This male puma narrowly avoided being collared by a researcher with the Santa Cruz Puma Project (SCPP). The SCPP captures and collars mountain lions to collect data for better understanding puma behavior. Courtesy of Paul Houghtaling.

Sixty feet high in the forest canopy, the puma begins to fidget. From the tree next to her, biologist Paul Houghtaling shakes branches and yells to frighten her from her perch. Disgruntled, the puma grudgingly descends the tree’s trunk head first, clinging to the bark and hissing at the researchers waiting below.

“It wasn’t the most graceful thing,” said Houghtaling, the field biologist for the Santa Cruz Puma Project (SCPP), when telling the story. “She was backing out, snarling like a dragon.”

Called 38F, this female puma is one of many caught and collared by SCPP. Partnered with UC Santa Cruz and led by UCSC professor of environmental studies Chris Wilmers, SCPP researchers have spent the past five years collecting data to better understand puma behavior, physiology and ecology, and how each are affected by habitat fragmentation in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Since 2008, Wilmers and the 10 graduate students and staff members involved with SCPP have caught and tagged 38 pumas from their 17,000 km² study region in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Today, this landscape is a mosaic of open forest, rural neighborhoods and roads — all of which are surrounded by cities. The researchers collect data from them with GPS collars, samples from deer kill sites and 44 trail cameras.

SCPP published their first study, which encompassed four years of data, on April 17. The results confirmed their prediction that pumas tolerate human activity in their basic subsistence habits — feeding and moving throughout their territories — but they need larger environmental buffers to conduct reproductive behaviors, which include raising kittens, communicating and mating.

“Just because you see mountain lions doesn’t mean it’s good mountain lion habitat,” Wilmers said. “What they really need to sustain their populations are big open spaces that allow them to find mates and reproduce.”

According to the study, healthy reproduction rates in puma populations require access to mates and success at raising kittens. Like humans, puma romance begins with communication — but instead of Match.com, male pumas use scent markings to advertise their presence to females. These occur at scrape sites, where pumas kick up piles of duff and leaves and urinate on them. Often, like in 38F’s territory, multiple male pumas have to duke it out for the strongest scent.

“They’re having a pissing contest with each other, essentially,” Houghtaling said.

When a female puma likes what she smells, she answers with a screeching call, also known as caterwauling. If all goes according to plan, the two will meet up and mate for several days. The female will den and give birth to kittens several months later.

Researches from the Santa Cruz Puma Project use various methods, such as motion-sensor cameras. Photo by Daniel Green.

Wildlife Neighbors

As open space becomes more fragmented, Wilmers said being a responsible wildlife neighbor will become increasingly important to the survival of puma populations.

“The more fragmented a habitat becomes, the smaller the population’s going to be,” he said. “[It becomes] a bigger deal, things like depredation, because you’re killing a smaller and smaller population.”

While pumas are characteristically shy animals that avoid human neighborhoods, the study shows they occasionally eat pets left outside after dark, said Yiwei Wang, a graduate student who is part of the project. At night, when humans go to sleep, the decrease in human activity invites pumas to venture into the rural neighborhoods to look for food.

Wilmers said pumas have the highest chance of being shot in rural neighborhoods, where many people have pets that could potentially be prey for pumas. It is legal in California for landowners to shoot mountain lions that threaten their property — according to the published study, eight of the project’s collared pumas have been shot for preying on domestic  livestock since 2008.

Wang and other members of SCPP reach out to landowners in rural communities close to open space to educate them about how to minimize conflict with pumas.

“It kind of comes down to, are we going to be good neighbors?” Houghtaling said.

For SCPP researchers, being a good neighbor means putting pets in sheds at night, when lack of human activity might entice pumas to infiltrate neighborhoods in search for food.

Roads are another cause of puma mortality, particularly Highway 17. Two of the project’s collared pumas have been hit by cars, one of which died from the accident.

“There’s potential for making these large highways more pervious for animal movement,” Wilmers said, “by building overpasses or underpasses for wildlife to cross the highway rather than crossing the road and risk getting hit by a car.”

SCPP has a working relationship with Caltrans, the state agency that oversees planning and construction of highways, bridges and railways. With help from SPCC, Caltrans is currently working to draw up a plan to implement these changes, Wilmers said.

While being shot or hit by a car is unfortunate for individual pumas, Wang said, habitat fragmentation poses the largest threat to the population in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is currently at a healthy 70–100 adult individuals.

“Getting some individual [pumas] killed doesn’t necessarily impact the survival of the population,” Wang said. “We’re more concerned for conservation purposes of retaining valuable habitat and making sure that development doesn’t occur in places that are really important to pumas right now.”

Among these important areas are forested corridors connecting areas of open space, which serve as routes of access for pumas. Cutting these off affects their ability to find mates and reproduce. It also limits the ability for new individuals to join the population, Houghtaling said, which is vital to the population’s future genetic health.

Trained hounds are also used to track and capture pumas to study their movements and habits. Photo by Daniel Green.

The Pumas of the Project

“Every individual animal is interesting,” Houghtaling said. “They have their quirks, they’ve had their experiences and their ways of relating to things that are a little bit different from one individual to another.”

Of the original 38 pumas collared, 14 are still alive. One male, 16M, became a local celebrity when stories of his escapades on Highway 17 spread. 16M crossed the highway more than 30 times, survived getting hit by a car and boldly changed the location of his territory, risking being killed by the males whose territories he expanded into. He was a favorite among the researchers, Wang said, until he was shot in November 2012 for preying on livestock.

3M was the first male collared in the Santa Cruz Mountains. According to one of Houghtaling’s SCPP blog updates, 3M taught the researchers lessons about important corridors in neighborhoods, the significance of marking sites and the importance of “patience, ingenuity, perseverance, versatility and humility.”

“3M was like a ghost. His collar was junk, it broke right away and would very rarely send us a data point,” Houghtaling said. “That cat really pushed our edges to think outside the box.”

Houghtaling said 3M’s elusive behavior forced the researchers to become more creative with technology, like using satellite transmitters to monitor when a lion is scavenging a deer and sending updates from GPS devices directly to emails and smartphones.

The researchers have refined their methods since they first captured 3M and now have several ways of catching pumas. They use box traps baited with a fresh kill, padded snare traps or hound dogs to track and “tree” an individual, or chase it up a tree, like with 38F.

“It’s always very awe-inspiring to see such a large, powerful animal and then kind of render it helpless for a little bit,” Wang said.

Out in the field a few weeks ago, a scrape site in Cemex Redwoods caught Houghtaling’s eye. He squatted low to inspect a paw print in the exposed earth, still moist from the puma’s recent presence. This scrape may have been made by the uncollared male in 36M’s territory that had been eluding the researchers.

Houghtaling radioed Dan Tichenor, the houndsman. Tichenor brought out Osage, a wizened Plott hound, to inspect the site. Osage sniffed the scrape and his tail started wagging. He barked in a direction off the trail, but didn’t give the particular howl that signals he found a fresh scent. The uncollared male had evaded the researchers once again.

Tichenor said hounds are effective in chasing pumas because pumas instinctively avoid conflict with other predators they evolved with, such as wolves.

“These hounds may be getting by on the wolves’ coattails, so to speak,” Tichenor said.

Once the hounds have “treed” a puma, the researchers shoot it with a tranquilizer dart. The drugs take several minutes to have an effect. That brief window of time often involves a wild chase to ensure the puma doesn’t pass out in a dangerous situation, such as in water.

“Their safety is our number one priority,” said Veronica Yovovich, a grad student with SPCC. “No data is worth hurting a puma over. If things look risky at all, we will back off rather than ever put a puma at risk.”

When a puma has safely fallen asleep, the researchers check its vital signs, collect various data and samples and put the collar on.

After a puma has been captured and let loose, the researchers monitor its movements with three devices on the collar: a GPS, a magnetometer that serves as a compass and an accelerometer to measure vibrations. Walking, pouncing, running and climbing, among other movements, each have a specific signature in the accelerometer data. The researchers found the key to these signatures by putting captive pumas on treadmills.

“Everyone’s like, you can never get a mountain lion to run on a treadmill,” said Gabriel Elkaim, the project engineer. “Turns out a leg of ham will get the mountain lion to run on a treadmill.”

SCPP researchers investigate kill sites, such as the one pictured above, to get more information about pumas’ movement. Photo by Daniel Green

Collars, Kittens and Deer

Now that one data set has been published, SCPP is looking to broaden the horizons of the original study.

Elkaim and Wilmers have been working on a new collar design that creates its own energy with a Faraday generator — a device that uses energy from friction caused by the animal’s motion — and solar panels. This would allow the collars’ battery life to last for 10 years rather than the current 1–2 years.

Incorporating these generators into the study would save the time and energy taken to re-collar animals on a regular basis, something that would allow for a larger study size.

“It’d be awesome,” Houghtaling said. “Instead of 38 [pumas], we could be at 70.”

Wilmers hopes to collar more kittens to better understand how habitat fragmentation affects their survival. This tricky business involves finding dens and visiting them when the mother isn’t around. Wilmers also hopes to start tagging deer, whose populations are declining in the western United States, he said. This may be due to any number of factors, including being eaten by pumas, but Wilmers said he predicts a future study will point to habitat fragmentation.

Yovovich’s current study — a facet of SCPP’s larger project — focuses on the effect of pumas on subsequent links in the food chain, such as deer and plants.

“Conservation goals are to have a healthy, intact ecosystem,” Yovovich said. “Plants co-evolved with grazers and grazers co-evolved with carnivores, and so the best ecosystem is to have all those pieces in there sort of feeding into each other.”

Along with depredation, predators affect deer with what Yovovich calls an “ecology of fear.” This model suggests prey species avoid places where predators have an advantage, which allows the flora in these “feared” areas to flourish from lack of grazing. For her study, Yovovich predicts that deer will frequent areas higher in human activity because pumas characteristically avoid these areas.

In the eastern United States, pumas and wolves — top predators — went extinct during the 18th and 19th centuries due to human expansion. Today, deer populations have exploded in their absence and forest ecosystems are severely depressed due to extreme overgrazing, said John Laundré, an instructor at Oswego State University of New York.

Laundré said opponents of reintroducing pumas in the highly developed east argue pumas can’t tolerate humans and even pose a threat to humans. Data from SCPP shows the contrary.

“People in the west are beginning to realize that they’ve been living among cougars for quite some time now and they haven’t caused problems,” Laundré said.

Yovovich said aside from having pets eaten, there is nothing to fear from pumas.

“You’re more likely to get killed by your toaster than by a mountain lion,” she said.

Human-puma encounters — in the woods, on roads or in backyards — are inevitable as long as human development cuts into open space and infringes upon pumas’ territories. SPCC aims to educate rural landowners with their findings so these chance meetings can be less harmful for both pumas and humans, Wang said.

“A lot of things about mountain lions are just a matter of conscience,” Houghtaling said. “In the brief encounter that you have with this being — that can be kind of fear-inducing — it’s important to have the context of knowing that it’s having the same experience, asking ‘well, who are you?’”

Paul Houghtaling uses an antenna to scan for nearby pumas. They are tracked through a collar sending radio signals. Photo by Daniel Green.

Photo-Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The sun was up all night long. Marci Beitch unwraps the scarf covering her face and crawls out from under her sleeping bag, which is supposed to protect against temperatures of up to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beitch rises to her feet. Removing the plastic door of her tent, she steps out into the snow where a cluster of yellow tents dot the landscape. A 10 meter tall bright red crane fills her vision, standing above a hole in the center of the camp. Bracing against the cold, Beitch gets ready for another 10-hour work day at the bottom of the world: Antartica.

“There really wasn’t an average day,” Beitch said, in retrospect.

Beitch, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student, was one of about 50 researchers who called Antarctica home Jan. 21–31 during the 2012 and 2013 field season of the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD). The project brings together professors, engineers and graduate students from nine institutions to meet once a year in Antarctica. They set up base above Lake Whillans — a subglacial lake 800 meters beneath the ice. This year was the first that they transported, assembled and employed an environmentally-friendly drill to reach the lake.

For UCSC glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk, the research literally opened up new worlds. While Tulaczyk gazed at the framed picture of a barren Antarctic field that hangs on the wall of his air-conditioned office, he recalled the expedition’s purpose.

“The first focus of the project is to study microbial life, which survive in environments deficient in light, organic matter and oxygen,” Tulaczyk said. “This will allow scientists to better understand conditions of habitability for other planets and how genetic mechanisms enable microbes to survive under difficult conditions. The second focus is to study mechanisms of motion for the West Antarctic ice sheet, as this will allow scientists to better predict future changes in global sea levels due to a warming climate.”

Antarctica offers a short window of “hospitality” — November through the end of January — for any research to be safely conducted. The window was used sparingly for preparation, yet little time remained for actual research.

The core project took place over a five day drilling period from Jan. 21–26 and a five day data collection period from Jan. 27–31. This story serves as an inside look at the rigors of collegial research, as it was done before the clock’s minute hand effectively sealed the hole at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 31 — the project’s deadline.

The Antarctic research team lowers a cable 800 meters below the icy surface into a bore hole to collect temperature and seismic data. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Building Toward Antarctica

The expedition begins here, in the forested region of UC Santa Cruz.

UCSC has played a role in the WISSARD project from its very beginning when Professors Slawek Tulaczyk of UCSC and Helen Amanda Fricker of UC San Diego first developed the idea of drilling into Lake Whillans around 2007. The professors pitched their idea to other U.S. scientists and successfully pushed The National Science Foundation (NSF) for most of their funding, which came through several grants including ones made to UCSC, Montana State University and Northern Illinois University. Tulaczyk then joined with UCSC professors Andrew Fisher and Susan Schwartz to plan the project as a team.

Tulaczyk said UCSC’s temperature data will be shared with other universities that took part in the project. Seismic data collected by UCSC will be kept exclusively for the Earth and Planetary Sciences department to study for a couple years before it is released in a public database.

In early summer of 2012, UCSC instrument engineer Dan Sampson began coordinating with instrumentation specialist Robin Bolsey and UCSC undergraduate Kyle Johnson to prepare the necessary instruments for subglacial research.

“The idea was to put together as complete a geophysical [instrument] package as possible,” Sampson said.

While Sampson and Bolsey designed the equipment UCSC used in Antarctica, undergraduate students from the Earth and Planetary Sciences department helped improve instrument designs and prepare cables and storage boxes.

The team used National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to construct several instruments from scratch, like a sediment piston corer to snatch sediment from the lake and a seismometer to detect minute vibrations in the ice sheet.

“The undergraduates had no comprehensive engineering background,” Sampson said, “but their feedback as sophisticated users was invaluable in providing suggestions for improvement and they were an intelligent bunch with a lot of good ideas.”

Undergraduate students Krista Myers, Nick Geier and Connor Williams coiled miles of cable to place inside a 20 foot storage container at the edge of the woods behind Baskin Engineering.

“What we did was mostly to help reel the cables onto a large reel,” Myers said. “We’d reel 800 meters on this huge crank reel that we would

it was fun. We got to jam to some KZSC while we were reeling away for hours.”

Myers said while undergraduates didn’t receive school credit for their summer work, it did give them the resume-worthy experience of working on an international research project.

UCSC professor Slawek Tulaczyk lowers cables to the bottom of a subglacial lake. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Stepping Into Snow

With the summer almost over, undergraduates helped pack and ship instruments and miles of cables sent in October and November.  All supplies landed on the shore of Antarctica at the McMurdo Station. From there, many instruments were flown to the field site while monster truck-sized snow tractors hauled platform equipment across 600 miles of frozen tundra.

Professor Tulaczyk and UCSC graduate students Marci Beitch and Ken Mankoff learned how to operate instruments in the deep-field — a term researchers use for Antarctic sites which don’t offer the safety of a nearby permanent station with ready access to heating, water, food and emergency care. In Antarctica, being even 2 miles away from a permanent station is referred to as the deep-field. This camp found itself 600 miles away from safety.

After six years of planning, Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson and the grad students found themselves in one of the world’s most inhospitable places separated from their data by half a mile of ice.

“It’s different from almost any other place on Earth,” Tulaczyk said. “It’s like another planet.”

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers operated a hot water drill for five days to open an 800 meter deep borehole to the lake. Researchers rushed for five more days to conduct research at the borehole by the end of Jan. 31— the calendar end of Antarctic summer and the date NSF mandated researchers must leave the site to avoid encroaching harsh weather.

The man-made borehole began to slowly freeze over, and due to the Jan. 31 deadline, the hole could not be re-drilled and continually used for research.

Beitch recalled that working at the borehole in the middle of the night exposed researchers to minus 20-degree temperatures.

“I remember a very cold night,” Beitch said. “I was working until 4 a.m. or so at the borehole, during which a cup of very hot water developed an icy surface in less than an hour. One other day a freezing fog blew over the camp and little beads of fog were freezing to my eyelashes.”

With eyes framed in ice the researchers continued their work.

“Scientists were sending measurement and sample collection instruments down around the clock,” Beitch said. “Some were working up to 20 hours. There was no regularity to the days out there. It was like ‘Okay, I’m working a shift from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., I’m going to sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then I’m going back on another shift.’”

Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson, Beitch and Mankoff often deployed the instruments for other universities when those university team members took a break.

“We had a very collegial team on the ice,” Tulaczyk said. “Nonetheless, some difficult decisions had to be made as there was insufficient time to accomplish all the science experiments. We were able to prioritize and cut tasks but we walked away from the field season still talking to each other.”

To combat the monotony of endlessly lowering and pulling cables at the borehole, the drill team blasted music from a boombox.

“We played James Brown continuously,” Beitch said. “That heated us up, for sure.”

UCSC graduate student Grace Barcheck missed out on the soul-infused cable pulling, instead venturing out of the camp to set up GPS and seismic-recording devices 100 kilometers downstream from the Whillans ice flow.

Barcheck and two researchers formed the safety minimum of a three person group as they travelled on well-packed ski-doo snowmobiles. Riding for hours on what Tulaczyk likened to a mechanical bull, Barcheck finally pulled her ski-doo into the downstream site. The group spent nearly a whole day pitching camp and the next four days setting up seismometer and GPS instruments. After the planned five days ended, subtle isolation anxiety began and the group rode their mechanical bulls back to the  site.

“We came back and we were all really excited to see civilization,” Barcheck said. “[The main camp] consisted of  containers and some more tents, but it was such a relief to have more people around. It’s not that I didn’t like the people I was with, but isolation is very strange.”

A crane lowers instruments into the bore hole. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Working for the Play

Work in the frigid camp stopped on the last night of sampling, as researchers packed up supplies. Some exhausted researchers took up reading, guitar playing, chilly walks and cross-country snow skiing, which the deadline had earlier ruled out. On the last night, Mankoff took out a big marker and scribbled on the empty packing boxes to transform them into oversized playing dice.

“We didn’t actually play craps with them,” Mankoff said. “But we were going to try to play backgammon. When we had a short amount of downtime, people were having fun.”

After the fifth day the borehole started to freeze over as the experiments and James Brown music ceased.

The minus 20 degree Fahrenheit winds retook this deep-field site in Antarctica, as the researchers flew to McMurdo station on the Antarctic coast and from there toward the warmer comfort of home.

In that now frozen borehole the UCSC researchers left a three-component, short-period, high-gain seismometer, a string of geophones and a fiber optic temperature sensor to record future data, but what they took from that borehole is both more understandable and more meaningful.

“The UCSC team hadn’t planned to bring back samples of the sediment or water this season,” Beitch said, “so we did not get the permits to do so. The only things we were able to take from the field were the relationships, the fun times and the laughter with these incredible people that we got to work with. Being a part of such groundbreaking, or ice breaking work was so cool. It just epitomizes the word cool.”

UC Santa Cruz Muslim Student Association member Hasnain Nazar. Illustrated by Christine Hipp.

Some arrive late. The door creaks against the voice of the man who sings verses of the Quran at the front of the room. These latecomers shrug off their backpacks, leaving them in a pile against the wall and hurriedly slide off their shoes before joining the rows of worshippers on the carpet. Each person faces the same direction, some with prayer rugs spread before their feet and others without, some rugs shared between two. They respond to the speaker in a unified, harmonic voice, bowing and kneeling between each segment of prayer.

This meeting of Muslim students is called Jumu’aa. Within the Muslim faith, Jumu’aa — a communal prayer — is held every Friday afternoon.

“[Jumu’aa] is meant to be a moment of reflection, to think about what happened in the last week,” said Abderrahman Bellal, a fourth-year from College Nine and president of the UC Santa Cruz Muslim Students Association (MSA). “When you’re walking between classes, it’s quiet, it gives you room to think. This time is similar, in that sense.”

The Office of Campus Life at UCSC sponsored MSA started to reserve this room for prayer in the 2010-2011 school year, according to Tariq El-Gabalawy, a fourth-year linguistics major who practices Islam. The room is open to both MSA members and nonmembers alike. Dean of students Alma Sifuentes worked directly with the group.

“My job as the dean of students is to try to facilitate activities that will help students be successful on campus academically,” Sifuentes said. “If you have a balanced life outside the classroom, you will do better in the classroom.”

Providing this space is one effort made to evaluate and improve the experience of Muslim students within the UC system.

In April and May of 2012, the UC President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion sent a team to meet with and evaluate the experience of about 65–70 Muslim, Palestinian and Arab students. The team spoke with students from UCSC, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles and UC Berkeley.

The purpose of evaluating these students’ experience was to “monitor and evaluate the progress of each campus toward ensuring conditions and practices that … provide equal opportunities for its community of students, faculty and staff,” according to the report published July 9, 2012.

The team found “the University of California campuses to be generally safe and welcoming environments for Muslim and Arab students; however, for students who are visibly and apparently Muslim or Arab, as well as active participants or leaders of organized student groups, the daily experience on UC campuses is notably negative and characterized by institutional insensitivity and daily harassment.”

In the wider sphere of the United States, the past two years have seen a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 50 percent nationally after the “Ground Zero Mosque” was proposed by the Cordoba Initiative in 2010. This percentage had barely dropped as of 2011, according to the most recent FBI hate crime statistics.

Some UCSC students and faculty said they experienced anti-Muslim attitudes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks of September 2001.

“My mom and many women in my family wear a headscarf,” El-Gabalawy said, “and after 9/11, we got harassed a bunch of times.”

Such harassment extends even to those whose appearances are similar to Muslims. Like Muslim men, Sikh men traditionally do not cut their beards. Sikh men wear a dastar, a turban that may be perceived as similar to the imamah that Muslim men traditionally wear.

Nirvikar Singh, a practicing Sikh and the chair of the Sikh and Punjabi Studies program at UCSC, said he experienced misplaced harassment during the period following Sept. 11, 2001.

“[This] was the main epithet I heard after 9/11 again and again,” Singh said. “Somebody rolls down the window of their car or pickup truck and shouts, ‘Osama bin Laden’ at me.”

Today, Muslim students at UCSC willing to come forward with their experiences on campus gave

UC Santa Cruz Muslim Student Association member Shadin Awad. Illustration by Christine Hipp.

reports that differ from those reported to occur at the national level.

Like women in El-Gabalawy’s family, Nargis Mohsini, a third-year UCSC student and vice president of MSA, wears a hijab, which visibly identifies her as Muslim. She said her peers have met her faith with acceptance.

“I only started wearing this hijab last year,” Mohsini said. “My first year, I didn’t wear it. There’s not much of a difference. The only thing is people look at me and I don’t mind that because it’s normal. People will compliment my scarf, and say ‘Oh, I like how you wrap it,’ or, ‘I like this scarf,’ but I’ve never had any negative experiences so far.”

Bellal, the president of MSA at UCSC, said some UCSC Muslim students maintain a quiet presence to avoid negative treatment.

“In the media, you always hear stories about Muslim students on other campuses being harassed,” Bellal said. “Parents are telling Muslim students to keep themselves out of situations where they could potentially be in trouble.”

Some Muslim students choose to create community through MSA, which serves as a space for these students to come together and be open about their religious beliefs. According to UCSC MSA’s website, their mission is “spreading truth and awareness about the real, peaceable message of Islam, and creating a safe and supportive environment for Muslims on campus as well as every person of goodwill to come together and connect.”

“We’re not political,” said Hasnain Nazar, a recent UCSC graduate and former president of UCSC MSA. “We’re an organization that’s purely trying to exist and coexist … to spread a little awareness and also to facilitate dialogue.”

In his one quarter at UCSC, Ziad Itani, a member of MSA, said everyone is respectful.

“I tell them I’m Muslim and they’re like, ‘Okay,’” Itani said. “I haven’t experienced anything against Islam.”

Mohsini said this generation is more accepting than its predecessor.

“Of course, some people might not be accepting of it, but I feel like a lot of people are open to it, or they’re okay with it,” Mohsini said. “People are more ‘do your own thing, it’s whatever,’ so it’s pretty chill.”

Despite these particular reports, El-Gabalawy said there is work to be done.

“I have positive hopes for the future, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t go on promoting diversity,” El-Gabalawy said.

The University Interfaith Council (UIC) is part of the administration’s effort to promote religious diversity at UCSC. According to their website, UIC is an administrative outlet created for the purpose of “[integrating] spirituality with academic life.” UIC, of which MSA is a member, receives university support because it accepts groups of all beliefs, said Pamela Urfer, the president of UIC.

“Diversity is the secret,” Urfer said. “Diversity and inclusion.”

Urfer said that the chancellor’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion is currently working to improve the university experience for religious students and faculty.

The Office of Campus Life took a step toward improving the experience of Muslim students by reserving a room for MSA to hold their weekly prayers — but when around campus, away from the prayer room, Muslim students have to find balance between their faith and their studies.

“If I were in class, and it’s my prayer time, then I’ll excuse myself,” Mohsini said. “I’ll tell the teacher beforehand and then I’ll come back. It’s no problem. In the library, I find a secluded little corner where no one’s usually at, so I’ll just pray there.”

Within students’ studies, academics and faith don’t always align. As a human biology major, Mohsini said there have been instances where the study of evolution conflicted with her faith.

“I learn things from school, for example evolution, that conflict with my religion,” Mohsini said. “But I only learn about evolution because it’s for school. I don’t take what I learn about evolution and take it to heart.”

For an anonymous non-secular faculty member, working in her academic field complements her faith.

“It is an integral part of my faith to seek knowledge,” this faculty member said. “And to me, the scientific method is one very important way to establish knowledge.”

Aside from balancing their faith and their studies, Muslim students also have to address views of Islam promoted by popular media and external sources.

“Any time you have a group that’s talked about a lot and stigmatized in popular media and you have a lot of people who have no experience or contact with those communities, people have preconceptions about them,” El-Gabalawy said.

In the experience of Shabir Ahmed, a first-year member of MSA, some of these stigmas have been spurred by what he calls “popular media’s demonization of Islam.”

“I’m Muslim and I’m human,” Ahmed said. “We’re normal and we do normal things.”

Nazar, former president of MSA, said that misconceptions about Islam attach “stigmas” to the Muslim faith. During a meeting they held on Feb. 21, about 12 MSA members addressed the most recent in a string of controversial comments made from within the UCSC community that may proliferate such misconceptions.

“When I joined the MSA, it was an accident,” Nazar said. “I came to the MSA with fear already because of the stigma that was attached to these organizations from people [who make statements like these].”

MSA members are still addressing the repercussions caused by these particular statements.

“The comments were really disheartening. A lot of people don’t know a lot about Islam in the first place,” said Shadin Awad, a member of MSA, during the meeting. “It’s already enough that as Muslims on campus we’re not visible in number.”

Some MSA members voiced worries at the meeting that the number of incoming Muslim freshmen will be adversely affected because of these comments.

“Someone who’s a Muslim in high school, who’s going to want to come to this school?” said Kamran Ali, MSA’s public relation’s officer.

Alma Sifuentes, dean of students, said students from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds — including Jewish, Arab and Middle Eastern students — “have explicitly said that they don’t agree with [these] comments.”

“I have had a number of students across a spectrum — maybe 10 or so — share with me that they would like to move past those kinds of comments and really work on making everybody feel welcome on the campus,” Sifuentes said.

In response, some MSA members consented to having their faces, names and the title of MSA printed on flyers posted around campus calling for UC President Yudof to take official action.

On a long term scale, MSA plans to combat misconceptions about their faith through promoting awareness about Islam in the UCSC community.

MSA carries out this mission through public outreach and trying to educate the campus community about the Muslim faith.

“At the end of the day, we have to do our own thing as an MSA, which is create our own image,” Bellal said.

Currently, MSA is planning a community service day and an Islam Awareness Week for spring quarter to spread awareness about the Muslim faith and its presence in Santa Cruz. At the meeting, several members, including former president Hasnain Nazar, voiced encouragement for increasing their publicity.

“It’s important now to step a little bit more into the domain of, ‘Hey, look at the community service we just did,’” Nazar said.

Through expanding MSA’s presence on campus, members hope to further their original mission of being a community resource for Muslim students.

“We try to help connect other Muslims and have a tight knit little community,” Mohsini said, “Just us, just hanging out.”

The Del Mar Theater, which has adapted to digital projection over the last two years. Photos by Sal Ingram.

Correction: City on a Hill Press has updated this version with two changes, one removing an error in the piece and in the other replacing a quote with another more accurate. CHP apologizes for any concern caused by these errors.

The age of the flickering celluloid filmstrip is fading.

Late in 2011, 20th Century Fox declared that by the end of 2013, it would stop making film prints for distribution to theater chains. Soon, other film studios followed their lead and in a very short amount of time, celluloid film was given an expiration date and digital cinema rapidly emerged as the standardized form for theatrical projection.

More than 80 percent of the approximately 39,500 theater screens in the United States have upgraded to digital. Because of the exorbitant financial costs of going digital, many smaller “art house” theaters with limited funding are facing a dire situation. The National Association of Theatre Owners estimated about 20 percent of all small theaters and drive-ins across the country will be forced to close their doors due to the impending standardization of digital projection.

For Santa Cruz independent theaters like the Nickelodeon affiliates — the Nick, Del Mar and Aptos theatres — the major transition from film to digital has altered the way they are conducting business.

The new computer system used for digital projection at the Del Mar Theatre.

The Big Shift

In the summer of 2010, the Nick and the Del Mar theatres began the extensive shift from film to digital. Scott Griffin, the chief operating officer at the Nick, Del Mar and Aptos Cinemas, sensed that the digitalization of film was impending.

“For years, we had heard everyone was going to go digital,” Griffin said. “But as soon as the major exhibition chains [like Regal] signed a financial agreement to go digital, everyone had to follow suit.”

Over the course of the next year and a half, the Nick and the Del Mar implemented all of their screens with digital capabilities. By December 2011, every screen between the two theaters had gone digital at the cost of $750,000.

Griffin attributes the industry-wide digital shift to the major studios’ desire to find a more cost effective way of exhibiting movies. Film prints cost approximately $1,500 per film, whereas digital files cost at most $150 — a margin that saves the studios a huge sum.

Although studios may have found a cost effective way of presenting films, theater chains have been forced to work with the more expensive digital technology.

“Logistically, it’s a lot more expensive working with digital than working with film,” Griffin said. “With digital, you have to update constantly. The software only operates in 10 year cycles, whereas with film you could have a 35mm projector which would last 30 years or more.”

Film vs. Digital

Whereas movies were once printed on large rolls of celluloid filmstrip and lugged around in metal canisters, now they are being projected through the use of a small set of convenient digital files. The files for feature films are typically stored on external hard drives called Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs).

Aesthetic differences between the two formats are slight, but noticeable. Film prints carry on them bits of dirt, scratches and the occasional spliced image. Digital is clean, brighter and delivers a sharp clarity without any of the haziness of celluloid.

“Film prints will start to run down over time,” said Marianne Lawlor, manager of the Del Mar Theater. “They’ll start to get vertical black lines, scratches, and really noticeable flaws. With digital, that possibility is never going to happen. It’s always going to look as clear and amazing as the first time you play it.”

For most theatergoers the difference between the two formats is negligible, but some celluloid enthusiasts ardently defend its qualities.

“Most people would prefer the clearest picture, and digital provides just that,” said third-year Film and Digital Media major Anthony Stratos. “But to see a film on celluloid means experiencing the movie purely. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but there’s a unique quality to celluloid.

Now that film is being projected digitally, the entire process is dependent on computer technology. Whereas film projectionists were once quite familiar with the technical qualities of celluloid projection, now they have to adjust to the many hiccups in a new computer system.

“With digital, because you’re working with computers, you’ll sometimes experience problems and have no idea what is wrong,” Lawlor said. “The transition has really been like learning a new language.”

The Nickelodeon theatre, first opened in 1969, has undergone many changes in its transition from celluloid to digital projection.

Adapting

After the Nick and the Del Mar made the hefty investment in digital projection, Griffin and his co-workers decided that the process of digitalization lended itself to an overhaul of the two theaters’ amenities.

“Because we’re spending all this money on digital, we decided to make some other upgrades to the theaters,” Griffin said. “The Nick was re-painted and re-networked to have more accessibility for the Internet. Every auditorium got a bigger screen and better sound. We just want to do more and take advantage of these technologies.”

One way both the Nick and the Del Mar have adapted to digital has been to implement special screenings and events using digital or Internet technology.

“When we rent out the theaters for special screenings, instead of asking the renters for a 35mm print, we can just use a DVD,” Lawlor said. “It’s much easier and more convenient for people interested in renting the space.”

Griffin said although the theaters rarely ran on-screen advertising before going digital, the switch to digital has forced them to subtly shift these business practices.

“We do have to run a little bit of on-screen advertising now,” Griffin said. “When weighing our options, we thought that ads would be the least impactful on our audience. It’s two minutes of something you don’t really have to look at that helps keep our business in a safe place.”

Dinner and a Movie

In an age dominated by Internet streaming, going to the theaters isn’t as common anymore. More than half of all homes in the U.S. currently stream T.V. shows and movies, and one-fourth of them use Netflix to access content. The Internet has quickly risen as a viable alternative to theater chains.

“If in a hypothetical future the only projected movies are super huge blockbusters, then the only way to access alternative cinema will be online,” said fourth-year Film and Digital Media major Dylan Hunter. “Little theaters like [the Nick] are what bring people out to go see that kind of content.”

Despite the rapid rise of online streaming, film lovers say there are major benefits to watching movies on the big screen.

“When I teach classes, I know students want to skip screenings and go watch stuff on a little screen, and I fight that as much as I can,” said Film and Digital Media lecturer Greg Youmans. “There are some movies that aren’t meant to be watched on a tiny screen.”

Throughout the process of adapting to digitalization, the Nickelodeon and the Del Mar have strived to retain their authenticity as a local business. The theaters serve food from Santa Cruz businesses like The Buttery and The Penny Ice Creamery, and they are on the only West Coast theater chain that serves non-GMO popcorn.

“A lot of other theaters exist because they want to sell stuff to people, but the Nick and the Del Mar exist because we just love showing movies and we think movies are important for people to watch,” Griffin said. “They spark conversations about subjects you might never have thought about before … It’s this amazing communal experience that you just don’t get if you watch a movie at home.”

Despite the Nick and the Del Mar’s many adaptations to this digital age, people may still prefer to stay in the comfort of their own home when they watch a flick. For Jahnavi Anderson however, the manager of the Nickelodeon, the communal cinematic experience continues to not only be relevant, but invaluable.

“When you go into this large dark room with the sound all around you, it’s like ducking out of reality for awhile,” she said. “It’s never just about watching a movie, it’s about the entire experience of going out and being swept away from your normal surroundings.”

Illustration by Caetano Santos.

A couch is pushed against the wall, amplifiers are hooked up and a guitarist plugs in. This is the scene of a house with rugged walls that will soon rattle with reverb and hum with hushed voices. The beating epicenter coming from the Santa Cruz home goes unchecked until local law enforcement launches into action.

Despite a recent amendment, the Santa Cruz noise ordinance is forcing independent musicians to channel their creative forces into constructing a network of noncommercial venues and homes, where Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) can flourish without being encumbered by commercial ties or municipal restrictions.

“My ultimate goal is to have a sustained community of people who put on shows, people who play shows and people who go to shows in a local setting that can operate within the confines of the Do-It-Yourself [music scene],” said Eli, a member of a Santa Cruz household that puts on at least one D.I.Y. show a week. He asked his full name and address to not be listed here for privacy reasons.

D.I.Y. shows have been a staple in underground music culture since punk rock hit the airwaves in the ‘70s. D.I.Y. creates an alternative to consumer trends by independently recording, manufacturing albums and merchandise, often booking tours in residential or noncommercial venues.

A breaker to the local D.I.Y. circuit is the Santa Cruz sound ordinance #9.36.010, legislation passed in 1980 which requires all “offensive noise” to cease from 10:00 p.m. until 8 a.m. the following morning. The ordinance allows the Santa Cruz Police Department to cite noncommercial venues for noise violations, often a step toward their complete shut down.

“Essentially you can’t have any noise that would disturb other people within 100 feet of your residence,” said Officer John Bush, a 15 year veteran of the Santa Cruz Police Department. “There’s also a separate ordinance for [issuing citations for] offensive noise during the day, depending if you’re doing constructive noise that’s offensive to somebody… or if somebody’s got a loud band and they’re playing next door in the middle of the day.”

Last October, a federal judge threw out a portion of the ordinance that was ruled to be too vague “to pass constitutional muster.” Although this narrowed the prohibition from “all offensive noise” to all unreasonably disturbing and physically annoying noises, neighbors can still end a house show with a phone call to the authorities.

“That’s the biggest thing we have to fight against, ducking around the sound ordinance. Creativity through censorship, that’s all it is,” said local D.I.Y. show promoter Nick Bane and owner of Santa Cruz production company BaneShows, which has garnered a huge following in Santa Cruz’s D.I.Y. scene.

Because of the enforced ordinance, the life expectancy for noncommercial venues is short, and the D.I.Y. circuit thrives in obscurity.

“Some people have houses that are secluded enough that nobody knows a show is going on,” said Mike Connor, a former writer on the Santa Cruz music scene for Metro Santa Cruz. “Others simply cram mattresses over their windows and keep the doors shut.”

For most D.I.Y. acts in Santa Cruz, only a scattering of renovated warehouses and residential venues comprise the framework for supporting DIY shows. Bane said an advantage to these venues is they confer great artistic freedom on bands, along with the ability to reap the rewards of self-promoting and producing.

“There’s no one making money off your back anymore … it’s crazy, I’m booking some of the biggest bands ever, but I’m still going to put them in that spot, where you’re no bigger than the audience, you’re going to be playing with the audience,” Bane said.

However, the size of the audience often presents more of a problem than a band’s inflated ego. City council member Don Lane said the city worries about larger unlicensed venues going unchecked, especially in light of recent events like the nightclub fire in Santa Maria, Brazil on Jan. 27, which killed over 230 people.

“I know that’s not common,” Lane said. “But if you’re going to have a big crowd in a warehouse, do you have a fire safety system or good exits? The city will pay more attention to those [unlicensed venues] and they won’t just let that go casually.”

Within the last decade, larger venues have increasingly dominated the local music scene by following city guidelines which often come at high cost, including proper sound insulation and safety measures to accommodate large crowds. Although the D.I.Y. scene has thrived in Santa Cruz for as long as Connor can remember, a decade ago many Santa Cruz locals were still looking to commercial music venues like the Attic and the Blue Lagoon for live, independent music. However, Lane said if a building isn’t containing its sound, local law enforcement has probable cause to investigate whether or not these regulations are being met.

“Whether it’s a very innovative musician or an old-fashioned marching band, if they’re too loud, then they’re too loud, and the city has to enforce that equally,” Lane said.

As a result, many local, smaller venues are unable to afford staying in Santa Cruz’s commercial districts. The remaining behemoths like the Catalyst and the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium have a greater financial incentive to book big bands with established followings in the community.

“In this system, lesser-known bands – and sometimes entire genres of music – are left in the lurch,” Connor said.

With the disappearance of Santa Cruz’s formerly diverse collection of performance spaces, D.I.Y. promoters like Bane have to often work with the few large licensed venues left unaffected by the ordinance to avoid fines.

“There were like, fifteen venues in Santa Cruz, all down Pacific Avenue … I grew up in that, but then all the venues started shutting down, you know, sound ordinance,” Bane said.” It sucks, because every light post in town had a flyer on it. That’s how you knew about shows. Imagine how beautiful this town was!”

Despite an overbearing municipal government, D.I.Y. musicians and promoters band together in a network of house venues and practice spaces to support the independent music community. Although seasoned D.I.Y.ers welcome the curious participant, they still endeavor to keep their scene under wraps. Flyers are selectively posted in punk-friendly spaces like SubRosa, a local Anarchist community space, and many shows are promoted exclusively through word of mouth. This cautionary approach prevents overcrowding at the houses, a factor that show organizers like Eli take into account to avoid citation.

Although many of the touring bands draw crowds of up to 80 people into Eli’s living room, many D.I.Y. bands typically lose money on tours and don’t receive the financial support necessary in traveling long distances. D.I.Y. promoters keep these bands afloat by not only providing a spot on their playbills, but a bed and a warm meal as well.

“You get to be a big fan of these really cool, if not local, smaller bands from other states, like this band [Good Luck] is from Indiana,” Eli said. He remembers seeing Good Luck in San Jose at a venue called House of the Dead Rat and being the only person there.

“I’ve seen bands that have come from New York and no one’s come to see them… but those are fun in their own way, like, these people came from far away to play a show for my housemates,” Eli said. “We’ll contribute to them even if no one comes. Even just with a place to stay, and dinner and stuff.”

D.I.Y. promoters and musicians like Bane and Eli organize and play shows with the hope of sharing music with a larger audience, regardless of monetary gain or loss. Bands go on tour, Eli said, with the intention to produce new, better material on a D.I.Y. platform, both in-house and online.

“Put your record online [on a D.I.Y. platform like Bandcamp] for free,” Eli said. “If someone sees a flyer for a show here, or ends up at a show here, and they see a band they like, 99% of the time they can go and find the album online.”

Guided by D.I.Y. principles, commercial success does not have to be the be-all end-all to a band’s creative authenticity. Although they have frequented the Catalyst since their rise to fame, Bay Area conscious-rap duo Zion I is no stranger to the thriving underground of local independent music, having gotten their start rapping and producing in local ciphers in the early 90’s. To strengthen the autonomy of independent music, they still uphold their original D.I.Y. tenets by producing their own merchandise and albums on their own label.

“We maintain and sustain the idea that you can be who you are, do it independently, and successfully doing what you love to do. You don’t have to cave in to commercial interests or pop sensibility,” said MC Zumbi of Zion I.

Zumbi holds that independent music is best served following the canon of D.I.Y. “You have to be active, dropping music, giving out free stuff, interacting with your fans directly.”

When asked about Zion I’s musical evolution into commercial success, he said, “It’s still the same thing, it’s always been the same music. It brings people together, it makes people feel things emotionally, and it tells a story of being a human being.”

Illustration by Maren Slobody

Over the past several years, UC Santa Cruz has been recognized as a school that caters to both organic and vegetarian foods and diets. The campus won an award from the largest youth animal rights group in the world: Peta2’s Most Vegan Friendly College in the Large United States Schools Division in 2011. UCSC continues to be a competitor, ranking in the top 10 schools again in 2012. UCSC’s reputation as a bastion of sustainability is a reflection of the rest of the Santa Cruz community.

Don Lane, a member of Santa Cruz City Council and a UCSC alumnus, said interest in healthy foods has continued to grow around the country, but some of the movement’s deepest roots are in the Santa Cruz community. Lane has been a witness to the growth of those roots since 1979 when he co-founded Saturn Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant that uses local and organic ingredients.

“That mindset has been present but it has just continued to grow. Interest in healthy food and organic farming,” Lane said, “these are all things that have been around for a long time but they’re kind of at a peak now.”

Lane said Santa Cruz’s culture around food was similar in the 1970s to how it is now, but interest in vegetarian foods have continued to grow. Saturn Cafe did not start out as a vegetarian restaurant, but eventually became one as the menu changed.

“There still weren’t any vegetarian oriented restaurants,” Lane said. “We felt like there were a lot of younger people especially who were looking for good vegetarian food and we decided that was the way we should go.”

Today there are more students than ever looking for vegetarian food, but UCSC’s students need look no further than their own dining halls for Meatless Mondays — a tradition where the dining halls rotate so one dining hall per week removes all meat products from their menu and introduces students to vegetarian and vegan style meals. UCSC’s meat lovers say they dread Mondays at the dining halls.

“I am definitely not a fan of Meatless Monday,” said second-year Jonathan Ho. “The dining hall here at College Nine has three main entrée stations, and one or even two of those can be dedicated for ‘Meatless Monday’ food instead of having the entire dining hall go vegan.”

Meatless Mondays, which Banana Slugs for Animals (BSA) helped organize with the dining hall services, have been going on for four years now at UCSC. BSA is an animals activist club on campus that reaches out to students and teaches about the abuse inflicted by factory farms on animals.

Students like those in BSA are the driving forces behind dining hall events like Meatless Mondays. BSA president Virginia Hanrahan said Meatless Mondays allow the dining hall services to reduce their carbon footprint, which also led to the creation of Beefless Thursdays and Farm Fridays.

“Meatless Mondays was just kind of a stepping stone for what dining services has extended into in the last few years,” she said.

Hanrahan, who is a fourth-year environmental studies and business management economics major, chose a vegan lifestyle in her freshman year at Santa Cruz. While there are numerous reasons to choose a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, Hanrahan said she thought there are a few very important arguments.

Illustration by Maren Slobody

“There are three main reasons to choose a vegan or vegetarian diet: the animals and the abuse that goes into [the livestock] industry and [not] supporting an industry that profits off of the cruelty to other beings. [Also] the environmental impact — the livestock industry is worse for the environment than the entire transportation industry. The third thing is health and just the amount of antibiotics and hormones that go into animals these days that people consume. They’re having an effect on people,” Hanrahan said.

BSA has increased their presence on campus by organizing events outside the dining hall. In November, BSA invited Peta2, a youth-oriented version of PETA, to set up an exhibit called “Glass Walls.” The exhibit, located outside of the humanities building, was a blow-up model of a factory farm, which allowed students to walk inside and see pictures, facts and a video of animals’ lives inside the farm. At the end of the tour students were handed pamphlets that promoted vegan and vegetarian lifestyles.

While BSA and Peta2 promote a vegetarian diet based on animal rights, Hanrahan said UCSC’s dining hall services take part in Meatless Mondays for environmental reasons.

“They have these goals they want to reach to be more sustainable, and a huge one that makes them more sustainable is reducing meat, because it’s one of the top environmental pollution factors,” Hanrahan said.

Awareness of the link between food production and the environment has played a huge role in shaping Santa Cruz’s food movement since its inception. One program that reduces the carbon footprint of UCSC is the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), which started throughout the UC system in 1986. CASFS works on developing sustainable food and agricultural systems for environmental, economical and social benefits. Undergraduate students often do research and fieldwork down on the farms and students can even apply for hands-on training at the garden through CASFS.

Tim Galarneau, the assistant specialist for Food Systems Education, said students are the driving force that keeps the garden and farm active, as they want more internships, externships and experience around food and gardening.

“It often has come from the students, from the historical founding of the Alan Chadwick Garden. Students wanted to garden on the campus,” he said. “They picked this unrighteous, duff ridden, rocky hillside below Merrill, cleaned it out and made one of the most beautiful intensive organic gardens I think we have in the area. It was from students’ passion.”

The passion of UCSC students is evident through the creation of new campus programs. CASFS also takes part in Farm Fridays, which first started a year ago, where dining halls feature produce from one of the many Santa Cruz local farms. Students who are working with CASFS have helped make it an influential force on campus. Farm Fridays began when a student intern took on the project as dining hall chefs showed interest in making specialized dishes.

UCSC’s farm, which is operated by CASFS, works with organic farms in the community,

many of which have been operating since the beginning of the organic movement. Soquel’s Everett Family Farm, run by Rich Everett, has been collaborating with the university for more than a decade. Everett, who lives on the farm, purchased the land around 10 years ago and began to convert the land for organic farming. He also uses their property for a program that teaches UCSC graduates how to farm by giving them a chance to run a portion of the Everett farm like it’s their own. They work on their plot for two years, learning how to use farm equipment and manage the infrastructure.

Everett started working with UCSC so students could get involved in learning how farming works and how food gets on the table.

“It’s so important for the [UCSC] student body up there, who come from such a diverse geographical and ethnic background, to learn as much as they can while they’re in school about organic farming and what goes into their bodies,” Everett said. “The more you learn the more you’re going to spread the word as you go back home.”

Everett said Santa Cruz may be one of the most supportive communities around for the organic farmer and small family farmers. He said the organic movement is still spreading, but Santa Cruz remains at the forefront of the movement.

“I think it’s really growing, but Santa Cruz is one of many little nucleus points where the whole organic movement is being taught in grammar schools, junior highs, high schools, and at UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo,” he said. “It’s a nucleus of teaching people not only that it’s good for you, but how to do it, and the community highly supports it.”

One of the ongoing struggles in the organic movement is making these foods accessible, which is a difficult task considering the prevalence of pesticide-grown food in many supermarkets and stores. Zane Griffin, the owner of Santa Cruz Local Foods (SCLF), which exclusively sells locally grown organic produce, said community support for the organic movement needs to expand to new levels, especially by making it accessible to those who buy groceries on a budget.

“I think one of the biggest missing links in the food movement is definitely food access,” he said. “Urban areas, especially low-income, underrepresented populations, have less access to healthy foods than more affluent communities and that helps the public health of that population. I think that’s something the organic movement needs to address and resolve.”

Griffin said more consumers will continue to learn about the health factors in conventional and industrial farming through education and word of mouth. According to Griffin, SCLF has customers who consistently buy produce and spread word about the market, creating more business every week.

“Consumers will become more and more aware of the health implications and economic implications of the food system,” Griffin said. “That’s definitely my hope and my prediction — more and more people will eventually be turned onto not just organic food but the locality of the food that they’re consuming.”

Griffin said this can happen by teaching about organic foods in schools and homeless shelters and allowing people to use food stamps at farmers markets.

“The community not only needs to open more farmers markets, making it easier for organic farmers to get the produce to … people,” Griffin said, “but they also need to incorporate education and outreach to [lower-income] populations, so everybody understands why people need to eat locally and organic and know what the health and economic implications are.”

Illustrations by Maren Slobody

Educational opportunity for all. At the point of its inception in 1960, this was the goal of the “Master Plan for Higher Education in California,” which set out to guarantee all eligible California residents a space in the state’s public higher education system. In accordance with the plan, the state affirmed its commitment to providing resources to ensure that public universities and colleges reflected the demographics of the California population.

Today, the public higher education system remains tied to the provisions of the Master Plan. However, in an era of consistent budget cuts, promoting the plan’s goal of “open access” continues to be a challenge.

The University of California, Santa Cruz has in the past initiated efforts toward realizing the Master Plan’s vision. During the 1970s, Oakes College, formerly known as College Seven, promoted the idea of accommodating underrepresented students from diverse family backgrounds.

Don Rothman, beloved educator and senior lecturer emeritus of writing at Oakes, helped pioneer a writing-tutoring program, which was designed to empower underrepresented students by supporting the development of their writing and communication skills.

“Our mission was to create a level playing field for underrepresented, working class students … for women who wanted to give science another shot and to use writing as a tool to create a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environment,” Rothman said.

This writing program was one of several efforts UCSC pursued with the goal of fulfilling the objectives of the Master Plan.

The aim: “Hispanic-Serving Institution” status

In an effort to reach the Master Plan’s goals, UCSC also assembled a team of 13 faculty and staff in March 2012 to identify the application requirements necessary to become an Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Awarded by the U.S. Department of Education, the HSI status recognizes that an institution’s total undergraduate enrollment is comprised of at least 25 percent Chicano/Latino students. Additionally, 50 percent of undergraduates must be recipients of financial assistance such as Pell Grants or other forms of federal aid. These requirements must be met for a minimum of two years in order for HSI designation to be awarded.

“Currently, we’re just under that 50 percent mark … so we’re looking to get more students from low-income families and under-resourced high schools, those who would be likely candidates for financial aid,” said Richard Hughey, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education.

The HSI team seeks to explore ways in which UCSC can improve strategies for recruiting and retaining underrepresented students from low-income communities. Through these efforts, the team aims to increase the university’s “visibility as a pipeline to college — and beyond — for all students from underrepresented groups,” said executive vice chancellor (EVC) Alison Galloway.

Last year, UCSC enrolled 3,539 new freshmen of which 1,025 (28.9 percent) identified as Chicano/Latino. Despite these record-high numbers within the freshmen class, the overall proportion of Chicano/Latino undergraduates still did not meet the 25 percent average, as required for the HSI designation.

“There’s been dramatic increases in the Chicano/Latino share of the frosh … but the earlier cohorts affect the overall average,” said Jonathan Fox, Latin American and Latino Studies chair and co-chair of the HSI team.

HSI status was awarded to UC Riverside in 2008 and UC Merced in 2010. Institutions that have been awarded the designation are eligible to apply for competitive federal grants to expand and support educational opportunities for low-income students, particularly those who identify as Chicano/Latino.

When UC Riverside was designated as a HSI, the university applied for and received a $3.3 million federal grant to fund its Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Pathway Project. The project aims to bridge the gap between UCR and its six partner community colleges by bringing more Chicano/Latino and low-income transfer students into the fields of STEM.

Executive vice chancellor Alison Galloway said if UCSC received the HSI designation, the resulting financial opportunities would be pursued with the aim of developing programs that would support all students.

“As much as we would love to use it for anything, given our budget situation, I understand there are pretty tight regulations on what we can do,” Galloway said. “We would have to look at programs that directly benefit primarily Chicano/Latino students in such a way that the services we provide will be accessible to a much larger group of students.”

However, Fox said there was a lot of work to be done before UCSC could become a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

“It’s going to be at least a couple of years before the [UCSC] meets the basic criteria for eligibility for HSI status,” Fox said. “We could do much more in terms of outreach and recruitment.”

When dwindling dollars cripple diversity

Since the Master Plan was enacted in 1960, the UC system has struggled to keep up with California’s demographic shifts. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2011 the Chicano/Latino share of the California population stood at 38.1 percent. Last year, 51.4 percent of students enrolled in K-12 public schools identified as Chicano/Latino. However, the Chicano/Latino share of freshmen across all UC campuses stood at 22.3 percent.

More than 50 years since the enactment of the Master Plan, its goal of equal representation has been challenged partly by economic pressures. According to past California budgets, the state has reduced funding to the UC system by about 35 percent since 2007–08, from $3.7 billion to this year’s $2.4 billion for 2012-13.

Rothman said that with a limited budget, UCSC was straying away from the Master Plan in that it lacked the resources or capacity to accommodate all students who seek to study at the university.

“Now that money is so tight, people are thinking, maybe we should shrink the freshman class and stop inviting so many people in, we can’t educate everybody,” Rothman said.

The ongoing divestment of the state of California from public higher education has forced universities to make due with limited funding. Rothman said UCSC’s ever-tightening budget constraints, which have let to staff layoffs and program cuts, have made it more difficult for the university to remain committed to its Master Plan promise.

“You [have] got to make sure you’re giving students what they need to succeed,” Rothman said. “But for that, you need money to hire people, and everybody knows that.”

Cuts to the UCSC budget have impacted various student support services, including the cultural and ethnic resource centers, which aim to create and maintain a supportive environment for racial diversity on campus.

Carolyn Dunn, managing director of the resource centers, said budget cuts earlier in the year left multiple staff members without a job, increasing the workload for remaining personnel.

“That’s kind of like the norm now … middle-management folks taking on more administrative duties,” Dunn said. “A lot of us wear two or three hats these days.”

Marla Wyche-Hall is the director of the African-American Resource and Cultural Center, which provides support for students in the African/Black community at UCSC. She said the services offered by the resource centers help to ensure students’ academic success, and the university would therefore benefit from increased funding for the centers.

“When students become involved in our programs they feel comfortable and motivated, and they are more likely to stay and eventually graduate,” Wyche-Hall said. “The university should provide more funds for these efforts, because in the end it’s a win-win situation for the UCSC community.”

But the resource centers at UCSC are not the only ones bearing the brunt of budget pressures.

The Educational Partnership Center (EPC), which forms part of the UCSC Undergraduate Education division, hosts several academic support programs to help underrepresented high school students pursue their goals for higher education.

Rafael Granados, EPC interim executive director, said the state’s budget crisis increased competition for federal grants and as a result were seeking alternative sources of funding, prompting a reevaluation of its outreach and recruitment strategies.

“There’s fewer resources, so more people are competing. It’s been challenging, and we know we can’t continue to rely on the state’s support — everyone is looking for other ways to raise funds,” Granados said. “Five or seven years ago, our budget was double what it is today, but since then, we’ve had to become more creative and utilize partnerships with student groups, schools, businesses and community organizations.”

Paths towards Diversity (Outreach)

In an effort to strengthen support for diversity on campus, several programs at UCSC are aimed at recruiting students from low-income and urban areas. The cultural and ethnic resource centers work in collaboration with several organizations devoted to promoting college opportunity through outreach programs.

The African/Black Student Alliance is a UCSC student-led organization committed to enhancing  communication and unity among African-American students on campus and beyond. A/BSA co-chair Jocqui Smollett said it was a problem that underrepresented students at UCSC sometimes feel marginalized, and that it is important for the university to support recruitment efforts to address the lack of diversity on campus.

“We are small in numbers, and we are spread out across the 10 colleges around campus,” Smollett said. “So not only are you not seeing people who look like you in class, but you’re not seeing people who look like you in your community or residence. I stay in College Nine, and four black people in a building is a lot to me. That’s a problem in itself.”

The Cultural Arts and Diversity (CAD) Center at UCSC strives to foster a spirit of unity between students from different backgrounds. CAD director Don Williams said he leads a “little army” of about 45 students who aim to improve campus diversity by regularly embarking on outreach excursions across the state.

“We often go around high schools in Los Angeles and the Bay area,” Williams said. “On our last trip we engaged with over 1,600 students.”

Williams said a diverse campus environment was important, for it helps to “cultivate well-rounded students by allowing them to explore different cultures and ideologies”.

Through it’s partnership with the EPC, UCSC is involved in several outreach efforts in the Santa Cruz area which help to attract prospective students from diverse backgrounds. These include the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA), a nationwide program that encourages educationally disadvantaged youth to excel in the fields of math and science. The EPC employs student interns and teachers who encourage MESA participants in local Santa Cruz high-schools to enter their science projects into annual competitions held on the UCSC campus.

“The students are mostly from poor or underrepresented communities,” Granados said. “The hope is that by participating in the science project competition, they will be motivated to later on apply to study at a university or community college.”

Olga Nájera-Ramírez, a UCSC alumna and faculty advisor of the Mexican folkloric dance group Los Mejicas, said when she applied to UCSC as a student of an underrepresented background, there were no real outreach program to support her throughout the university application process.

“I felt lost, overwhelmed and had no one to turn to for advice,” Nájera-Ramírez said. “I know how intimidating it is for first-generation students to navigate their way through the application process. It’s a daunting task and can be very hard without the proper support.”

In order to provide support for underrepresented students who are preparing for university, EPC works through the partnership program Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP). In collaboration with EPC, GEAR UP joins university students, teachers and counselors from high schools in low-income and under-resourced communities to aid high school students with preparation for higher education.

“We have student interns going down to schools and tutoring kids,” Granados said. “We also help them to construct an academic plan so they know early on what the requirements are to get admitted into UC.”

Nájera-Ramírez said community performances by Los Mejicas often sparked interest among Santa Cruz residents, who tend to visit UCSC afterwards to enquire about the various cultural theatre groups on campus.

“People see the group perform, and immediately they become interested in learning more about Mexican heritage and culture,” Nájera-Ramírez said. “They contact us at the university to find out how they can get involved.”

Retention

In order to reach the HSI-required 25 percent mark of Chicano/Latino students, the university must focus on not only recruiting students, but retaining them through providing support throughout their college education.

Rothman said effective retention requires a welcoming environment, one that is conducive to students’ academic success. Without the necessary support structures, he said the university could be diagnosed with the “revolving door syndrome”.

“The Revolving Door Syndrome is when you invite all these minority students in, but you don’t work to retain them and help them graduate,” Rothman said. “Without proper retention strategies, these students drop out feeling defeated and stupid.”

Chicanos and Latinos Educandose (Ch.A.L.E.) is a needs-based retention program at UCSC within the Chicano Latino Resource Center (El Centro) that provides academic support through creating a space for students to network and collaborate with one another.

Monica Cordova, third-year literature major and Ch.A.L.E. retention coordinator, said the organization engages students through hosting both cultural and academic events. However, funding cuts continue to limit the impact of their efforts.

“If we had enough money we could put on big-scale events that would attract more of the community,” Cordova said.

The Way Forward

According to federal budget projections for the 2013 fiscal year, more than $200 million in competitive grants will be set aside for HSIs across the United States.

UCSC could benefit from HSI grants in several ways, one being through the Educational Opportunity Programs (EOP), which provide academic and personal support to improve the retention of first-generation college students. EOP director Pablo Reguerin, said he would like to use HSI funding to ensure a seamless transition for students who enter UCSC after coming from underprepared high schools and community colleges.

“We want to provide students with academic support by means of tutoring to improve their achievement in the classroom,” Reguerin said. “We also want to counsel students on how to manage their time and budgets, so they are better equipped to navigate the university system.”

As the demographics of UCSC’s undergraduate class approach the levels required for HSI designation, Hughey said the HSI team had not yet adopted any clear policy that would regulate the allocation of HSI grants.

“Currently, there is no specific plan for how federal HSI grant funds might be spent,” Hughey said. “That will depend on the department or unit of the university that writes the proposal for the grant application.”

However, Smollett said any funds that may result from the HSI designation should be allocated towards improving the experience of underrepresented students on the UCSC campus.

“It’s crucial that the administration dedicate this funding to improve diversity,” Smollett said. “Though these are desperate economic times … we shouldn’t be naive. We must hold our administration accountable and ensure that administrators hold each other accountable.”

With weakening financial support from the state, universities have been challenged with cutting back expenditures while still trying to fulfill the Master Plan by serving all members of an increasingly diverse society.

Rothman said as UCSC works toward the HSI designation, the question of whether the university can remain faithful to its Master Plan duty and serve underrepresented students, will depend on how it allocates its funding.

“Because of the economic crisis we’re in now, we’re facing some big problems,” Rothman said. “The question is, where are you going to put your resources when they’re really limited? Are you going to put it in diversity and work with students who you can help to become honor students? Let’s assume that without any help, without the transition in the first two years, they won’t become honor students — they may even drop out. You’ve got to believe that you’re actually putting the money and the resources in a place where it will make a difference.”

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

In the original print version of this story, Mary-Claire King’s name was spelled Mary Clair King. This was corrected for this online version.

When UC Santa Cruz researchers and graduate students published on July 7, 2000 the first record of a person’s whole DNA sequence, or genome, the field of genomics was still young. Utilizing a UCSC designed online DNA database, this international effort cost over $100 million and was known as the Human Genome Project (HGP).

That project changed the world.

“[The HGP] is the first time that humanity got its glimpse of the DNA message that had been passed on for so many aeons,” said David Haussler, UCSC professor of biomolecular engineering and director of The Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering. Haussler introduced “Genomics Gets Personal: Property, Persons, and Privacy,” a recent panel on genomics which took place at UC San Francisco on Sept. 27.

Hosted by UCSC, panelists discussed the use of genetic information and its effects on society today.

Haussler was at the center of UCSC’s research in the HGP and its success in providing free genomic information online. Since then, the speed and cost of sequencing, or decoding, the human genome code of four proteins — A, T, C and G — has improved exponentially.

“The field of genomics and personalized medicine is moving at an extraordinary rate,” Haussler said. “What cost 12 years ago [an] excess of $100 million next year will cost $1,000. One hundred thousand times improvement in little over a decade … the social implications of that are enormous.”

Since the HGP, which was officially completed in 2003, UCSC has continued its renowned work in genomics, coming out with world famous research and technology including the Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a database developed by Haussler to store genomes of cancerous tumors to better understand what causes different types of cancer and how to treat them.

“Genomics is a huge subject at UCSC,” said Brandon Allgood, UCSC alumnus and director of computational science at Numerate Inc., a drug design and technology company. “It is a world leader in some respects.”

Allgood said one of the reasons for the university’s leading role in the field is its commitment to interdisciplinary studies, especially between the sciences and social sciences. Jenny Reardon is at the forefront of connecting those subjects.

Reardon is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE) and the creator and co-director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC, a community dedicated to bridging the gap between the sciences, social sciences and humanities. She is the author of “Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics,” which covers the history and controversies that encircled one of the most controversial social issues in genomics’ past, the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP).

Separate from the HGP, the HGDP aimed to record the genetic variation within the human species by sampling genetic information from isolated human populations. By researching isolated populations, researchers hoped to track humanity’s early movements and settlements to learn more about the origin of the human species, develop drugs specific to diseases affecting certain populations and to study the enormous amount of diversity that exists among humans.

The project was quickly challenged by indigenous groups who were concerned that their genetic information, separated and categorized, would be misused in a way that would have a negative impact on indigenous communities. Justified by a history of past oppression and inequality, many indigenous peoples were concerned with the HGDP’s overall mission, communication efforts, as well as other concerns.

“In the long history of destruction which has accompanied western colonization we have come to realize that the agenda of the non-indigenous forces has been to appropriate and manipulate the natural order for the purposes of profit, power and control,” wrote members of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, a meeting of indigenous leaders from the United States, several Central and South American countries and Canada, according to the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism’s website. “We particularly oppose the HGD Project which intends to collect, and make available our genetic materials which may be used for commercial, scientific, and military purposes … We hold that life cannot be bought, owned, sold, discovered or patented, even in its smallest form.”

Reardon said the project came under scrutiny for, among other things, biocolonialism and racism.

“It was called the vampire project, a project interested in sucking the blood of indigenous people more than it was interested in their livelihood,” Reardon said, acknowledging the painful history of colonialism and eugenics, the widely rejected practice of promoting certain people or traits and rejecting, sometimes violently, less desirable people or traits. “The trauma of the past has been strong.”

Reardon said this was not the intention of the scientists involved and that the scientific community has worked hard to address these concerns.

“These well meaning scientists, many of whom, like Mary-Claire King, were committed to issues of human rights. Bob Cook-Deegan was a member of Doctors Without Borders,” Reardon said.

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

Robert Cook-Deegan is a research professor in genome ethics and law and policy at Duke University and author of “The Gene Wars: Science, Politics and the Human Genome.” When the HGDP first began, Cook-Deegan played a major role in the project and in one of its first controversial encounters with society.

“We made one pretty big mistake in the original paper that proposed doing what became known as the HGDP,” Cook-Deegan said. “I think I’m the person who put the term ‘vanishing opportunity’ into the title of that paper, and in retrospect that was a pretty stupid turn of phrase.”

Cook-Deegan said it was unintentional that the term implied that collecting data from dying populations was more important than actually helping them survive.

“The foreseeable consequence of that terminology ‘vanishing opportunity,’ was that [people thought we believed] it was more important to study human origins than to right the wrongs and to focus on human rights. And of course we don’t believe that, but we didn’t explicitly say that, and we should have,” Cook-Deegan said. “I did view that as a mistake.”

Even as the field of genomics still reels from its controversial past, it continues to pervade society and bring to light new concerns.

With the completion of the Human Genome Project, the cost of sequencing genomes dramatically decreased as technology became cheaper, faster and better. This has allowed more and more data to pour in, but one of the biggest questions posed at the panel and that genomics faces today is: who gets to look at all that information? Should it be exclusive to the experts or be open to everyone?

“There are two philosophies,” said Cook-Deegan, who was one of the four panelists. “One is, share only the stuff that we kind of know how to interpret now, and that is under the framework of ‘this is a great big genetic test’ … People who are used to the way of the web, and the way that we think about information now don’t like that because there is an intermediary there who is deciding what information is shared with the individual.”

Ryan Phelan, another panelist and the creator of DNA Direct and founder of Direct Medical Knowledge, what became the backbone to the online medical site, WebMD, said people have never had open access to information in such a way.

“What has happened is the internet. What took 30 years to get WebMD to be ubiquitous, it is now going to take us 5–10 years to get genomic information ubiquitous,” Phelan said. “There’s a whole continuum here of information to the patient, to the doctor, for decision making or for research.”

Panelist Gail Jarvik, the head of the department of medical genetics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said in her experience, access to uncertain or unknown genetic information can be harmful to patients.

“I have had very unhappy experiences with just giving people variants of uncertain significance back for breast cancer and having their doctor decide to take off their breast,” Jarvik said. “Even though I very specifically said, this is likely to be benign, I don’t think this is a breast cancer causing mutation, the doctors say well you have breast cancer, you have a mutation in your breast cancer gene, off with your breast.”

However, John Wilbanks, a panelist who runs the Consent to Research Project, which gives people an easy way to donate their health data to a database for researchers to use and analyze, said although there will be mistakes as genomics moves forward, the data will be public with or without the consent of experts.

“As people who are sick or have family members who are sick can access these technologies outside of the institution, they’re going to,” Wilbanks said. “A lot of bad decisions are going to be made as a result of that but if you are not part of the existing clinical research system anyway, this is a ray of hope.”

More progress can be made by making genomic data easy to donate and available to the public on free databases, Wilbanks said, than by allowing only a select few scientists to access it.

However the information is accessed, there is money to be made in the future of genomics. Drug companies are already scrambling to get ready to provide customers with sequencing technology and drugs developed to be effective for genomes.

Phelan spoke about the Chinese genome sequencing company BGI–Shenzhen’s acquisition of Complete Genomics, another genome sequencing company based in Silicon Valley. He said corporations are already bracing for the future of genomics.

“These are companies, large companies making big plays in the translation of these technologies into the consumer market,” Phelan said.

As far as the future of personalized genomics goes, Cook-Deegan said he is cautious about making predictions. People will get their genomes sequenced, but why? And what will happen to that information? That, he said, remains to be seen.

“We’ve got all these reasons [for getting our genes sequenced]. We’ve got pharmacogenetics as a reason, we’ve got ancestry as a reason, we’ve got genetic risk of a foreseeable condition as a reason to get your genome done, and you’ve also got the fact that it’s a cool thing to talk about at cocktail parties,” Cook-Deegan said. “That’s what’s driving it right now, but we’re going to move beyond that.”

As for the social issues, Haussler said there will continue to be important debates about how genomics can best be integrated into society.

“I can only do my research in the context of society,” Haussler said. “It is absolutely necessary that we have a social contract — that society understands the value of the research so that it is maintained, funded and enabled. A lot of this, from a society’s point of view depends on what the benefits of genetic research are. As those grow, I think that a compromise will become more obviously necessary. When personal genomes are really saving lives and really helping people live fuller, longer, better lives, healthier lives, compromises will be made on some of these social issues.”

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

In the original version of this story, it was reported that, “Prop 65 targeted businesses that were handling or exposing people to carcinogens. These places were required to post signs notifying people that the enzyme could cause serious health problem.” However, it should instead read, “Prop 65 targeted businesses that were handling or exposing people to carcinogens. These places were required to post signs notifying people that carcinogens could cause serious health problems.” City on a Hill Press apologizes for the mistake and has corrected the language below.

As caravans of dirtied trucks come rattling into the parking lot and quietly creak to a halt, farmers start unloading crate after crate of vibrantly colored fruits and vegetables. They begin arranging everything into careful patterns, artfully showcasing their earth-grown produce. Crowds of people flood into the city farmer’s market, picking through stacked heads of veiny radicchio, baskets of shiny green jalapeños and trays of waxy plums. As the afternoon carries on, a farmer helps assist an elderly couple to distinguish between a Jonagold and Fuji apple as families snake through crowded aisles packed with local vendors.

For a few hours every week, food brings the many individuals of Santa Cruz together.

In this era, food consciousness has become an integral part of daily life and labels like “organic,” “grass-fed” and “hormone-free” continue to have a growing influence on the foods people buy. Now, consumers are posing big questions about the food they eat, how it’s made and most recently, whether or not it’s been genetically modified.

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

“There’s a progressive interest in organic and sustainable farming practices,” said Elizabeth Borelli, founder of the website community sustainablesantacruz.org. “This creates an environment where farmer’s markets are held almost every day of the week. There is an abundance of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs and a local, organic market mecca.”

Come Nov. 6, one proposition may help clarify growing concerns over California’s food. If passed, California’s Proposition 37 will require labeling on certain raw or processed foods that have been genetically modified.

Genetic engineering is a process by which a plant or meat product has its DNA modified —usually in a laboratory — by genes from other plants, animals, viruses or bacteria. Evidence as to whether or not genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are adverse to health is not conclusive.

In the Santa Cruz community, food awareness has garnered strong local support. One group that has helped educate the public about food issues is Slow Food, an organization committed to local agriculture. Peter Rudduck, communications manager for the Santa Cruz chapter said the city has helped pave the way for food consciousness in California.

“I think that Santa Cruz can lead as an example for the state and for the nation,” Ruddock said. “People may say that Santa Cruz and the other communities involved in food advocacy are just college towns with kids who haven’t grown up yet, but that’s not the case. Santa Cruz is absolutely a leader when it comes to the problems facing our environment.”

Dario Dickinson, manager of local grocery store The Food Bin, said food advocacy in Santa Cruz was born when UC Santa Cruz was established.

“Food awareness really started with UCSC,” Dickinson said. “It’s an alternative campus that has attracted alternative people. These people are concerned with protecting the environment and this environmental focus has caused a highly concentrated number of activists.”

Over one million Californians signed the petition to get Proposition 37 on Tuesday’s ballot. Many food advocates believe the momentum sparked by this proposition has the potential to pave the way for a national debate.

To those in favor of the proposition, it’s a matter of being well-informed. The “Yes on 37” campaign has argued that every Californian deserves the most accurate information on how his or her food is processed. Supporters have rallied behind a single phrase: “Right to Know.”

“Proposition 37 is not an anti-GMO thing,” said Daniel Press, a UCSC environmental studies professor. “It’s not an anti-anything. It’s a community’s right to know.”

Press, who was recently named the new executive director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at UCSC, said he supports Proposition 37 for its educational goals.

“Why would we want to oppose learning more about our food supply?” Press said. “The more information, the better.”

Although Press supports the goals of Prop 37, he also mentioned its similarity to Proposition 65, passed in the mid-1980s. Prop 65 targeted businesses that were handling or exposing people to carcinogens. These places were required to post signs notifying people that carcinogens could cause serious health problems. Press said after the proposition passed, many people did not take notice of the signs. He fears the same effect could happen with the passing of Prop 37.

Locally-grown produce is showcased weekly at different farmers markets in Santa Cruz. There are currently five weekly farmers markets in the county.

The “Yes on 37” campaign has been largely funded by small grassroots and food health communities including The Center for Food Safety, the American Public Health Association and the Organic Consumers Association. The campaign has raised more than $4 million to date in support of the proposition.

In a panel discussion hosted by sustainablesantacruz.org on Oct. 25, food journalist and author Michael Pollan spoke at Santa Cruz High School about the impact of the proposition.

“As I understand it, President Obama gets the food movement,” Pollan said. “The health care crisis, the energy crisis and the climate change crisis are linked by food. The president understands this. But he’s decided that it’s not the right time to invest any political capital in these issues because he doesn’t see a movement. He’s gone on record to say ‘show me a movement’ and ‘make me do it.’ This is our chance to make him do it. This is our chance to show him the food movement.”

“No on 37” supporters say the proposition’s potential to increase grocery bills, taxpayer costs and the many labeling exemptions are inconsistent with the proposal’s intentions.

“This is an incredibly poorly written proposition,” said Dave Heylen, vice president of the Communications at the California Grocers Association. “We as an industry believe that customers have a right to know what’s in their food. We have no issue with the labeling in and of itself. But we think it should be done on a national level, not a local level.”

Heylen also said the proposition will result in serious financial burdens for food distributors and food retailers.

“These retailers are at the end of the chain,” Heylen said. “They don’t create the food and they make low profit margins.”

According to the official election guide, the proposition will elicit “increased annual state costs ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to over $1 million to regulate the labeling of genetically engineered foods.”

Heylen said the weightier costs for both the state and its grocery retailers will inevitably cause food prices to soar.

However, some others are not as convinced.

“I think that the ‘No on 37’ scare tactics are bullshit,” Dickinson said. “They say that the proposition is going to raise food prices, but I don’t think that’s true and I don’t think people should be scared to vote ‘Yes’.”

Ruddock said the potential increase in food prices will only be a temporary setback for non-GMO products.

“People who abandon GMO food will find that the alternatives will initially be more expensive,” Ruddock said. “Some people will not be able to abandon GMO food because of the cost differential. In time this ought to work itself out. If enough people abandon GMO food, then non-GMOs will eventually become the mainstream. And once these products are the mainstream, the prices will come down.”

Borelli said businesses and corporations funding “No on 37” are concerned more with profits than public health.

“Most of the information about health, now widely accepted as truth is in fact distributed by people with a giant vested interest in the outcome,” Borelli said. “Industrial food manufacturers, usually huge conglomerates with lots of buying power, allocate substantive budget dollars to research, lobbying and advertising as part of a self-governing system. Small organic or sustainable growers don’t have the marketing power to compete by a long shot, so as a society we’re getting the messages big business wants us to hear.”

The “No on 37” campaign has been funded principally by food industry corporations including Monsanto, Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s. The campaign has raised more than $34 million in opposition. Monsanto alone has allocated more than seven million dollars towards the “No on 37” campaign.

Proponents of “No on 37” said the proposition excludes far too many food products that would be exempt from required GMO labeling. Some of these exemptions include alcoholic beverages, organic foods, restaurant fare, prepared foods and meat from animals that may have eaten genetically modified crops.

“Everyone cares about what’s in our food,” said Megan Gamble, an advocate for the “No on 37” campaign. “But Prop 37 is a poorly written law that gives inaccurate and misleading information … it exempts two-thirds of the foods we eat, many of which have genetically engineered ingredients.”

Gamble also said the labels themselves will be misleading to consumers.

“Labels as outlined in Prop 37 would give people the impression that something was wrong with the foods when that’s not true,” Gamble said. “‘Yes on 37’s’ biggest donors have likened Prop. 37 labels to a ‘skull and crossbones’ on the products. It’s totally misleading.”

Whether or not Proposition 37 passes, its existence on the ballot reinforces a broadening public interest in food. Given time, this growing food awareness has the ability to awaken a national dialogue.

“The greatest potential solution to current food health issues is a community,” Ruddock said. “We have to build a large group of people that understands that the food system is broken. There are more pressing issues than just labeling. We need to begin addressing all of the food problems in this country.”

 

Election Day is coming Nov. 6. Readers may find local polling locations on www.votescount.com. 

Illustration by Christine Hipp

Despite what some might think about the prevailing political views at UC Santa Cruz, the campus is no elephant graveyard. Since the university was founded in 1965, conservative students have organized themselves into political clubs to challenge the liberal majority — no longer.

Since 2009, the College Republicans at UCSC — the former sole conservative student organization on campus — has not filed for official club status through Student Organization Advising and Resources (SOAR), and has remained an unofficial group since.

UCSC is currently the only UC campus that does not have a registered student Republican club. According to past members, registered or not, the club has proven difficult to sustain for a variety of reasons.

“The entire student population hated us,” said Jake Cummins, UCSC alumnus and former treasurer of the College Republicans when it was still registered in 2008. “Our outreach was always unsuccessful, our pamphlets were torn up, things were thrown at us. Anytime we tried to recruit, we had violent protest.”

For Republican students like Mark Oshima, former vice president of the College Republicans from 2011–12, the club was a valuable community resource for the minority of students who wished to use it. But even when organized, the club had difficulty achieving the weight necessary to strike a political balance on campus.

“We had a real problem with number retention,” Oshima said. “It’s hard to keep new members because unlike the Democrats who have a lot of local causes to pursue, for the College Republicans, there’s nothing to do in Santa Cruz.”

Oshima referred to the sparse field of Republican candidates in Santa Cruz running in the upcoming election, which continued to dwindle when Bruce McPherson, a high-profile conservative running for the 5th District supervisor seat, dropped his Republican party affiliation in June.

On campus, the College Democrats at UCSC have a number of active organizers, and signed up 130 people at this year’s OPERS Fall Festival.

In the greater Santa Cruz area, voter registration among students and non-students has reflected a similar trend of Republicans with numbers suggesting a political minority.

According to the Santa Cruz Elections Department, there were nearly 80,000 registered Democrats in the County compared to just 26,000 registered Republicans in the month of June. The seven current members of city council are all self-proclaimed progressive Democrats, as are the eight candidates running for vacant council seats in the November election.

However, Santa Cruz has not always been dominated by progressive Democrats. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, a conservative business class reigned over a solidly conservative county.

“The chamber of commerce ran the elections,” Rotkin said. “They were the ones who decided who would be the next city council members.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp

Rotkin said that starting in the 1960s, many conservatives in town objected to the business community’s aggressive development plans for Santa Cruz. These included proposals to build 12 story apartments in the downtown area and even the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Santa Cruz County town of Davenport.

An environmental movement gained popular support in the city during the 1970s, bolstered by student activists flocking to the new and progressive university. As the vocal student body grew, it began to have an impact on local politics, especially after the 26th Amendment was passed in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18 from 21.

“Students got involved in the freeway development plan that was originally going to put a highway through Pogonip, and they helped stop a convention center that was going to be built on Lighthouse field,” Rotkin said. “A bunch of conservative neighborhoods became very progressive around this time.”

Although the city and university maintain a liberal reputation, a survey of first-year students conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) showed signs that nowadays a significant portion of the student body may be drifting away from its leftmost roots toward the political center.

The survey from HERI showed that approximately 8.2 percent of incoming UCSC freshman class identified as conservatives in 2010. In the same survey, the percentage of far-left students declined to 5.4 from 8.1, while the percentage of liberals declined to 47.3 from 56.3.

Rotkin said despite the increase in moderates on campus, the political dialogue has become somewhat stifled.

“There’s a higher ratio of conservatives on campus than ever before, but the nature of the discussion has moved to emotion rather than actual debates over policy,” Rotkin said. “You can have a serious policy discussion about what ought to be done about [immigration], but I’ve seen people jumped on when they say we have an immigrant problem because it’s misinterpreted as saying immigrants are evil.”

Erica Lee, former member of the College Republicans, said many students with conservative viewpoints avoid discussing politics altogether to avoid provoking their peers.

“If the College Republicans at UCSC didn’t exist, I would have spent all four years of my schooling keeping my opinions to myself,” Lee said.

While looking for a successful club to use as a model for their organization last year, the College Republicans approached their counterparts, the College Democrats, for advice on how to get their club off the ground.

“They asked, ‘what are you guys doing that you would suggest we do?’,” said Max Perrey, the president of the College Democrats at UCSC.

The College Democrats urged them to join SOAR to gain official club status and arranged for policy debates and social gatherings between the two organizations.

Oshima said after a vote from existing members however, they decided not to register again as a SOAR organization. Oshima wanted the club to register with SOAR last year to create an official space at UCSC where conservatives could express their political views, he said.

“That’s part of why I helped start the club again,” Oshima said. “So you could pass around ideas that you wouldn’t say in class.”

Oshima said discussion sections were an example of an environment on campus where speaking freely could be problematic for conservative students weary of upsetting liberal-minded teaching assistants. He described one TA who upbraided him in discussion for criticizing Obama’s health care plan.

“I don’t want to criticize most of the TAs because by and large they’re professional,” Oshima said. “But this TA just said to me, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ — he literally said that. Afterwards, I just pretended to be a moderate liberal in class.”

For some conservative students, this discretion sometimes extends to the lecture hall. A fifth-year student who wished to remain anonymous said that in several of their classes, professors expressed political views in lectures.

“Some professors will take a political position or statement and drop it into their class when it has absolutely no basis being there,” they said. “For students new to college or taking a class without much of a background in that type of issue, they just sort of internalize it and accept it as part of the truth of what a professor is teaching.”

The club format provided a safe forum for conservative students who wanted to engage in political activism or exchange ideas with like-minded peers. However, several former members said it also created a more visible target for individuals hostile to their political views.

Oshima said people tore down the posters he and other members set up around campus to advertise events and that the persistent antagonism forced the club to think of creative ways to keep their message in the public eye.

“After those posters, we tried to use humor so they weren’t immediately torn down,” Oshima said. “We made ones with pictures of Darth Vader that said come join the dark side.”

Perrey said the political diversity of UCSC would be bolstered by an official Republican club. However, he said the Republicans are not the only political group that lacks a representative organization on campus.

“I think it would be a benefit to UCSC if there was a club for not only the Republican party but people from all over the political spectrum,” Perrey said. “Why isn’t there a Green party club? Why isn’t there a Libertarian club? Why isn’t there some sort of centrist club of decline to state voters of different political persuasions?”

Illustration by Christine Hipp

Noah Miska is a self-proclaimed student activist and a member of the Demonstration Advisory Group, a group whose aim is to ensure appropriate administrative responses to protests on campus. He said it should not automatically be assumed that a political balance will be valuable for the school.

“If the question is do [conservatives] serve some purpose in balancing out the political spectrum, one could argue that,” Miska said. “But I don’t think the point of a political debate is to have two polarized sides create some sort of desirable middle, because I don’t think the middle is inherently the right position to take.”

While most of the UCSC Republicans interviewed agreed that a more politically diverse campus would be beneficial for the community, several remained skeptical that it could ever be achieved in the near future.

“It would require either an entire cultural attitude shift among the student populace, or other clubs banding together to tell people to leave them alone to practice free speech … which is highly unlikely,” Cummins said.

Given that the UCSC Republicans have not had a table at the OPERS Fall Festival for the last four years, the organization seems dormant. However, if the UCSC Republicans do choose to register with SOAR as an official student organization, the deadline is coming soon — Friday, Dec. 7.

Illustration by Christine Hipp

You may have heard about the California state budget crisis. It’s an issue that hasn’t gone away since its start in 2008, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency due to an $11.2 billion shortfall. There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

Since the start of this crisis, the state has been reducing the amount of money set aside for higher education.

The blame for the reduction in funds and the increase in tuition, along with the loss of valuable programs at schools in the University of California (UC) system, goes in many directions. Often, blame is pointed at the state, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) and even at the school itself.

Despite being an economic powerhouse that produces media, foodstuffs and technology, the state of California spends more than it makes, with a revenue of $88 billion to support a $129 billion budget in 2010–11, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO). This discrepancy has forced the state to cut funds to various departments.

According to past California budgets, the state has reduced funding to the UC system by almost 31 percent since 2007–08, from $3.7 billion to next year’s proposed $2.6 billion. Since 2007–08, the state has cut (on average) 6.8 percent of funds allotted to the UC system every year. Additionally, California State Universities (CSU) have had to sustain an average cut of 7.6 percent every year since 2007–08.

UCOP governs the UC system and also decides and implements tuition increases. With the state cutting funds that the UC has depended on for many years, UCOP has made steep increases in tuition and fees as well as budget cuts to the UC system.

California resident tuition for the 2012–13 school year rose 17 percent from the 2010–11 school year, an increase of $1,878. According to the UC Santa Cruz financial aid website, tuition for the upcoming school year is now up to $11,220, and with additional fees, the total comes to $13,416 per year.

While the CSUs have a lower tuition than the UCs, they have also felt the bite of the budget. Since 2001–02, albeit before the fiscal emergency, tuition for CSUs has been raised from $1,428 to  $4,335, a 67 percent increase. It has risen 31 percent since 2007–08.

According to the Los Angeles Times, only 10 out of the 23 CSU schools will accept any mid-year transfer students in 2013. The 13 schools restricting admission will require incoming juniors to have at least an associate degree, not just community college transfer credits.

UCSC has faced tough budget decisions due to reduced funding from the state. In the beginning of the 2000s, approximately 40 percent of UCSC’s budget came from the state. According to the UCSC Budget Summary for 2011–2012, less than a quarter of UCSC’s budget is made up of state funding.

One of the major effects of UCSC’s budget crisis has been cuts to academics. Community studies and American studies were effectively suspended in spring 2010 and June 2012, respectively. The suspension limits the majors from taking any new students for at least two years, but it remains to be seen whether they will be reintroduced into the UCSC curriculum.

Also, since 2008, certain academic divisions have sustained large cuts in their funding. The humanities, physical sciences and biology, and the social sciences have all lost over $1–3 million from their budget. While the arts have maintained a steady budget, and engineering has actually had an increase of $0.5 million, UCSC’s funding for the academics in total has dropped 11 percent since 2008.

However, funding for education may see help from taxpayers in the future.

Proposition 30/Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012

On July 18, the UC Board of Regents endorsed Gov. Jerry Brown’s state tax initiative, Proposition 30, which will be voted on in November.

Proposition 30 states, “The chief purpose of this measure is to protect schools and local public safety by asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. This measure takes funds away from state control and places them into special accounts that are exclusively dedicated to schools and local public safety in the state constitution.”

The initiative, also known as the Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012, guarantees cities and counties ongoing funding for public safety programs such as the police and child protective services.

Brown’s proposition will raise the state sales tax by one-fourth of a cent for a maximum of four years, and will raise taxes on constituents who earn $250,000 or more a year by 0.5–3 percent, for a maximum of seven years.

Concurrent with the passage of Proposition 30, the state has agreed to increase UC and CSU state funding by 6 percent every year for four years, starting in 2013. K-12 also stands to gain funds from the passage of Brown’s initiative, with a 9.6 percent increase of about $4 billion for the 2012–13 school year.

Revenue expected from Proposition 30 ranges from $5.4 to $7.6 billion per year, from 2013 to 2018, according to the LAO and the Department of Finance.

On Aug. 21, The San Diego Union Tribune reported that a Field Poll found 54 percent of respondents in favor of Proposition 30 and 38 percent against it.

Although Proposition 30 is not a permanent solution to the budget crisis that has afflicted higher education, Mark Yudof, the president of the UC, said it is a step in the right direction.

“Gov. Brown’s 2012–13 budget package, in tandem with his revenue initiative, contains an implicit deal for UC. It is an imperfect deal, and it is not without risks,” Yudof said on July 18 at the UC regents’ meeting at UC San Francisco. “Still, it is a better deal than we anticipated. And it is our best shot at taking an important step toward the financial stability that this university so desperately needs.”

The regents have discussed budget troubles for many years but have not found an answer beyond increasing tuition and cutting the budget allocated to the individual schools of the UC, which has forced many UC schools to cut academic programs and lay off staff.

“I’m hopeful that if [the ballot measure] passes, we will get a multi-year deal and the university will be on the road to recovery,” Yudof said.

At the July 18 meeting, the UC regents voted on and passed a resolution that promises a tuition freeze for 2012–13, concurrent with increased funding from the state through Proposition 30. If Proposition 30 fails, tuition could go up as much as 20 percent midway through the school year. That would increase tuition by about $2,500, for a total of about $14,600 per year.

If Proposition 30 fails, the UC and CSU will automatically lose $250 million from state funding in January, along with another $125 million that has been pledged for the 2013–14 school year.

“It’s impossible to say with complete precision what the impact would be on any given campus if voters don’t approve Proposition 30,” said Jim Burns, director of public information at UCSC. “But obviously, the fiscal impact would be great, as the UC system would face a projected $375 million budget cut. University leaders have indicated that systemwide fee hikes could follow, as well as additional cuts to programs and additional layoffs.”

Funds raised by the new taxes will go to the UC or CSU system, but indirectly. All revenue from the initiative will be allocated for K-12 education (89 percent) and community colleges (11 percent). But should the initiative pass, Gov. Brown’s revised budget plan states that the UC will gain 3.6 percent more funds for 2012–13 than in the past year.

Some money will then be shifted around from the higher education and K-12 budget to other departments and to pay off debt, although funding to public safety and K-12 education will be sustained.

Should Proposition 30 fail, K-12 education will be forced to cut the school year by about two weeks in many school districts.

“We’re 47th in the nation in per student funding and the United States already has one of the shortest school years in the world,” said Michael Watkins, Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools. “We’re trying to ensure that all kids have access to education, but that won’t happen without revenue. I don’t care what your stance is on higher taxes, schools need additional funding.“

According to NoNewTaxes.net — a website paid for by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which opposes Proposition 30 — the real issue at hand is California’s overall tax status in the nation. Citing an income tax that is the third highest in the nation, and sales tax that is fourth, as well as money that taxpayers are paying for the creation of a future bullet train (that Californians voted for in 2008), No on Proposition 30 focuses on governmental mismanagement of money and tax policy. No on Proposition 30 describes itself as “Californians for Reforms and Jobs, Not Taxes.“

Among the supporters of No on Proposition 30 are Joel Fox, president of the Small Business Action Committee, and Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association. Those backing the proposition have repeatedly argued that Governor Brown is holding education hostage, forcing people to make the decision between increasing taxes or an automatic cut of $5.5 billion to K-12 education and higher education budgets.

“Prop. 30 supporters are asking voters for $50 billion in higher taxes, yet they admit they can’t

even keep track of the money they have,“ Fox said. “Losing millions of dollars and monitoring finances through an ’honor system’ underscores the need for reform, not taxes.“

While it remains to be seen what will happen, the future of the UC and CSU depends on the passage of Proposition 30.

“The schools need more money and the people we are asking can afford it,“ Brown told CBS San Francisco Local News on Aug. 22. “If voters do not pass the proposition, we’ll be shortchanging California’s future.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp

How should UC Santa Cruz expand its campus — or should it? That question has fueled nearly a decade of contentious debate between supporters and opponents of UCSC’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). Due to the terms of a lawsuit that many say redefined the relationship between UCSC and the city of Santa Cruz, the answer may depend upon the decision of a previously little-known administrative body called the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO).

At its next meeting on Oct. 10, LAFCO will make a decision that could have far-reaching implications for the future of UCSC’s campus and students.

How LAFCO ended up in this position is just as important to understand as the decision itself. Spanning everything from student protests to nearly a dozen lawsuits, the LRDP’s past is a troubled one, and the LAFCO meeting is merely its most recent installment.

In the Beginning

The LRDP is a 15-year future development plan required of all UC campuses that outlines how each university will grow in order to uphold their mandate to educate all of California’s eligible high school graduates. First unveiled in 2004, UCSC’s current LRDP would largely focus new construction on 247 acres of forest in the north campus area above Colleges Nine and Ten.

Among other things, the plan calls for research facilities, student housing and new colleges to be built on the north campus site, in order to accommodate a proposed 16 percent increase in the student body that would boost the number of students from 16,450 to 19,500.

Opponents of the LRDP cite its potential negative effects on traffic and housing in Santa Cruz, as well as possible unforeseen impacts on the environment and the city’s water supply as reasons to halt or scale back the plan. On the other hand, the university maintains that it has an obligation to meet the needs of future students — and that means expansion.

Shortly after the LRDP was announced in 2004, concerned citizens in Santa Cruz began to form groups and hold meetings to oppose the plan. Because UC campuses were established by State law they are normally exempt from local land use policies, a fact that meant legal action was one of the only options available to the LRDP’s detractors.

“We saw [what] it would entail and we thought to ourselves ‘This is something we definitely don’t want to happen,’” said Ted Benhari, who served on the executive board of the Coalition to Limit University Expansion (CLUE), a Santa Cruz nonprofit formed in 2005 in response to the LRDP.

In 2006 several lawsuits were filed against UCSC by both the city and county of Santa Cruz, CLUE, additional community organizations and 11 private individuals. These lawsuits charged that UCSC had violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by misrepresenting the potential impacts of the LRDP, which were outlined in an Environmental Impact Report (EIR).

Those lawsuits were combined into one in 2007, and Judge Burdick of the Santa Cruz Superior Court ruled that the EIR had been deficient in its estimation of the LRDP’s impacts on traffic, housing, and the city’s water supply. He then ordered all the parties involved to a year of mediation in an attempt to fashion a set of terms they could agree upon.

The Comprehensive Settlement Agreement (CSA) reached through that mediation process required UCSC to make payments of an undisclosed amount to the city of Santa Cruz in order to mitigate the LRDP’s impact on traffic and the city’s water supply. UCSC would also be required to apply to LAFCO to have the city’s water and sewage services extended to the north campus site. In exchange, the city agreed not to oppose that service extension and the other parties agreed to end their suits.

Responses to the CSA were varied, but the importance of the standard it set for future relations between the city and UCSC was acknowledged by many involved.

“In its own way [the CSA] was a landmark document because for the first time UCSC formally recognized the impacts they have on the community and agreed to try and ameliorate them,” Benhari said. “They had pretty much rode roughshod over the community before this.”

UCSC’s director of public information, Jim Burns, also emphasized the CSA’s significance.

“It’s a historic document, and there’s a reason why people keep referring to it,” Burns said. “Because for the first time we all decided to figure out how to live in this community together and to do it responsibly, and not in a manner that deprives the university of its right to fulfill its educational mission.”

Since then however, numerous student protests have erupted over the amount of forest that would be cut down to make room for the LRDP’s projects. At the same time, the ability of the city’s water supply to support more users is still hotly contested.

The issue of UCSC’s future expansion remains far from settled.

“The city council seems happy with the CSA because they got millions of dollars to help mitigate the impacts UCSC has on the city,” Benhari said. “On the other hand the north campus development still means growth beyond what we consider to be the city’s carrying capacity.”

UCSC is now free to begin construction elsewhere on campus, but before the north campus development goes forward LAFCO’s approval of the service extension will be required. Although UCSC never technically waived its belief that it is not subject to LAFCO’s jurisdiction due to its state mandate, in the spirit of the CSA the city and university agreed to submit their application to the agency.

Since the vast majority of the projects outlined in the LRDP take place on the north campus site, the conditions under which LAFCO approves the application — if it approves it at all — will have a huge impact on the direction of UCSC’s future growth.

Upper Campus is pending development. Environmental concerns and city restrictions may restrict the Long Range Development Plan. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Caught in the Middle

Staffed by seven locally elected officials, LAFCO “was created by State law in 1963 to regulate the boundaries of cities,” according to its website. The agency regularly makes decisions involving city planning and water concerns, but they rarely attract much public interest.

That changed as soon as opponents of the LRDP began to regard LAFCO as their best hope for halting north campus development.

“We saw LAFCO as one of the only local bodies that had any power to control the proposed expansion,” Benhari said. “So of course we tried to make our voices heard in the dialogue.”

When LAFCO agreed to start holding hearings on UCSC’s and the city’s application in December of 2011, the agency’s once quiet and relatively insular meetings soon became the main battleground for the LRDP debate.

“It’s been kind of like ‘Hey LAFCO, we never knew you existed before, but we figured out that you’ve got the ability to limit the university’s expansion. You can throw a monkey wrench in their plans by just saying no,’” said Patrick McCormick, the executive director of LAFCO, who is responsible for the agency’s day-to-day operations but does not vote on its decisions.

At LAFCO’s most recent meeting on June 6, the room was packed as students, faculty and community members gathered to voice their opposition to the north campus development. The amount of forest slated to be destroyed in the north campus development and the fragility of Santa Cruz’s water supply remained the key concerns voiced by the LRDP’s opponents.

“The quality of the testimony has been incredibly high,” said LAFCO commissioner John Leopold. “We’ve now had a number of hearings where we’ve heard very powerful testimonies from the public. And on the other side we’ve heard the same stories from the city and university, they haven’t changed their tune. They keep saying ‘we have a CSA.’ But they’re not addressing the issue.”

Many of those interested in the outcome of the decision have noted the sensitive position LAFCO now finds itself in.

“I think that it’s very rare for the city and the university to get along super well and I think they were about to get along on this, if LAFCO had complied,” said Nadia Peralta, a fourth-year individualized major at UCSC and a member of the Save the Forest Coalition (SFC), a student organization composed of multiple groups that oppose the LRDP.  “So I think that LAFCO’s kind of caught in the middle.”

The main issue at stake is LAFCO’s attempt to determine the conditions under which UCSC and the city’s application might be approved. The specifics of those conditions continue to be the subject of much controversy.

“Between December 2011 and June 6, either the city or the university has threatened to sue us 13 times,” Leopold said.

LAFCO has also faced pressure from those opposed to the LRDP, who want the agency to impose harsher conditions or simply say no altogether.

LAFCO’s water policy, adopted in 2011, provides the guidelines that the conditions will be based on. It dictates that in order to be approved, new projects which make use of the city’s water supply must demonstrate an “adequate, reliable and sustainable” source of water.

The adoption of that policy proved to be more contentious than LAFCO’s commissioners had anticipated.

“In February of 2011, just five days before the policy was about to be adopted, [LAFCO] got an 18-page letter from the city of Santa Cruz telling us that it was nice that we did this but that we had no power to do these things, and we thought it indicated that they were going to sue us over it,” Leopold said. “And that didn’t make people happy.”

That lawsuit never materialized, however, and the rules of that water policy are now being used to determine the conditions in question.

“So that’s actually one of the reasons it’s taken LAFCO so long to make a decision,” said Gary Patton, an environmental lawyer who represents a nonprofit that sued UCSC over the LRDP. “They’re trying to make sure that when they make a decision, it’ll be as legally strong as possible, since they’ve been threatened with litigation from both the city and university.”

Some of the nonprofit organizations that oppose the LRDP have even stated publicly that they would provide legal assistance to LAFCO in the event of a lawsuit. Provided, of course, that LAFCO’s conditions are tough enough.

The Devil is in The Details

The first condition proposed by LAFCO is that the north campus construction projects be “water neutral,” meaning that any water used by those facilities must somehow be offset by conservation projects in other parts of Santa Cruz on a “drop by drop basis,” Leopold said.

“It’s an elegant concept really, water neutral growth,” McCormick said. “It also implies that if your program isn’t delivering conservation, then you’re not going to grow.”

The plan that the city and UCSC have come up with to achieve this calls for the University to make a lump sum payment to the city every time a new facility is opened. The city would then use that money to replace lawns with artificial turf and purchase low-flow washing machines to replace higher water-usage units owned by residents of Santa Cruz.

While UCSC has already reduced its overall water consumption by roughly 30 percent in the past two years thanks to the installation of low-flow toilets, showers, sprinkler-heads and other projects, LAFCO commissioners remain skeptical of the ability of UCSC to be truly water neutral if more construction were to occur.

“They’ve accomplished a significant amount of water conservation up on campus,” Leopold said. “What we don’t know is whether there’s much more additional work they can do to conserve water to offset the expansion of the north campus. If they can’t realize it on campus, is there really the ability to realize it off campus?”

Furthermore, McCormick said in his opinion, UCSC should be looking at additional ways water can be conserved on campus, instead of trying to achieve water neutrality solely by offsetting its usage through conservation efforts in the city.

“It’s a fascinating issue to think about,” McCormick said. “You know, here’s this green university with a lot of academic assets but they really aren’t showing any state of the art leadership in water usage. The university is doing all the standard stuff…but it’s only done just the basic stuff that everybody is doing when it comes to water conservation.”

The water use issue is compounded by the fact that even under current conditions, Santa Cruz’s water supply can become dangerously low during drought years.

“The city itself has said that it doesn’t have enough water to handle a multi-year drought, and that’s why they’re exploring options for increasing supply,” Burns said. “That’s irrespective of anything that’s happening at the University.”

This problem has led Santa Cruz to seriously consider constructing a desalination plant in order to provide the city with an alternate source of water during drought years, but Burns sees this as a problem the city will have to deal with regardless of UCSC’s water usage, which is currently about 6 percent of Santa Cruz’s annual overall usage. If the construction on the north campus site were to go forward, that number would likely increase to about 8 percent.

“The city doesn’t have enough water in drought years regardless of the campus,” Burns said. “It’s not as if in drought years the city is short only 6 percent [of its] water. So it’s disingenuous to suggest that university growth should be driving the discussion about whether or not the city has adequate water supplies.”

On top of all this, it’s likely that Santa Cruz will have to further reduce its current water supply in order to conserve the habitat of the Coho Salmon and Steelhead Trout, two endangered species that live in the streams from which Santa Cruz obtains the vast majority of its water.

In order to address that issue, LAFCO’s second major condition dictates that the city must complete a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) before moving forward with their application. The HCP would ensure that the streams containing the Coho and Steelhead stay at levels which would prevent any further threat to those species, which would likely mean that Santa Cruz would be able to pull even less water from those streams.

Santa Cruz has been in negotiations with the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) for the past 13 years in an attempt to obtain a permit that has many of the same requirements as the HCP, and has yet to meet them. Due to this fact, Leopold is skeptical of the city’s ability to comply with the HCP.

At LAFCO’s June 6 meeting the decision to approve or deny the application was postponed. Two subcommittees were established to investigate the city’s ability to complete an HCP and pursue water neutrality. They are due to report their findings at LAFCO’s upcoming meeting on October 10, when LAFCO will once again vote on the application.

North campus is where the bulk of new additions to UC Santa Cruz would be placed, according to the LRDP. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Closing Arguments

Although it has threatened to withdraw its application if the current terms don’t change, at this point UCSC is still committed to continuing its participation in the LAFCO process.

“We’re still hopeful that this will end reasonably in the not too distant future, and with a fair outcome that doesn’t undercut the substance and spirit of the settlement agreement,” Burns said. “I think that would be a real setback for the community if that happened.”

Burns said while he appreciates the gravity of the concerns surrounding North campus development, he also thinks it’s somewhat arbitrary to decide that UCSC must cease to expand now, in 2012, considering that the campus has been growing ever since it opened in 1963.

He said if UCSC had decided to halt its expansion earlier, many of the students who go here now might not have been able to attend.

Opponents of the North campus development have a different take on the situation.

“I do not believe that this is for greater access to education. I think that’s a terrible lie considering how many lecturers have been fired from this institution, how much has been cut, how tight our classes are, how unaffordable this place is already,” said student activist Nadia Peralta. “There’s so much that needs to be addressed before we could even think about making this a more accessible place that I think it’s pathetic to use greater access to more people in the state as a reason to expand right now.”

While the LAFCO process has been ongoing for the better part of a year without reaching a verdict, many don’t see that as a bad thing.

“We have the luxury of time to get the decision right,” McCormick said. “It’s a public dialogue, and business is being done in the open, not behind closed doors. So if we can keep talking, why not?”

LAFCO commissioner John Leopold is of a similar mind.

“If we’re working to get it right, taking our time is the best thing,” Leopold said. “If we’re just trying to get it done so people stop talking about it, that’s a bad way to make policy. So, don’t be surprised if we don’t finish in October.”

Stevenson Provost Alice Yang meets with students at the Stevenson Fireside Lounge to discuss the proposal of the critical race and ethnic studies major. Photos by Chelsea McKeown.

“If we don’t do something now, it will never happen.”

The fight for a critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) major at UC Santa Cruz is nearly as old as the school itself. In light of never-ending financial woes, students, faculty and administration at UCSC have decided the time for CRES is now or never.

Humanities dean William Ladusaw underscored the renewed sense of urgency on campus to make this program happen.

“Living with today’s budget makes this an urgent time,” he said. “We have to make the most out of the curriculum that we have. We used to plan for the future, thinking we were going to have lots more faculty, and we had big ideas for all new programs someday. We don’t believe that we’re going to have lots more faculty anymore.”

This coming fall, a formal proposal for CRES will be submitted to the Academic Senate, a legislative body run by the faculty which decides the university’s academic course. The proposed program will include an undergraduate major and minor, as well as a graduate-designated emphasis. A graduate emphasis is to a graduate student as a minor is to an undergraduate student.

Many pre-proposals for the program have already been introduced to UCSC. Eric Porter, the current chair of American studies, was a primary part of the faculty team that wrote up the latest pre-proposal and submitted it for approval and comments from the faculty, administration and students on May 9.

“This pre-proposal is the culmination of many different documents that people have drawn up,” Porter said. “Earlier documents were more like calls for action, where they said, ‘We need an ethnic studies program and this is why.’ There was a longer pre-proposal submitted by faculty in the fall, but Dean Ladusaw asked us, for the purpose of distribution and getting the conversation started, to make it significantly shorter.”

The document proposing the CRES initiative last fall listed 25 faculty members who said they were dedicated to working with the program, in addition to a comparable number who said they wished to support it. Ladusaw said the formal proposal will include a faculty charter, in which faculty can formally show their commitment to the program. The proposal emphasized exploring race and ethnicity through a global lens, something with which many students who have been involved in the planning for CRES have expressed their dissatisfaction.

Third-year Anna Nelson, who has been involved with CRES’s development since early 2011, said she hasn’t agreed with the direction the proposal has taken. She has been part of the student organizing group for CRES and was later a part of the undergraduate, graduate and faculty working group which formed after the March 2 rally and retreat in demand of ethnic studies.

“Some of the changes made by Humanities Dean William Ladusaw [to the fall pre-proposal] are taking the concept of CRES away from its roots in student-initiated struggle in a local context,” Nelson said in an email to City on a Hill Press. “For the past 40 years, UCSC students have fought for ethnic studies with rallies, marches and at least two hunger strikes, all for the simple demand of access to education that was relevant to their lives and was critical of the university itself as an institution that primarily represents and values the histories, knowledge and contributions of white and European cultures.”

The fight for a CRES program at UCSC started in 1969, just four years after the school was established. Students took over the first graduation ceremony and protested the marginalization of and discrimination against students of color on campus. In 1977, a group of students called for a Third World and Native American Studies (TWANAS) program.

“Asking why it has taken 40 years for a CRES program to finally be started at UCSC implies that basically nothing relevant has happened during this period,” said Latin American and Latino studies (LALS) chair Jonathan Fox. “The creation of the campus-wide ethnic studies course requirement was seen as a significant student victory at the time, as mentioned by last year’s commencement speaker for Merrill College, Ricky N. Bluthenthal.”

William Ladusaw, dean of the UCSC humanities division, meets with students at the Stevenson Fireside Lounge to discuss the proposal of the critical race and ethnic studies major.

UCSC currently has LALS, an ethnic studies program focused on Latinos in the Americas. Fox said its creation as a program and eventual growth as a department was an important student victory in the scope of the fight for a CRES program.

Nelson said comparable CRES programs typically follow a “four food groups” model, which consists of Asian American and Pacific Islander, African or black, Chicano or Latino, and Native American or indigenous studies. Macarena Gomez-Barris, the interim chair of American studies and ethnicity at USC, said their curriculum follows such a model.

“The American studies and ethnicity (ASE) major at USC is directly about race and ethnic studies, power, and the analysis of race and racism,” Gomez-Barris said. “For ASE at USC, we start with the assumption that Los Angeles is a global city, where black, Chicano, Native and Asian social movements — of bodies and for political power — have and continue to have intense global ties and a long arc of international influence.”

The UCSC pre-proposal states that CRES seeks to examine “the public” and “the common good” from a racial and ethnic point of view. It goes on to say this requires the study of the dynamic power relations resulting from the cultural and institutional stigma and policy of the idea of “race” on a local, national and global scale. Nelson fears that the emphasis on global perspectives in the pre-proposal will take precedent over all other views.

“Ethnic studies has always been tied to social justice in a U.S. context, especially in terms of  genocide against indigenous and Native Americans and their cultures with U.S. history,” Nelson said. “There’s nothing wrong with studying how race and ethnicity work outside of the U.S., but if the focus is on the ‘global,’ CRES would not be relevant to our local context in this country, this state, this city and of course this campus, which reflects racial inequality itself. Emphasizing the ‘global’ implies that UCSC, within the U.S., is an outside observer, rather than a structure that needs to examine itself.”

One of the CRES faculty and administration working groups is developing a special guest lecture series for the 2012–13 school year. The goal of these lecture series is to generate more student interest in CRES, as well as to learn from comparable programs at other universities so that UCSC may improve its own program.

An independent study sociology class entitled Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: Envisioning and Organizing a Liberatory Department has participated in the planning for the new major for many years. The class is led, taught and organized by students.

“The main goal of the class is to study what CRES is and what it could look like as a major at UCSC,” said Randy Colón, a fourth-year sociology major who is in the class.

Colón said CRES needs to maintain its focus locally in order to draw attention to and combat tensions surrounding race and ethnicity on campus.

“CRES won’t put an end to racist graffiti,” Colón said. “But at least it’ll begin a critical discussion on why more attention should be paid to this issue and what we can do about it.”

On May 20, the CRES independent study class held a meeting at Kresge Town Hall open to all students to discuss the pre-proposal for CRES.

To kick off the meeting, everyone introduced themselves and said why they were there. Reasons ranged from giving support to finding out more about what CRES was. Tamara Gonzalez, a feminist studies and anthropology major, said students need to make sure that this pre-proposal results in what has been rallied, fought and campaigned for 40 years — a CRES program that doesn’t forget its duty to justice and self-examination, as well as global perspectives.

“As students, we have a lot of power and it’s time that we tapped into that power,” Gonzalez said. “We need to tell the administration that this is what we need.”

The following day, a CRES forum was held at the Stevenson Fireside Lounge that invited students, faculty and administration to discuss the pre-proposal and address any questions and concerns people may have had.

At the forum, students from the CRES independent study class discussed their concerns that the pre-proposal created a program that was not focused on local issues, and was designed to look at CRES only through a global perspective.

Ladusaw said much of the vision will be carried out by student interest when the program is created.

“The fact that language doesn’t show up in the pre-proposal doesn’t represent a rejection of the aspiration to the local service learning aspect of the program,” Ladusaw said. “The task here is to make it legible to the bureaucratic process.”

Despite student concerns about the viability of the pre-proposal as it is now, the administration and other groups on campus support the pre-proposal as it stands.

Executive Vice Chancellor (EVC) Alison Galloway has earmarked two faculty provisions for the future major. Faculty provisions are large chunks of money that promise to pay the salary of faculty members for the entire time that they are employed at UCSC. That means a starting salary of at least $60-$65 thousand, which does not include costs that helps to jump-start the academic career of new faculty.

“I think that CRES would be a valuable addition to our campus,” Galloway said. “Many of our faculty are already engaged in work that incorporates a critical examination of these areas of interest.”

The new director of the African American Resource Center, Dr. Marla E. Wyche-Hall, said she was very excited about the pre-proposal and its focus on global perspectives, as well as what it means for the future.

“It is critical to learn about others from a multitude of lenses and perspectives that goes beyond just Black and European, but stems to the Latina, African and many more plethoras of diasporas that should be explored within the realm of higher education and beyond,” Wyche-Hall said. “The wonderful thing about this proposal is that it will bring scholars together from a variety of disciplines and offer topics that will evoke conversations that will ignite scholarly thought.”

Wyche-Hall also said she hopes to teach or co-lecture CRES classes in the future.

This coming fall, a formal proposal for CRES will be submitted to the academic senate, a legislative body run by the faculty which decides the university’s academic course.

Although it remains to be seen what shape CRES will take, students, faculty, and administration alike are setting their sights high.

“I think that CRES, at its full potential, would change the climate of UCSC and become an influential force both academically and politically,” said third-year Anna Nelson. “We should make sure that students are at the center of the decision-making process.”

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That means hiring. Lindsay Clarida, Northern California director of the Fund for the Public Interest, Inc., said that while canvasser turnover varies among offices during the academic year, the coming season is the time when most people sign on.

“Family Student Housing.”

Most know the residential area exclusively through the Santa Cruz Metro’s automated bus stop announcement. The 199-unit housing community extends from the edge of Porter Meadow down to the east entrance in 42 nondescript beige buildings.

UCSC’s Family Student Housing (FSH) units opened to students with families in 1971 at a rate significantly lower than that of the local market in order to provide affordable housing. Yet, for a community that used to operate at near 90 percent occupancy, FSH has had higher amounts of vacancies in the past few years.

“When we moved in, they had us sign a waiver that we knew there would be hazardous materials like lead and asbestos in the units,” said two-year resident of FSH Raquel Vega. “A lot of our neighbors have mold in their bathrooms.”

For many FSH residents, however, their largest worry stems not from the living conditions, but from affordability.

FSH is no small component of a student with family’s experience at UCSC. For many students, affordable rent here makes a university degree possible.

Illustration by Amanda Alten

Resident and single mother Brynda Zeller commented on the benefits of living at FSH.

“The best part about living here is the community. [My daughter] Alyssa is able to go and play with the neighbors’ kids right across the way,” Zeller said. “I can wake up and take her to preschool. It’s free if you’re income eligible, and most of the residents do qualify.”

Zeller works part-time, but attributes her ability to live at FSH to substantial financial aid.

At $1,407 per month, FSH at UCSC is currently the third most expensive of the UCs after UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.

In 2009, rent at FSH increased 7.5 percent, followed by substantial residential outcry.

After halting another comparable rent increase, the administration has slowly increased yearly rent in smaller, 3–4 percent amounts since 2009.

Most off-campus housing spaces advertised for college students do not or cannot accommodate a student’s family and children. Those that can are generally more expensive than the FSH units UCSC offers, according to campus provost Alison Galloway.

Former FSH resident Elaine Kinchen, who graduated in 2010,  said shouldering the increases changed her academic plan significantly.

“For me, the rent increases meant taking 25 units per quarter,” Kinchen said. “Still, in the one and a half years I was in school, I graduated with $11,000 in student loans.”

She added that the current cost of rent in a FSH unit would be insurmountable.

“I could not go back to school now if I tried,” Kinchen said. “No family in my situation could.”

In order to lessen the recent hardship many FSH residents face, the administration has extended the rate-saver option, which insulates continuing residents from rent increases, to the community for one year. The housing policy was also amended to allow one non-family member in. In years past, this would have violated contract requirements.

Raquel Vega, a Cabrillo College student, and her partner Luciano Hidalgo, a UCSC undergraduate, are raising their daughter at FSH. Hidalgo works part-time as a tutor, but the family does not have a steady source of income.

“We had to go and apply for social services in order to maintain. It’s pretty much running on financial aid, which is $1,800 per quarter, food stamps, another $100–300 … and the other half is loans,” Hidalgo said. “If it were to go higher, we would be forced to move back home.”

Taking Down the House

The UCSC’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), confirmed by the Board of Regents in 2006, included plans to demolish and renovate FSH in an effort to increase accessibility and living conditions.

“The low availability and high cost of [off-campus] housing has made it difficult for the campus to attract and retain talented students with families,” according to the LRDP proposal. “It has become increasingly difficult to develop and maintain the desired close-knit campus learning community.”

To address these concerns, a set of goals for the future of FSH were created. Included in the list were objectives to build additional housing units that “are as affordable as feasible.”

A 2008 civil lawsuit agreement required the campus LRDP to provide more on-campus housing for a projected increase in enrollment.

Associate vice chancellor Sue Matthews explained the university’s plan for future FSH development.

“[Right now] we need somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,100 beds to meet our projected growth,” Matthews said. “Our angle is to deliver something as affordable and accessible as possible.”

The project was a complete renovation plan, one where the existing FSH units would be demolished in two phases, and replaced with higher-density units and an expanded childcare facility — effectively doubling the available living space.

Campus provost Galloway said the amount of relief the university can provide is limited. However, she said she is hoping the university will be able to help those who are in “critical condition.”

The plan was met with significant resident concern over raised pricing. Former FSH resident Kinchen said the administration’s “critical condition” criteria needs adjusting.

“To increase rent when people are barely making it by with food stamps … [would be] a little bit ridiculous,” Kinchen said.

In response to resident concern, the administration expressed willingness to work with residents to find an alternative solution that would mitigate immediate impacts. Several campus entities looked for alternatives to the LRDP plan.

One was FSH resident and Ph.D. candidate Orville Canter, who proposed that FSH be turned into a co-operative housing arrangement.

With help from his wife Victoria and others including teaching assistant union president Josh Brahinsky and Graduate Student Association president Erik Green, Canter worked for nearly a year in writing his Affordable Family Student Housing (AFSH) proposal. When he turned in the final draft on March 28, it was also the result of significant communication with the housing department.

Undergraduate Brenda Zeller and her daughter Alyssa inside their home at Family Student Housing. Photo by Nallely Ruiz.

Under Canter’s proposal, he outlined a cooperative housing model wherein FSH would cede from the campus housing syndicate and handle rent, maintenance and community welfare internally.

Currently, one-third of the $3 million annual gross revenue generated by FSH is deposited into a campus-wide syndicated housing fund, partly to pay off the construction debt and maintenance of other housing projects on campus.

The proposal, which mirrored similar student-cooperative housing accommodations at other universities nationwide, was particularly appealing for FSH residents.

“The only people who don’t like this proposal are people who haven’t read it,” FSH resident Hidalgo said.

AFSH projections included significantly reduced rent for FSH residents, full or partial scholarships, free housing for especially needy families, increased energy efficiency and a variety of sustainability infrastructure. The proposal also outlined doubling the pay of FSH maintenance workers without affecting the contracts of union employees.

Canter’s proposal specified a clear intention to continue collaborating with the university in the form of regular reports and open access to the site for the administrators, as well as a five-year “testing” phase to ensure success.

However, when proposal drafters met with campus provost Alison Galloway, associate vice chancellor Sue Mathews and vice chancellor Peggy Delaney with their final draft on March 28, the proposal was declined in favor of the LRDP project.

“We’re pretty disappointed,” Canter said. “When we showed up [with the final draft], it seemed like [the provost] already made up her mind and wasn’t listening to anything we said.”

Campus provost Galloway, who authorizes decisions to renovate FSH, said the proposal was technically impractical.

“I’m pretty open to getting proposals for things we can make work better,” Galloway said. “So I was not going to say, ‘Oh no, you cannot do that’ from the very start because I didn’t know if it was going to be feasible. But the overall prospect of taking and blocking that out of our housing would be very, very difficult.”

Galloway said the proposal’s offered liability protection of FSH was ultimately too risky.

“No matter what happens, the university is the deep pocket, so if anything goes wrong, the liability rests with us,” she said.

Immediately after the meeting, Canter created a Change.org petition titled “Save Family Student Housing,” with a signature goal of 1,000. Currently, over 600 have signed. Openly critical comments from dozens of self-identified students, alumni and allies followed.

Moving forward, the tone of discussion may yet go a different direction.

Erica Ayon is the chair of the Student Labor Action Project, a Student Organization Advising and Resources organization at UCSC. The group has unanimously approved AFSH.

“There’s usually a student committee for new construction,” Ayon said. “With Social Sciences III, there was a student committee — people showed up with building plans, they knew the budget, etc. But this time there really hasn’t been much involvement.”

Hidalgo said he is not sure about how much impact discussion can have at this point.

“I don’t think we can be really clear about being willing to work with the administration because they’re not clear with us,” Hidalgo said. “They say that they’re willing to work but it’s always ‘under these conditions.’”

Students and residents of Family Student Housing gather at the Quarry Plaza for campus provost and executive vice chancellor Alison Galloway’s office hours. Photo by Chelsea McKeown.

Campus provost Galloway said any minor services to FSH buildings would trigger the need for massive repairs.

“The structures themselves need replacing,” Galloway said. “That’s the unavoidable part of it.”

Advertisements currently exist on TAPS buses and the UCSC Housing website to announce the available FSH space. So far, over 60 applications have been submitted, roughly 10 percent, 30 percent and 50 percent of which are from single-parent families, two-parent families and couples, respectively.

“[Canter] had a lot of good ideas, but I think a lot of it was wishful thinking — it just wouldn’t happen, given the way things are set up,” Zeller said. “But I don’t think any perceived risks of having a co-op outweigh the need for affordable FSH.”

Galloway said renovation plans are not finalized.

“The bulldozers are not arriving over the summer,” she said. “But if things change, we may have to push forward.”

Over 40 FSH residents and concerned allies showed up at Galloway’s most recent office hours, held on April 19, creating a small crowd in Quarry Plaza. She stayed to speak to each one personally, although she couldn’t promise anything beyond a conversation.

Illustrations by Leigh Douglas

Correction: In this printed feature, we incorrectly stated that AFSCME Local 3299 had only 47 members. AFSCME Local 3299 actually has 20,000 members statewide– a local UCSC unit of the union has 47 members.

There were about 20 of them. They stood in the sun at the base of campus on concrete islands planted amid the steady flow of buses and student drivers. They held signs and handed out flyers. Some students stopped to talk to them, but most didn’t.

At UC Santa Cruz, union protesters aren’t an unfamiliar sight. That was on April 28, a Saturday — appropriate, considering that without unions, weekends might not exist.

A few days later, on May 1, just over 50 students and union workers took to the campus streets — with the workers delivering their bargaining proposals in person to UC administrators. May 1 was International Workers’ Day, almost a must-show for the pro–labor rights crowd, both student and worker. But for UCSC, the crowd of 50 was a little anemic.

The few workers and students present chanted alternately in English and Spanish, and though their numbers were low, energy was high.

“We’re going to fight until the end,” said senior custodian Rosario Cortes, addressing the crowd through a bullhorn. “Until we win.”

The union demonstrating both days was the American Federation for State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), with the local chapter being AFSCME Local 3299. It is a small union, with the local UCSC unit comprising about 47 members.

“We’re not a statewide entity. We’re local to this campus, and we bargain our own contract,” said Family Student Housing carpenter Orin Hutchinson. “I think that one person can make a difference.”

Public sector unions, like the ones at UCSC and other public entities, aren’t nearly as marginalized as unions in the private sector. Public sector, or government, workers are unionized at about a 37 percent rate, compared to only about 7 percent for workers in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still, the university budget crisis is a storm that hasn’t let up, and unions at UC haven’t weathered it unscathed. From AFSCME’s workers to the librarians and lecturers of University Council – American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), union members in the public sector have been hit right along with students by the financial crisis buffeting the state and the UC system at large.

With budgets being slashed, contracts renegotiated and union members dropping out of the system left and right, it’s time to look at the working environment provided by Santa Cruz’s largest employer: UCSC.

AFSCME’s Fight

The green shirts of AFSCME members make them easily recognizable for UCSC students. This university employees union demonstrates frequently, and can often be found protesting alongside students both on campus and at the state capitol.

Like UC students, they’ve had a rough time lately. Spikes in pension and healthcare contributions have created some significant hurdles for public sector unions.

“For the last 20 years, they [the UC] haven’t given any money to pensions,” senior custodian Cortes said. “We are the ones paying for us. They want to take our retirement.”

From 2007 to 2010, professional support staff positions have dropped from 3,010 part-time and 1,897 full-time employees to 2,703 and 1,827 respectively, with hiring freezes taking as much of a toll as employee layoffs.

“We’re being asked to do more work with less people,” said campus electrician and AFSCME member Gary Riggs.

Layoffs and overwork are two iconic responsibilities that UC unions are finding it increasingly difficult to prevent.

“The university is adding millions of square feet in new buildings, yet they’re shrinking the number of employees that maintain and work on those buildings,” Hutchinson said. “There’s a lot of deterioration going on at this campus.”

AFSCME currently doesn’t provide job security to its members, and that item is central to their contract negotiations with the university.

“As the article is written now, the university has the ability to lay off employees and then contract out that work later with no repercussions,” Riggs said.

Additionally, AFSCME was hit by a breach of contract scandal on March 6. UCSC had allegedly been taking additional healthcare and pension contributions out of workers’ paychecks. This is something that’s supposed to be bargained over, according to California Government Code Section 3571, but UCSC allegedly did it before the contract negotiations had begun. AFSCME took UCSC to court over the issue, and it’s currently being resolved.

UCSC and AFSCME are now at an impasse regarding AFSCME’s contract and are headed to mediation on May 7. With money tight, UCSC is being forced to take a harder stance toward its workers, union members included.

“UC workers have every right to express their voice, as long as their actions are in line with UCSC policy,” said UCSC employee and labor relations manager Renée Mayne on May 1. “The university is very committed to bargaining in good faith.”

Some union members, however, don’t see it that way. Rebecca Gilpas, an AFSCME organizer, said the UC simply isn’t being straight with them.

“The employer is not coming to the table in good faith,” Gilpas said, referring to the UC’s finagling over AFSCME’s contract. “This is the one opportunity we have to present what is due and fair, and we’re out here because we want the public to know that UCSC does have the money. UCSC seems to always take but not give, and we want the public to know that.”

Miki Goral, state treasurer of UC-AFT and a librarian at UCLA, is skeptical as well.

“Employees are now contributing more to their retirement funds, and healthcare costs paid by the employee do go up,” Goral said. “The union [UC-AFT] doesn’t necessarily buy the fact that the UC doesn’t have money when you see all these huge raises at the administrative levels.”

AFSCME is one of the more visible unions on the UCSC campus, so their plight hasn’t gone unnoticed. And UCSC is renowned for the cooperative spirit fostered between union workers and students. Former Santa Cruz mayor and former community studies lecturer Mike Rotkin said UCSC is notable within the UC system for how it treats unions.

“We actually have an administration at UCSC that’s less anti-union,” Rotkin said. “We don’t tend to have a campus that totally ignores the contract — like UCLA, who ignores contracts all the time and then they go to arbitration.”

But considering UCSC’s recent stance toward AFSCME’s contract negotiations, that may be changing.

UC-AFT: Battle of Attrition

UC-AFT is a far cry from AFSCME — with over 3000 members on all the UC campuses, the librarian/lecturer union has more clout and is the only academic union on campus. But they’ve taken hits as well, especially the librarian unit (unit 17; the lecturers are represented by unit 18, and have their own contract, which is also being negotiated).

“Most of us are being paid at the level we were in 1999 and 2003, in real dollars,” said UC-AFT representative and UCSC librarian Kenneth Lyons. “When you compare our pay with the pay of CSU and community college librarians, we come out very much behind.”

Librarians at UC, who are largely if not entirely unionized, have suffered pay inequities for years. On average, they’re paid roughly 20 percent less than librarians at California State Universities (CSUs) and community colleges, with some variations based on seniority and rank. This, Lyons thinks, hurts the UC. And the UC realizes that, too, but they’ve reacted in a different way.

“Because the UC recognizes that to retain librarians they need to pay them better, what has happened in a lot of cases are rank and file librarians being made into managerial staff and given managerial stipends,” Lyons said.

Stipends might not sound like an issue, but the managerial promotion amounts to a union-dodging measure by the UC.

“What happens then is that they’re moved out of the union, because they’re now managers,” Lyons said. “It’s a workaround for retention. In a lot of cases, the managerial duties are not as managerial as they want us to believe.”

Additionally, the UC has tapped another resource to avoid dealing with union members: students and temporary workers. UC-AFT treasurer Goral has noticed a trend.

“There’s definitely a movement toward using students to do the work that librarians do,” Goral said. “But the idea that you can just hire student assistants and give them a little training — it puts the [student] worker in an awkward position, because they’re trying to help, but they don’t have the requisite knowledge and skills.”

Lyons notices the trend at UCSC as well.

“Temporary employees and library staff — non-librarians and students — are being used more and more to do librarian work. The administration then feels they can increase librarian workload,” Lyons said. “It’s an issue for both librarians and the services provided by the library.”

Librarians, who predominantly have master’s degrees, are jumping ship to work at CSUs and community colleges, or simply finding work elsewhere. Their jobs are being filled by untrained students and temporary workers. And their pay is stagnating. But the union isn’t completely defanged.

“Librarians have secure jobs. People haven’t been laid off for the most part,” Lyons said. “But positions have been reduced through attrition. Still, you have secure employment and a more traditional retirement system. If we didn’t have union protections, I think there would have been layoffs.”

Lecturers, on the other hand, have experienced a different trajectory. As lecturers are usually cheaper than professors and other tenured university staff, their use has skyrocketed.

“They’re cheaper, and can teach twice the courses for half the cost,” Rotkin said. “It’s good for the union, but not great for the educational system.”

As someone who has taught at UCSC for several decades, Rotkin can comment on trends in lecturer use.

“Now, lecturers do about half the teaching in the UC system,” he said. “Back in 1969, lecturers were doing about 10 percent.”

Many lecturers are part-time, and many of them don’t get sick leave or vacation. And when the university needs to make cuts, new lecturer hires are usually first to go, as their job protections don’t tend to kick in until they’ve been at the university for several years, Rotkin said.

“They can’t get rid of you ‘just because’ or just to save money, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get to your sixth year,” Rotkin said, referring to the year when lecturers get a slew of protections.

Layoffs. Hiring slumps. Overwork and under-training. These trends are endemic among UC unions. Many people, including Rotkin, say that if unions are to survive and flourish, they have to start looking past the bargaining table.

Unions: Political Movers and Shakers

A central issue, as Rotkin sees it, is union reluctance to focus on their declining numbers.

“For a long time, the union movement ignored this problem and focused on contract negotiations,” Rotkin said. “But there’s a big struggle going on, especially in the Midwest, where legislation is being passed that’s making it harder and harder to organize unions.”

Rotkin is referring to the union struggles in states like Wisconsin, fueled by the Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and widespread anti-union sentiment. But motions like that aren’t restricted to the Midwest.

“Even here in California, there’s a ballot measure to keep unions from being involved in politics. It’ll be on the ballot this November,” Rotkin said. “Unions are in big trouble, and we want to move toward more political work ­— there’s funding that we need that we can’t get at the bargaining table.”

Some union actors have already taken steps into the political arena.

“Our president [of UC-AFT], Bob Samuel, has been very active in working with government and legislators on issues relating to budgets for undergraduate education and union funding,” Goral said. “He’s trying to make sure that money set aside for undergraduate education is actually set aside for undergraduate education. This hasn’t been done in the past.”

What Rotkin said he wants to emphasize is how tied together UC students and UC unions are — they’ve got shared interests.

“There’s a common interest in making sure funds go toward education rather than golden handshakes,” Rotkin said. “We’re fighting tuition increases, making sure funds for undergraduate education go toward undergraduate education rather than things like hospitals, which are already immensely profitable. It’s ridiculous.”

Maybe next year there will be more than 50 students demonstrating with AFSCME. After all, as the April 28 protesters chanted, what will students be once they graduate?

Workers.

Photo of Lauren Lui. Photo by Morgan Grana.

When Lauren Lui walks into work, she puts on her lab coat and safety goggles. She is surrounded by beakers, Bunsen burners and microscopes — all objects you would expect to find in a lab.

Although this is a typical day for Lui, it’s a scene that is more rare than one would imagine in the 21st century, as the fields of science and engineering are still primarily dominated by men.

By college graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field across the country, and in some cases, the difference is extensive. At UC Santa Cruz, women make up only 15 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients in physics and engineering majors, according to UCSC’s Office of Informational Research.

“The biggest challenge in women getting involved in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] is feeling that they belong to the high-tech world,” said Lui, a UCSC graduate student and Communication Chair of Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE).

Although statistics demonstrate that girls compare closely with boys in standardized math and science tests at the K-12 level, the stereotype that women are not “capable enough” for these fields persists. Once enrolled in a four-year university, women are not nearly as involved as men in the STEM fields, even though there are groups at the professional and collegiate levels trying to change this through outreach.

At UCSC, 54 percent of students and 42 percent of faculty make up the current female undergraduate and staff population. Female students comprise 14 percent of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, compared to 55 percent of all humanities majors.

Groups like UCSC’s Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) aim to advance women’s roles in STEM fields by reaching out to female students both before and during college.

In July 2011, Margaret Ortega’s position as WiSE’s director of diversity recruitment and retention in the graduate division was eliminated. WiSE now reports directly to dean of graduate studies Dean Miller and is completely student-run. Although WiSE still has funding from the UCSC Women’s Center and the Center for Bio-molecular Science and Engineering Research Mentoring Institute (CBSE), it has lost the guidance and support Ortega’s position offered.

WiSE has taken the initiative to improve the number of women in STEM fields on campus. It has been able to expand and survive despite budget cuts by letting graduate students run the organization.

“We currently have a staff advisor in CBSE — Zia Isola — and we benefit greatly from her mentorship. I worry about what would happen if her position was eliminated, too,” Lui said.

WiSE encourages UCSC members by connecting them to mentors, and providing networking opportunities as well as seminars and discussions, to further learning through outreach.

When Lui was an undergraduate at UC Davis, she endured the challenges of feeling isolated from her major, which was mathematical and scientific computation with an emphasis in biology. She said with a small number of women in her classes, it was hard to relate to anyone, and she felt outnumbered.

“When I was an undergrad, one of my computer science classes had only three women,” Lui said. “It just makes you feel weird, when you’re the only one wearing pink. It’s hard being one of the few girls.”

In 2010, WiSE decided to expand its outreach to high schools and middle schools in Santa Cruz County, focusing not only on women, but on retaining people from all underrepresented backgrounds.

Lui said outreach at an early age is important to piquing girls’ interest in the sciences.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

“Women might have not been encouraged at an early age,” Lui said. “So you miss out on a huge pool of talent. It’s important to have this diversity because we bring a different point of view to these fields.”

Stacey Falls, an advanced placement (AP) chemistry teacher at Santa Cruz High School, is one of the three local teachers who have worked with WiSE.

Although Falls had no prior knowledge of WiSE before allowing the group to come into her classroom, the organization was persistent and made it evident that outreach was important.

“They really made a point of calling me back over and over,” Falls said. “But I didn’t know the people who were so persistent in calling were part of a program named WiSE, and I didn’t realize it had anything to do with women in science and engineering.”

After WiSE got in contact with Falls, she noticed some students began to develop enthusiasm for the STEM fields.

“A group of graduate students came to my class,” Falls said. “They were awesome. My AP chemistry students were pretty excited about getting to know and hang out with grad students. I know my students felt like they got insight into the life of grad students.”

The graduate students decided to involve the AP chemistry class in their own research.

“The group of graduate students did some science-y activities related to their work,” Falls said. “Later, my students voted on which grad student’s work they were most interested in, and they came back and did more in-depth activities related to their research.”

Falls said gender dynamics “influence not only whether women study science in the first place, but also what kind of science they are more prone to study.” Based on Falls’ experience as a college student, women are drawn to “fuzzy science,” like environmental science or biology, as opposed to chemistry or engineering.

UCSC’s numbers support Falls’ theory — women actually make up 59 percent of ecology and evolutionary biology majors, while only having a presence of 11 percent in computer science.

Falls said she recognizes that if students are given the appropriate exposure to the STEM fields in high school and then go into a four-year university, they are able to decide if the STEM fields are a right choice for them.

However, the need to get women involved in STEM fields as undergraduates is only half the issue. Although women represent 50 percent of all Ph.D.s, and make up a large part of scientific research in some fields, they are still more likely to fall out of STEM fields before attaining a concrete position, according to a study done by UC Berkeley in 2009.

Perhaps this is because often women are more likely than their male counterparts to leave their careers in STEM fields, often out of a desire to start a family.

The “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline” study, conducted by UC Berkeley, found that many research universities do not give much help to women in this situation.

“[S]ome universities may not be complying with Title IX,” the study states, “which requires that research universities receiving federal funds 1) treat pregnancy as a temporary disability for purposes of calculating job-related benefits, including any employer-provided leave, and 2) provide unpaid, job-protected leave for ‘a reasonable period of time’ if the institution does not maintain a leave policy for employees.”

Fourth-year and information systems management (ISM) major Evelyn Caño wanted to be in a field that would develop her skills in problem solving and challenge her knowledge of the world.

“I wasn’t told that my field is uncommon,” Caño said. “I just discovered it on my own from my experiences in my own classes. The ratio of women to men has always been uneven.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Outreach was what first sparked Caño’s interest in her major.

“I was invited to attend the Engineering Summer Bridge Program at UCSC for a week, during the summer as an incoming freshman,” Caño said. “My sophomore year, I took my first information systems management course and felt that not only was I exposed to engineering and technology early, but also the management and business perspective, which I found to be a very attractive combination.”

Female students, including Caño, may feel intimidated by their male peers when studying together, but students are still able to build a community and connect with each other when studying.

“The few women that I see in the field are close, but the guys are not exclusive either. We all work together,” Caño said. “[It’s not] until upper divisions that you find out who is going to stick with you. I’ll admit it was hard getting a study buddy.”

Caño said a recent review session for one of her computer engineering courses brought her to a new realization.

“At that moment, it crossed my mind that maybe seeing four girls sitting together, the male students probably assumed they were in the wrong class,” Caño said. “[All these comments] made me feel like some males underestimated women’s potential for majoring in engineering, or possibly just assumed women found no interest in the field.”

As one of the few female professors in the UCSC Jack Baskin School of Engineering, Tracy Larrabee experienced firsthand the isolation that many women feel within the STEM departments.

“I thought time would fix this,” Larrabee said. “I thought the existence of role models would fix this. I thought society’s liberalization would fix this. I was wrong. I’m done trying.”

Larrabee’s high school teachers told her she could not go into the sciences because of her gender.

“I was told point blank [by my teachers] that I couldn’t do it,” Larrabee said. “More than once, [I heard] that girls couldn’t, in general, and that I couldn’t specifically. I had a better education, apparently, than kids get now — even if the current education is much more politically correct.”

Students in the Molecular Biomechanics Laboratory course needed to thaw out their samples and then freeze them in liquid nitrogen during a lab assignment. Photo by Morgan Grana.

According to a 2011 study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, K-12 schools do not have the resources nor the support necessary to provide students with quality science learning opportunities because of budget cuts in state funding.

Former middle school teacher Preetha Menon taught sixth through eighth grade science, but left teaching to go back to school and address specific education issues in her own school system. She said that often, not enough time was spent on science in her classroom.

“In most elementary schools where the majority of my middle school students came from, [the students] did not experience much science learning,” Menon said. “Most students would tell me that they had science classes only once a week in the fourth and fifth grades, and in the lower grades, it was taught occasionally.”

This past fall Baskin Engineering announced on its website that a record number of women are pursuing degrees in computer science and computer engineering.

UCSC third-year molecular cell and developmental biology major Alex Benanti said it is up to women to bring a fresh perspective to the relatively male-dominated STEM fields.

“It is now our turn to work hard to further our presence as women within the sciences,” Benanti said, “not that we should ever seek to overshadow our male counterparts. Rather, we should aim to partner with the men currently in the field and bring our perspective from a woman’s point of view to strengthen the scientific discipline as a whole.”

Photo by Sal Ingram

After dipping her feet in the water of body modification, UC Santa Cruz third-year Emily Kneeter wanted something a bit less conventional.

Energetically moving her hands, Kneeter displays different body modifications as she talks. Drawing her hands to her face and tapping the stud centered on her upper lip, a small anchor is visible on her hand, and as she kicks out her legs, a vividly colored rose can be seen on her foot.

While tattoos and piercings are among the more common modifying procedures, there are a variety of other options to choose from, including but not limited to tongue splitting, aesthetic implants like horns, and expanding previously pierced holes — more commonly known as stretching.

Such procedures are becoming increasingly more popular and accepted. Surveys conducted by the American Academy of Dermatology have shown a rise in Americans with tattoos — 24 percent of Americans aged 18 to 50 have at least one. That number increases for the younger age range from 18 to 29, for which 36 percent are found to have at least one tattoo.

Kneeter finds herself among that number and has elected to get a variety of body modifications, including tattoos, piercings and the less common procedure of scarification.

“I originally wanted a branding. It’s not like a cattle brand — it’s electro-cautery, a pen they use for surgery,” said Kneeter as she draws her shirt up to display the puffy, dark heart on her abdomen. “But when I went to get it, they told me scarification would be more precise because they use a scalpel to do it.”

Similar to tattooing, scarification is a procedure that permanently places an image or words on the body and can be done by cutting or burning, or through other less common practices such as chemicals or abrasion.

“I like the idea of having something you’re so interested in permanently on your body,” Kneeter said. “I just like having a decorated body. It’s so much more interesting than having nothing.”

Santa Cruzan Eric Swanson-Dexel displays a colorful montage of images on his arms and body as he walks through the streets of downtown Santa Cruz. Swanson-Dexel also said tattoos can be deeply meaningful ways to express life experiences.

“The human skin is an incredibly sensitive canvas, so being able to put ink on the body is a beautiful expression of art displayed through humanity,” Swanson-Dexel said. “A lot of things [inspired me to get body modifications] — spirituality, life story — each of my markings has specific stories to them and value of events or relationships and the expression of my beliefs.”

Photo by Sal Ingram

For piercer Samantha Robles — co-owner of Way Body Arts, which is located by New Leaf Community Market in Westside– Santa Cruz — body modifications have been a huge part of her life. Robles and her business partner ended up in Santa Cruz after deciding to strike out on their own and open a body art studio.

She said the more extensive or unique the modification, the more her interest grows.

“All of a sudden that was all I could think about, and I would spend hours on the Internet or in books trying to find things I had never seen before and just finding out as much as I could,” Robles said. “And not just getting it, but how to do it, what it should look like as opposed to what it could look like, things done properly and the history of them, too.”

Robles’ interest in body-modifications has led her to even try human suspension, which she has said was one of the most intense and amazing experiences of her life. Suspension involves piercing hooks through an individual’s flesh — most commonly through the back or knees — then lifting and supporting the individual by those hooks and a system of ropes.

Similar to suspension, magnet implantations are virtually invisible and used only for entertainment.

UCSC transfer student Paule Conte felt the call of body modifications — getting stretched earlobes, labrets and a magnet surgically implanted in his finger.

“I definitely got a much stronger interest in body modifications being friends with piercers,” Conte said. “I kind of became a shop rat.”

Conte got the magnet implanted because he said it seemed interesting and relatively soft-core compared to other procedures he’s seen friends get.

Responses to body modifications vary greatly. Body-modifying enthusiast Kneeter said people usually like her modifications, but she has also experienced outright disdain toward her chosen appearance. Her family threatened to cease paying for school, and a romantic prospect also found her modifications unappealing. But Kneeter said that her modifications are no different than any other form of appearance-altering people engage in on a daily basis.

“Body modifications are literally anything you do to change your appearance — dying your hair is a modification to your personal appearance.

“Styling your hair a certain way, or putting makeup on is modifying your appearance,” Kneeter said. “People always freak out about those who are crazy modified, like the man that looks like a cat, [but] if it makes you more comfortable with your body it shouldn’t be frowned upon.”

Northern California model Kathryn Dalbeck showcases a mural of ornate images on her body — a delicate rosevine flowing from her hips up her side. Her last name runs across her shoulder blades, surrounded by intricate patterns with the image of the traditional Irish claddagh below and a richly colored lotus on her lower back, among others.

Dalbeck said all of her tattoos symbolically represent different parts of her life, and that displaying images that represent her individuality is deeply important to her.

“It’s referring to something you look at that is beautiful and [it] can explain it in a different way,” Dalbeck said. “Maybe it tells a story as you’re going through your tattoos, so if anybody looks at your tattoos and asks why you have it, you can explain all the meaning. Maybe it’s for your grandpa, it reminded you of this, you lived here — whatever is most important to you.”

Dalbeck’s tattoos prove challenging in her modeling career. In a profession famous for strict physical standards — to which agencies have commented on Dalbeck’s hair, height and eyes already — standing out isn’t always an advantage.

Photo by Sal Ingram

“I never even thought I’d make it this far and have the ability to approach an agency to say, ‘This is something I’m really good at. This is me,’” Dalbeck said. “If I didn’t have my tattoos, I probably could have been taken and they could have worked with my height, but now that I have them? All bets are off.”

As Dalbeck is confined to freelance shooting, she has only had one opportunity to work with a photographer who had a complete team. Dalbeck said she was turned down for many great offers because of her tattoos, so to get the job she decided to wing it and accept the offer without disclosing the nature of her tattoos.

“He was trying to figure out ways to cover my tattoos and he ended up saying, ‘You would have been a beautiful model, but I don’t know how we’re going to clean up this mess you’ve created on your body,’’” Dalbeck said. “It was just so offending. I wanted to walk out and say, ‘You think this is a mess? This represents something that is so much above my love for modeling — which is so incredibly hard to beat — these [tattoos] represent a family member, my life. And for you to call that a mess? You are disgracing me completely.’’”

In addition to professional reasons for not wanting body modifications, there are personal ones as well.

“Think where you want to place it, why you want to place it there, what exactly you’re getting,” Dalbeck said. “Will this mean to you — for the rest of your life — what it means to you when you get it?”

Despite the challenges her tattoos have presented, Dalbeck said she does not regret having them and hopes they will help her find her perfect career. For Dalbeck, her tattoos have helped hone her career into something she said she truly enjoys.

Similar to how Dalbeck’s tattoos have helped guide her career, Way Body Arts employee Adrian Aguayo’s tattoos have directed his.

“I was into tattoos before I was pretty much into any art in general,” Aguayo said. “I gave it some time, I tried school, I tried a lot of different things — but I was always ending up back at the shop. I had a friend there who gave me a job to make some extra money and it was just a hooked high.”

Body modifications range greatly from individual to individual, as does the reason behind them.

“People these days get [body modifications] for more of the right reasons than they ever did,” Aguayo said. “In the beginning, with sailors, it was, ‘Don’t be a pussy — do it,’ but now people get it because something personal happened or they want to show their independence.”

There are degrees to which one can be involved with modifications, spanning from those who have a gallery of piercings and modifications to those who have as few as one tattoo. For UCSC second-year Avery Damon*, her first tattoo may be the end of the line for her modifications.

Damon’s first and only planned experience with tattoos took place on March 1, and she said she found the process to be novel, though a bit uncomfortable, and worthwhile in the end.

“It was a little scary, but really exciting. I’ve never gotten a tattoo before,” Damon said. “[I learned] how long it takes, how you have to take care of it after. I’m excited and I just want it to heal and [to] show my friends.”

Photo by Sal Ingram

After bandaging the fresh ink, Aguayo hugged Damon as they reached the end of their journey together. Aguayo said the favorite part of his job is “making people happy, making them love their body more than they did before.”

Co-owner of Way Body Arts Robles said that although there is no wrong reason to want a piercing or tattoo, there are plenty of wrong ways to go about it.

“I have to deal with people’s bodies, and because I’m not a medical professional, people don’t want to listen sometimes, even when it’s serious,” Robles said. “This is your body, and I’m making holes in it,” Robles said.

Santa Cruzan Swanson-Dexel said he sees modifications as a way of representing one’s self, but not where identity is found. Modifications are a means of communicating what is already true of you, and the same can be done by other non-permanent or non-aesthetic means.

“Each person has a choice in having them or not having them. I don’t place a lot of weight on them in one way or the other,” Swanson-Dexel said. “I would say being the person you are is not about the ink or adornments that you carry on your body, just like clothes or styles is not the person that you are — the value of who you are is so much more.”

*Names have been changed

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

“I mean, everything’s here,” said Emily Terson* as she ran her fingers through the pages of the thick manila folder sitting before her on the desk.

“You’ve got their name and address and all that info — of course Social Security [number], also their transcripts all the way through the beginning of their undergraduate education,” Terson said. “Financial statements, financial aid, letters of recommendation, evaluations, test scores, their application, resumè, emails, copies of their passport … it’s all here.”

That’s Ken Foster. The soft-spoken son of two Quaker parents, he has lived in Santa Cruz his whole life and in 1985 completed an apprenticeship with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). Now in his 50s, Foster runs Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping, which specializes in creating “beautiful, ecologically-based living environments for public and private lands using permaculture techniques.”

When he bought his Westside home in 1999, Foster wanted to create a space that would serve as a living, breathing example of those techniques in action. For the last three years, however, he has been fighting to keep it.

“Picture this: The economy goes south and your business is flat-lined. I had to start making some tough decisions,” Foster said. “I had to make the choice of either keeping the business alive or making payments on my mortgage.”

On the advice of several friends, Foster decided to stop paying his mortgage until he could get a loan modification to keep his business afloat. Foster thought it sounded like a reasonable idea at the time, but over the past three years, he became so disillusioned with the process that he decided to take action.

Foster is a member of the Occupy Santa Cruz (OSC) Foreclosure Working Group (FWG). Formed shortly after the OSC camp at the courthouse was taken down, the Santa Cruz FWG is one of a number of similar groups cropping up in cities across the nation — from Tucson, Ariz. to Louisville, Ky. — all working to address and bring attention to fraudulent foreclosure practices.

Sitting in his bedroom and looking out over the backyard he has spent the last 13 years cultivating, Foster recounts a speech he gave in front of a Chase bank on March 11 during a rally organized by the FWG.

“So now, picture this: You start applying for a loan modification, and applying and reapplying, and applying and reapplying, over and over, for two years,” Foster said. “And then, November of last year, the house was foreclosed on and a trustee sale date was set for later that month. So I called them and said, ‘What’s up? You guys just set a date to sell my house five days from now.’”

Foster’s mortgage had been securitized, bundled up in a package with thousands of other mortgages and sold to an unknown investor. Chase no longer owned the mortgage it had issued to him, and as result it was no longer their call on whether or not to accept his petition for a loan modification. However, this last bit of information was only revealed to Foster after he had spent two years in negotiation with Chase, trying to get the loan modification.

“For 24 months, I talked to them,” Foster said. “They’d say, ‘Talk to this guy, get this form, we lost this, send us another,’ and then when it’s all over they say, ‘Well, your investor doesn’t do modifications.’”

Foster is not alone. Since 2007, there have been over 6,000 foreclosures in Santa Cruz County and over 8 million nationwide. A recent article by the Huffington Post found that the length of the foreclosure process nationwide has nearly tripled since 2007, going from an average of 253 days then to an average of 653 days now.

As these foreclosures make their way through the courts, they’ve ignited a series of legal battles at both the local and statewide levels, culminating in a $26 billion settlement last year among the five largest banks in the country and the attorney generals of 49 states.

Most of these foreclosures have their origin in mortgage-backed bonds, which lay at the heart of the recent financial crisis. In order to create these bonds, tens of millions of individual mortgages like Foster’s were packaged into groups, or “pools,” and then sold as investments.

This was made possible by the creation of the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) in 1995, “an innovative process that simplifies the way mortgage ownership and servicing rights are originated, sold and tracked,” according to its website. Until MERS, it was necessary to record on paper each time the deed to a house and its accompanying mortgage was sold, and to pay a fee to the county in which the sale occurred, a slow and potentially costly process when dealing with millions of mortgages.

To achieve its trademarked slogan of “Process Loans, Not Paperwork,” MERS allowed parties trading in mortgage-backed bonds to do all of the necessary record-keeping instantly and electronically. When the housing bubble burst in late 2006 and homeowners started going into foreclosure en masse, however, it became apparent that there were problems with tracking down who actually owned the titles of the mortgages that had gone through MERS. In addition, the MERS system greatly reduced judicial oversight of the foreclosure process.

“Given the numerous problems I see in nearly every non-judicial foreclosure case I preside over,” wrote Owen Panner, a federal judge in Oregon, in a ruling last year, “a procedure relying on a bank or trustee to self-assess its own authority to foreclose is deeply troubling to me,” he wrote.

Due to these legal and technical problems, delays and a lack of communication between banks and frustrated homeowners have become commonplace. Furthermore, a series of recent audits and lawsuits have thrown into question the legality of many of the loans processed by MERS, and by extension the foreclosures associated with them.

An audit last month by San Francisco Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting found that out of 400 recent foreclosures, 84 percent contained what appeared to be clear violations of the law, according to an article by the Associated Press.

Following last year’s $26 billion settlement with the banks, California attorney general Kamala Harris recently proposed a set of legislation, titled the “Homeowner’s Bill of Rights,” which would give greater protection to homeowners facing foreclosure. One of the proposed laws would put an end to “dual-track foreclosures,” referring to the practice of banks saying they are negotiating a loan modification while simultaneously moving forward on a foreclosure, much like what happened to Ken Foster.

Given the scale of the issue in Santa Cruz and across the nation, several members of OSC decided to get together and see what they could do about it.

“When the OSC camp was taken down and the dome was taken out and all of that, it became clear that we were going to have to approach things in a different way,” said Joy Hinz, a founding member of the FWG. “And so foreclosures seemed like the thing that was the most egregious and the most obvious to me, the thing that needed immediate work. So we formed the [Foreclosure] Working Group and started thinking about what we could do and how we could make a difference.”

Starting with a handful of OSC members, the FWG now has about 20 regulars who meet weekly to discuss foreclosures and plan ways of addressing the issue at the county level. Hinz sees moving forward on foreclosures as an essential part of Occupy’s overall goal.

“Many Occupy groups have done the same thing, so it’s actually a national thing, starting a foreclosure working group,” Hinz said. “And [they’re] moving forward on having foreclosures be a very significant part of what they’re doing, perhaps even the tip of the spear.”

Their first course of action was to start gathering signatures for a petition to Santa Cruz County Sheriff Wowak, asking that he abstain from carrying out evictions until the foreclosures he’s enforcing can be shown to be legal. The FWG is currently planning to meet with Wowak within the next week to discuss this.

Another plan has been to address the County Board of Supervisors and ask them to impose a moratorium on foreclosures in Santa Cruz until they have been subjected to the type of audit performed by Ting in San Francisco.

While the supervisors haven’t gone so far as to impose a moratorium, they have pledged their support of the issue. On March 6, John Leopold, First District Supervisor, announced that he would direct the Santa Cruz County District Attorney and the Santa Cruz County Administrator’s Officer to look into what could be done by the County to fight fraudulent foreclosures. They are due to report back to the Board of Supervisors on April 10.

Leopold also pledged his support of the proposed “Homeowners Bill of Rights,” and has asked the county’s legislative delegation to draft a letter supporting the bill, while also urging that the state laws “not prevent further action by local governments interested in enacting additional programs of support for vulnerable homeowners.”

“We have a crisis on our hands,” Leopold said. “I’ve been looking into it, and it’s a very difficult issue to address at the county level, but we need to do something.”

Ernesto Munoz, another member of the FWG, is well versed in those difficulties. A graduate of Cuyo University in Argentina with a degree in accounting and a doctorate in economics, he’s talked with Leopold at length about measures it might be feasible for the county to take, but has seen several ideas that appear promising be scuttled by complicated bureaucracy. This has led him to focus his efforts on more immediate concerns.

“When the crisis came, I started by giving some conferences explaining the economics of the financial crisis,” Munoz said. “But then I decided to do something practical. I had heard that there were a lot of people in Watsonville losing homes; I am a Spanish speaker, so I found my way there. I went to a meeting at a church, and there were like 40 or 50 families there. They were desperate, disoriented, the banks were turning them down, they were being abused by people who charged them money and didn’t help them, so I decided to start helping.”

Munoz said that many families in Watsonville were fighting a war on two fronts. In addition to dealing with the complicated process of getting a loan modification, many residents were being sold faulty legal advice by unscrupulous lawyers and realtors, who charged upfront fees and then either did nothing or quickly disappeared.

“For many people, especially in Watsonville, trying to seek help is like walking through a minefield,” Munoz said.

After becoming a Certified Foreclosure Counselor, Munoz began providing free assistance to families facing foreclosure in Watsonville. Working with Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action (COPA), Munoz has helped over 50 families receive loan modifications since then, mostly by guiding them through the process of filling out Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) forms.

HAMP is a federal program designed to help homeowners who are behind on their mortgages reach an agreement with their bank that allows them to keep their house and renegotiate their mortgage. Still, Munoz said, the program isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.

“Technically, [the process] shouldn’t take more than three weeks. In reality, it takes on average about a year,” Munoz said. “The banks, I would say, drag their feet. In my opinion, they are basically only doing the loan modifications because of pressure from the Treasury Department and the media. But the program was supposed to help 4.5 million people and so far they have given loan modifications to 900,000. So they have set up this system where things go very slowly.”

Mark Reed, a member of Occupy Monterey who has been working closely with the FWG in Santa Cruz, said he can attest to that.

“It’s very frustrating. Because you actually get all the paperwork together, and you know, we had it kind of planned out, we had the whole package,” Reed said. “And then they keep on losing paperwork and sometimes I think it’s on purpose, because it’s odd that they’d lose one piece out of all the other stuff that you sent. And then they need more paperwork and this and that, it’s always constant delaying action on the bank’s part.”

Reed went into foreclosure in 2010, after the construction company he’d been working at for 22 years made the decision to close its doors. After nearly a year of back and forth phone calls and faxing of paperwork between Reed and his bank, he was granted a three-month trial period, after which he would receive his loan modification.

“I made all my payments the first three months,” Reed said. “Then they said it was going to be a six-month trial period. I made all those payments. Then they said it was going to be a nine-month trial period.”

Reed said his experience, like Foster’s, has inspired him to speak out and try to do something about the state of the foreclosure process.

Reed participated in the same FWG organized march as Foster on March 11, and told his story to the crowd assembled outside of Bank of America that day. Numbering about 200, the marchers made their way through downtown Santa Cruz carrying signs and banners, and stopped in front of banks to put “foreclosure notices” on them.

The outcome of this and the other measures that the FWG is working on remain uncertain for now, like the petition to Sheriff Wowak and the county’s ongoing investigation into foreclosures. Reed and Foster’s situations are in a similar place.

Reed is still waiting for his trial period to end and his loan modification to go through. Foster is trying to arrange a sale of his house while he continues to negotiate with Chase, in the hopes that his investor might change its mind.

Munoz is confident that progress is being made.

“First of all, whether Occupy accomplishes any one specific strategy, is not that important. What is important is the pressure,” Munoz said. “The office manager here, Bank of America in Santa Cruz, he has no real power, but he can bring it to the central offices and say ‘Hey, I am having this pressure here.’ See, and if there is Occupy in Denver and Occupy in New York and Occupy in Reno, that are asking for the same, then the pressure starts building up.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp

When 52-year-old Karen Jones* walked into the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center (WAWC) nine months ago, it was an act of desperation.

“I had left Arizona from a situation of domestic violence and I was really looking forward to my new life in California. I was going to be home free,” Jones said. “I got here and it took about nine months before I had collapsed into myself and had thoughts of suicide at a time when I should have been starting a new life. It was in that moment when I reached out to the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center.”

Jones told the receptionist she had hit her “complete bottom,” and within 30 minutes they provided her with an advocate, who comforted her and assured her it was going to be OK.

When she left, the center provided Jones with a small gift bag of toiletries — “such a special little thing of personal care,” Jones said.

She started her path of healing.

But since Jones first came to the WAWC, funding has been cut, the resource has been threatened, and even fundraising has been unable to provide significant help.

In an effort to remedy an estimated $25.4 billion deficit, Gov. Jerry Brown slashed through state funding for state social service programs in January 2011. The new budget takes steps toward “dismantling much of California’s once vaulted social safety net,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

A sleepy wooden building at the end of a stretch of colorful gabled houses and arches of mature tree cover, the WAWC commands no attention from the rest of the avenue. The antiquated Young Women’s Christian Organization (YWCA) sign that hangs from the side of the building is the only hint pointing to what goes on behind those doors.

Aside from Defensa de Mujeres, a Santa Cruz domestic violence service center for women and their families in Santa Cruz, WAWC is one of the city’s only resources designed to help those who have been in an abusive relationship or struggled with poverty.
Over $200,000 in grant money has been eliminated by the state for domestic violence services, family literacy services and youth development services. Seven workers at WAWC have been laid off so far, and the remaining 27 have been furloughed.

“My advocate is no longer here on Friday,” said Sarah Walker*, domestic violence survivor and friend of Jones. “You are used to [being able to] fall apart [any time], but now I have to watch my days when I need help.”

Since 1933, when the center was first created under the name Young Women’s Christian Association, the programs provided have grown beyond women’s issues to support the development of the entire family.

The center’s mission statement pledges to “encourage women and their families through personal action and leadership” and aspires to reach this objective through their three umbrella programs: Family Literacy Services, Domestic Violence Services and Youth Development Services. Unlike other centers in Santa Cruz County, the services are designed to “serve the whole lifespan” of their members.

“Our teen moms who have babies, we get them as early as two weeks [for childcare],” said Jennifer O’Brien-Rojo, director of WAWC. “As soon as [the babies go] to school, they come into our [youth development] program. Then, all the way through the end of life, [we have] our breast cancer programs. So it really is the whole spectrum.”

O’Brien-Rojo started at the WAWC as a volunteer when she was 15 in 1985. After college, she came back to become a board member for the center before eventually becoming the director. Now 42 years old, 27 years later, O’Brien-Rojo sat on the edge of her chair as she spoke about the WAWC in its prime.

“In ’99, when I went on staff we just went crazy writing grants for all the things we wanted to do,” O’Brien-Rojo said. “We just saw so much need in our community.”

From 1996 to 2001, the budget of the WAWC exploded from $300,000 to $1.5 million thanks to funding from state grants. The center was able to develop their three main programs during this time.

Two of the three large programs, Family Literacy Services and Youth Development Services, had their state funding eliminated this year. Yet the WAWC has been able to keep the programs afloat by cutting staff to the bare minimum, requiring staff to take alternating furlough days to ensure the center is always open, and cutting what O’Brien-Rojo calls “the gravy” of the Youth Development and Family Literacy services, leaving only the necessities.

It costs $200 per day to fund the Family Literacy program, and the same amount to fund the Youth Development programs.

The Youth Development Services program, which is funded 90 percent by a state grant, started out small but over time created one-on-one mentoring services, youth support groups, a comprehensive sex education program and youth empowerment programs.

The Mom and Kids Club, a 10-week program that supports families who have survived domestic violence, helped facilitate the expansion of the Youth Development program.

“We got to the end [of the program] and we had this group of teen girls that said, ‘That’s great that you finished your program, but we’ll be back here next week,’” said O’Brien-Rojo, chuckling. “They owned the center now. It was their space.”

The kids kept showing up and WAWC staff kept coming up with more programs to provide for them.

Eunie Del Rosario — or “Ms. Eunie,” as her eighth-grade science class calls her — was so affected by the “family life” class the WAWC provided for the local Shoreline Middle School as part of their Youth Development Services that she joined the board of directors at WAWC.

“I call [the program] ‘family life’ versus ‘sex ed,’” Del Rosario said. “When I hear about [sex ed], it sounds like [it’s only about] an act and the relationship is not even considered. [We] give them the opportunity to look at what the facts are and they make the choices from within.”

The program was popular with the eighth graders, who on the first day were allowed to “get their giggles out” by saying out loud every sexual slang word they could recall. UC Santa Cruz-trained volunteers from the WAWC helped to teach the program. Del Rosario said the eighth graders responded well to the volunteers.

“These young [volunteers] are so passionate and [it’s] contagious to have that energy in my classroom,” Del Rosario said. “They’re a gift to come into my room with all the up-to-date information and give these kids tools to make good choices.”

Originally, WAWC provided additional programs for sixth and seventh grade classes that taught students how to have healthy relationships and friendships with their peers; however, those services were cut due to lack of funding.
Since the cuts, the WAWC have had to replace their full-time director of Youth Development Services with a half-time staff position.

Recently, the Youth Development director was eliminated completely. Volunteers, primarily from UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College, have picked up the slack — but their time is hindered by their school schedules, which include breaks.

In 2006, the center received an award for the highest teen mom graduation rate in California, and in 2008, the center received a second award for highest rate of teen moms continuing on to higher education.

“When we started, Santa Cruz was a hot spot for teen pregnancy, and in our 10-plus years of having the funding and doing the work, it is no longer a hot spot,” O’Brien-Rojo said. “But we really need to continue that work, because if we stop, then it’s going to climb right back up again.”

Two years later, $70,000 was cut due to a state decision to allow school districts to use California School Age Families Education Program (Cal-SAFE) money that was intended to support programs for pregnant and parenting teens on general expenses.

A state Community Challenge Grant, which finances teen pregnancy prevention organizations, had helped finance the program. However, in 2011, the state ruled to eliminate the grant funding.

Due to the budget crisis, WAWC is now unable to provide childcare for the teen moms, or home visits, which the center provided to make sure the parents attended school.

The Even Start Family Literacy Program, which provides resources for the preschool-aged children at WAWC to begin a steady academic career despite instances of abuse in their past, was unable to survive the elimination of its $140,000 grant.

The program worked with many English as a Second Language (ESL) children and was so successful that many of the children tested out of ESL classes — and some students were even recruited by local private schools.

“If we weren’t here, the worst-case scenario [is that] people die,” O’Brien-Rojo said. “On the other end of the spectrum — but to me, just as grave — is people never reach their potential. They never get to be who they were put on this planet to be.”

Rhonda Rhodes, a current employee with Human Resources at UCSC, was a domestic violence survivor and a member of the WAWC in the early 1990s. After completing her own healing process, she stayed at the center and supported other women by facilitating the same support groups she joined when she first came to the center.

“It’s kind of like we always know there’s a home to go to,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes has two adult sons who were part of the WAWC childcare programs, and now has a 10-year-old daughter. Rhodes said it was “unfortunate” that the Youth Development Services and Family Literacy Services funding was cut, especially since she plans on sending her daughter to GirlZpace, a WAWC youth empowerment program.

“I always knew that the [WAWC] would be a place [my children and I] could go to for support,” Rhodes said. “It’s really sad that there’s no funding for that youth program. Sometimes you need [a] resource other than your school.”

Fundraising for the WAWC has been a difficult process. O’Brien Rojo said the center is currently trying to generate more money from the community so they will not be as vulnerable to the “whims” of the state in the future.

However, throughout the turmoil, WAWC still succeeds in keeping the meat of their programs alive by using innovative methods to fill the financial gaps left by the state.

“You’re either going to sink, float or evolve,” Del Rosario said. “[WAWC] has evolved with their ingenious ways of making ends meet.”

On March 3, WAWC hosted their third annual unique tequila tasting fundraiser, called Agave Agape, at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz. The event has grown from 45 guests at the first event to 150 guests this year.

Former member of the WAWC Laiaa Johnson* attended the event with her son, now a UCSC student. Johnson had used the free childcare services the center provided while working as a family law attorney in Santa Cruz County.

“[Working with the WAWC] was the best experience of my life,” she said. “It is totally a group worth supporting, because they do so much for families in our community. We are so lucky to have them.”

Members of the WAWC and domestic violence survivors from other organizations attended the event.

Nine months after she sought help, Jones sits with her friend after a support group for domestic violence survivors as they reminisce on the WAWC’s effect on their lives.

It took two years for Jones’ friend, Sarah Walker*, to admit that she needed help healing from her past of domestic abuse.

“You are so isolated that you can’t believe [it — you wonder,] ‘How did I get into this situation?’” Walker said. “And then you come here and it’s just … big hugs.”

“My life turned around for me,” Jones said, wiping tears from her eyes. “[The WAWC] started a path of healing, recovery, education, information and support in a place where I didn’t think I would be able to make it, honestly.”

The two women hugged outside the center before parting ways.

“I’m a possibilities broker,” O’Brien Rojo said. “Being the bridge, as the executive director, I give people that opportunity to be part of someone else’s possibilities by being donors. By financially supporting us, you get to be part of that person thriving. The returns on that investment are never-ending. There is never going to be a recession on human potential.”

*Names have been changed

The streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown were alive with excitement on Feb. 11 as the traditional Chinese dragon paraded through the one-way streets that are home to more than 100,000 people, celebrating Chinese New Year.

The first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in 1848, and have since established themselves and the Chinese New Year as an integral part of the city. What many do not know,however, is that these large public celebrations once took place in Santa Cruz.

What remains of a neighborhood of Chinese immigrants and fishermen are Americanized restaurants and shopping centers. Woodstock’s Pizza, CVS and Cooper Street are just a few of the local installments now occupying land near what was the exclusive home of the Chinese during the mid-1900s.

The 1920s saw the greatest decline in Santa Cruz’s Chinatown population, as the predominantly male and elderly residents died of old age or returned to China, turning the once vibrant and busy neighborhood into a ghost town.

Due to waning population size and flooding, the last of the Santa Cruz Chinatowns died out by 1955. Since then, the gambling halls and early morning Cantonese greetings have disappeared and been covered up by modern infrastructure, bearing no resemblance to the Chinese architecture that used to stand in their stead.

About 60 years ago, the scenery in Santa Cruz at the crossroads of Cooper and Front Streets consisted of wooden houses and Chinese temples. Santa Cruz has seen a total of five main Chinatowns throughout its history. One of the larger Chinatowns, named Birkenseer’s after its owner, George Birkenseer, was home to 59 Chinese Santa Cruzans at its peak — making it one of the larger Chinatowns in Santa Cruz history. Birkenseer’s was also one of the last Chinatowns, and in 1955, as it carried out the final years of its existence, a Chinese man and his mother were the town’s only residents.

By 1955, the floods discouraged the last of the Chinatown residents from remaining. The December 1955 flood proved to be the last straw, as the two remaining Chinese residents packed up and left.

The primary characteristic of Santa Cruz Chinatowns was old age, but this was closely accompanied by an absence of women.

Women were more or less absent from this particular Chinatown’s society, explains Sandy Lydon, a Cabrillo College professor and historian specializing in Chinese studies, in his book “Chinese Gold.”

“The percentage of Chinese women in Santa Cruz was the lowest in the Monterey Bay region,” Lydon writes. “The Chinatown [Front Street 1872-1894] consisted of 10 buildings housing 37 men [and] one woman.”

In the 1880s, Santa Cruz columnist Ernest Otto described Chinatown as having so few female residents he could name every one of them without hesitation. And indeed, during Otto’s lifetime, 22 of the 29 Chinese residents in Chinatown were male, with an average age of 59.

In modern times, the two major Chinatowns in the United States are located in New York City and San Francisco. The Chinatown in San Francisco many of us are familiar with today does not exactly resemble the long-gone and significantly smaller Santa Cruz neighborhood. This can be attributed to population decline and an elderly demographic.

Reverend Norman Fong, executive director of the community development center in San Francisco’s Chinatown, described the demographics of the neighborhood.

“The max number of elderly residents would be half [of the total Chinatown population],” Fong said. “On the fringes of outer edges of Chinatown, we have seen a 10 percent decrease in the Asian population as [Caucasians] come in.”

Still, Fong is confident in Chinatown’s longevity.

“Our Chinatown is thriving,” he said.

Part of the reason for Fong’s confidence lies in a 1986 Chinatown rezoning act prohibiting the demolition of old and historic buildings. It also restricted the construction of additional levels to existing buildings.

“Preventing the demolition of any buildings was the best thing we ever did,” Fong said.

Fong is concerned, however, that while Chinatown may not be headed for extinction, this may change in years to come.

“It’s changing,” Fong said. “Right now, [only] 85 percent of Chinatown residents are Asian.”

Fong said that may soon change, as Chinatown is no longer the only Asian-American neighborhood in San Francisco.

“Folks that still want to come back to Chinatown live somewhere else and just come [to Chinatown] for education and cultural events,” Fong said.

The sheer density of the area makes it difficult for families to live within Chinatown. Single-room occupancies (SROs), make up 45 percent of Chinatown’s housing. SROs, like the title suggests, each consist of a single room sometimes housing families of over 10 people.

For some residents, living in Chinatown still has a significant appeal. Fong said the draw of Chinatown has to do with the strength of the community.

“There’s a strong community to keep Chinatown alive and well,” Fong said. “The seniors feel safe here — it’s a place where they can speak their language … we have a lot of seniors.”

Ming dDong is a second-generation Chinese businessman in San Francisco who owns several tea shops in Chinatown.

“Only old people live here,” dDong said. “It’s shrinking.”

Like dDong, many of Chinatown’s business owners believe something is changing, though they are not sure what.

The median household income in Chinatown is about $10,000 a year, one-third of the city’s median income. With numbers like this, some business owners face greater financial difficulty than they have in the past.

“[Business was] better in the beginning,” said Iey, a Chinese immigrant who knows only a few words of English and has worked at Chinatown’s Delicious Dim Sum for 12 years. “[Business is] not as good now,” Iey said. “There is enough to get by.”

Susan Wu, who has owned a jewelry store in San Francisco’s Chinatown for 22 years, said business is getting worse.

Chinatown does, however, create a market for tourists, bringing in over 20 million of them a year.

dDong runs successful tea shop businesses most often frequented by tourists. He pours his custumers an assortment of Chinese teas, each tailored for a specific purpose — some to cure a headache, and some a hangover.

There are teas for every age group, but the demographics of Chinatown are less diverse, dDong said.

In terms of people who actually live within Chinatown, there are few young people — no young Chinese want to live in Chinatown, dDong said.

The number of legal Chinese immigrants coming to the United States in 2010 was 70,863, a decrease from 2006, when the number was 87,307. In 2010, New York’s Manhattan Chinatown also showed a 9 percent decrease in population from 10 years earlier. That, however, only accounts for legal immigrants on the decline.n, dDong said.

Kim Lee*, who works in San Francisco’s Chinatown and lives in another part of the city, described how she attempted to legally enter the United States but was stopped and imprisoned by the Chinese government. Only after escaping from prison was she able to illegally immigrate to the United States.

“It is extremely difficult to come here,” Lee said.

Immigrating to America from China no longer has the same appeal it once had. China offers better, higher paying jobs and incentives to return — outweighing the reasons for staying in the United States.

Robert H. Austin, a physics professor at Princeton, said in 2008, “My postdocs are getting great offers [from China].”

According to The Atlantic, Princeton professor Shi Yigong was offered a prestigious $10 million research grant to return to China and become the dean of life sciences at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Yigong did not take the job, but the United States is offering less incentives to come here and more reasons to leave.

“When you talk about China, what you’re actually seeing is more people going back,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C. “With the combination of bad labor conditions in the U.S. and sustained or better conditions back in China, increasing numbers of people will go home.”

Recent years have seen a shift of immigrants coming to the United States for education and then returning to China.

“China’s technology industry is dominated by [immigrants who return to China],” according to The Economist.

This may prove problematic for the United States as the trend of temporary immigration to the country increases.

A recent study by Duke University showed that, while legal immigrants make up one-eighth of America’s population, they founded a quarter of the country’s technology and engineering firms.

The effects of decreased immigration would be strongly felt by the United States. In 2002, Chinese immigrants generated approximately $105 billion for the country, according to “Golden Venture,” a documentary on immigration.

dDong says it is the elderly who keep Chinatown’s history preserved, at least in San Francisco.

“I don’t know what will happen to Chinatown when the old people are gone,” he said.

dDong is confident, however, that some aspects of Chinatown do not depend on the elderly.

“You can’t find this anywhere else in the United States,” dDong said, gesturing toward the old, historic buildings surrounding him.

But people are not buildings — and they do not last forever. As the people who have made San Francisco’s Chinatown unique slowly die or emigrate, the question becomes, “What will happen to Chinatown’s future?”

Reverend Fong is not worried, but understands something will have to be done to accommodate a changing neighborhood.

“In the future, we will have to improve housing — increase the nightlife, or something,” he said.

Whatever challenges or changes Chinatown will face in the coming years, Fong said he is confident the strength of the community will persevere.

“We will never let Chinatown die,” he said.

*Names have been changed

After a 16-year-long project to find an “Earth 2.0,” Steve Vogt, UC Santa Cruz astronomer and professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and his project team have found an irrefutable “super-Earth,” a planet that has characteristics similar to those of Earth.

Discovered in 2010, the super-Earth Gliese 667Cc is perfectly situated in the habitable zone of a triple-star system 22 lightyears away. The planet is named for German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese, who catalogued many of the nearby stars Vogt and others have been exploring.

Some of these characteristics of a super-Earth include the planet’s position in its solar system, whether it is of a similar size, and whether or not it is a rocky planet as opposed to a gas giant. Most of these super-Earths are too close to their sun, making them too hot to inhabit, much like the planet Mercury in our system. What makes Gliese 667Cc different from these other super-Earths is the possibility of life on its surface.

“This is the first earth-sized, potentially habitable planet that we know of,” Vogt said.

It is almost unequivocal that there is life on these planets, Vogt said, and the main goal of astronomers in the past 20 years has been to find that life by looking at the stars and searching for super-Earths.

“Since the beginning, it’s been very clear that the end-game of all this is to find another Earth,” he said.

Gliese 667Cc represents but one answer to the great cosmic puzzle. The diverse research of the astrophysics faculty at UCSC opens many roads to discovery to answer the questions humans have asked since they first looked up at the sky. While these questions are seemingly infinite, the search for planets provides a start.

“What used to set humans apart from other animals was curiosity,” said Paul Butler, a member of Vogt’s project team. “Where do we come from? How did we get here? Is there are reason why we are here? Are we alone? These are the fundamental questions of astronomy — this is why astronomy is historically the first science.”

Butler is a pioneer in the search for exoplanets, or planets outside Earth’s solar system. He said the search for super-Earths is essentially the search for our very humanity, our origin and our place in the universe, and the loss of our curiosity is the greatest threat to discovering the answers to these heavy questions.

“It would not occur to previous generations to ask why people study the sky,” Butler said. “As people withdraw from the natural universe into their iPod, PlayStation 3D and Siri cocoons, this is becoming an increasingly common question. While we won’t be around to see the end results of this work, this is nonetheless why we get up in the morning.”

Vogt said the characteristics of the planet and its place in the solar system indicate a strong possibility of life on its surface.

Because Gliese 667Cc is an M-class dwarf star, it does not emit as much light or energy as our G-class sun does. 667Cc has to be very close to the star itself to be in the habitable zone, Vogt said. Since the planet is so close to its sun, they are in a synchronized orbit. This means 667Cc has a light and a dark side, much like our moon.

“If there were organisms on the planet, they would probably hang out on the band in between the light and dark side, the twilight zone,” Vogt said. “It’s like an ecological buffet: There are hot ecosystems, icy ecosystems and everything in between.”

Vogt called Gliese 667Cc “the real deal.” A previous super-Earth found by Vogt and his team, Gliese 581g — also named Zarmina’s World, after Vogt’s wife — has been disputed. Some people doubt Gliese 581g was the first habitable planet discovered since the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) Swiss group disputed its discovery in 2010. Vogt and his team have stood by their discovery, as no competing research group has refuted their data in a peer-review journal.

The search for other planets that can sustain life has yielded a result greater than they could have hoped for, Vogt said. It has demonstrated these planets aren’t rare — in fact, the universe is teeming with them.

“We’ve only looked at about 25 percent of the stars within the sphere of our study, [which is] about 22 lightyears,” Vogt said. “When you work out the statistics, it tells you that about one out of eight stars have these potential Earths around them. When you consider the billions of stars in our universe, it tells you there must be millions and potentially billions of planets like these.”

UCSC has been a hotspot for astronomy and astronomical discoveries since the school opened. In order to jump-start interest in UCSC, the UC system made UCSC the headquarters of Lick Observatory. UCSC was ranked No. 1 in terms of its scientific contributions and how often it has been cited in reference to other works in a 2008 paper by Anne Kinney, director of the astronomy and physics division in NASA’s Office of Space Science.

Vogt has been on the faculty of UCSC and the Lick Observatory for 34 years, and has won an impressive array of awards throughout his years of astronomy. He built the Hamilton Spectrometer at Lick in the 1980s and went on to design the Automated Planet Finder (APF), which began gathering data this year. Every clear night it can, the APF automatically looks at candidate stars and searches for planets that may be in the star’s system.

Vogt has been active in other areas of academic interest as well. On Feb. 28, the Annual Faculty Research Lecture was held at the UCSC Recital Hall. Introduced by Chancellor George Blumenthal as “the papa bear of planet exploration,” Vogt was given the honor of lecturing at this special event.

At this lecture, Vogt described his methods of research, the impact of his findings, and a method of traveling among the stars that had been proposed in the 1960s. This method of travel would enable us to see the planets themselves.

“It was called Project Orion,” Vogt said. “[The star craft] was called a nuclear propulsion space vehicle, and you would just drop nuclear warheads out the back to accelerate. In about a month you would get up to about an eighth of the speed of light.”

The goal of such a spacecraft would be to do a flyby of the planet and take pictures of the planet and surrounding celestial bodies that could be sent back to Earth. Then astronomers would be able to see what the surface and its atmosphere look like, and in turn analyze its habitability.

Jonathan Fortney, associate professor of astrophysics and astronomy at UCSC, is also involved in the search for exoplanets. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Fortney recently helped characterize the atmosphere of a super-Earth discovered prior to Gliese 667Cc, in 2009.

“We have found the atmosphere of this planet is dominated by water vapor (steam),” Fortney said.

Called GJ1214b, this planet has an estimated surface temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a Hubble press release.

However, the search for exoplanets is not the only path to discovery walked by UCSC researchers. Xavier Prochaska, a UCSC astrophysicist and astronomer, seeks answers to deep questions about our place in the universe as well.

Prochaska studies clouds of primordial gas left over from the Big Bang Theory. He uses quasars to shine light behind the clouds, much like a flashlight, to study the elements within them. Quasars are remote, luminous celestial objects that emit energy.

Studies of these clouds help explain one of the theories of how the universe produced itself, called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.

“At first there was only hydrogen — just free protons,” Prochaska said. “After the Big Bang, about seven minutes, give or take, things had cooled down enough to start making other elements — like helium, lithium and boron. It’s actually very hard to make carbon, and that only occurred after the first stars were made.”

The glass clouds Prochaska seeks are called “pristine gas.” They only contain helium and deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

“We’re really testing … in this case, confirming, how the first elements were formed in the universe,” Prochaska said.

The current chair of UCSC’s astrophysics department, Greg Laughlin, has been a part of Vogt’s recent discoveries. Laughlin was key in creating a new program that takes raw data of light spectroscopy and analyzes it completely. This project allowed Vogt to take publicly archived HARPS Swiss data concerning the same Gliese 581 star system and combine it with his own data. This led to the discovery of the disputed super-Earth Gliese 581g.

Laughlin’s research includes the search for exoplanets, but he helps undergraduates with research of their own.

“This is a great training ground,” Laughlin said. “[Astrophysics] is a great major for learning practical skills for the modern economy. One of my students went straight from grad school to a senior data scientist at LinkedIn.”

Other students have been researching the skies as well. Matteo Crismani studies planets that have short orbital periods, which seems contrary for planets of their size. He said he believes, and is testing the idea, that inflation of these planets is due to the magnetic field of the planet or star, which creates a “toaster effect,” causing them to swell.

Even first-years like Tanmayi Sai are beginning to conduct research early in their academic career. Sai is using NASA data to hunt for Brown dwarfs, using statistical tools.

“Being proactive is what its all about,” Laughlin said. “You pay so much to come here — take advantage of your ability to be proactive. Go beyond what is expected.”

As Carl Sagan said, “We are star-stuff.” The quest to know our universe is only beginning, and UCSC astronomers and astrophysicists are at the forefront of that journey.

Illustrations by Amanda Alten.

She giggled over Skype as she applied bright red lipstick in the mirror.

“Sorry, I’m listening! Just doing my makeup,” she said, laughing. “I gotta work later, you know.”

Josie Savage* is not a barista or waitress like many college students. Savage makes her living by webcamming — doing live online porn — under the porn name Josie Savage.

Savage, a sociology major with a concentration in queer theory at the University of North Carolina, believes in order to navigate the realm of online porn it is necessary to widen the scope in which it is viewed.

She said what is considered “normal” must be rethought, to adjust the institution of pornography itself.

A blonde size-zero with double-Ds, being mounted by a large, oily and muscled man — this is the mainstream, commercial porn experience.

“Straight people watch porn, gay people watch porn, queer people watch porn,” Savage said. “Everybody thinks it should be OK, to some degree, but we don’t know how to navigate that.”

The once-a-month rush of a Playboy magazine is fleeting, while the endless accessibility of online porn makes it everlasting. Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography, according to the internet pornography statistics on TopTenReviews.com.

Although there is no way to answer the question of whether online porn is good or bad, it is undeniable that its accessibility today has changed the way we act in our real-life sexual relationships. The question is: How do people feel about this?

Researchers Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson co-wrote “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow,” a book and online piece on PsychologyToday.com about the negative effects of online porn. They said online porn is the biggest trigger of erectile dysfunction’s serious interference with real-life relationships, citing that 70 percent of young men treated for sexual performance problems use Internet pornography heavily.

In Robinson and Wilson’s research, the sex workers themselves are rarely mentioned in the endless research conducted.

For Savage, working in the online porn industry is not only a reliable source of income, but also a way she can use her sexuality and her people skills. Savage said her job has allowed her to explore her own sexuality — she identifies as queer — and help others do so as well. Savage said she, like many sex workers, is a survivor of sexual abuse.

“I eventually want to do sex therapy, so I am finding a way to make sex OK for me, and others, outside of the context of the socially constructed loving relationship thing that I feel is blown out of proportion,” Savage said. “It’s not the only way to fulfill all of our sexual needs.”

Savage develops relationships and friendships with her customers, most of whom are regulars. On her website and over Skype, she tries to create a safe space for herself and her clients.

“[I’m] creating a space where someone can explore their sexuality in a healthy way without fear of me calling them gross or telling them it’s not OK,” Savage said. “I’m not in the business of telling someone that they are fucked up for feeling the way they feel. I think a lot of times people’s sexualities are influenced [negatively] by society.”

Natalie Purcell, a graduate from UCSC’s doctoral program in sociology whose book, “Pornography and Violence: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Pornographic Fantasy,” will be published next year, said porn is intimately entwined with our day-to-day relationships.

“Like other genres of our mainstream media and culture, pornography has a complex and multilateral relationship with our identities, relationships and practices,” Purcell said. “It can simultaneously reflect, reinforce and rebel against different aspects of our lives, attitude and behaviors.”

Purcell said mainstream porn reflects what is popularly desired, which in turn can lead to false definitions of normality.

“The content of mainstream pornography is shaped by popular demand — by what people already say, do and desire,” Purcell said. “What we see again and again in mainstream pornographies — and in any other part of our daily lives — helps define our sense of the ‘normal.’ On a societal level, pornography is one of many modes of cultural expression that can impact our sexual identities, relationships and practices.”

Porn star Tasha Reign, who has been in the adult entertainment industry for over a year and is a fourth-year student at UCLA majoring in women’s studies, said “normal” doesn’t necessarily play a part in mainstream pornography.

“When somebody watches porn they want to watch a fantasy,” Reign said. “They could be watching something that’s beautiful or they could be watching something that’s hardcore and rough — it depends on what that particular person likes. Mainstream media in general has definitely shaped what people view as ‘normal’ and ‘sexy,’ but in porn, because it’s so kinky there is not a ‘normal’ anymore.”

Beginning with a job at Hooters in high school that led to stripping, her career ultimately blossomed into an invitation to the Playboy Mansion, where Hugh Hefner reviewed her portfolio. Reign feels empowered by her sex work.

“The gender roles in porn are very different,” Reign said. “Women make more money than men, much more money. In regular society, the majority of men are the breadwinners. It definitely switches things up — the dynamics change. The women rule the show, in my opinion.”

Savage said gender roles in porn are the problem, and works to defy them. She said pornography is a way she expresses her sexuality and works to break the extreme gender roles present in American culture.

“I’m pansexual. I identify as queer,” Savage said. “I think the gender binary is a problem, and we need to be getting past it. I think every work in sexuality that I do that stresses that helps.”

Although the Internet has allowed her to liberate herself from gender constructs, Savage said the Internet has also changed how we “do sex” — in a negative way. This negative stigma is what Savage combats in her sex work.

“I didn’t have questions growing up because I had a computer in my room when I was 13,” Savage said. “I knew what sex was, at least this one kind of sex that you saw in mainstream porn. And I do think our preferences have been really informed by that. We look around us at what’s called ‘hot,’ at what we think as a society is sexy, and we internalize it.”

It’s not only porn-positive people who take issue with this kind of internalization. Luke Gilkerson, Internet community manager at Covenant Eyes — a website that offers education and software tools to encourage the fight against Internet temptation — said Internet porn drives users beyond their natural libido.

“Pornography essentially trains men and women to be sexual consumers, not lovers,” Gilkerson said. “To treat sex as a commodity, to think about sex as something on-tap and made-to-order, it trains … viewers to desire the cheap thrill of fantasy over a committed relationship. The real problem with pornography isn’t that it shows us too much sex, but that it doesn’t show us enough. [Pornography] cannot possibly give us an experience of real intimacy.”

Aside from the lack of intimacy, Gilkerson said online porn also sets unrealistic standards of beauty.
The negative effects of these skewed perceptions is something Gilkerson is intimately familiar with. Before he was the community manager at Covenant Eyes, Gilkerson was a porn addict. When he moved to Michigan to get married, he was introduced to the Covenant Eyes community. Here he found a way to heal, and help others who shared a similar struggle.

“Pornography is just the tip of a very ugly iceberg of unrealistic beauty standards imposed by mass media,” Gilkerson said. “If people are concerned about how the photoshopped models in standard advertising affect a girl’s self-worth, how much more should they be concerned about a highly-edited pornography film?”

Webcam model Savage said she is occasionally confronted with users who want unrealistic ideals, but that it is ultimately worth it.
“The Internet can be a really mean place, as is evidenced by every forum, ever,” Savage said. “I don’t need to sit here and have my body insulted. But then I think about it, and the people who aren’t saying that are looking at me and masturbating, which is probably one of the biggest compliments. Ultimately, it’s definitely given me more confidence.”

For third-year Evergreen College student Willy Johnson* — who humorously suggested he be called by that name for the purpose of this piece — webcamming is simply a way to make money. He said the question of whether or not this makes him happy is a complicated one to answer.
“There is a lot of intellectually masturbatory discussion around sex work,” Johnson said.

“[This ignores] the actual, lived realities of the people who engage in it. Personally — and I want to stress the ‘personally,’ because I think the answer to this question is going to vary wildly from person to person — I don’t find it empowering, in the same way I probably wouldn’t find working retail empowering. It’s a way to pay the rent.”

That Johnson is transgender complicates this further: He lives his day-to-day life as a man, but cams as a woman.

“It is exceedingly surreal, in a way that veers between being flattering and being absolutely horrible,” Johnson said, “to be desired for a body that I would do almost anything to be rid of.”

While webcamming has helped Savage explore her sexuality, Johnson said it has not left much room for his.

“It’s played a role in exploring sexuality in general, though not necessarily my own,” Johnson said. “The work requires I pretend to be both female and straight, when I am neither. For me, personally, it’s very, very fake. It’s a performance that panders to the male gaze in a way that doesn’t leave any room for my sexuality as someone who identifies as gay and [transgender].”

Jessica Drake, Wicked Pictures exclusive contract performer, writer, and director, has been in the adult industry for over 10 years. In addition to being the creator and host of “Jessica Drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex” — a series of sex education DVDs that aim to make sex education sexier — Drake holds sex workshops all over the world, and brings her real-life experience to the table.

Drake has been in a relationship with a partner, who also works in the industry, for eight years. She said they never have jealousy issues, because they can relate to each other and understand each other’s jobs.

Drake said she is not strictly “acting” when she has sex onscreen. For that reason, she keeps a list of onscreen partners she has chemistry with.

“Some people may have a hard time accepting the fact that I really get off with the people I work with,” Drake said. “But to me, sex is something I don’t want to have to fake. If you’re not enjoying sex, and you’re really just going through the motions, whether it’s on-camera or off-camera, it requires a disconnect. I’m not willing to turn off that part of my body, or my brain or my soul.”

As Savage pointed out earlier, and as evidenced by the wide variety of perspectives, an expansion of the way the pornographic realm is viewed is necessary. Savage said the denial of her right to be a porn star without being looked down upon is a problem.

“I don’t think [porn] should be something people are ashamed of, because I think that’s a larger problem of how we treat sexuality,” Savage said. “For me, it’s mostly an agency thing. The way culture, especially straight culture, sees porn as degrading to women — it really denies agency. I do porn because I enjoy it. Someone telling me I am being degraded, almost against my will, is truly insulting.”

Everyone has a different perspective on how porn affects his or her life, whether they are a porn star, a consumer of porn or an anti-porn activist. Sociologist Purcell said why each person feels the way they feel, and in what context, is the important part.

“Who feels degraded or empowered by which pornographies, within what contexts, and why?” Purcell said. “Certainly, there are many people who find the images, words and actions portrayed in mainstream heterosexual pornography to be hurtful and abusive, but you will also be able to find people — including women — who would shrug off the same content or find it titillating, empowering, even revolutionary.”

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

When Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti learned that Borders Books, located on the 1200 block of Pacific Ave., announced that it was closing its doors back in Feb. 2011, Protti immediately emailed her customers, thanking them for their “loyalty and for [their] belief in the value of independent [businesses].”

“Downtown just couldn’t sustain two bookstores of our size,” Protti said. “It was nice to see the local, independent business come out as the victor, so in a sense, I do believe it was a ‘win’ for the local.”

Just 11 years earlier, when Borders moved into its downtown location, the store was immediately met with protests organized by local-business supporters. Despite customers who appreciated the alternative retail options offered by the big-box store, the corporation as a whole failed to survive — to the tune of $1.29 billion in debt.

Now, the self-proclaimed “phenomenon in the fashion world” known as Forever 21, or Forever XXI, is slated to open its doors this August in the 20,000-square-foot space vacated by Borders only a year ago.

After showing interest in the area for its market of students, locals and tourists, Forever 21 Inc. signed a 10-year lease with Redtree Properties for the 1200 Pacific Ave. location in early February. A deal with the clothing chain had been in negotiations for six months, said Doug Ley, managing partner of Redtree Properties, in a public statement. The retailer is currently working on its plans for renovation through the city’s approval process.

The company, best known for its inexpensive, “trendy” clothing targeted toward young women and teens, is worth at least $1 billion, according to a 2009 Forbes report. Operating nearly 500 retail locations worldwide, Forever 21 is considered one of the fastest-growing retailers in the United States.

The city of Santa Cruz, known for its left-wing politics and “hippie” persona, has been known to limit the development of larger, corporate retailers. However, this trend has slowly declined over the past few decades, as more and more chain stores have made their way into the community and the city continues to make plans for development and economic growth.

“Despite efforts to slow the town’s growth, Santa Cruz is very gradually turning into a big city with big city problems — congestion, crime, etc.,” said Frank Perry, director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. “The changes are not so noticeable over the course of two to three years, but over the decades, the changes have been immense. A few years ago, I met a man who grew up here and was visiting for the first time in 50 years. I still remember his comment: ‘My God, what have they done to my town?’”

Plans for the opening of the sartorially savvy chain revisit an issue that Borders also faced upon opening downtown: taking the city’s business identity for a turn, not for better or worse, but for development’s sake — economically and financially.

Chain stores have come and gone throughout the history of the Santa Cruz area and have been a result of past events dating as far back as the Great Depression, according to local historian Ross Gibson. Gibson said chain stores like Woolworth’s succeeded in building a positive relationship with the Santa Cruz community by selling locally-produced products, but added that the relationship failed to last due to a change in management and the implementation of a new “corporate business model.”

“During the Great Depression, downtown [property owners] found they couldn’t lease [their] buildings, and businesses invited in chain stores to fill the spots,” Gibson said. “A lot of people saw this as large corporations taking money out of Santa Cruz and not benefiting the community, while merchants were giving sweetheart deals to chain stores. Leasing went on for 50 years with depression prices, and that’s where this all really began.”

The 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 triggered a shift in the business locale after much of the infrastructure downtown was destroyed during the natural disaster. The quake caused $433 million in damages, injured 600 and killed six people in Santa Cruz alone. Among the ruined infrastructure were the former Pacific Garden Mall as well as The Cooper House restaurant and bar, which was known from 1972 to 1989 as a cultural hub and popular gathering place for locals.

A columnist in the Washington Post wrote that Santa Cruz lost more than physical infrastructure in the earthquake.

“A piece of the ‘60s went down when the quake struck this beach town last week,” she wrote, “and no amount of cement and plywood, no amount of government loans, can bring it back. The quake stole the only thing Santa Cruz had going for it — its past.”

Local businesses struggled to recover following the disaster and were forced out of the market due to rebuilding costs. The city, desperately seeking retailers to fill in the cracks left behind by the huge loss, welcomed big box stores in an effort to boost the local economy.

“In years prior to the quake, the downtown area was made up of historic buildings — buildings that were already paid for where lease prices were low,” Gibson said. “These were the lease prices that allowed local companies to start out in Santa Cruz, but after the earthquake, things needed to be rebuilt. [Since] that cost money, local companies couldn’t get into the market anymore, and those who did prior to the quake just couldn’t survive through it.”

Gibson attributed the struggles faced by local businesses following the earthquake to city council decisions made to completely remodel the infrastructure of downtown. The city was allegedly committed to “rebuild downtown to standards that made each building and the whole of downtown better prepared should another earthquake strike,” according to an executive summary of the Santa Cruz Climate Adaptation Plan from 2008.

Gibson said that local businesses could not afford the necessary remodeling of downtown’s infrastructure to meet new building safety standards. Additionally, infrastructure that was only partially destroyed was torn down, as opposed to being restored.

“Some people never forgave us for buildings coming down,” said Mardi Wormhoudt, former county supervisor and mayor at the time of the quake, in a Metroactive 2005 report, “which is understandable, but we made the best decisions we thought we could, given the evidence we had at the time.”

Gibson said the decision to rebuild instead of restore was allegedly made to prevent the homeless from living in the downtown area.

“After the earthquake, the city had a choice to save the buildings that were damaged,” Gibson said. “They chose to tear it all down and rebuild. Los Gatos saved every single building they could, and they bounced back in six to eight months. Santa Cruz turned its back on all the debris — they completely took out the Pacific Garden Mall and brought in a traditional streetscape of suburban sprawl. In that sense, I believe they made a mistake.”

Following the earthquake, the downtown area was completely rebuilt. Since then, various businesses, including local and chain stores alike, have come and gone. Peter Koht, current economic development coordinator for the city of Santa Cruz, said the plans to open Forever 21 were strongly influenced by an effort to introduce “anchor stores” into the downtown retail community. The addition of the fashion retail chain is also expected to keep shoppers in Santa Cruz from taking their business to neighboring cities like San Jose.

“The city of Santa Cruz produces a lot of sales, and these purchases don’t always happen in Santa Cruz,” Koht said. “By bringing the products and brands people want into the city’s retail environment, we can keep the sales here.”

However, Peter Beckmann, co-chair of Think Local First, a local volunteer organization that supports locally owned businesses, said bringing in corporate retailers is not the answer to boosting local sales.

“The better approach would be to find out in which industries revenues are leaving our area and then attract or strengthen the respective businesses,” Beckmann said. “Locally owned businesses provide part of the soul of a community. Towns with exclusively corporate businesses and big shopping malls feel empty, not made for ‘human consumption.’”

While Santa Cruz embodies the quintessential enclave of an independent beach town and has attracted tourists for decades, Koht said he believes that the trend toward bringing commercial retail into the downtown area will better serve changing consumer tastes.

“Downtown areas across the nation are making a move away from malls and that general kind of lifestyle to street retail, where residents show enormous support for the local retail community,” Koht said.

Koht said by moving “anchor stores” into the downtown layout, the area as a whole will better serve the types of stores and brands shoppers look for and generate more sales within the city.

The closure of Borders downtown was a contributing factor to the growing vacancies of commercial space downtown as stores go out of business. While independent booksellers downtown may have been able to regain some sales following Borders’ departure, the city lost out in significant tax dollars and took a step back in economic growth.

The news of the clothing retail giant moving downtown has been accepted with hesitation as local business owners, specifically in the garment industry, express their hope that Forever 21 will only bring more customers to the downtown area.

While many local businesses like Bookshop Santa Cruz advocate independent retailers over national chains, Protti said that big business is also able to have a positive effect on the community.

“A business closing is a loss for any community — with a loss of jobs and income,” Protti said. “Borders took away a huge part of our sales for 10 years, but at the same time, having a new business move in downtown, big box or not, will bring in jobs, bring in income, and ultimately draw more people to the downtown area and make all of [the businesses] successful.”

Toshiko Shek, manager of Sway, believes that customers will continue to stay loyal to her business and views the opening of Forever 21 as an opportunity to draw in new shoppers.

“Forever 21 obviously has a lot of clothes that are on the more affordable side, but at the same time, we have a lot of regulars that have shopped at our store for a long time,” Shek said. “Hopefully, people who come into town to shop at Forever 21 will spend more time here, walk around downtown and maybe discover our store. That’s my hope.”

Forever 21 is known for its practice of “fast fashion,” selling a majority of their hip and trendy styles of clothing, shoes and accessories for low prices — like $1.50 for a pair of earrings and $8.50 for a dress. The chain has also recently introduced men’s, children, plus-size and maternity lines at select stores.

“Forever 21 is definitely a better option for college students — especially given the current economic conditions — who want to shop but can’t because of the money,” said Amy Kwong, fourth-year American studies and psychology double major. “They offer prices that are a lot lower than what you can generally find in other stores downtown, like Urban Outfitters and Kurios.”
While the news of Forever 21’s grand opening was happily received by deal-hunting customers and supporters of a “balanced” retail community, the store’s arrival has also sparked controversy among supporters of local and independent businesses.

“I’ve been coming to downtown Santa Cruz for the last four years for the quaint, small shops,” said Brittany Smith, first-year environmental studies major. “So many of those shops will not be able to compete with Forever 21’s prices … Hardly any store would be able to compete. I feel like some shops have a hard enough time competing with Urban Outfitters.”

 As consumer spending continues to dwindle as a result of the economic downturn, the search for lower prices has put local, independent businesses up against both online and corporate competition. With the majority of closed businesses in Santa Cruz consisting of local, independent firms, the Borders closure remains a clear exception.

“Stores like Velvet Underground, Graphix, and Skate Works have gone out or are going out of business because student clientele look for deals,” Smith said. “Forever 21 will perpetuate this struggle for local businesses in the area.”

Kurios manager Lindsay Taylor, while acknowledging the economic value of the store to the city, sees the opening as a threat to the character of Santa Cruz’s “local aesthetic.”

“I was disappointed to hear about Forever 21 moving in downtown,” Taylor said. “I just moved here from New York to get away from the same things … At the same time, I understand why the city allowed them in, but I’m just hoping that any new businesses moving into the empty stores downtown will be for the better.”

The fashion retailer’s opening is also expected to restore community jobs that were lost with the closure of Borders last year.

“[Forever 21] will definitely create more jobs in the downtown area,” Taylor said. “I get about 10 applications a week, typically from younger students in college, and this will definitely be an opportunity for more people to find employment.”

Additionally, an estimated $6-8 million is expected to be earned annually by the fashion retailer, according to city officials. One percent of this projected revenue is expected to be recycled back into the city through the collection of local sales tax, which will fund city projects and repairs.

“Welcoming a retailer of this size and quality will have a huge impact on downtown, and raise sales all along the avenue,” said Bonnie Lipscomb, the city’s director of economic development, in a statement. “We hope that this announcement will spur other retailers examining our market to join Forever 21 and all our other outstanding merchants downtown.”

In compliance with development and remodeling plans completed over the years in response to natural disasters and a buildup of the tourism industry, growth within the city’s infrastructure has taken its toll on community spaces as more and more of the city’s infrastructure became commercial space in efforts to build and sustain the local economy over the years. Buildings once used as community centers downtown slowly became retail spaces as the commercial market in Santa Cruz developed.

“A lot of industrial buildings downtown were used to serve local artists within the community … but those began to disappear in the early 2000s as new businesses were coming in and making lease offers that [the artists] couldn’t afford,” said Gibson, Santa Cruz historian and lifelong resident.

Forever 21 is part of an influx of large-scale clothing retailers, restaurants and fast food chains that have joined the Santa Cruz area over the past few decades.

Among these businesses are Urban Outfitters, Gap, Jamba Juice, Cold Stone Creamery, Safeway, Target — set to open in Capitola in summer 2012 — and most recently, Panda Express and Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Mayor Don Lane founded the local Saturn Café in 1979, following his graduation from UC Santa Cruz. While Lane said he supports the local business effort, he also believes that larger retailers are necessary for the community’s success.

“The reality is that it takes the whole package for a community to succeed,” Lane said. “There needs to be a mix of local and non-local in order to build this economy. In general, I feel like an independent, local community is ideal, but it’s a mixed situation where a lot of smaller businesses downtown know that these larger stores will draw more people into the area.”

While the Santa Cruz community has been defined by its burgeoning counterculture values in the past, the city continues to be characterized not only by its unique people but also its business practices and politics. Despite the fact that the city has taken on a modernized, suburban design while approving more nationally and internationally recognized businesses, many local and independent businesses continue to put up a fight, thrive and survive as a result of local support.

“The more people believe [Santa Cruz] has a unique characteristic, it attracts people who want to be a part of it,” Gibson said. “Culture is a self-perpetuating prophecy, and this community will never lose its culture as long as it is survived through the people that came to experience it.”

When one business closes, it allows for another business to move in — this is a simple step of economic development. Whether new development is fueled by the birth of a fashion retail giant or a fast food burrito chain, one thing’s for sure: This city doesn’t take development lightly. It never has.

Even with Forever 21 making its entrance into the downtown shopping area, there remains an estimated 28,000 square feet of vacant commercial space downtown. Filling these empty commercial spaces remains a high priority for the city and its plans for economic growth. Maintaining this growth while allowing for the preservation of the city’s local businesses will remain a constant controversy.

“I keep thinking about the things I knew when I grew up here. These were the businesses that I really truly loved … it’s sad to see them go and watch the big guys take over,” Gibson said. “But we need to promote the nature, history and culture of this area. Santa Cruz’s legacy hasn’t died out — if it’s dying at all. It’s not going to be the same — nothing can stay the same — but we need to fight to maintain and defend the culture that is so completely Santa Cruz. That’s what’s important here.”

Photo by Prescott Watson.

The Second Stage Theater is completely dark except for the lights illuminating center stage, where members of the African American Theater Arts Troupe (AATAT) gather in an intimate circle before their rehearsal. They aren’t holding hands, but they might as well be. Here, the students open up and share what’s currently happening in their lives, from handling midterms to loving Skittles.

This isn’t just another production or class — it’s a family, one that is celebrating its 20th anniversary as the only African American theater troupe in the entire UC system. In spite of financial struggles through the organization’s history, AATAT has triumphed to reach this milestone, one they will commemorate with the opening of their latest play, “Ruined.”

A student-based organization, AATAT is a group of predominantly African American students who perform an annual production depicting aspects of African American life. According to their website, AATAT’s mission statement is “to create unity, higher visibility and an understanding of the African American culture at UCSC.” Through “Ruined,” AATAT hopes to bring awareness to present-day social injustices.

The group sings and dances around the stage with excitement in preparation for their latest play before Don Williams, founder and director of AATAT, arrives. Williams, director of Cultural Arts and Diversity (CAD), has been working at UC Santa Cruz for the past 22 years and is the backbone behind programs like Rainbow Theater and AATAT. Williams and AATAT are almost one and the same — you can’t mention one without the other.

“I believe that if we’re going to be a teaching institution, it is our global duty to make sure we touch upon the major culture groups that are really here at the university,” said Williams, who regularly spends 12 hours a day on campus during the week working on various projects.

AATAT gives students the opportunity to act, direct, stage-manage, film and write plays. AATAT is open to all students, regardless of ethnicity or level of experience. This program gives students the foundation to connect, learn, grow and change with the support of their peers.

Williams said the motto for AATAT and Rainbow Theater is, “if you want to be truly blessed, learn to uplift others higher than yourself.” An emphasis on sharing students’ gifts and building upon strengths — whatever they may be — to help others is key to AATAT.

“It’s not even about the grade, it’s not even about the class, it’s about the service,” Williams said.

AATAT also acts as a major outreach and retention program for the university, giving students of color — especially African American students — a chance to be in theater and full-length productions with other underrepresented students. Out of the 16,451 students at UCSC, only an estimated 450 are African American, which amounts to 3 percent of the population. Of the current members of AATAT, 30 of the 40 are African American.

“There was a time when the UC was losing a lot of African American students who would come here because of the isolation that went on,” Williams said. “AATAT provided that nature of common experiences.”

AATAT was established in 1991 by a group of African American upperclassmen who persistently approached Williams about producing a theatrical show. Williams, who first began at UCSC as a theater technician, said he took time out of his own schedule to create AATAT. At first, students did not receive credit for the productions.

Since the program’s inception, AATAT has given over $85,000 in scholarships to participants of the program. Five members are chosen annually by AATAT to receive $1,000 for their role in AATAT as well as for academic excellence, another way the program supports its community.

Jessica Jones, playing brothel owner Mama Nadia, attempts to soothe war victim Salima, played by Precious Wingo in “Ruined.” Photo by Prescott Watson.

Third-year theater arts and feminist studies double major Alana Duvernay is the assistant director of “Ruined.” Duvernay, who has been a member of AATAT for all of her three years at UCSC, sits in the front row at every rehearsal to assist the director and actors with their lines and overall character development.

“I chose UC Santa Cruz because of AATAT and Rainbow Theater,” Duvernay said. “First, because there are not multicultural theater groups in the UC system, [and] second because it is my goal, and AATAT’s goal, to uplift other people.”

During rehearsals, it is obvious a clear line of communication is necessary to attain a level of respect and trust among AATAT members. This is especially true when touching upon sensitive subjects like rape in “Ruined.” The actors must abandon their everyday personalities and transform into characters they may not be comfortable or familiar with.

Thousands of students have participated in AATAT over the past 20 years. AATAT’s success has sparked the creation of other multicultural programs like Rainbow Theater, also run by Williams. But despite their constantly sold out shows, AATAT continues to struggle yearly with financial shortfalls.

Over the years, AATAT has experienced many setbacks, predominantly a lack of staff and funding for the inherently costly productions they put on each year. However, with Williams’ focus on the future, you won’t ever hear him talk about the negatives.

“This art form of theater is a vehicle we cannot allow to [die out] or something,” Williams said. “It has a way of connecting with you like nothing else. You can go to the movie theater and you’re at the discretion of the editors. But [when] you come to live theater, you are the editor.”

Photo by Prescott Watson.

Photo by Prescott Watson.

Theater arts graduate Maria Olivo, an AATAT alum and former president of Rainbow Theater, is currently getting her master’s degree in theater education in the hope of creating a similar multicultural theater arts program in California’s Inland Empire. This was almost made impossible during Olivo’s four years at UCSC, when Williams’ job and programs were at risk of termination due to budget cuts.

“We knew that without him Rainbow and AATAT wouldn’t exist,” Olivo said, sitting in the theater and taking notes for her dissertation. “He’s really the heart and soul of these programs, and the students are the breath that keep it all going and functioning together.”

Duvernay, who encourages and supports the entire cast of AATAT, said Williams continually struggles to maintain his position and receive the support and funding needed for his programs.

“Don is constantly fighting for us, constantly charging things on his own credit card, running from meeting to meeting, conference to conference, seeing if he can do something for us,” Duvernay said.

But AATAT now sees more possibility for prosperity in their future, thanks to Measure 49. Undergraduate students voted last year to voluntarily increase student fees by $5.25 per quarter. This money goes toward the CAD, which supports AATAT and Rainbow Theater.

Third-year electrical engineering major Amanuel Zeryihun is acting for the first time in “Ruined.” On Tuesday night, Williams awarded Zeryihun with one of the $1,000 scholarships. The cast and crew cheered him on, but Zeryihun was speechless.

While sitting behind the stage with his fellow actors, Zeryihun said it is important for people to recognize all the hard work put into this organization.

“People need to know this didn’t just come out of nowhere,” Zeryihun said. “It didn’t just last 20 years. It required the struggling of everyone who got on board, especially Don Williams, who is the visionary for this.”

Zeryihun is inspired by witnessing the changes AATAT and Williams create in the community on campus.

“It’s really important our university invest in people like him because he teaches from a very genuine approach, and it’s not something you find here a lot of the time,” he said.

Jessica Jones, a third-year student who plays Mama Nadia, the main character in “Ruined,” looks forward to the 20th anniversary celebrations. Many AATAT alumni will return to watch the show.

“For people to actually see how long this legacy has lasted is very powerful,” Jones said. “We’re here now, but we want to know what happened 20 years ago.”

Photo by Prescott Watson.

On stage and off, the players of AATAT spend time together working on lines, getting into character, and sharing valuable information to feel more comfortable about the play. Jones and Zeryihun bring their characters into their everyday life, like asking one another to pass the milk in a Congolese accent at their house.

Adam Buxbaum, a fifth-year theater arts graduate student, said there’s a lot of experimental theater occuring on campus, but AATAT’s theater work goes a different route.

“AATAT is consistently the only production every year that actually brings real poignant and pertinent issues to the community,” Buxbaum said. “AATAT works to agitate and educate, to make people leave the auditorium angry and feeling like they can make a difference.”

AATAT members hope it will continue to grow and gain support as a theater troupe so African American productions will continue to exist on campus even when Williams is gone.

“My hope is that AATAT will always be here,” Williams said, “[and] that this campus will always be a beacon to making sure diversity really does happen and is not just spoken.”

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

Someone made it possible for you to fling a hapless bird across the thumbprint-smudged screen of your smartphone. I say “you” because, statistically, you probably play video games. You exist in two-thirds of American households. You’re probably male (60 percent chance), but you’re less likely to be so than in the past. Age-wise, 25 percent of you are under 18, 49 percent of you are between the ages of 18 and 49, and 26 percent of you are over 50. That’s a shift that’s happened over the last decade — no longer should the term “gamer” conjure up images of 17-year-old boys racking up kill streaks in “Call of Duty.” As a matter of fact, if so many people play games, is “gamer” even a relevant term anymore? The audience for gaming has never been more diverse, and game creators are getting more creative in response.

We as a society have moved past the point of considering video games and their creation as the sole province of the unclean, asocial masses. Those masses have become more sophisticated and taken on the role of purveyors of modern culture. They’ve got their Sundance-esque credibility, and their do-it-yourself ethics are as convincing as any from past decades.

They’re also here at UC Santa Cruz. Silicon Valley is already a constant pull on UCSC graduates with a technical bent, but with the gaming industry bringing in $66 billion in sales in 2010, it’s a field that more and more are going into.

Jane Pinckard is the associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media (CGPM). Founded in 2010, the CGPM is a relatively recent addition to the computer game design major at UCSC, which was founded in 2006 as the first in the UC system.The CGPM was established to house and facilitate research in the field of video game design. Jane credits the major’s formation to one person.

“Five years ago, computer science enrollment was falling across the country,” Pinckard said. “[Chair of computer science] Jim Whitehead went out and recruited top faculty [for the new major]. It was Jim’s vision, and he brought the A-team together.”

Pinckard said she didn’t have access to anything nearly as organized as the CGPM to facilitate her interest in video games and gaming culture in the late ’90s.

“I started writing about games and game culture in 1997, and I was really interested in thinking about games as cultural products and as being embedded in culture,” Pinckard said. “At the time, there weren’t many other publications doing that.”

Based on Pinckard’s experience, things clearly change. Nowadays, gaming sites and review forums are about as natural as mediocre food blogs. Pinckard sees this as an inevitable evolution of the industry.

“It’ll happen naturally as game-literate generations grow up,” Pinckard said. “It’s a natural sophistication and maturation of the medium.”

Graduate student Teale Fristoe also said that barriers to entry into the field are dropping in more ways than one.

“Ten years ago, the only way to get your product in front of somebody was to go through a publisher and get your game in a box on a shelf. If you wanted to be in the industry, you had to be a cog in a giant machine,” Fristoe said. “These days there are flash portals, the App Store, Steam; all these different venues where you can just put up a game.”

Fristoe sees this as a huge shift in terms of manpower and individual creative capacity.

“Two-, three-, even one-person teams can put their work online now,” Teale said, a look of enthusiasm stealing across his face. “You can create something small and beautiful and release it to the world. Maybe not everybody will enjoy it, but anybody can.”

Pinckard said it’s easier than ever for a few people to realize their game design desires.

“It used to be that you couldn’t start a game studio with just you and your friend,” Pinckard said, smiling widely. “But now you can. It’s like indie film.”

Comparing video game creation to the explosive growth of the independent film movement might not be far off the mark; like independent film, the industry draws in all types. Devon Wyland, a senior in the computer game design major, came from a background in graphic design, and had no plans to immerse herself in video game design. But one thing inevitably led to another.

“Santa Cruz didn’t have a graphic design major, but the more I got through the game design major, the more I loved it,” Wyland said. “What’s nice about video games is that you can merge any interests you have. It’s a really open field to go into.”

The major is growing beyond the classes it offers, as interest increases. The support network that has formed outside of the classes speaks to the enthusiasm of the participants.

“Because of the interest in game design, we have a game developer club. Up to 60 people show up sometimes to talk about, test and make games,” Wyland said. “We have a lot of support behind game design, so even if the classes aren’t there yet, I can see it coming in the future.”

This network lies at the heart of what makes game design popular at UCSC. Fristoe sees the game developers’ club as an essential component to the sense of community fostered within and outside of the major.

“The game developers’ club is the focal point of the game developer community outside of the classes. It brings together people who are interested in making games, and we get to have weekly meetings,” said Fristoe, who emphasized the necessity of a strong community in the game design process. “Play-testing is a very important thing. If you actually want a game that others can enjoy, you really have to work hard to make it understandable and clear.”

The nuts and bolts of game design have found an easy fit in the tech-heavy environment at UCSC. In addition, the creative minds tackling the frontiers of video game design have found a place here.

Undergraduate Zachary Lindblad is in the middle of his senior project — computer game design majors put together a fully functional video game during their senior year as part of a team. Even as an undergraduate, Lindblad is engaged with the future of game design.

“On the design end, it’s all about the youth of the medium,” Lindblad said. “In games, so little has been done, so much is being done, and it’s all moving in a thousand different directions.”

Much like Pinckard, Lindblad sees the current state of game design as mirroring revolutionary moments in other forms of media, like film.

“We’re not just talking better graphics, better production values. We’re talking entire realms of human experience opening up just within the last few years,” Lindblad said. “Many people have said being a game designer today is like being a filmmaker at the birth of sound in movies, but comparing the ability of one person to realize a game the entire world can play together to the addition of sound [to movies] does not do it justice.”

But like Wyland, Lindblad acknowledges the place other forms of media have had in influencing his work. This is especially true for his current project titled “Hello World,” a game about exploration — a summary that hardly does it justice — that Lindblad has wanted to make since he was in high school.

“‘Hello World’ was directly influenced by ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” said Lindblad, referring to the revered Stanley Kubrick film. “Being a designer and not having your biggest influence be outside your medium leads to stagnation in ideas.”

Chelsea Howe is a former employee of Zynga, the social network game developer responsible for “Farmville.” She now works at Social Chocolate alongside Jane McGonigal, author of “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.” Social Chocolate is a video game studio dedicated to creating “disruptive and deeply enriching social experiences,” according to their ethereally styled website, which features a beta of their current project on its front page.

“Games are possibly the most powerful medium that exists. So why aren’t people asking, ‘What does this game mean?,’” asked Howe in a lecture given on Feb. 8 at Jack Baskin Engineering, in a room appropriately named “The Simularium.”

Howe said that the medium of game design has vast potential to evoke emotions in players.

“There’s no reason why games can’t start a revolution,” Howe said. “I wanted to make games that made people laugh and cry. How do we make people feel something?”

The mainstream video game design industry often designs trends that assume a homogeneous audience, Howe said, but “homogeneous” is hardly the word to describe consumers of video game culture today.

“People interacting with our systems aren’t just bullet points,” Howe said. “If you design for generic players, you’re going to get generic games. People aren’t just what they want. People care about things. Games can be about that.”

Howe said the use of ambiguity is a narrative tool for game designers — sometimes it helps to let people fill in the blanks themselves when you’re trying to evoke strong emotions.

“People don’t like ambiguity,” Howe said. “If we can’t solve it, we’ll make up reasons for it. Players project themselves into the spaces we leave open.”

Howe said video games possess a unique capacity for engagement that other forms of media don’t have, but that that capacity has yet to be fully explored.

“Can our systems tell stories the way art and music can? Can interactivity provide the same thing? Can we evoke emotion purely through interactivity in games?” Howe asked. “Every time you feel an emotion, it spreads to six other people you know. Feel better. Mean better. Make better games.”

Jamin Warren used to write for the Wall Street Journal, but left his position there to start up a gaming culture website called Kill Screen. He did this because he felt there was a void in the video game industry.

“As someone in my 20s interested in design, art and music, there was little writing on games that appealed to those interests,” Warren said. “[Essayist] Chuck Klosterman wrote that video game criticism can’t get started because it lacks the voices to explain it in a meaningful and relevant way. We’re hopingto fix that.”

Warren said the lack of dialogue about the cultural significance of games is a result of their meteoric rise in popularity.

“The big issue with games is that their commercial success has risen faster than their cultural relevance,” Warren said.

Warren sees games as intensely personal objects that offer clues about the people who play them.

“What I love about games is that they’re reflections of who we really are,” Warren said. “I spent a long time as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, trying to get subjects to open up about their lives. But with games, we play as the people we truly are, and I love what that allows us to discuss afterwards.”

Illustration by Amanda Alten.

We are a hip and savvy youth.

We call our moms, Facebook our friends, LinkedIn our employers, email our professors and text everyone else.

So the question is, how do we date?

Between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples in the United States met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University.

With such high numbers, it is no longer plausible that online dating is something exclusively for the over-25 community. Even so, the social stigmas of finding a mate online continue to persist.

“You’d be shocked by how many people on campus have OkCupid accounts that they don’t talk about,” said Caitlin Emmons, a fourth-year American studies major at UC Santa Cruz.

Last summer, Emmons joined OkCupid out of curiosity. The disparity in the number of young users she saw on the site with the lack of open conversations about online dating piqued Emmons’ interest, and drove her to conduct academic research. In a paper she wrote on the subject, she found the prevalence of online dating has not removed its social stigma.

“It’s sort of like fight club,” Emmons said. “You don’t tell anyone until they break the rule, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m doing this.’ And then you find out and there’s this instant discussion about it, but most people are not going to openly admit to it. It’s become more socially acceptable, yet it’s very much a social taboo.”

Jane Pinckard, associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UCSC, said even though there is social taboo surrounding online dating, there is less stigma around it for the youth community now than ever before.

“When I was in my 20s, about 10 years ago, dating sites were still relatively new and it was seen as a last resort. You wouldn’t do it unless you were desperate,” Pinckard said. “Now I feel like it’s more, ‘Oh, OkCupid! That’s fun, I read their blog, it’s kind of funny.’”

OkCupid is the largest dating website in the United States, according to their blog OkTrends. This free site makes its matches through statistical analysis of its members’ answers to site-and user-generated quizzes.

While dating sites are not games, Pinckard said dating sites fit into the playable media mold.

“It’s media that’s for entertainment,” she said. “You can approach it with a playful attitude and it supports and enhances playful behaviors.”

The nonexistent price tag and playful quizzes draw youths to OkCupid’s casual atmosphere.

“I usually describe [OkCupid] as the Google of dating websites,” said Eryca Sender, a 21-year-old Santa Monica City College Student. “Since OkCupid is free, it’s kind of like everyone and not their mother, because that’s not the demographic.”

Illustration by Amanda Alten.

Still, Pinckard said she is a little surprised younger people are increasing their participation on dating websites.

“I always thought when you’re under 25 it’s easier to [meet people] because … you’re in different classes all the time, you’re meeting different people,” she said. “Once you get a job and you go to the same office with the same people, it gets a little harder.”

The assumption that college is a time of constant socialization and free time is quite common, but arguably highly inaccurate.

“I’m working on four or five different movies right now, and then I have work and classes,” said Tom Smith*, a 22-year-old UCSC student. “I want to talk to girls, but I never have time, so I’ll go 20 minutes online and I’ll meet someone really quick.”

Smith said he doesn’t like the idea that he is someone who needs a dating site to meet women, a classic stigma of using the sites.

“People always say ‘there’s no stigma about online dating,’ but they have to say that because there still is stigma about online dating,” 21-year-old Sender said.

On top of busy schedules, the average 20-something is shouldering debt or other money problems in an increasingly jobless market.

“In a lot of cases, what you see people turning to is romantic validation,” Emmons said. “You go home and turn on your account, and there are three messages waiting for you that have nothing to do with economic situation. They have nothing to do with your classes — it gives you an out.”

Convenience and entertainment are only two of many reasons young people are increasingly joining dating websites.

“I don’t think anyone goes to OkCupid if they’re super happy with their lives,” said Sender, who joined OkCupid after a breakup.

Life-changing events, like breakups or moves, are a common reason people join online dating sites, Emmons said. She said this is because life-changing “trigger events” often create a void in an person’s life. To fill the void, people try to adapt and re-develop their selves.

But what’s different about this online “you” is you become your own creator. With no one else posting on your wall or tagging you in silly photos, you become the auteur and editor of your image, Emmons said. Any responses you get to the profile re-enforce and validate the new self you have created, giving you confidence in your new life state.

For others, the impetus to join isn’t about life-changing events, but stagnancy.

“I was just kind of tired of waiting for something to happen,” said Lizzie Brozek, a 20-year-old student at Sonoma State University. “I felt like I had nothing to lose by trying online dating. The worst that could happen is that nothing would happen, and that was already happening.”

But for some, deciding to join is an act of impulse — or “whiskey,” as Smith said while laughing.

“It’s not a pretty story,” he said. “It was me, drunk, and I made a profile and then the next morning I had messages.”

Just as the reasons for joining vary, the types of relationships sought differ.

“There may still be a little sleazy factor because there are some sites — Match.com and even OkCupid — that are seen as temporary hookup facilitators rather than, ‘I’m just having fun and meeting people to date,’” Pinckard said.

But what sounds like a sleazy relationship to some may sound like an ideal relationship to others.

“There’s still that option to do short-term dating, which is essentially hooking up with a more PC title,” Emmons said.

Although she knows many people find long-term monogamous partners on OkCupid, Emmons said she feels real-life hook-up culture is just as prevalent on the Internet as in real life.

“A lot of people have mapped the college culture onto their OkCupid accounts,” Emmons said.

Cheap pickups are definitely one of the social customs that have made their way onto the Internet.

“I’ll get messages that are definitely form letters,” OkCupid user Sender said. “You can kind of tell when someone sent you and 20 other people the same thing. It’s pretty obvious, and it’s also kind of funny, because they actually think that works.”

She describes a message she received that listed the sender’s attributes and then offered for her to decide whether or not she wanted to fall in love with the sender.

What is her response?

“I blog about it,” Sender said. “I think a lot of people are ashamed of Internet dating, and initially I was, but now I kind of take it at face value and realize it’s more entertainment than actually dating.”

Sender is not alone in using this coping mechanism. Countless blogs and hash-tags have popped up on the Internet discussing the horrors and hilarity of online dating.

In some ways, a bad message is better than no message at all.

Illustrations by Leigh Douglas

Editor’s Note: All information printed in this story has been done so with the sources’ expressed consent.

One night on campus, Jennifer Black* ended up at Porter Meadow with her new college friends. Black felt great about her acceptance to UC Santa Cruz, like she deserved to have her first drink. She didn’t know then that this decision would change her life forever.

“I had that attitude for the next year and I just drank and drank and drank,” Black said. “At first it started out as just plain fun, a lot of crazy adventures with zero inhibitions or fear. I only vaguely remember going to parties, because I would black out so frequently.”

Black, who is now 20, had to drop out of UCSC because of her addiction to alcohol.

“I didn’t start drinking until I got to college,” Black said. “I was always the last one to finish off a bottle and the first one suggesting to get another drink.”

While alcohol use is prevalent on most college campuses across the United States, some students take it to another level, where alcohol begins affecting their lives in a negative way. Although there are differences among binge drinking, alcohol abuse and alcoholism, all three exist at UCSC.

The Safer California Universities held a survey in 2010-11 that found that 41.1 percent of students at UCSC reported experiencing some kind of personal problem at least once during the past quarter as a result of drinking. In addition, 28.8 percent reported experiencing some kind of serious personal problem as a result of drinking, and 16.5 percent reported some form of public misconduct. Of the people who completed the surveys, 96.5 percent were full-time students and 60.8 percent were under 21 years old.

A handful of students are forced to deal with their alcohol dependency, but there are hundreds of students at UCSC and thousands across America who do not recognize their problem with alcohol.

Doug Smith*, a middle-aged man from Santa Cruz, has been in recovery for the past two years with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Before recovery, Smith lost his job, house and family to alcoholism.

Smith, who had been using drugs and alcohol since he was 18, never felt that he had any problems with alcohol.

“It’s not even that you know you have a problem, it’s your family and your loved ones who notice it,” Smith said. “You’re just a young person, you think you’ve got everything in check, you think you’re wise, and then you just end up doing the wrong stuff.”

Jim Mosher, an attorney and alcohol policy consultant based in Felton, spoke to campus radio station KZSC in November 2011 about alcohol policy.

“Drinking on college campuses is a real serious problem,” Mosher said. “The brutal fact is that alcohol is the most abused drug in the country. It causes 4,700 young people to die each year.”

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, “Approximately 5,000 young people under the age of 21 die as a result of underage drinking; this includes about 1,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes, 1,600 as a result of homicides, 300 from suicide, as well as hundreds from other injuries such as falls, burns and drownings.”

At UCSC, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, Sober Slugs, meets twice a week for students to receive support dealing with alcoholism. At 8 p.m. sharp every Tuesday, the meeting begins with a moment of silence, followed by the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” they say in unison.

As a result of the prevalence of alcohol abuse, college campuses like UCSC are reaching out to their students to provide a safe space to discuss their problems.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a 12-step program that helps men and women of all ages deal with alcoholism. Sober Slugs meets up twice a week on campus for students to help each other deal with their drinking. In Santa Cruz alone, there are over 20 different AA meetings at various locations across the county, including on-campus meetings.

Vince Velasquez, a UCSC graduate student who attends Sober Slugs meetings, knows he has a problem with alcohol.

“I like young people meetings better because I don’t feel so different; normal AA meetings have older people,” Vasquez said.  “It’s why I go to Sober Slug meetings, because I feel like I can relate to the people in the room.”

Black, who has struggled with making true friends in school, feels at home in meetings.

“AA was the first time I felt a part of a group of people that won’t judge me, where I felt like I could really fall apart and be accepted without drinking,” Black said.

Students come to the Sober Slug meetings with different lifestyles, backgrounds and reasons, but they all have one thing in common: alcohol addiction. Although the initial decision to take drugs or drink alcohol is largely a voluntary choice, the substances change the brain chemistry and cause a user to compulsively seek out a drug and use it, regardless of the negative consequences to the addict and those around them, said Jennifer Lowry, a clinical pharmacologist and medical toxicologist. In a U.K. study, the addictive properties of alcohol have a higher propensity for addiction than amphetamines, tobacco and ecstasy.

“There are so many people in AA, people you wouldn’t expect to be there,” Black said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you stand for. If you’re in the room trying to get clean and sober, you’re welcomed. I’ve never seen a more diverse and unusual group come together in that way, so peacefully.”

Black, who was new to Santa Cruz in 2009, turned to alcohol when she was nervous about making new friends and starting new relationships.

“Drinking came so natural to me and it felt so good for so many reasons, like all of a sudden I didn’t have fear anymore,” Black said.

Though Black made many friends through drinking, none are her friends today.

“When I first started drinking, I remember having heart-to-hearts with everybody. Suddenly everybody was my best friend,” she said. “But a lot of them were my friends because we had really awesome parties. They all supported my drinking.”

Since her great-grandfather’s generation, each generation of Black’s family has experienced alcoholism.

“I knew from a very early age to stay away from alcohol,” Black said, “but I was tired of walking on eggshells because of the fear I had around drinking.”

Black — who had been living in an apartment on campus — was no longer allowed to reside there after she left UCSC.

“After I dropped out, I was basically squatting on campus,” she said, “staying at different friends’ dorms or apartments until the RA would tell me to leave.”

Even at this point, Black continued to drink.

Naturally, not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a standard reference for psychiatrists and psychologists, there are different levels and variations of alcohol use.

The DSM classifies moderate use of alcohol as unproblematic. One bad incident with drinking is known as a critical incident.

When a pattern of negative consequences and multiple incidents is established, the individual is considered to have a substance abuse issue. A person is classified as alcohol-dependent when they have “tolerance; periodic loss of control of quantity and/or behavior, important activities reduced or given up because of use; moderation difficult or impossible.”

Fortunately, there are many resources and helpful individuals on campus at UCSC that serve to help those struggling with substance abuse issues.

Paul Willis, an alcohol and drug educator at UCSC, works on education, reduction and prevention programs that are created to support students. Willis is in charge of many prevention programs, including the Student Health and Outreach Program (SHOP) and Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS).

SHOP offers information, education, resources and support with alcohol and other drug use, sexually transmitted infections, rape crisis counseling, and sexual health, holistic health and stress management. BASICS is the two-session process with online survey/assessment that SHOP offers for students to reduce high-risk behaviors. Some of these students are already experiencing patterns of abuse or dependence. The majority are not.

“Everything we do is around harm reduction,” Willis said.

Between these and other similar programs, Willis offers information, resources and support for students. For potential alcoholics, the intention of these programs is to reduce high-risk behaviors of addiction.

UCSC requires all first-year and transfer students under 24 to take Alcohol Education (AEDU), a mandatory online pre-matriculation prevention course. It provides research-based information about alcohol and its effects. AEDU seeks to create a learning experience that will motivate behavior change, reset unrealistic expectations about the effects of alcohol, link choices about drinking to academic and personal success, and help students to practice healthier and safer decision-making. Through these and other programs, UCSC’s goal is to educate, assist and support students in making decisions about alcohol and other drugs.

Yet, despite all the resources, some students and even parents reinforce the myth that college is where you learn to drink, Willis said.

“Drinking and being reckless was a huge part of the college experience,” Black said. “In college, you don’t have to be responsible for how risky your actions are. The more hardcore you can drink, the cooler you are and that’s just the truth.”

Grad student and Sober Slugs member Velasquez agrees.

“At the college level, people feel like they need to drink to fit in,” Velasquez said.

Willis said although college plays a role in a student’s drinking experience, it’s not the only factor.

“It partly has to do with our society,” Willis said. “Young people start drinking and smoking pot in high school and already have patterns established before they get to college. Some of it is just continuing the patterns that are already there.”

Willis says he knows each individual person and situation is different, and cannot put any person into one category.

“For some students, it’s curiosity, or the pressure of wanting to make new friends,” Willis said. “The pressure is strong and alcohol does act as a stress reliever and makes it easier to be around people.”

Willis, who has been working with SHOP for the past 10 years, knows the importance of proper alcohol education.

“We’re just trying to educate people to make their own choices based on what are they looking for in school, what do they anticipate doing in life, and if alcohol has made consequences that made a mark, and do they want that to continue,” Willis said. “But we also reinforce and support students who don’t drink and smoke.”

Doug Smith, a Santa Cruz native, got involved with drugs and alcohol at an early age because he was hanging out with kids who were older than he was and who could easily access substances. Smith felt that his lifestyle of drinking beers and smoking marijuana was normal.

“Alcohol cost me my family, my business, my life, everything. I got really deep into it,” he said. “You don’t become an addict overnight; it takes a long time. First you use the drugs, and then they use you.”

Similarly, alcohol cost Black her college career.

“I lost so much of what college is really about while I was there,” she said. “I earned nothing and I ruined that experience for myself. I thought of myself as superhuman, like nothing could hurt me, but alcohol ruined me.”

Smith, who has depression and anxiety issues, felt the need to use alcohol to cope.

“It’s an escape,” he said. “You drink and you forget about all your problems, so you continue to drink to relax, but then it gets to a point where you want it every night. You need a shot in the morning so you don’t feel hungover.”

Smith calls drugs and alcohol “the great deceiver” because they led him to believe everything was fine, when in reality his life had gotten out of control.

“I missed out on a lot of things through the years I was an addict, but what’s done is done and I want to stay clean and sober,” he said.

Smith, who attends AA meetings, understands where he is in his journey.

“I’m an addict in recovery,” Smith said. “I get excited when young people come into the meetings. If they want advice, I’m willing to talk. If I can influence someone to stop using, then I’ve done my part.”

Black and Velasquez, who both attend Sober Slug meetings regularly, are “working the program” that AA offers. Black has been sober for over a year and Velasquez has been sober for at least five years. Both understand alcoholism is something they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

Even though Velasquez knows he has a problem, he doesn’t enjoy dealing with it.

“I don’t like going to meetings, I can’t stand it.” Velasquez said. “But I get something out of going to meetings. There are some really good things about AA.”

On rare occasions, when the problem of drinking isn’t dealt with, there are more severe consequences.

“Alcohol killed one of my friends,” Velasquez said. “He went to sleep [at a party] and never woke up. He was that wasted. After that, I knew it was time to get sober.”

When Smith was 21, he got a DUI and was forced by the courts to attend an AA meeting every day for two months. Smith attended meetings, but felt that he wasn’t an addict until he lost his family because of his alcohol use. Today Smith has been sober for two years.

“I wish I would have taken advantage of that experience and actually worked the program,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to change. It’s never too late. Being sober is a good way of life.”

*names have been changed