Alternative Foundations
Claire WallaCo-Editor in Chief
“Excuse me, are you Don Rothman?”
We’re sitting at a round table in the back of Lulu Carpenter’s café, where local artwork hangs from shabby brick walls and Edith Piaf’s prominent French drone mixes with the buzz of café patrons. Now that he’s retired, Rothman comes here a lot; he says he likes the way that the intimate space of the coffee shop allows people’s lives to intersect-it’s one of the places where today’s version of democracy thrives. With a navy blue sweater vest and an unassuming presence, he nestles into the scene almost unnoticed behind a pad of paper and an active pen. He stops writing when we arrive, and, without missing a beat, redirects his stream of thoughts from the pages of his notebook into one of the most soft-spoken Brooklyn accent you’ll ever hear. He only stops when he hears his name, and then he looks up.
“I was one of your students,” the woman, who’s now standing at our table, says.
Rothman’s modest features stretch into a smile so large it reaches the corners of his eyes.
“Yes, yes, I remember!” he says, delighted. He estimates that must have been 25 years ago. “How are you?”
Rothman’s former student, now a local veterinarian, introduces Rothman to her husband and young son. They briefly exchange stories before parting ways and Rothman turns back to the table, remnants of that huge smile still visible on his face: “That’s one of the absolute joys of teaching somewhere for 34 years,” he says.
Rothman retired from teaching writing at UC Santa Cruz in 2007 with an accumulation of fond memories. Though he won’t hesitate to take a moment to gush about his work, Rothman’s smile begins to fade as our café conversation picks up again.
He’s worried about the future of education at UC Santa Cruz.
Since the university opened in 1965, the campus, like any public institution, has been pushed by political winds and been forced to adapt to economic bumps along the road. But the height of today’s tribulations not only magnifies existing problems, it’s caused many to question how we got to this state. The threat of losing up to 10 percent of state funding puts most within the university system ill at ease. It reveals an already wounded system that is still recovering from other drastic cuts just a decade ago. And as the university looks toward another economic beating, it has many asking the question: At what cost?
A Hopeful Beginning
Rothman came to UCSC fresh out of graduate school. He was highly involved in political activism at UC Berkeley, when anti-war protests, draft-resisters and civil rights demonstrations were an everyday part of student life. He came to UCSC for reasons similar to many other faculty members at the time.
“We thought UCSC was a really revolutionary site to create change,” he said. The war in Vietnam had cost thousands of lives, billions of tax dollars and had simultaneously depleted public morale-the UC’s new university in Santa Cruz would create an alternative environment.
Oddly enough, the idea for this innovative college began in a dorm room at Stanford University, where roommates Clark Kerr and Dean McHenry dreamed up a system of higher education that combined the best of both of their undergrad experiences.
In 1965, their vision finally materialized. Kerr had been President of the UC system for seven years when the UC Regents gave him the task of developing three new UC campuses. He placed McHenry, Kerr’s academic assistant at the time, in the top leadership spot at the campus in Santa Cruz and together the two worked to create the campus they had dreamed of three decades before. Unlike Berkeley, which had a strong emphasis on graduate research, they created UCSC to foster undergraduate education. The campus would emphasize tight-knit communities and cater to interdisciplinary work, rather than purely traditional disciplines. The university was to be built around several smaller colleges, where undergraduates would be able to learn within a small-school environment that was also part of a bigger university system.
Kerr and McHenry’s vision was manifest in the faculty members Kerr had a hand in hiring, like Rothman: “We were trying to shape our vision around students thinking out of the box, creating their own majors and thinking critically within the context of the university,” Rothman said.
Rothman was part of a unique cast of professors who, given the political climate in the 60s, brought alternative ideas to the traditionally conservative university model: Humanities Professor Norman O. Brown, who retired in 1981, highlighted Marxist theories in his critically acclaimed book, Life Against Death, and Professor Bettina Aptheker, daughter of radical activist Herbert Aptheker, was an open member of the communist party, whose political roots stemmed back to her teenage years when she worked for civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Later, the university would also hire Angela Davis, much to the chagrin of California’s former governor Ronald Reagan. In 1969, Reagan had succeeded in urging UC Regents to fire Davis from UCLA’s philosophy department because she was an open member of the communist party (he later vowed that she would never teach at the University of California again). Her hiring was controversial in large part due to her relationship with the Black Panther Party, whose founder, Huey P. Newton, happened to receive both his bachelor’s degree and PhD from UCSC.
UCSC professors’ work often rejected convention and overflowed into several subject areas at once, which spawned such interdisciplinary fields of research as Community Studies, Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness.
This unique curriculum, Rothman said, was a part of what UCSC was proud of.
But teachers were beginning to feel the weight of this new structure. The demand for interdisciplinary learning put a lot of pressure on science teachers, who were forced to teach both in their own field of research, as well as within their affiliated college.
Chemistry Professor David Kliger, currently UCSC’s Executive Vice Chancellor, was hired as a Kresge College faculty member in 1971, the year the college first opened. He said he found it very difficult to teach and conduct research efficiently with the demands of the college system. In addition to teaching three courses in physical chemistry, he taught three courses for Kresge College. Kliger said it was especially tough to keep up with his research given the small population of graduate students. “I had to do pretty much everything on my own,” he said. Of the 17 faculty members who were initially hired to work at Kresge, Kliger said that he was the only one granted tenure. “Just about everyone of us ended up getting a divorce during that time because it was so stressful,” he said.
In the end, Rothman said UCSC was a great experiment that took its toll on too many people.
Kliger agreed: “It had become clear from the start that the emphasis on the colleges was not sustainable.”
And simultaneously the political climate that initially fueled the university began to lose steam. President Kerr had made his stance clear from the beginning, saying in a 1952 speech at the Berkeley campus: “I shall be eternally vigilant to preserve freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression for the students and for the faculty.” But the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, which eventually led to student arrests and widespread government crackdown, caused trouble for the university’s leader. President Kerr had been blacklisted by the FBI because he refused to expel students who participated in the protests, the San Francsisco Chronicle revealed in a 2002 report. He was criticized for being too liberal, so in 1966 the UC Regents voted in accordance with the wishes of California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, to relieve Kerr of his duties as President of UC. Kerr was fired in 1967, just two years after UCSC welcomed its first freshman class.
In 1975, eight years after Kerr left the UC system, Ronald Reagan left office and began his campaign for the White House.
That same year, Chancellor McHenry retired and was replaced by Robert Sinsheimer. Rothman suspected that Sinsheimer was brought to the university with orders from the top to “shake up Santa Cruz,” as he put it, because the campus’ eclectic and richly experimental academic system was just too difficult to govern.
And so the little experimental college by the sea was rocked, and educational goals were reshaped. The campus went through a “reorganization” in 1979, which essentially broke-down the college system and set the school on its new course.
Funding
The influx of conservative values propelled by the post-McCarthy era political machine-which decimated state funding for public education through Proposition 13-has brought the UC to its current state: it’s completely and utterly strapped for cash.
A May 2006 budget report from the UC Committee on Planning and Budget found that from 1985-2005, the proportion of the overall UC budget that came from the state general fund was cut in half, from about 50 percent to about 25 percent of the overall university budget. And with the state now facing what Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal emergency, the UC has been dealt a major blow. And though all state programs have suffered, the budget report suggests that, “Higher education is the only major element of California’s public sector that has grown more slowly than the population.”
And for a major research institution responsible for educating the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates in the state, this means that UC is struggling to provide basic services for its students, which ultimately forces the institution to get external financial sources to pick up the slack.
These sources come in three forms: federal contracts and grants, private donations and endowments, and student fees. All three areas are vulnerable to attack when the state’s economy falters.
Still, the quickest and easiest road to recovery doesn’t come without dire consequences. Steep tuition hikes could theoretically solve the university’s budgetary woes in a flash, but the consequences would be dramatic. According to the UC Committee on Planning and Budget, the “high tuition/high aid” model, like the University of Michigan (see sidebar), would shrink enrollments and, at the same time, reduce the quality of the university’s student body. “The overall UC system would continue in name but not in reality, as the most prestigious campuses draw on a national student pool and collect large amounts of non-resident tuition while other campuses struggle with diminished resources, fewer programs, and reduced research capacity,” the report found.
In essence, the report concluded: ”[An end to state funding] would end the UC system as we know it.”
Leadership
Back at the café, Professor Rothman’s drink was getting cold: the words spilled from his lips so rapidly they left little time for tea.
After reflecting on how UCSC’s past has shaped its future, Rothman emphasized the importance of leadership. “The deans can be really proactive and creative, but they can also be yes-men.” He said that the atmosphere of pressure within the administration leaves little room for mistakes, let alone creative freedom. Based on those that he’s known to have left the administration, Rothman said, “People were ground up by a system that was destroying them.”
Professor Martin Chemers knows what it’s like to be in this pressure-cooker of a situation; he was acting chancellor after former Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood was promoted to UC Provost, just before Chancellor Denise Denton.
“I don’t think that anyone can know what that’s like,” he said. Chemers said that there is an enormous amount of pressure at the top because the chancellor is essentially responsible for making decisions with various interest groups constantly pushing for their agendas to be met.
“Ultimately, the chancellor’s making decisions for a $400 million entity-any mistakes that are made are big mistakes,” he said.
It doesn’t help that the job is so complex. “It’s like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose,” Chemers added.
Chemers, whose work in psychology focuses on leadership, ran for chancellor in 2004 against Denise Denton. He didn’t get the job, but he has theories for why.
“I had a very strong feeling that they wanted a natural scientist,” he said. “All throughout my interview, they asked how I could be a chancellor without being a natural scientist, because scientists already have relationships with big name people. I thought I could do it.”
The push for increased funds may be necessary, but Rothman would rather see a push for innovative leadership. He thinks that the university should strive to re-incorporate certain elements that made the college system unique without fully reverting to its old state.
Kliger agreed. “The one thing that I kind of miss was that we were small enough that there was more participation from faculty across campus. There’s less contact between faculty from other departments; I think that’s a real loss. That was the whole idea of the colleges that Dean McHenry set out to achieve,” he said.
Kliger agrees that elements of the former system can be reinstated, but not necessarily replicated. “People feel so much nostalgia for the way the colleges were, but I think there’s not enough imaginative thought about what they could be,” he said.
Professor Emeritus David Swanger came to UCSC in 1971. He left a teaching position at Harvard University to teach education and poetry.
“I thought this was better than Harvard, because this held the promise of change, and embraced it,” he said.
Swanger said that things are different today, in large part due to the fact that instigating change and maintaining new ideas is always hard. “It’s harder for an institution to change than to stay the same,” he said. “This is why so many of our Chancellors have been scientists; it’s a safer route to prestige.”
He said that UCSC is in sort of a convalescent stage. “We’re recovering from a series of administrations that were mediocre or worse… we’re at that juncture where visionary leadership can be restored and there’s space for that now.”
When Swanger retired in 2005, he waived the option to keep an office on campus, so he suggested the Stevenson Coffee House. In the midst of students chugging cups of coffee and reading philosophy texts, his voice was difficult to hear, but his message was loud and clear.
“The function of the university is to carry out the mission of ‘educare’: to lead people to think abstractly in terms of goals, ideals and principles that go beyond one’s immediate, material situation. That’s one of the functions of education, to be a leader for change within the system.”