mark's education at UC Santa Cruz and his subsequent early employment as a lawyer. The second part deals with his time at Kaiser Permanente, and the important and timely issues concerning health care in America that he has studied and helped influence.
Mark then returned to UC Santa Cruz and his studies: "At that point, I was majoring in history, but I was still taking chemistry classes. I was always interested in the sciences. I didn't quite finish the chemistry major, but I was darn close."

Now the question became: What to do with an undergraduate degree in history? "Coming out of school, my first thought was to go into academic history. But I was concerned that, at that time, there were very few teaching jobs in the humanities. Larry Vesey set me up with an interview with the head of the history department at Yale, and I asked him a very important question: 'How many of your last graduating class have gotten jobs? And his answer was, 'Zero.' So I decided that I had better apply to law school," Mark says with a chuckle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This profile is the sixth in our series Beyond the Forest , which examines the lives and careers of UC Santa Cruz grads who have found their own paths using the humanities as their foundation.

# data[].attributes.body
Alumnus Alexis Harte’s long career as a singer/songwriter has included original albums and songs for TV and film, and his company has become a pioneer in scoring and sound design.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For Alexis Harte, it was the perfect creative storm.

He was a songwriter, his adolescent daughter loved music, and here was an offer to pen a song about father-and-daughter musicians for a short film being done by Oscar-winning movie director and animator Patrick Osborne.

Harte, a 1991 Crown College graduate who majored in English literature and journalism, pulled out his guitar and went to work. His song, "No Wrong Way Home"-performed by Kelley Stoltz and Nicki Bluhm-became the heart of Osborne's immersive, virtual-reality film, Pearl, which would go on to win an Annie, a Peabody, a Creative Arts Emmy, and be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Shorts category-the first virtual reality film in that group.

The success of the song and the film is just one of the highlights in Harte's long career as a singer/songwriter, one that has included not only original albums but also songs that have appeared in television and film. In addition, Harte cofounded a company that has become a pioneer in scoring and sound design for Google Spotlight Stories, a series of short, virtual-reality films viewers can watch on their tablets and phones.

An old guitar

Harte started playing music at 14 when he found an old electric guitar in the attic of his mother's house in Berkeley.

"I pulled it out and plugged it in and started banging away and learning songs and chords," Harte says. "It became front and center in my life."

At UC Santa Cruz, Harte played in a few bands, studied journalism, and decided to become an environmental reporter. He did a two-year masters program at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, worked in the Amazon doing community forestry work, and eventually got a job as an urban forester in San Francisco. But it was music that always called to him.

Quitting his comfortable government job, Harte began performing and writing songs, some of which were licensed for films, commercials, and television shows. Eventually, he joined forces with composers and producers JJ Wiesler, Scot Stafford, and Dave Lebolt to form Pollen Music Group, a sound design and scoring company headquartered in the Bay Area. The firm's location near Silicon Valley soon brought it into the new world of technology and immersive sound design.

According to Harte, his partner, Stafford, had contacts at Google, which was developing a series of animated, virtual-reality films it called Spotlight Stories as part of its Advanced Technology and Projects program. The effort was led by creative director Jan Pinkava ( Ratatouille, Geri's Game) and included talented directors like Justin Lin of The Fast and the Furious series and Glen Keane, lead animator on Disney classics like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Pollen Music Group was tapped to do the music and audio.

The Pollen Group, says Harte, developed and used its own tools to create quality, 360-degree audio for the project. Its system not only helped solve the nausea-inducing sensation of the audio not being synced to the visuals, says Hart, but also became part of the storytelling.

"If we want you to turn 180 degrees (as you watch the film) we could put up a sign," says Harte, "or better yet, we could create a sound behind you that makes you turn."

For Pearl -the story of a down-on-his-luck musician who lives in his car with his young daughter and whose musical talent is eventually eclipsed by hers-Harte set out to pen a song that would enhance the emotionality and power of the film.

"When you're writing (music and lyrics) for a film, you don't want to be on-the-nose with something," Harte says. "For instance, if you see the daughter opening a Christmas present in the back seat of the car, there is a sadness and joy to it. The question is, how do you convey that emotion in a lyric without it being too obvious and descriptive.

"That's really where there is a lot of hand-wringing for me."

Working with an animatic, which is a preliminary version of the movie, Harte created a song that centers on dreams and the meaning of home and, in the film, was sung first by the father and then by the daughter.

Original tracks

But Harte is also a solo artist whose own version of "No Wrong Way Home" won a spot on Sirius radio's The Coffeehouse channel. Harte also has recently released a new EP titled Briefcase, with its featured single and video "The Night of My Death."

Inspired by the moment Harte inadvertently stepped into the path of a speeding truck and was almost hit, the song is a study of the things we leave undone in our lives.

Harte turns thoughtful when asked about the sentiment of his song and if he sees life as good now that he's turned 50.

"I've got to say life's pretty good," he says. "I look at how lucky I am to get to do what I like doing and getting some recognition for it. ... I struggle with a lot of stuff people my age do, but, on balance, I think how lucky we are to live in a place that's not war torn, or where you can turn on the water and the lights. I think: gosh, how lucky can we get? I feel like I have a lot to be thankful for."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For Alexis Harte, it was the perfect creative storm. He was a songwriter, his adolescent daughter loved music, and here was an offer to pen a song about father-and-daughter musicians for a short film being done by Oscar-winning movie director and animator Patrick Osborne.

# data[].attributes.headline
Alumna Marilyn Shea-Stonum's Vision for Crown's Future

# data[].attributes.subject
Alumna Marilyn Shea-Stonum's Vision for Crown's Future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When an alumna recounts her special memories from Crown College, it becomes easy to join the effort by Crown alumni to double the college’s endowment by 2021

# data[].attributes.headline
Earth scientist James Zachos honored by European Geosciences Union

# data[].attributes.subject
Earth scientist James Zachos honored by European Geosciences Union

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the 2016 Milutin Milankovic Medal from the European Geosciences Union.

The award recognizes Zachos "for his groundbreaking contributions to documenting and understanding climate change throughout the Cenozoic." He will give the Milankovic Medal Lecture at the EGU General Assembly 2016 in Vienna, Austria, in April.

Throughout his career, Zachos has been at the forefront of the fields of paleoclimatology and paleoceanography, working to understand the climates and marine environments of Earth's distant past. Layers of sediments deposited on the ocean floor hold evidence of past conditions, and Zachos has led studies of these clues that have reshaped scientists' views of long-term climate change and rapid climate transitions during the past 65 million years.
﻿Global warming
In the early 1990s, Zachos was among the first to recognize the importance of a rapid episode of global warming now called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). As the chief scientist on an Ocean Drilling Program expedition (ODP Leg 208) and lead author of a 2005 Science paper, he showed how deep-sea carbonate dissolution was influenced by a massive carbon release during the PETM. This work is highly relevant to understanding how human activities are driving modern-day global climate change.

Early in his career, Zachos contributed significantly to the understanding of the oceanic carbon cycle in the aftermath of a mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period 65.5 million years ago. His work on Antarctic glaciation across the Eocene-Oligocene transition and its effect on climate and the global carbon cycle resulted in landmark papers.

Zachos is also known for his work on climate change throughout the Cenozoic era, exemplified by an iconic graph of stable isotope measurements now known as the "Zachos curve." His high-resolution measurements enabled detailed studies of the relationship between climate cycles and variations in Earth's orbit around the sun. Astrophysicist Milutin Milankovic (for whom the Milankovic Medal is named) first proposed this relationship in the 1920s.

"Through several ground-breaking contributions, Zachos fundamentally transformed our understanding of climate change throughout the Cenozoic and made a sustained impact within, and far beyond, the boundaries of palaeoceanography," stated an EGU announcement of the award.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth scientist James Zachos honored by European Geosciences Union

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the 2016 Milutin Milankovic Medal from the European Geosciences Union. The award recognizes Zachos "for his groundbreaking contributions to documenting and understanding climate change throughout the Cenozoic." He will give the Milankovic Medal Lecture at the EGU General Assembly 2016 in Vienna, Austria, in April.

# data[].attributes.body
When family members have the experience of attending UC Santa Cruz in common, they've walked the same paths—contributing to a sense of pride, connection, and shared values...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jerry Ruiz grew up in a small town outside Visalia. His parents never went to high school, but Ruiz was a stellar student and earned excellent grades.

However, it wasn't until an educational opportunities coordinator from UC Santa Cruz reached out to him that his dream of going to college became a reality.

Ruiz (Crown '77, economics) is now a successful lawyer in Los Angeles. As the first member of his family to go to college, he inspired his four younger brothers, who also attended UC Santa Cruz.

The Ruiz brothers' story illustrates what educational studies have suggested over the years; when a sibling goes off to college, or a parent returns to school later in life, this act of ambition and bravery will encourage others in the family to follow their example.

But it's more than just a question of inspiring and emboldening family members to attend the same university. Family ties also make a college career a smoother and more comfortable ride-even for insecure first-year students-while increasing pride, connection, and a strong sense of shared values.

In its 50 years, UC Santa Cruz has inspired many family members to share the experience of attending-then becoming proud alumni. We tell some of their stories here.

Paving the way

"My mother was very good at reinforcing the idea that education was very important," said Ruiz. "When we were young we had no excuse not to get out of bed and go to school."

Roberto Rubalcava, then-director of UC Santa Cruz's Educational Opportunity Program, reached out to Ruiz and recruited him.

When he arrived at UC Santa Cruz, Ruiz immediately felt like he was part of a community. He found a close circle of friends and helped to establish a Latino-themed dorm on campus.

Ruiz now mentors youth from underserved communities and directs them toward college careers, attends the campus's Multicultural Career Conference, and serves on the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Council, which supports student scholarships.

He said that Latino families embrace that spirit of the "pioneer student" who sets a good example for his brothers and sisters and paves the way for them.

"Convincing the first in the family to go far from home is the hardest sell," said Ruiz. "Once the first one goes, the rest of the family usually follows."

The same principle held true for Freddy Ruiz (Crown '80, psychology), who felt safe and secure about attending UC Santa Cruz because his brother was a senior there while he was an incoming first-year student. A large circle of mentors and friends awaited him when he arrived.

"Jerry was the flight lead," said Freddy Ruiz, a former Air Force Judge Advocate Officer. "I was just a kid. He was a smart guy, and I knew he'd picked a school where we were going to do great."

Freddy Ruiz is now a lawyer in San Antonio, but he still spends several weeks a year in Santa Cruz, and is encouraging his stepdaughter to apply to UC Santa Cruz next year.

"I wish everyone in life had a chance to go to school in Santa Cruz," said Freddy Ruiz. "They'd never regret it."

All in the family

Naomi Salaz (Crown '81, education) was also inspired by a family member to attend UC Santa Cruz. But it was her father, Richard Salaz (Merrill '72, community studies), who came to UC Santa Cruz as an older adult with five children. The same EOP director who inspired Ruiz to come to the school recruited him.

"My dad was the oldest student at the time with the most kids," said Salaz.

Richard Salaz attended a junior college in Colorado before he got married. He studied in Mexico City for two years. Then he came back to the United States and had five kids. He decided to move out to California.

"He moved out here to California because there were so many opportunities for work," said Naomi Salaz. "But when he got out here, he was working in a factory and he wasn't happy at all."

UC Santa Cruz opened up a different world, exposing him to an intellectual environment and the wild creativity of the bohemian and "hippie" culture of the late '60s and early '70s.

"Dad said the reason he went back to school was to be a role model for his kids, to show that it was never too late to get an education," Naomi Salaz said. "He also wanted to expose us to campus life."

She lived in the dorms at Crown for all five years of her college career, graduated, and went on to become an elementary school teacher in Salinas.

But she was not the only one to follow her father. Both of Naomi's sisters also attended UC Santa Cruz. Her sister Rose Ann met her future husband Bob Weber (Crown '84, biology) in the dorms of Crown College.

"It was really meant to be," Weber said. "We were from such different backgrounds and probably wouldn't have met anywhere else."

Weber himself is a fount of "all in the family" stories about UC Santa Cruz.

His father worked for the State Department, so the family travelled abroad when he was younger. He didn't know much about schools in the United States, so he followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Jon, who received his Ph.D in chemistry from UC Santa Cruz. His three younger sisters, Ann, Catherine, and Elisabeth, also graduated from UC Santa Cruz.

But the family connections don't stop there. His sister Catherine was married to another alum on campus. After seeing the rich educational opportunities at her children's school, Weber's mom, Barbara, was also inspired to attend UC Santa Cruz after Weber's father retired from the State Department.

"I think we all really believed in the educational philosophy of UC Santa Cruz," said Weber, now a doctor in Watsonville.

In total, at least a dozen of Weber's family members have attended UC Santa Cruz. His daughter, Marie, will be getting married on campus in September.

The third generation of Webers and Salazes now has alumni ties to UC Santa Cruz.

Weber's daughter, Stephanie (Crown '14, electrical engineering), said she felt her family's connection to the university was something very special.

"It was pretty neat being in a dorm right across the quad from the dorm where my parents met," she said.

Deep connection

Sometimes the connection to campus goes even deeper. Max Levin, father of Deborah Alastra (Porter '83, fine arts), was a founder of Crown College. He served as the senior preceptor at Crown and was a faculty member in the psychology department until his retirement in 1981. Her mother, Dorothy Levin, was a counselor at Porter for many years.

Alastra attended a small alternative high school in England for her senior year of high school. The only college she applied to was UC Santa Cruz. She was accepted, started her studies at Cowell, and, like her father, left a mark on campus. She helped build the original A-frame at the college and worked on the stained-glass window at the Cowell Library. She took a break from school and returned when she was 26 to Porter College. Now she is a children's book illustrator in Oakland.

Alastra's niece, Naomi Andrews (Cowell '88, history), decided to attend UC Santa Cruz because her grandparents lived in Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D in history from UC Santa Cruz and is now an associate professor of history at Santa Clara University.

When she was at UC Santa Cruz, the campus was small but growing quickly. The faculty were part of a tightly knit group that didn't change much over the years. She lived in one half of a duplex, and her aunt, Deborah, lived in the other half. "She was more like a much older sister," Andrews said.

Andrews's younger brother, Josh, attended UC Santa Cruz and had some of the same professors as his sister.

"I grew up spending a lot of time in Santa Cruz," said Josh Andrews (Stevenson '97, history). "My sister started grad school when I was a freshman. It was good for me to be where my family was." Josh Andrews is now a lawyer at Uber, the San Francisco-based rideshare and taxiservice company.

The Andrews's cousin, Samuel Levin (College Eight '08, health sciences), said Santa Cruz attracted him because three generations of his family lived there- people he didn't get to see often growing up. It was also the most desirable school for him with a strong reputation in the sciences. He was thrilled when one of his human physiology professors spoke fondly of his grandfather.

Besides, turning UC Santa Cruz into a family affair made it comfortable right from the beginning.

"It was nice to have familiar faces in a new city after leaving home," said Levin. "I am proud to be a graduate of the same university where my family attended and worked. Seeing their lives and their work, success, and lifestyle make me proud to be a part of the same education they had."

Amy Ettinger is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jerry Ruiz grew up in a small town outside Visalia. His parents never went to high school, but Ruiz was a stellar student and earned excellent grades. However, it wasn't until an educational opportunities coordinator from UC Santa Cruz reached out to him that his dream of going to college became a reality.

# data[].attributes.headline
Campus named Employer of the Year for longtime alliance with HOPE

# data[].attributes.subject
Campus named Employer of the Year for longtime alliance with HOPE

# data[].attributes.body
UC Santa Cruz Dining was recently honored as Employer of the Year for being a longtime employer of people with developmental disabilities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Campus named Employer of the Year for longtime alliance with HOPE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz Dining was recently honored as Employer of the Year for being a longtime employer of people with developmental disabilities.

# data[].attributes.body
UC Santa Cruz Dining brought home first-place honors from a national cooking competition highlighting the best vegan recipes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UC Santa Cruz Dining brought home first-place honors from a national cooking competition highlighting the best vegan recipes.

Every year the National Association of College and University Food Services (NACUFS) invites dining departments from around the country to submit entries that feature a favorite vegan recipe.

This year's winning recipe, Vegan Polenta Lasagna, was created and submitted by Geraldine McCutcheon, production manager at Crown/Merrill Dining Hall. The lasagna features a layer of colorful Italian vegetables between layers of golden polenta.

The process of preparing for the competition began with a team of tasters, photographers, and marketing folks who gathered dining menus, comment cards, nutritional data, and other information and organized a presentation book for McCutcheon's entry. Criteria for selection included a 500 word essay describing the ingredients and their health benefits. In addition, all ingredients were to be listed with step-by-step cooking instructions and a nutritional analysis.

Vegan and vegetarian fare is increasingly popular with students, dining hall surveys indicate, and UCSC Dining offers many options, including soy burger patties, Tofurky substitutes, tempeh stir frys, portabella burgers, egg substitutes, and full salad bars.

UCSC Dining has competed successfully in previous sectional culinary competitions, including an entry in the Best Local Foods Contest (Third Place, 2007) and the Loyal E. Horton Dining Awards competition (Honorable Mention, 2006).

Winning entries will be on display in book form at the 50th National Conference in Washington, D.C., in July. As the winner of the contest, UC Santa Cruz received free registration to this gala event.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz Dining brought home first-place honors from a national cooking competition highlighting the best vegan recipes. Every year the National Association of College and University Food Services (NACUFS) invites dining departments from around the country to submit entries that feature a favorite vegan recipe.

# data[].attributes.headline
Scott Brandt appointed to Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software

# data[].attributes.subject
Scott Brandt appointed to Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scott Brandt, vice chancellor for research and professor of computer science, has been appointed as the inaugural holder of the Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz.

The endowed chair was established in 2015 through a gift from UCSC alumnus Sage Weil, who also made additional gifts totaling $2 million to support research in open source software. Brandt said he will use the funds from the chair to support the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at UC Santa Cruz.

"Sage Weil's support helped us start a big research effort in open-source software here at UC Santa Cruz, and the endowed chair makes a permanent statement about the value of this work," Brandt said.

Brandt is a founding faculty member of CROSS, which was created to bridge the gap between student research and open-source software projects. Weil developed his Ph.D. thesis project into a highly successful open-source software product, the data storage system Ceph.

"People often do great research projects as graduate students, but they rarely make the effort to turn them into something other people can use. One of the things that made Ceph so successful is that Sage was able to keep working on it in the context of his company after he graduated, and he wanted to make that same opportunity available to others," Brandt said.

CROSS funds open source research projects, builds collaborations with industry partners, and selects promising projects for further development in the CROSS incubator. Three companies--Toshiba, SK Hynix Memory Solutions, and Micron--have joined CROSS as founding industry members, providing additional funding and serving on the center's industry advisory board.

Director Carlos Maltzahn, professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz, said the center is currently funding four research projects, and CROSS faculty designed an undergraduate course in open-source programming that was taught for the first time winter quarter. He said the additional funding provided through the endowed chair will help expand the scope of the projects supported by CROSS.

"Initially, we've been focused on storage systems, but we would like to support open-source projects in many more research areas," Maltzahn said. "One of our new projects, for example, is a collaboration with the UCSC Genomics Institute on smart storage devices in genomics. It's still storage-related, but by branching out into genomics we're starting to see the diversity we want to achieve."

Brandt's own research is in the area of computer systems, focusing on storage systems, real-time systems, and performance management. Brandt and Maltzahn supervised Weil's thesis research. Weil was already a successful entrepreneur when he came to UC Santa Cruz in 2004 to study data storage systems. After earning his Ph.D. in computer science in 2007, Weil continued to work on Ceph with a small team at his web hosting company, DreamHost, then founded the spin-off Inktank to further develop the platform. Inktank was acquired by open-source software provider Red Hat in 2014.

The Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software is one of eight endowed chairs established at UC Santa Cruz in 2015 through gifts from campus supporters and matching funds from the UC Presidential Endowment Fund. Increasing support for the Baskin School of Engineering and endowed chairs are goals of the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz, which to date has raised more than $223 million in resources for the campus.

The Campaign for UC Santa Cruz supports excellence across the university through increased private investment in the people and ideas shaping the future. It is bringing critical new resources to each academic division, and to signature initiatives in the student experience, genomics, coastal sustainability, data science, and the intersection of the arts and sciences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
center for research in open source software

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scott Brandt appointed to Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scott Brandt, vice chancellor for research and professor of computer science, has been appointed as the inaugural holder of the Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz. The endowed chair was established in 2015 through a gift from UCSC alumnus Sage Weil, who also made additional gifts totaling $2 million to support research in open source software.

# data[].attributes.body
UC Santa Cruz reached the venerable age of 50 in 2015—meaning that many of its departments and programs are now hitting some big milestones, too.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The last couple of years were banner times for Slug-related anniversaries, with many UC Santa Cruz programs and institutions marking major milestones in 2016 and 2017. Here is a sampling of big dates.

50th anniversaries
Stevenson College
One of the oldest colleges on campus, UC Santa Cruz's Stevenson College celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

Founded in 1966, Stevenson is the second college established at UC Santa Cruz. Adlai E. Stevenson College opened in September 1966, 14 months after the death of the former governor of Illinois, democratic presidential candidate, and Ambassador to the United Nations.

Stevenson's enduring theme is "Self and Society," putting a special focus on the goals of both self-understanding and active participation in one's community.
Stevenson students are known for their diverse interests, ranging from the humanities and social sciences to natural sciences, the arts, and engineering.
Crown College
Could a college that seems so young at heart really be turning the big 5-0 this year? It may be hard to believe, but the science-minded Crown College, which came to life during the Summer of Love, is turning the half-century page.

Crown College's theme is the sciences and technology, and the way they are used in the wider world, for good and for ill. In fact, the founding provost of Crown College was the distinguished biologist Kenneth V. Thimann, for whom Thimann Laboratories are named.

The college's core course, Ethical Issues in Emerging Technologies, emphasizes the great responsibility that comes with great power, and helps students make public policy decisions regarding science and tech.

Crown College is marking this grand occasion with not just one reunion, but with a series of events during Alumni Weekend from a reception and wine tasting to the showing of a documentary about the college's 50 years of cultivating innovation.
Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems
The staff at UC Santa Cruz's legendary CASFS program is so successful at training and inspiring farmers that it maintains an ever-expanding Excel spreadsheet listing their names and businesses.

The list goes on and on. In a mere five decades, CASFS has spread the gospel about sound, sustainable, and innovative farming practices to every corner of the globe.

How has this program, and its students, come so far since its inception in 1967? CASFS director Daniel Press said that the program's mentors trained farmers and gardeners so systematically, efficiently, and inspiringly, that it prepared them for innovation, and showed them how to think about farming in the long term. "Knowing you are doing your part for food justice, beauty, and healthy agriculture helps carry you through the really tough times every farmer faces," he said.

The mission of CASFS is to lead the way in the latest research, development, and advances in sustainable food and agriculture, championing and pioneering methods that are environmentally sound, economically viable, and socially responsible.

CASFS plans an array of events to mark this grand occasion, with the main event, the First Fifty Celebration, happening July 28-30.
Rugby
In the fall of 1967, a few young UC Santa Cruz undergraduates including Carl Norris (Stevenson '68, economics) were hanging out on a sports field on campus when they noticed a couple of professors throwing, kicking, and knocking around an object that looked suspiciously like an oversized, pale-white football.

Fifty years later, rugby remains a force at UC Santa Cruz, with an engaging and quirky history of its own and a long list of illustrious alumni. There are not one but two men's teams and an active women's program, recently battling Stanford, the University of Nevada at Reno, and state universities across Northern California.

Now, Norris and other committed alumni have launched a brand-new tradition: the UC Santa Cruz rugby reunion, which will be held every year. These get-togethers are a great time to forge new rugby-related friendships or rekindle old ones.
Natural History Field Quarter
Ken Norris, the late UC Santa Cruz professor of natural history, founded the Natural History Field Quarter (NHFQ) in the early '70s to give his students, in his words, "the greatest adventure of your lives!"

More than four decades after the beloved professor launched the program, the adventure is still going strong. NHFQ, a 10-week immersive, 15-unit course that is offered each spring through the Environmental Studies Department, is hosting a special reunion on April 30 at noon at Little Basin State Park in Boulder Creek to mark its 45th year. This reunion will take place during UC Santa Cruz's Alumni Weekend celebration, which runs April 28-30.

This year, the reunited graduates will camp out together at the state park during a weekend of reminiscing, and, of course, botanizing, journaling, birding, sketching, observing, and rekindling. In addition, celebrants will pay tribute to a beloved teacher and friend of the program, Breck Tyler.
Los Mejicas
You've seen their flashy but historically faithful outfits. You've marveled at their enthusiasm, their commitment, and their dance moves. But did you know that Los Mejicas, which celebrates and sustains the tradition of Mexican folkloric dance, is turning 45 years old this year?

Los Mejicas is one of the most highly respected dance groups on campus, providing an enjoyable outlet for students as well as community members. This group is more than just one of the oldest organizations at UC Santa Cruz-it's also a class in its own right. Students can enroll through either the Anthropology or Latin American and Latino Studies departments.

The group will have a reunion to celebrate this special landmark, featuring a light dinner, performances, speakers, and lots of free time to connect with friends. The festivities take place 6-10 p.m. April 29 at the Stevenson Event Center, part of this year's Alumni Weekend festivities.

Those who wish to join Los Mejicas, enroll in a class, or take in one of their upcoming performances can find more information on the group's official blog.
Sammy the Slug
Could the world-famous UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug mascot really be 30 years old? Indeed, the beloved creature marked three decades in 2016.

In the early 1980s, Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer brought the campus into the National Collegiate Athletic Association as a Division III school for the first time. Until then, UC Santa Cruz had unofficial sports "clubs" but no NCAA teams.

Sinsheimer felt that Division III status was a good compromise; it enabled UC Santa Cruz to compete while holding onto its "traditional low-key approach to athletics."

NCAA Division III-affiliated colleges did not offer full sports scholarships to student athletes. However, they were expected to have an official mascot, and UC Santa Cruz was no exception. In 1981, a group of student athletes pushed for the sea lion; Sinsheimer supported their choice. The matter seemed settled, but the slug cause would not die. Students kept showing up to basketball games, and yelling "Slime 'em!" and "Go slugs!"

In 1986, the newly formed Student Union Assembly (SUA) voted to put the mascot issue on a campuswide ballot measure.

Eric Satzman (Cowell '87, sociology), the SUA president at that time, recalls that it was a nonbinding resolution. The administration, not the students, had the final say about the mascot issue. Still, Satzman was confident the slug would prevail and at least the students' preference would be made clear.

The rest, as they say, is slug history. The slug mascot may very well be the most recognizable image associated with UC Santa Cruz. John Travolta helped the cause immeasurably in 1994 when he wore a UC Santa Cruz T-shirt, with the Fiat Slug logo designed by alumnus Marc Ratner (Cowell '87, linguistics), in Quentin Tarantino's hit movie Pulp Fiction.
Jack Baskin School of Engineering
UC Santa Cruz is proud to host "the engineering school of the 21st century."

The Jack Baskin School of Engineering is named for the retired engineer and philanthropist Jack Baskin, whose steadfast support led to the founding, as well as the rapid growth, of the school, which was founded 20 years ago in 1997. Since its creation, the program has more than tripled the number of its faculty, and built up the student body to an impressive 4,000.

The program is a proven training ground for students, whether they wish to explore bioengineering, bioinformatics, computer engineering, computer science, or an array of other choices.

Students have gone on to jobs at such companies as Amazon, Apple, Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Ford Motor, Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, JPL,

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, Tesla, Twitter, and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and are on the faculty at such distinguished institutions as Duke University, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

The program also offers MS and Ph.D. degree programs in applied mathematics and statistics, bioinformatics and biomolecular engineering, computer engineering, and other disciplines.

The school will mark this milestone on April 29 from 9:30 a.m. until noon with Brunch at Baskin at the Jack Baskin Auditorium 101 during this year's Alumni Weekend celebration. The event will include a brunch, an alumni presentation, and a lab tour.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The last couple of years were banner times for Slug-related anniversaries, with many UC Santa Cruz programs and institutions marking major milestones in 2016 and 2017. Here is a sampling of big dates. Stevenson College One of the oldest colleges on campus, UC Santa Cruz's Stevenson College celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

# data[].attributes.headline
Road to '65: Creating a Design for the New Campus

# data[].attributes.subject
Road to '65: Creating a Design for the New Campus

# data[].attributes.body
This second installment in our series of stories leading up to a celebration of UCSC’s 50th anniversary looks at the early architectural plans that were taking shape 50 years ago, in preparation for UCSC’s opening in 1965. This is a longer version of a story that appeared in the spring '13 issue of Review magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Editor's note: This second installment in our series of stories leading up to a celebration of UCSC's 50th anniversary looks at the early architectural plans that were taking shape 50 years ago, in preparation for UCSC's opening in 1965. This is a longer version of a story that appeared in the spring '13 issue of Review magazine.

It's hard to imagine what UC Santa Cruz might have become: a cluster of high-density buildings rising out of the Great Meadow like some unsightly crown.

But thanks to a combination of two visionary UC administrators, a modernist landscape architect, and an influential team of California architects, those early plans to build a university in the middle of beautiful slope of grass died a quick death. Instead, the state's seventh UC campus became a daring experiment, not only in its academic form but also in its design.

It was UC President Clark Kerr and UCSC's first chancellor, Dean McHenry, who championed a bold educational plan for the campus, which was to be set on 2,000 acres of ranch land overlooking the Monterey Bay.

Instead of a large, impersonal university, McHenry and Kerr-old college roommates - envisioned 15-20 small residential colleges with individual identities where students would mingle closely with their professors while enjoying the benefits of a major research institution.

The New York Times called it "an experimental project widely regarded as one of the most exciting in education." The two men insisted the campus architecture reflect those same innovative ideals.

"California was full of the post-war optimism of the 1950s," said Frank Zwart (Cowell '71), UCSC's Campus Architect Emeritus. "Everything was possible and California was the wave of the future."

In that spirit, Kerr and McHenry wanted buildings that were original, matched the spectacular landscape, and not only fostered community but also intellectual exploration.

In his oral history, Kerr likened his idea for the campus design to an old fishing village, Aigues-Mortes, in southern France where one step through an ancient stone wall took a visitor from a bustling town into the forest. McHenry talked of finding "as much diversity among the colleges as you'd find in a high quality residential district of a suburban area of city."

They convinced Regents to hire a consortium of influential Northern California designers to prepare a master plan that would concretize their maverick vision and guide the location and design of buildings. Architects John Carl Warnecke, Ernest J. Kump, Theodore Bernardi, Robert Anshen and Steve Allen were soon wandering the old Cowell ranch land, taking notes and envisioning what a new university could be.

Leading their walks through the grass and redwoods was Thomas Church, a UC Berkeley- and Harvard-trained landscape architect known for his trademark hat, high-laced boots, and the way his designs blurred the border between inside and out.

Church and the architects were so struck by the beauty of the UCSC site they convinced the Regents to move the heart of the campus out of the meadow and into the trees, where the flora and terrain would be both a challenge and an inspiration.

"Instead of remaking the land, the land must remake our standard conceptions of building and place and parking lot," Church wrote enthusiastically after touring the site in 1962. He warned, however, "any attempt of a designer to compete in grandeur with this site is doomed to failure...color and texture will be as important as form."

Rather than being daunted, the master planners rose to the land's challenge of knolls, ravines and towering trees. "Never, perhaps, has the site chosen for the development of such a venture been so inspiring," the architects wrote in their 1963 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP).

They noted, it was also a time when architectural styles were being reappraised, affording a chance to be different. "There is a new desire for emotional content in the design of important buildings, and for a richness and subtlety that seems to have been lost in a concern with technological innovations," they wrote

The planners envisioned one type of architecture for buildings that would sit "proudly" on hilltops and another for those sheltered in the trees. Colleges would be no more than three-stories with the potential for high-rise structures as the campus grew. They talked of using light colors and off-whites used in densely forested areas with warmer earth tones on sunny hilltops. Textures would range from smooth to rugged and while the residential colleges would be informal in style, the central campus buildings would be more formal, "almost monumental." There must be no clichés, no tired architecture-whether traditional or modern, they said.

They wrote of a science center that would give "a sense of courts and quadrangles with provisions for future tower buildings." They envisioned undergraduate colleges within walking distance of the academic core and other colleges. "Thus there is separation but no sense of isolation," they said.

Most importantly, they wrote, "The campus should not have a single 'style.'"

Three of the LRDP architects went on to design buildings on campus. John Carl Warnecke and Associates created McHenry Library with its textures of concrete, exposed aggregate and glass reflecting the ruggedness of the forest. Kump Associates of Palo Alto designed Crown College, and Theodore Bernardi of Wuster, Bernardi and Emmons planned the campus' first college, Cowell.

It was not an easy road, however.

Bernardi, whose firm was closely associated with what was known as Bay Area Style which lay between the more severe International and elaborate Beaux Arts styles, produced a design for Cowell that was first rejected both by Kerr and the Regents.

"...It looked like a motel on Lake Tahoe - scattered throughout the trees," Kerr said in his oral history. The firm was sent back to design a cluster of inward-facing buildings with cast-in place concrete walls, heavy timbers and red-tile roofs nestled on the very edge of the forest. Two courtyards "one for men, the other for women," were included in the plan, according to McHenry in a 1963 Chancellor's memo.

Joseph Esherick's Stevenson College with its shed roofs and saddlebag-style rooms reflected his dedication to site requirements and user needs. Campus architect Zwart noted Esherick went so far as to lay out buildings on the site as design work progressed, skewing some of the building footprints in order to preserve a number of massive redwoods.

Budget constraints, however, forced the use of cheaper materials like stucco, wood frame and nail-on windows rather than the concrete and timber used for Cowell.

Both Cowell and Stevenson colleges were completed in 1966 - a year after the UCSC opening, forcing students to live in trailers, eat their meals in the East Field House and take classes in what is now Thimann Laboratories for the first year of their college life.

Crown and Merrill came next in 1967 and 1968-69.

Merrill College architects Campbell & Wong set their stark buildings amid thick redwoods with playful components like bridges, balconies and blue roofs. Crown's architect, Ernest J. Kump, would follow a slightly more traditional path that barely hinted at his innovations in the world of modernism during the 1930s and 40s.

All four of the early colleges seemed to satisfy the ideals set out by the founding architects - although neglected from the Long Range Development Plan design was an intramural sports stadium proposed for the quarry and a giant tower rising out of the redwoods near Science Hill - a feature that may have been better left unbuilt, according to Zwart, who saw sketches of possible designs for the edifice.

"It had a real Jetsons quality to it," Zwart said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Road to '65: Creating a design for the new campus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Editor's note: This second installment in our series of stories leading up to a celebration of UCSC's 50th anniversary looks at the early architectural plans that were taking shape 50 years ago, in preparation for UCSC's opening in 1965. This is a longer version of a story that appeared in the spring '13 issue of Review magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As we begin the new year, it is with great sadness that I share Crown College CRE Shane Sanchez passed away during the winter break.

Shane has been a member of the CHES family since 2005, working with graduate student housing, the University Town Center, and joining the Crown/Merrill family in 2011 as the CRE for the Crown apartments. Shane's exuberance for students and his job could be seen in his colorful restoration of the Crown/Merrill Community Room and recurring events including the C/M welcome bbq, and Diagon Alley. Shane was also the advisor of the Tabletop Gaming Association, who make the Crown/Merrill dining hall their home every weekend.

But Shane was a recognized personality around campus, having both taught and frequented OPERS rec classes and participating in a variety of campus events. Some of my first memories of Shane were student accounts of wickedly tough classes they'd attended. Shane also gave his time to assist the University Interfaith Council.

With his generous spirit, Shane had a way of showing up for others in times of need or taking on a menial task no one else wanted to do. Shane believed in his Resident Assistants as empowered leaders and strongly advocated for students every opportunity he had. Shane was one of a kind, and his brightly colored presence will surely be missed up here on the hill.

Please join me in sending good thoughts to Shane's partner, Gina, and his family, including his sweet dog Galaxy.

As we enter the new quarter, thank you for continuing to be present and supportive for our students and each other as we move through this difficult time. If you need additional support, you may also want to access the Employee Assistance Program at 1-866-808-6205 (https://shr.ucsc.edu/benefits/eap/).

A celebration of life is being planned for early February and more information will be available on the Crown College website

Sincerely,
Alex Belisario

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Crown College CRE Shane Sanchez passed away during the winter break. He was a member of the CHES family since 2005, working with graduate student housing, the University Town Center, and joining the Crown/Merrill family in 2011 as the CRE for the Crown apartments.

# data[].attributes.headline
Physicist Peter Young elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

# data[].attributes.subject
Physicist Peter Young elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Physicist Peter Young elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Peter Young, distinguished professor of physics, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Max M. Levin, a lecturer emeritus of psychology whose ties to the campus go back to 1967, died on Saturday, February 16, in Portland, Oregon. He was 91.

Levin served as the senior preceptor at Crown College and as a member of the Psychology Department, where he taught until his retirement in 1981.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made in support of scholarships for low-income students at UCSC. For more information, please contact Kathleen Hughes, development officer for Student Affairs, at khughes@ucsc.edu or call (831) 459-4552.

The following obituary was submitted to Currents by the family of Max Levin.

Max M. Levin: March 29, 1916-February 16, 2008

Max M. Levin, Senior Lecturer and Senior Preceptor at UC Santa Cruz's Crown College from 1967-1982, died on Saturday in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 91 after a prolonged illness. Max is survived by his children Dr. Richard Levin, a physician in San Diego, and Deborah Alastra an artist in Portland, Oregon; grandchildren Naomi Andrews and Joshua Andrews, Daniel Levin and Sammy Levin, and Anita Alastra and Jacob Alastra; great grand daughter, Maya Levin; and by his wife Gloria Weiss Levin. Max was the eldest child of David Levin and Rose Vinitsky, both immigrants from Russian Poland.

Born Menachem Mendel Levin in Chicago in 1916, Max and his family, which included younger sisters Ida and Sarah, moved to the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles in the early 1920s where his father worked in the construction trades. In 1928 Max traveled alone cross-country to New York to attend yeshiva, ultimately spending the turbulent beginnings of the Great Depression in NYC. While there Max turned away from the religious path laid out for him by family expectation during his days at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (now part of Yeshiva University), focusing his interests on questions of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as progressive politics.

In 1932 Max returned to Los Angeles to attend the University of California. While an undergraduate there, Max met his future wife Dorothy Gillman, originally from Canada, and also a resident of Boyle Heights. Max and Dorothy married in 1937 and moved to Berkeley, he to attend graduate school and she to finish her Bachelor's degree. Max's early ambition was to study anthropology on the East Coast, but this intention was ultimately thwarted by Jewish university quotas, and he entered a PhD program at UC Berkeley in experimental psychology. While there he worked with Edward Tolman, one of the pioneers in behavioral psychology. During the war, Max and Dorothy's oldest children, Claudia, then two years later Richard, were born, and fourteen years later their daughter Deborah was born. Max served in the Public Health Service during World War II and also in a social service position at the now defunct Homewood Terrace Orphanage, which served Jewish orphans. Over the course of his career, Max held a number of faculty positions at universities and research institutions in diverse parts of the country, including the University of Washington, Pullman; University of Wyoming, Laramie; the Foundation Fund for Research in Psychiatry at Yale where he worked with well known psychiatrist, Fritz Redlich; the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland; and Stanford University, where he ran the Institute for Alcohol Studies 1961-1967.

In 1966, at the founding of the University of California, Santa Cruz as the undergraduate campus of the UC, Max joined the pioneering faculty, serving for a time as the Senior Preceptor at Crown College and as a member of the Department of Psychology, where he developed and taught a long running course, Youth and Young Adulthood, until his retirement in 1982. Max was widowed by Dorothy's 1983 death to cancer, and he remarried Gloria Weiss of New York City in 1986. Max's eldest child Claudia, mother of Naomi and Joshua, and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in San Diego, died in 2002. Max remained a resident of Santa Cruz until the end of his life, maintaining close relationships with his remaining children and grandchildren.

Max's aptitude for higher education went well beyond academic pursuits; he was eternally interested in and supportive of young people on the cusp of adulthood, helping them find independence, direction, and meaning in their lives. He will be missed by young and old alike. Services will be held on Friday, February 22 at 11am at Beit Shalom Cemetery on Meder Street in Santa Cruz.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Max M. Levin, former psychology instructor and Crown preceptor, dies at 91

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Max M. Levin, a lecturer emeritus of psychology whose ties to the campus go back to 1967, died on Saturday, February 16, in Portland, Oregon. He was 91. Levin served as the senior preceptor at Crown College and as a member of the Psychology Department, where he taught until his retirement in 1981.

# data[].attributes.headline
UCSC professor named second Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County

# data[].attributes.subject
UCSC professor named second Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UCSC emeritus professor of education and creative writing David Swanger has been named the second Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County.

He succeeds UCSC humanities lecturer Gary Young, who has served in the position for the past two years.

The Poet Laureate is an initiative of the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County--in collaboration with Poetry Santa Cruz--and is designed to advance, enliven, and promote the art of poetry throughout the county.

"This is a special place in terms of being a paradise for poets," Swanger noted. "There are many fine accomplished poets living here, and we have a plethora of classes, readings, workshops, and informal gatherings of poets."

"But there is also an entire population of poets and poetry lovers who are not part of the visible, published and performing cohort," he added.

Swanger recalled that years ago, he ran a weekly poetry feature in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. During that time, he helped publish over 200 poems from people outside the recognized arena of poetry in Santa Cruz.

"It was an enriching experience for me and I hope a powerful experience for the people I published," said Swanger

"As poet laureate, in addition to working with established colleagues in poetry, my plan is to once again reach out to people and places where poetry is not as much a part of the conversation."

Prior to his retirement in 2005, Swanger taught educational philosophy for the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz, and poetry classes for the Literature Department.

He was a longtime friend of renowned short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, whom he met at UCSC when they both arrived on campus to teach in 1971.

In 2002, Swanger donated a collection of letters he received from Carver to UCSC's Special Collections.

Swanger has written four books of poetry and is also the author of The Poem as Process and Essays in Aesthetic Education.

In 2005, his poetry book, Wayne's College of Beauty: New and Selected Poems, was selected from more than 400 entrants to receive the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry.

Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor chose a poem from that book, "Patriarch at the Lake," to read on National Public Radio's Writers' Almanac program.

"Poetry is important, as it has always been, for expressions of the human condition and our connections with each other," said Swanger.

"You discover your own feelings that you didn't know you had, and have a form in which you can share them. Poetry can teach us empathy, in that we can feel what others feel when the poem is right."

Santa Cruz's new Poet Laureate will perform multiple readings throughout the county this April in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Patriarch at the Lake

The aunts, splendid, pale
and ample in their bathing suits,
unfurled tablecloths, challa, melons,
seltzer water in blue bottles, and
honey cakes and other cakes.

After the required hour everyone
but Grandpa waded, stirring silt
around our ankles, enjoying mud.
Then, as if called by voices beyond
us, the old man rose, his belly taut,
trunks reaching his knees, his shins
white as fish, and walked without
watching the ground toward water.

We parted to let him pass, we receded
onto the beach; he prowed outward
and swam. He remembered, he stroked
and roiled and spumed his way away
then back to us, his shorebound spawn.

--David Swanger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UCSC professor named second Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UCSC emeritus professor of education and creative writing David Swanger has been named the second Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. He succeeds UCSC humanities lecturer Gary Young, who has served in the position for the past two years.

# data[].attributes.headline
UCSC Dining Awarded 'Green' Certification

# data[].attributes.subject
UCSC Dining Awarded 'Green' Certification

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UC Santa Cruz Dining was awarded Green Business certification from the City of Santa Cruz in a presentation by Mayor Emily Reilly in April. Through this certification, the city recognizes that UCSC, with major contribution from UCSC Dining, embraces cooperative solutions that protect the community's economic and environmental resources.

Clint Jefferies, food service manager at Crown/Merrill Dining Hall, was instrumental in ensuring that the dining hall and Banana Joe's café met the guidelines for certification. Now Jefferies is working closely with the other restaurant and dining hall managers to prepare them for their inspections.

The Monterey Bay Area Green Business Program is a partnership of environmental agencies, utilities, and nonprofit organizations that recognizes businesses that operate in an environmentally responsible way. To be "green" certified, participants must be in compliance with all regulations and meet program standards for conserving resources, preventing pollution, and minimizing waste.

By becoming a green certified business, UC Santa Cruz Dining enforces and promises to continue:

. Compliance with all applicable environmental regulations as stipulated by the Monterey Bay Area Green Business Program

. Conservation of energy, water, and other resources

. Implementation of sound environmental practices that prevent pollution and waste generation

. Environmentally responsible business practices within our community

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UCSC Dining awarded 'green' certification from city

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz Dining was awarded Green Business certification from the City of Santa Cruz in a presentation by Mayor Emily Reilly in April. Through this certification, the city recognizes that UCSC, with major contribution from UCSC Dining, embraces cooperative solutions that protect the community's economic and environmental resources.

# data[].attributes.headline
In Memoriam: Raymond Narverud, Dana Grier

# data[].attributes.subject
In Memoriam: Raymond Narverud, Dana Grier

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Crown College is saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two Crown undergraduate students this summer.

Raymond Narverud was a Computer Science major who came to UCSC in the fall of 2010 from Napa, California; he passed away in late June. Dana Grier was a Psychology major who came to UCSC in the fall of 2008 from Castro Valley, California; he passed away in early August.

The College extends condolences and its deepest expressions of sympathy to the family, friends, and loved ones of Raymond and Dana at this difficult time.

Please contact the Crown College Office at 831-459-2665, Counseling and Psychological Services at 459-2628, the College Administrative Officer, Alex Belisario, at 459-2452, or the Provost, Joel Ferguson at 459-2412 for information regarding resources for support.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Memoriam: Raymond Narverud, Dana Grier

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Crown College is saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two Crown undergraduate students this summer. Raymond Narverud was a Computer Science major who came to UCSC in the fall of 2010 from Napa, California; he passed away in late June.

# data[].attributes.body
A student writes about her experience caring for, and learning from, UCSC's marine mammal "animal ambassadors".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Editor's note: As part of the Student Issue, we asked a student to write a piece forus. We hope this first-person by Maia Goguen gives you an up-close look at what it'slike to be one of the student volunteers who work tirelessly, 365 days a year, caring for animals in the Marine Mammal Physiology Project. Volunteers gain a breadth ofexperience ranging from animal care and husbandry practices to data collection and hands-on animal training with a variety of marine mammals and exotic birds.

It's 7:30 on a Saturday morning and I am having a stare-down with a sink full of dead fish.

Two years ago this would have seemed strange to me because, 1) I'm awake at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, an event unimaginable for most college students, and 2) I'm next to a sink full of dead fish.

This, however, is not part of a strange dream, but rather a first step in "bucketing," one of the many morning tasks volunteers perform at the Marine Mammal Physiology Project (MMPP), a UC Santa Cruz lab under the direction of marine biologist Terrie Williams.

The MMPP studies the physiological, energetic, and biomechanical parameters of several marine mammal species, and the sink full of fish will be breakfast for the lab's animal residents. MMPP is home to Primo and Puka, two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins; Taylor, a Southern sea otter; and KE-18, a Hawaiian monk seal. Three cockatoos, Junior, Mary, and Wiki, and two cockatiels, Shadow and Savannah, live here, too.

MMPP has also been my home, at least 20 hours a week, for the past two years, but I am a small part of the MMPP workforce. You know the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." Then what does it take to raise nine exotic animals? The MMPP community!

After finishing bucketing we move on to other daily "chores" like checking the temperature and water quality of the pools, scraping algae (and feces) off of pool walls, and cleaning everything, from bird food bowls to buckets filled with fish juice.

It is dirty and tiring work, but I would choose all of it over cleaning my room any day. These tasks are essential for the health of the animals, the primary concern for everyone at the lab, and are actually fun when you do them with friends.

Throughout the day we also work to keep the animals enriched, or mentally healthy, by picking out toys, introducing them to novel things, and being creative in our interactions with them.

Then comes everyone's, especially the animals', favorite part-feeding! Feeding sessions use the animals' daily food as a motivator to enforce good "table manners" or behavior, and train many husbandry behaviors, including weighing, blood sampling, and exercise, and research behaviors, including diving and sitting under a metabolic dome for oxygen consumption measurements.

The animals voluntarily perform all research and husbandry behaviors. MMPP trainers also use these sessions to teach volunteers about feeding, training, and research techniques. As an assistant trainer, I now get to feed and train these amazing animals!

I am constantly learning ways to improve my communication and training abilities in different situations and with different species, skills that are necessary for a career in animal care and training. I have also been able to watch and participate in research sessions and have had the opportunity to apply the training and research knowledge I have gained while working with MMPP to my own study on the metabolic rates and assimilation efficiency of cockatoos.

This applied research experience will help me with my goal of going to graduate school to continue biological and conservation research.

MMPP has taught me the importance of teamwork, both with animals and other people. It is inspiring to see what we all can accomplish together!

I would like to thank Professor Terrie Williams for this opportunity to learn and live my dreams. I would also like to thank Traci Kendall, Beau Richter, and Courtney Ribiero-French for their guidance, care, and patience. Lastly, I would like to thank the rest of my MMPP family: Hilary Mills, Donna Beckett, Bryan Tom, Breanna Beck, Nick Alcaraz, Caitlin Carrington, Meagan Davis, Margaret Cummings, Noel Fong, Vicky Karabanova, Hannah Blaisdell, Laura Francisco, Kim Kendig, Travis Trihn, Aubrey Sanders, Melissa Sigala, Krista Rigsbee, Janelle Lundin, Victoria Hess, Danna Jackson-Molidor, Leann Castle, and Amber Diluzio for all of their love and support for the animals and each other.

Deeper pools, deeper research

The outdoor marine mammal research facilities at Long Marine Lab need to be rebuilt and improved-the pools and life support system are nearly 35 years old. Plans are being developed and private funding sought for the project, which will allow important new study of seals, sea lions, dolphins, and sea otters. Among improvements: making the pools deeper so marine animals have room to dive-and researchers can study how they do it. To learn more, call (831) 459-4240, or write to sciences@ucsc.edu.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Editor's note: As part of the Student Issue, we asked a student to write a piece forus. We hope this first-person by Maia Goguen gives you an up-close look at what it'slike to be one of the student volunteers who work tirelessly, 365 days a year, caring for animals in the Marine Mammal Physiology Project.

# data[].attributes.headline
Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams honored by Chopra Foundation

# data[].attributes.subject
Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams honored by Chopra Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UC Santa Cruz physicist Joel Primack and his wife Nancy Abrams have been chosen to receive the 2012 Spirit of Rustum Roy Award from the Chopra Foundation. The award is given "to those making major contributions to the scientific understanding of consciousness and helping to move humanity towards a just, sustainable, healthy and peaceful world."

Primack and Abrams will share the award with Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, a Harvard University neurologist. The award, which includes a $100,000 prize, will be presented in March at the third annual International Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, CA.

Primack is a distinguished professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz and director of the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center. He has been one of the leaders in the creation of the modern theory of the universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies. Abrams, an attorney, cultural philosopher, and lecturer at UCSC, has worked for the Ford Foundation and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress.

Primack and Abrams co-taught a popular course called "Cosmology and Culture" at UCSC for more than a decade. They have also written two books exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of modern cosmology: The View from the Center of the Universe (Riverhead, 2006) and The New Universe and the Human Future (Yale, 2011).

The Chopra Foundation, founded by Dr. Deepak Chopra, is committed to creating a peaceful, just, sustainable, and healthy world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams honored by Chopra Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UC Santa Cruz physicist Joel Primack and his wife Nancy Abrams have been chosen to receive the 2012 Spirit of Rustum Roy Award from the Chopra Foundation. The award is given "to those making major contributions to the scientific understanding of consciousness and helping to move humanity towards a just, sustainable, healthy and peaceful world."

# data[].attributes.body
My favorite class, taught by my favorite professor Hilde Schwartz, was The Fossil Record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Name: Scott Rohlf

Age: 21

Major: Earth sciences (environmental geology concentration)

Hometown: Capitola

UCSC College: Crown
Favorite class or professor and why?
My favorite class, taught by my favorite professor Hilde Schwartz, was The Fossil Record. It was great fun, and I learned about many things that I hope to make my focus of study in the coming years. Hilde was always very open to helping anyone in the class, always had handouts and supplemental material provided for you, and often gave out candy. What more could you want?
Most memorable experience at UCSC?
My most memorable experience has occurred very recently. This year I have joined an Argentine Tango Society on campus and it has been the best thing I've done with UCSC in the last four years. I've met some really great, friendly people and I get to dance a few times every week.
Favorite spot on campus and why?
My favorite spot on campus are the tennis courts at the East Field House. I have played tennis there every quarter, either because I was taking the advanced tennis class through OPERS or practicing with the tennis club.
How has UCSC shaped you?
Geez, hard question. Through the last four years, I've become a person who is relaxed and calm, but understands what needs to be done and when it needs to be done in order to get the task accomplished in time. The open-minded state of UCSC has broadened my views of a lot of topics.
What are your future plans?
Next year I will be a graduate student in the Earth Sciences Department under a one-year masters program. So after hopefully receiving my masters, I will apply for jobs in either the private sector with geotechnical consulting or do some museum work in the field of paleontology.
How did you choose your college, and how has your college affected your education?
My life as a Crown student did not have a strong effect on me. The core class I took my first quarter of freshman year was great. I really enjoyed it. But I don't think it affected my education one way or another. And I only maintained one friend from when I lived in the dorms at Crown. So I think being a Crownie did not affect me much.
Accomplishments:
My biggest accomplishment, outside of graduating UCSC, has been my work with the Disability Alliance. For the past two years, I have been president of the alliance, which is run by students with disabilities. I helped create this club four years ago in part to create an example for other students with disabilities--to show them that a disability doesn't have to hinder your performance, especially if you play to your strengths. Last winter we had our main event, a Disability Awareness Fair, where we educate passersby about different types of disabilities such as learning, physical, mental, etc., in order to slowly help destigmatize disabilities and erase stereotypes. As a student with learning disabilities who is not afraid of the stereotypes, I have been trying to show over the last four years that other students with disabilities don't have to be afraid either.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Name: Scott Rohlf Age: 21 Major: Earth sciences (environmental geology concentration) Hometown: Capitola UCSC College: Crown Favorite class or professor and why? My favorite class, taught by my favorite professor Hilde Schwartz, was The Fossil Record. It was great fun, and I learned about many things that I hope to make my focus of study in the coming years.

# data[].attributes.body
Cota-Robles, a professor emeritus of biology at UC Santa Cruz, died September 12 after a brief illness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Memoriam: Memorial service for Eugene Cota-Robles, October 7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A memorial service for former Crown College provost Eugene Cota-Robles has been scheduled for Sunday, October 7, at 1:30 p.m. at the Crown-Merrill Cultural Center.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ben Doniach, a former UC Santa Cruz employee, died on July 10, 2018 from injuries suffered in a collision with a car while riding his bike. He was 61.

Doniach was hired in 2002 and worked on campus until August 2007. He served in Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services (CHES) as a senior building maintenance worker at Crown College.

Services will be held at a future date, as his wife, Tutti, is recovering from a lengthy illness.

He loved his interactions with the students at Crown, particularly leading the summer student paint crew. On three occasions, he was selected by the students of Crown to hand out diplomas at graduation, a high honor. When he had to have brain surgery to remove a benign tumor, the university staff donated three months of vacation leave.

During his convalescence, the students at Crown made a colorful mobile of a thousand origami paper cranes, which still hang in Ben's room. Ben was noted for his extensive and varied music tastes while at Crown, and many people would tune into his playlists. Ben liked to say he "played a mean turn-table."

Ben is survived by his partner of 33 years, Tutti Hacking; daughters Hannah and Zoë Doniach (Santa Cruz), Rori Launspach and grand-daughter Madison Jane Garfinkel-Launspach (San Jose); his father Sebastian Doniach, step-mother Jennifer Doniach, brother Joseph Doniach (Palo Alto); sisters Alex Doniach (San Francisco), Martha Doniach (London), Tabitha Doniach (Santa Rosa); and his step-father Richard Joseph (Tucson).

His full obituary is available online.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ben Doniach, a former UC Santa Cruz employee, died on July 10, 2018 from injuries suffered in a collision with a car while riding his bike. He was 61. Doniach was hired in 2002 and worked on campus until August 2007. He served in Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services (CHES) as a senior building maintenance worker at Crown College.

# data[].attributes.headline
New book by Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack finds meaning in the cosmos

# data[].attributes.subject
New book by Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack finds meaning in the cosmos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A new book by the husband-and-wife team of Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack, distinguished professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, explores the cultural and social implications of the modern scientific understanding of the universe.

The New Universe and the Human Future, published by Yale University Press, is based on the Terry Lectures that the authors gave at Yale in October 2009. Subtitled How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World, the book advances a view of humanity's place in the cosmos that offers new insights into seemingly intractable global problems such as climate change and unsustainable growth.

In the introduction, the authors explain that the book "is not about science per se. It's about us and what we as a species need to do, now that we understand for the first time where we are in time and space."

Primack and Abrams will give a multimedia presentation based on their new book on Monday, April 4, at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. In this talk, they will explain modern cosmology using stunning astronomical videos and relate it to life on Earth, suggesting ways of understanding global issues in their cosmic context. Additional information and tickets for the talk are available online.

The New Universe and the Human Future builds on ideas first presented in an earlier book by Abrams and Primack, The View from the Center of the Universe. The pair has co-taught a popular course called "Cosmology and Culture" at UCSC for more than a decade.

A leading cosmologist, Primack is one of the principal creators of the modern theory of the universe on the grand scale. Abrams, an attorney, cultural philosopher, and lecturer at UCSC, has worked for the Ford Foundation and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress.

Praise for their new book comes from diverse sources, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace laureate, who said, "Abrams and Primack show us how the strange and newly discovered nature of our universe can empower us to meet the gravest challenges of our time." Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, said, "Joel Primack is a pioneer of modern ideas of cosmic evolution, superbly qualified to write with Nancy Abrams an original synthesis and distinctive perspective on humanity's place in the cosmos."

A companion web site for the book includes remarkable images and videos relevant to specific chapters. Many of the videos are based on supercomputer simulations of key aspects of the evolving universe, including videos based on Primack's research on the role of dark matter in the evolution of structure in the universe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New book by Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack finds meaning in the cosmos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new book by the husband-and-wife team of Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack, distinguished professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, explores the cultural and social implications of the modern scientific understanding of the universe. The New Universe and the Human Future, published by Yale University Press, is based on the Terry Lectures that the authors gave at Yale in October 2009.