Before 2020, UC Santa Cruz chancellors held quarterly in-person press conferences with students and addressed their concerns face-to-face.
“It was a really important and useful connection,” said third-year UCSC student and Student Media Council (SMC) co-chair Darwin Melchiorre, in reference to the chancellor’s press conferences. “As students, it can feel very unempowering when we have very limited contact and back and forth communication with administration and the decisions they’re making.”
The quarterly meetings have since been reduced to videos of Chancellor Cynthia Larive answering a curated questionnaire. The most recent Jan. 26 posting was published by UC Santa Cruz on YouTube, titled “Chancellor Larive answers 14 Student Questions.” In it, Larive discusses a range of topics including housing insecurity, federal funding, the presence of ICE on college campuses and more.
Despite being over 30 minutes long, the video left students with unresolved concerns regarding campus policies and one lingering question: Will the chancellor ever bring back UCSC’s tradition of holding press conferences with students?
“No, I’m not, I’m not going to do another press conference,” said Larive in an interview with City on a Hill Press.
For someone currently under a five-year review for her performance as UCSC’s highest level administrator, resolutely discontinuing this tradition is a stark decision.
“As soon as the press conferences were taken away, there was a pretty strong effort from student media and organizations within student media to try to bring them back. Even five to six years later [it] is still being brought up as something that would be really beneficial,” said Melchiorre.
The video project was described as an “opportunity to ask what you want to know — about leadership, student life, university priorities, or anything you’re curious about” on a flyer from UCSC’s official Division of Student Affairs and Success (DSAS) Instagram page. Assistant Vice Chancellor (AVC) and Chief of Staff Lucy Rojas reached out to various student organizations during fall quarter of 2025, including student governments and the “Big Five” cultural organizations — Black Student Union (BSU), Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlán, the Student Alliance of Native American and Indigenous Peoples, Bayanihan, and the Asian/Pacific Islander Student Alliance — to garner student participation in the video’s production.
She additionally promised all students a $100 gift card for their support, even if they didn’t stay until the end. DSAS also made an Instagram post announcing an open call for students interested in participating and/or submitting questions, subsequently qualifying them to participate in a raffle for a $25 Amazon gift card. While submitted questions were considered in the planning process, it is unclear how many made the final cut or how much editing each question was subjected to prior to filming.
Initially, several organizations accepted the offer. But, before the project’s completion, all student organizers quit and those unaffiliated with an organization requested to remove their names from the credits.
“Bayanihan didn’t want to be associated with the censorship that the chancellor would want in doing things that look, on the surface level, to be supporting students and listening to student concerns – but in reality, not doing that at all,” said Ayla Sana, a second-year UCSC student and member of the Filipino Student Association’s core leadership team.
Students’ Hope for Connection and a Misrepresentative Product
Behind students’ decisions to support Larive’s project was the apprehension of missing out on a rare chance to speak with her, an opportunity that was once available on a regular basis.
“A lot of us were on the fence of, ‘should we continue to show up’?” said Savannah Daniels, a fourth-year UCSC student and Black Student Union (BSU) co-chair. “If we don’t show up, we now lose the opportunity to ask her questions that are relevant to our space, our student body and students who are like us.”
While Larive was the subject of the video, Rojas acted as the project manager. The chancellor attended one of four meetings held by Rojas, which, according to student sources, lasted about 10 minutes over Zoom. The meetings were held either virtually or in-person. In them, Rojas informed students they would choose and develop questions, that a student representative could potentially interview Larive on camera and that a live webinar modality might be used.
One student, fourth-year UCSC student and Bayanihan co-chair Kyle Delmo recalled feeling confused about what the final cut would look like, partially due to a lack of definitive answers from Rojas.
“In the planning process, we were told that it would be a live webinar where people would send in questions through a Zoom chat and there would be no student [moderator/interviewer],” said Delmo. “It would just be the chancellor asking or answering the questions that appeared in the chat. Then, it went back to the idea of it being pre-recorded.”
In the published video, AVC Rojas can be heard interviewing Larive in a voiceover. When asked about whether or not students requested a live stream video, Larive punted.
“No, I don’t know if that was true. I don’t know what it was intended to be,” Larive said. “I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding in that, but I think Lucy [Rojas] was engaged in those conversations with the students and could probably better clarify that idea.”
Upon City on a Hill Press’ outreach to Rojas, the Communications Director for Student Success and Campus Climate, Erin Elliot, was deferred to and responded in her stead.
“The project was developed from the outset as a prerecorded video initiative and was presented to participating students in that context from the beginning. While some participating students expressed interest in a live webinar format during the process, Lucy consistently clarified that the Chancellor’s direction was to move forward with the video project as planned,” Elliot wrote in an email to City on a Hill Press.
According to BSU Co-Chair Daniels, when prompted with a student’s proposal for a live webinar, Rojas refused to comply.
“She absolutely shut down the live video,” Daniels said. “When I was walking in, [I was] understanding this as a collaborative project. It was not reflecting that when we were actually asking for what we wanted to do and what we wanted to be in charge of.”
Students Demand to Bring Back Press Conferences
From Chancellor Larive’s perspective, the video was an “experiment.”
“It was worth a try and [in] all experiments, in my experience, you try to learn something, and sometimes the experiment works the way you think it’s going to, sometimes it doesn’t work at all,” Larive said.
Said experiment was also posted to Instagram Reels by DSAS and divided into four short snippets. As of publication, the Reels collectively accrued upwards of about 10,820 views and have gathered 68 likes over the span of about five months. It should be noted that one view amounts to three seconds of watching.
A number of individuals virtually commented on the posts with sentiments alleging inauthenticity and a failure on behalf of administrators to uphold the promises they make with students. One commenter critiqued Larive’s dissent of press conferences.
“Why won’t you allow students to do an in person town hall like previous UCSC chancellors? Pretty convenient to do short videos rather than face actual students,” the comment reads.
In the aftermath of this production, some students believe the solution to the growing disconnect between administrators and the student body is to bring back in-person press conferences.
“We’re really hoping we can get a more honest relationship with the administration through press conferences,” said SMC Co-Chair Melchiorre. “It would allow us to ask questions instead of just seeing that a decision is made.”
Regardless of the perceived impacts of the online videos, several students expressed a desire to see administrators make actionable efforts to connect with the UCSC student body and listen to their concerns.
“In an ideal relationship with the chancellor, I would really want to feel like I’m cared about,” Daniels said. “I don’t think showing up on a Zoom means you don’t care, but it says so much more to have to be there in-person and look at us in our face and talk to us in our face.”
She continued, “There’s so much lost when you don’t have a connection to your students.”
Additional Reporting by Cecilia Schutz and Naomi Schulze.
