City on a Hill Press: When did you first start producing music?
DJ Sam F: I started producing when I was 16. I used Garageband at first and then I used Reason. It was mostly hip-hop back then and I kind of rapped. It was pretty silly.

CHP: How did you get started producing at UCSC?
DJ Sam F: One of my friends from high school, Lucky Date, talked with me about being producers and making it a career. He kind of inspired me to get back into it. I took a class at UCSC on Logic the end of my sophomore year and since then I’ve been in Logic. For the past two years I’ve been producing EDM, but I wasn’t good at first. It took a while before
I liked the end result.

CHP: What types of EDM do you produce?
DJ Sam F: Dubstep, electro-house and “hip-hop step.” I’ve done a bunch of remixes that are about 100 beats per minute. People really like those but I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into a “remix genre” of what I do. I’m working on my EP now and it’s going to be electro. I also work on some glitch-hoppy, rap influenced EDM.

CHP: What other artists/genres influence your work?
DJ Sam F: Definitely Porter Robinson and Lucky Date. Skrillex has been a huge influence — his music has been super innovative and he started the whole “brostep” genre. People hate on it but I love Skrillex and I’ve always considered him as one of my favorite artists. I’m influenced a lot by the hyphy movement because I grew up in Berkeley, so you’ll find rap things [in my music] that allude to Bay Area hip-hop.

CHP: How would you describe your musical style?
DJ Sam F: It’s pretty complex. I do resampling — crazy techniques of making my sounds. I’ll program a synth, bounce it to a new file, edit it again, re-compress it and add more effects. Really complex, glitchy sort of sounds.

CHP: How long do you usually spend on a single track?
DJ Sam F: It depends. A hip hop remix I could do in two days, sometimes even a day. Originals I like to spend more time — really go back into fine detail and find everything that I do like, until I have a final product I can say I’m really proud of.

CHP: What is your process when starting a track?
DJ Sam F: Before I can do anything I need to clean my room, it’s like a weird OCD. If my bed’s messed up, in the back of my head, I’m like “I can’t produce.” Then I’ll usually start with drums or a sample and then layer it. I usually start with drums, then go to build, then drop.

CHP: What is your favorite part of performing?
DJ Sam F: I’m really into the vibes. When I drop a song and everyone is stoked, that’s the best for me. I just get really excited and I jump and see the crowd’s appreciation. Especially when it’s an original. So definitely “vibing” off the crowd.

CHP: What was the strangest or most interesting thing that has happened to you at a show?
DJ Sam F: This isn’t strange, just really unfortunate. There was a really drunk girl at MOTIV, and she came up and was lingering next to me in the booth. I asked if she could please move and get out of my space but she was like, “No, f*** you.” Then I was like, “Security, can you please tell this girl to leave?” Then she goes to the crowd and finds her boyfriend. They come up and then close my laptop and the music stops and I was like, “Security, get them.”

CHP: Is producing and performing music something you intend to pursue as a career?
DJ Sam F: Definitely. After I graduate I’m planning on moving to LA to network down there. It’s all about coming up with original music. I have a release on Universal Republic — I did a remix of The Lonely Island’s new song “Yolo” that comes out on Saturday.

CHP: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming producers?
DJ Sam F: Dedicate yourselves to it. It’s really hard and takes a lot. But if you’re committed to spending three hours a day, everyday — no exceptions — for like a year, then it’s definitely possible [to be successful]. I haven’t made it yet myself, I’m on a path to hopefully succeed. But it takes dedication and full commitment.

Sam’s music is available online on his SoundCloud and Facebook.
soundcloud.com/djsamf
facebook.com/djsamf

DJ Sam F gets the crowd going at the E-40 show.

DJ Sam F gets the crowd going at the E-40 show.

Sam F adds effects to the mix.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

Sam uses a variety of plugins.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F works with his production setup in his house

Sam works with Massive to craft his synths.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F uses Apple Logic in his production.

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.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

UC Santa Cruz fourth-year Wesley Goto has more on his mind than senioritis. The Porter community assistant (CA) has been hard at work designing the Asian-American cultural festival, a “dream project” for the graduating student.

The festival, which will take place in the Porter breezeway from 1–5 p.m. on April 14, will showcase a broader definition of Asian culture with the aim of dispelling stereotypes.

“The Asian Cultural Festival is a big celebration of Asian culture,” Goto said. “I’m not talking about the stereotypical Chinese, Korean, Japanese. We’re trying to pull in a little bit of everything. This is a celebration of true culture — not just [a] play on stereotypes.”

The event will consist of many booths where patrons can learn about many Asian cultures in a fun and interactive way. At Goto’s booth, for instance, he and his team will teach the history and mythology behind the nearly 400 year-old art of origami.

“The festival will host different booths at which students will make crafts while learning about Asian culture,” Goto said. “Each station will be fun, but will also carry with it a historical lesson or something to take away.”

Goto said he hopes the event has a lasting effect on the student body.

“Stereotypes don’t reveal the true fundamentals of culture,” Goto said. “The biggest thing I see with the stereotyping of individuals is that you don’t really know what’s really there,  the core fundamentals of the culture.”

Goto said education should not be  restricted to classrooms and hopes that the event’s outdoor location will draw a diverse crowd of passersby.

“Living on campus … your education is primarily in the classroom,” Goto said. “Our job is to educate beyond the classroom, in a non-traditional way.”

Fellow Porter CA Halan Guedi has invited local artists to showcase their Asian culture-inspired work in art installations, which will be located in the I-Lounge at Porter College.

Porter CA and assistant planner Victoria Anderson said the event will be a “big festival”.

“It’s a celebration of history, tradition, culture,” Anderson said. “We’re here to educate, [but also to] just have fun!”

How will the group measure the success of the event?

“Success means that they are walking away with something that they didn’t know before and they learned it in a fun way,” Goto said. “The biggest thing that I am trying to push is appreciation for things that you don’t necessarily identify with.”

Porter Quad is a common place for people to smoke on campus. After the implementation of the tobacco ban, this will no longer be an option. Photo by Daniel Green.

Chancellor George Blumenthal reminded the campus community in an e-mail on March 25 tobacco will soon be banned from UC campuses. Come Jan. 1, 2014 the 8 percent of students who smoke on UC campuses and the 10 percent of UC employees who smoke will have to take their cigarettes, cigars and all other tobacco products off campus and off all UC properties.

“We cannot be on the forefront of healthcare if we cannot ask ourselves to eliminate, at least attempt to eliminate, these types of behaviors on our campuses and in our medical center,” said Steven Gest, medical director of Santa Cruz’s Occupational Medical Center and assistant clinical professor at UCSF.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, 1,129 college campuses are currently 100 percent smoke free and 766 of these have a 100 percent tobacco-free policy. This is a marked increase from the 290 college campuses that were 100 percent tobacco-free, according to the American Lung Association, as of November of 2012.

“It’s really a bit of a tidal wave,” said Saladin Sale, the UCSC director of Risk Services and co-chair of the campus committee to oversee the implementation of the policy.

System-wide, Kevin Confetti, the director of workers’ compensation for University of California Office of the President, is co-leading the tobacco-free policy implementation. Confetti said a 100 percent tobacco-free campus will be difficult to achieve.

“There are a lot of nooks and crannies on our campuses,” Confetti said. “Our campuses are very, very large.”

Because implementers of the policy cannot be everywhere all the time, the policy will be primarily enforced “educationally.”

“The first 12–24 months of the policy … we’re hoping that, instead of using a stick, for lack of the better word, that we can help educate folks and get them to appreciate and understand the benefits of tobacco cessation,” Confetti said.

UC plans to educate smokers and nonsmokers within the UC community by offering cessation education, referral and resources, over-the-counter and prescription tobacco cessation medications, telephone, individual or group counseling and on-site individual and group support as educational outlets.

Steven Gest said that smoking does not only affect smokers.

“There’s been a recent uptake in the incidence and severity of asthma, and we’ve been searching for the root cause of that,” Gest said. “Second hand smoke has been allocated as one of the partial root causes.”

UCSC students and faculty consistently complain about secondhand smoke, said Jean Marie Scott, associate vice chancellor of risk and safety services and co-chair of the committee that oversees the implementation of the tobacco ban with Saldin Sale.

“We have quite a few faculty and students, and staff members, in any given year who are very much impacted from secondhand smoke,” said Scott, who said she has worked at UCSC for over 20 years. “With the new policy going into effect, I’m hopeful that we’re better able to mitigate and have people cooperate in a way that they’re not impacting folks across the campus with secondhand smoke.”

This new policy will also reduce the amount of litter on UCSC’s campus, Scott said, after reporting the huge volumes of cigarette butts that currently litter UCSC’s campus.

It also invokes the question of whether smoking is a right or a privilege, said Steven Gest. He said it is a right in the privacy of an individual’s own environment, but it is also a privilege that should be restricted when it negatively influences and infringes upon others.

“The greater society is not willing to absorb the cost of your decision,” Gest said.

Sale hopes a dialogue regarding the ban will continue within UCSC communities.

“In the months to come, we’re going to be having a very open campus discussion around these issues,” Sale said. “Hopefully we can really model a very positive thing for the rest of California society.”

Photo by Salvador Ingram

Behind the stacks of vinyl at Streetlight Records rouse the gritty sounds of Pickwick.

This Seattle band performed a free show on March 7 for Santa Cruz record-store patrons before taking the stage at Don Quixote’s International Music Hall in Felton later that night. These were among the first stops on Pickwick’s premiere coast-to-coast tour, where they will promote their debut LP “Can’t Talk Medicine” — released March 12.

Pickwick is what happens when indie-rock melds with the reverberation of neo-soul, creating sounds that frontman and 2004 UC Santa Cruz alumnus Galen Disston call “dirty and garage-y.” Disston’s superbly soulful vocals intertwine with the instrumental musings of ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll. Their vintage sound is nuanced by the musical manipulations from vibraphonist and Grammy award-winning musical engineer Kory Kruckenberg. In addition to Disston and Kruckenberg, the six-man band is composed of drummer Alex Westcoat, keyboardist Cassady Lillstrom, bassist Garrett Parker and guitarist Michael Parker.

Since their formation in 2008, Pickwick has gained popularity in the Pacific Northwest, placing the band directly on the Seattle music scene map. Their current success is due largely in part to the receptiveness of the Seattle community.

“It just felt like there was something up in the Northwest,” Disston said. “Seattle takes chances on bands.”

The band’s 2011 compilation EP entitled “Myths” landed them among Seattle’s best current musicians. NPR also listed them among the “5 Artists You Should Have Known in 2011.” Since then, Pickwick has played festivals such as SXSW in Austin, Tex. and Washington’s Sasquatch! Festival.

Pickwick’s most recent endeavor is their nationwide tour to promote the band’s debut album, “Can’t Talk Medicine.” The multifaceted album, which was recorded in a living room, is seen as a collection of every band member’s different musical style and influence, Disston said.

With a nod to their eclectic approach, “Can’t Talk Medicine” showcases the band’s fine-tuned, sharp and soulful vibes and is accompanied by an almost natural grittiness. The dark, more heavy-hitting sounds featured on “Brother Roland” and “Halls of Columbia” are complemented by the refreshing “Letterbox” and end-track “Santa Rosa,” which showcase harmonies similar to infused indie-folk Americana. The album also includes notes of gospel organs and an eerily nostalgic interlude entitled “Myths.”

The debut album isn’t the only place where the band’s energy can be felt — these impassioned musicians also know how to awaken an audience and preach the sounds of Pickwick on stage. The Seattle band will have the opportunity to share their music with upcoming performances across the United States and Canada. The tour features stops ranging from San Francisco, Austin’s SXSW Festival and New York.

“We’re thrilled [to be going on tour],” Disston said. “This is the first time that we’re touring the East Coast.”

After their show at Don Quixote’s on Thursday, Disston — who was covered in sweat and expressed nothing but gratitude toward the audience — said he was happy with the way the show went. With the excitement of a North American tour ahead of the band, he said Pickwick’s kineticism will surely continue with every stop on the tour.

“We don’t really know any other way to do it,” Disston said. “We really can do this night after night.”

“Can’t Talk Medicine” was officially released on March 12. You can purchase it at your local independent record store or at pickwickmusic.com

Photo by Daniel Green

2005, 2007, 2009 and now 2013? After a weekend winning streak by UC Santa Cruz men’s tennis against three ranked teams in three days, coach Bryce Parmelly said his second season as UCSC coach will end like his last season as a UCSC senior in 2005 — with a national title.

In the weekend of March 9–11, the No. 11 Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) ranked Banana Slugs defeated No. 16 Pomona-Pitzer 8–1 on March 9, before beating No. 20 Texas-Tyler 6–3 on March 10 and No. 13 Whitman College 8–1 on March 11.

The long weekend of tough opponents and tougher vollies was scheduled by Parmelly to be an early test for his team, who will face two more ranked opponents, No. 3 Williams College and No. 14 Middlebury, before entering playoffs.

“We designed the weekend to simulate the experience these guys would face in a national championship situation,” Parmelly said. “We’ve been talking about this weekend for months.”

Men’s tennis player Erich Koenig said he enjoyed the spirit his team showed in hammering home three wins against ranked competition.

“We got better every day that we played,” Koenig said.

Photo by Daniel Green

Men’s tennis is currenty UCSC’s most successful program. The team has finished 13 times in NCAA’s top two positions since 1988. Their last title came in 2009 and followed championship victories in 2005 and 2007. The 2009 title bookended seniors Sam Rodgers, Erich Koenig, Andre Halabi and Erik Rosner freshman year with the team.

The final match of the weekend was Monday’s matchup with Whitman College and was considered to be a strong victory for the team. Players were heard whispering of how much they wanted to win the match, sentiments that were drowned out by Whitman fan’s loud support for their favorite players throughout the day.

Last season, Whitman men’s tennis recorded the team’s first victory over UCSC in their school’s history. While this year’s matchup ended in a lopsided 8–1 win for the Banana Slugs, a singles matchup between UCSC senior Sam Rodgers and Whitman junior Steven Roston continued long after their teammates finished playing.

Their singles matchup, originally one part of six matches taking place on UCSC’s East Field courts, featured numerous rallies of six or seven shots as the match time crept past two hours.

Around 30 fans and players descended on the immediate bleachers surrounding Rodgers and Roston as both players battled for an advantage in the first two sets of the match. Unlike their teammates’ matches that day, Rodgers and Roston had to play a tiebreaker.

As the match wore on, Rodgers’ conditioning was the difference that Roston could not catch up to. Without breaking a sweat in the 10-point tiebreaker, Rodgers finished the match by firing back several unanswered points to stun the watching Whitman players, who were hoping to take one more individual win before packing to go home.

Despite a long match time, many fans and players said the ending was anti-climactic. The match lasted two and half hours — a half hour more than any of Roston’s or Rodger’s teammates played.

Coach Parmelly was not surprised by Rodger’s dedication to playing tough in the two-and-half hour match.

“He’s the hardest working player on the team,” Parmelly said.

Roston said he disliked losing the singles matchup to Rodgers.

“I learned I had to go more with the ebbs and flows of the game if I want to win against a player like that,” Roston said, whose mother and sister accompanied him to the game. “I knew once everyone was done I had to perform at my highest level.”

Parmelly said Rodgers was a strong example of why he believes his team has the potential to win the championship this season.

“My guys are tough,” Parmelly said. “And they don’t like losing.”

The UC Santa Cruz men’s tennis team will play Middlebury, Williams College and DePauw on March 24, 25 and 26 in Claremont, Calif. Their next home match will be against Cal Lutheran on April 14.

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

You’ve probably heard about the Keystone XL pipeline by now, but you might be a little bit fuzzy on the details.

Maybe you’ve heard that environmentalists have repeatedly called on Pres. Obama to can the 1,700 mile-long pipeline, which would pump roughly 510,000 barrels of oil a day from the tar-sand oil fields in northwestern Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, due to concerns over oil leaks and the fact that the tar-sands are one of the dirtiest sources of petroleum on the planet.

But maybe you haven’t heard that the only reason Obama even has a say in the matter is because the project would cross the U.S./Canada border, or that the XL’s sister pipeline, which is even longer and runs from Alberta to Illinois, already exists and has had oil flowing through it for three years.

There are plenty of other details I could bore you with, but here’s the thing: the details don’t matter.

What does matter is what the pipeline — and Obama’s decision to either approve or deny it — represents.

Which brings me to another thing you may not have heard about. On Feb. 18, protests were held around the nation denouncing the Keystone XL, in cities from Chicago to San Francisco. Although it didn’t receive much in the way of national media attention, the main event was in Washington D.C., where 40,000 protesters rallied at what’s now being called the “largest ever climate protest in U.S. history.”

The way this protest was covered by conservative media outlets helps to highlight just why the decision over the pipeline is so important. With headlines like “Idiots Converge on Freezing D.C. to Protest Global Warming” and “Bitter Cold Greets Global Warming Protesters,” most of these articles played up the supposed irony inherent in protesting global warming during cold weather.

And they’re far from the only ones using day-to-day weather patterns as the basis of their belief, or lack thereof, in global warming.

A study released earlier this month found American’s attitudes towards global warming change with the weather — with more people identifying as believers and more media outlets publishing stories on global warming in months with very hot or cold weather, and less in gentler months.

But this just helps to illustrate a key fact about climate change and one major reason why it’s so hard to make believers out of skeptics: “Climate change is not a breaking story,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist and the study’s author.

In fact, global temperatures haven’t increased at all in the last 10 years, a fact that has led many skeptics of global warming to claim that there’s nothing to worry about.

But in doing so they completely miss the point: Climate change and global warming are only understandable in the context of the long term.

They take place over decades and their effects are an intricate and interlocking series of events that at times can seem outright contradictory — like the Midwest experiencing one of the most severe droughts on record followed immediately by one of the most extreme snowstorms on record, as is happening right now.

Plus, if you go back a hundred years there has in fact been a clear and relatively steady rise in global temperature. It’s only when you zoom in and look at it in terms of days, months or handfuls of years that the picture seems haphazard or open to interpretation.

And this is exactly why Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL is so important. If he denies the pipeline it will send the most tangible and unequivocal message to date that the United States is taking climate change seriously and not changing its mind on a day-to-day basis.

It will send the message that, in the long-term, even projects as large and expensive as this one are not worth sacrificing the well-being of our planet.

Obama has been talking a lot about climate change in the last few months. By moving from rhetoric to action he’ll be demonstrating to Americans and to the rest of the world that the thousands upon thousands of reports and statistics released thus far on global warming demand solutions as well as our undivided attention — both now and in the future.

And before I go any further, a quick word about some of those statistics.

While it’s true that global temperatures haven’t increased since 2000, it’s also true that last May marked “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10^99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe,” said Bill McKibben, a prominent climate change spokesman, journalist and environmentalist, in a Rolling Stone article.

It’s also true that last July was the hottest month ever recorded in the United States, that last summer saw the lowest level of ice ever recorded in the Arctic and that superstorm Sandy was the largest hurricane ever recorded to form over the Atlantic.

Which is why it’s besides the point that it still got cold this winter, or that global temperatures haven’t risen in 10 years, or that we’ll most likely have some pretty mild months in between the extreme ones.

The point is climate change is happening, humans are causing it and unless we can learn to engage with it on a long-term basis and factor it into our short-term decisions, by the time we’re ready to act it will be too late.

The specifics of the Keystone XL Pipeline don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but the message Obama’s decision will send absolutely does.

By saying no, Obama will be taking the all-important first step towards putting the big picture into perspective and finally acknowledging that climate change trumps any narrow, short-term understanding of what’s best for ourselves, our nation and our planet.

UC Santa Cruz Students Nick Chase (left) and Steven Esser built a half pipe in their front yard, giving themselves an off-campus place to skate. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Is skateboarding a dangerous sport for thrill-seeking athletes or a mode of transportation for the UC Santa Cruz student? The UCSC community has mixed feelings about skateboarding on campus, even within UCSC’s skateboarding community itself.

UCSC skateboarders mostly say dangers are inherent in skateboarding UCSC’s campus because of its hazardous traffic and steep hills. Some however ignore that danger, despite a campus wide ban, while others seek different outlets in Santa Cruz for their sport.

Skateboarding UCSC students often ride longboards on campus — skateboards meant to ride hills and paths, not half-pipes. These boards are often used for transportation between classes.

“UCSC is a dangerous campus to skate on for sure, especially for new skaters, who are easy to spot and whom I see everywhere, but I think skating is such a convenient mode of transportation it shouldn’t be discouraged or prohibited,” said first-year Ph.D candidate Dave Fryxell.

UCSC Chief of Police Nader Oweis said skateboarding was banned on campus because of its potential for harm.

“People were skateboarding and they were breaking benches and causing other types of vandalism,” Oweis said. “Or they were falling and they were breaking their necks and getting very badly injured.”

However, Oweis said he is open to discussing changes to the skateboard ban to ensure safety for UCSC’s skaters.

“I think the times have kind of changed,” Oweis said. “I think skateboarding is now not just used to do tricks. Skateboarding is now being used as a transportation mode. There could be a potential for a discussion.”

Oweis said the police department of UC Davis, which Mr. Oweis once worked for, has opened a conversation about making skating legal in certain areas on Davis’ campus. Oweis noted that geographical differences between the two campuses made Davis—a flatter campus—safer for skating.

Oweis also said several incidents of students injuring themselves skateboarding at UCSC have occurred since his 2011 hiring.

One student, who wished to remain anonymous because of the campus ban, said they had multiple run-ins with the police, the first of which resulted in a citation and fine which later was reduced to community service hours. Since then that student has taken precautions to avoid citations, including skateboarding at night with a group of fellow riders.

“Its harder for them to give everyone tickets if we travel in a group,” the student said.

Sometimes that student said their skateboarding group of friends may scatter into the forest at night to make a quick getaway from UCSC police. Other students have reported suffering injuries when making this type of escape from the police.

Second-year Nick Chase  is a skater who supports prohibiting skateboarding on UCSC campus, citing the reckless nature of inexperienced skaters.

“Some people just buy a longboard and [they think] ‘look there’s a hill’ and they don’t even learn how to skateboard and go down these hills at 30 miles an hour,” he said. Chase said he witnessed a skateboarding student accidentally collide with the back of a bus as it drove downhill from College Eight.

Skateboarders do not lack for options, should they choose to not skate on campus. Mike Fox Park, located on San Lorenzo Boulevard, has been a magnate for shortboard toting skateboarders since its 2007 opening.

Third-year skateboarder Christina “T” Miller said she was in favor of the type of skateboarding that occurs in places like Mike Fox Park.

“I definitely think that skateboard culture is really cool,” Miller said. “Like you can see someone working on a trick for a really long time and then finally when they get it down, everyone in the skatepark will see it and we all smack our boards down. But I think that not being allowed to skateboard on campus is a good idea because there’s too much traffic and too many pedestrians and the campus is too hilly.”

Miller said UCSC should embrace its skateboarding community by providing them a safe place to skate on campus so they don’t have to travel to far away parks or use the busy and dangerous UCSC surface streets.

“I do think that it’s not fair that we have a lot of facilities on campus for other sports and not skateboarding,” Miller said. “If they’re going to make skateboarding illegal on campus, they should at least put a really small skatepark somewhere.”

Sammy the Slug gives away a pizza to hungry fans and the Santa Cruz Warriors “UCSC Night”. Photo by Daniel Green.

With several different UC Santa Cruz clubs taking part in the Warriors’ timeout and halftime performances, last Friday’s Warriors blowout loss showcased the blooming relationship between campus and Santa Cruz’s newest team. Fans were treated to Acquire A Capella singing the national anthem, a musical chairs contests between UCSC’s NCAA basketball players, Sammy the Slug break dancing and a choreographed dance by the UCSC cheer squad. About 70 UCSC community members also took part in a pre-game party at Surf City Billiards.

“We wanted to recognize UCSC as an integral part of the community,” said Warriors public and community relations manager Matt de Nesnera.

Both regional programs manager Allison Garcia and UCSC athletic director Linda Spradley are attempting to foster a strong relationship between the Warriors and campus to capitalize on the buzz the team has created in their inaugural season. Garcia, who helped organize “UCSC Night” at the Santa Cruz Warriors, viewed the outing as a way to reach out to UCSC’s staff, students and alumni.

“Alumni, students and faculty are all a part of a larger community here,” Garcia said. “We all have to have this Banana Slug Pride. It’s something bigger than just our student experience.”

Garcia said UCSC is different from other campuses in the UC system as many of its alumni move away from Santa Cruz when they graduate. In the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay Area, Garcia noted the campus has some 10,000 alumni living and working in the region, roughly an eighth of the campus’ 88,000 alumni overall.

“If you compare Santa Cruz to Berkeley, they have 80 percent of its alumni staying in the region. We have less than 20 percent stay.” Garcia said. “We’re really trying to put on events like this to strengthen the connection of the alumni, students and faculty.”

Spradley said UCSC’s relationship with the Warriors can be beneficial for UCSC athletics in particular, but noted that time and budgetary constraints have kept her department from seeking out a greater relationship so far.

“We want to hold clinics with the team and to learn from them,” Spradley said. “They have tons of expertise in a variety of places that we could learn from. We will develop a relationship when we get a chance.”

The Santa Cruz Warriors’ working relationship with UCSC stems from last November when the team began practicing at College Eight’s West Field House gym as downtown’s Kaiser Permanente Arena awaited finishing. In turn, the Warriors have returned the favor by allowing UCSC basketball a chance to practice in the approximately 2,400 seat arena they call home.

“UCSC has always stepped up whenever we needed help,” said Warriors public and community relations manager Matt de Nesnera.

Spradley hopes to one day see a UCSC basketball game in the arena.

Current UCSC cheerleading captain Allison Grove said that UCSC athletics and the university could also benefit from using the arena.

“I feel that our athletes that use the West Field House do not get the actual experience of being a collegiate athlete when they play at home because it only allows for minimal fans and spectators to come out to the games,” Grove said. “I think that the university can bond with the city of Santa Cruz more that way, actually.”

Many of the UCSC students, alumni and faculty, including Grove, were turned into fans as the night’s events wore on.

“Although that was my first Warriors game, I do plan to attend more games before their season ends,” Grove said.

Photo by Daniela Ruiz

History lies at the base of UC Santa Cruz in a crumbling, decaying form. Unusable since 2006, the Cowell Lime Works Hay Barn demonstrates what campus was like before the school was founded.

The barn, which was built on the UCSC campus about a century before the school began, had an important role in the manufacturing of lime and limestone products in California. The barn housed oxen that hauled these products to the wharf for shipment. After being purchased by Henry Cowell, the barn became part of his local business named Cowell Lime Works.

The barn is being preserved by the Friends of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District. This group is planning to renovate the barn and transform it into a modern building available for campus use.

According to the group’s website, the organization “works to restore and preserve the old lime kilns and historic buildings of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District.” The group’s president Frank Perry attributes the barn’s steady deterioration to years of weather damage. “It’s no longer in use because it’s in too bad of a condition and it’s not safe to go in,” Perry said. “After periods of storm damage, the barn became unsafe.”

A fight for the restoration of the barn has been going on for the past few years through many proposed project ideas.

“For one reason or another, [the ideas for restoration] just didn’t work out and finally about a year ago, there were some people who had a serious interest in saving the barn,” Perry said. “It’s possible now that it will be in fact fixed up and put to use by the campus. It’s just a matter of finding the funding and so that’s what a number of people are working on right now.”

Dean Fitch, who is in charge of physical environment planning at UCSC, said the barn’s feasibility study is in its final review stage. The planned reconstruction will maintain the original heavy timber frames while also meeting current building codes. The complete design and environmental analysis of the rehabilitated barn project still needs to be defined, which may take about a year.

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) became involved with the project about a year ago when the museum got in touch with the Friends of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District. The museum’s “Barn Raising” exhibition, which will be open until March 17, focuses on the future of the Cowell Lime Works Hay Barn.

“Since we are both an art and history museum, we’re all about investigating the history of Santa Cruz,” said the curator of “Barn Raising,” Marla Novo. “So we thought it would be great to turn [the barn’s restoration] into an exhibition.”

The exhibition consists of different pieces of art and historical artifacts that are related to the barn’s history, such as photography of the barn throughout its years, various belongings of workers who were involved on the barn’s site, timber framing tools and a hay fork trolley. The exhibition’s main attraction is an interactive model of the hay barn under construction, which can be taken apart and put back together by visitors.

“It’s really fun when we have volunteers actually pound out the pegs and put the hay barn together,” Novo said.

Novo said the exhibition is a chance for students to learn some history about their home away from home. “We thought it would be wonderful to show our community something like timber framing and have an exhibit that uses interactivity so people can come and actually find out a little bit about the Cowell Lime District up at UCSC,” Novo said.

Daniel Press, a UCSC professor of environmental studies, said he predicts the newly reconstructed barn will be used for numerous projects like storing fruits and vegetables for the on-campus Community Supported Agriculture program, as well as holding classroom workshops, office space and exhibits.

“My goal and hope is that people would be fighting for space in the barn,” he said. “It would be that busy.”

I love being in beautiful landscapes. Part of the reason why I decided to come to UC Santa Cruz was because of its natural beauty, so I thought it would be fitting to show my perception of my new home as a freshman.

I come from Los Angeles and one thing that reminds me of home is being at the beach. The beach is a calming place where you can relax and it was a really humbling experience to sit down and separate myself from my surroundings in order to focus on these landscapes. Coming from the concrete jungle of L.A., drawing the majestic landsapes of Santa Cruz was inspiring and enjoyable. Santa Cruz has an abundance of beauty and it’s nice to incorporate that in my artwork.

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

What do a recent spike in violent crime, used syringes and the homeless have in common? These three issues have spurred the Santa Cruz City Council to pass new public safety legislation, in the process igniting a debate over the way in which Santa Cruz ought to approach the topic. Street Outreach Supporters (SOS), a local syringe exchange, has become the focal point of conflicting viewpoints in the debate, as SOS comes under fire from the city council.

During a meeting on Feb. 12, the council voted unanimously in favor of measures intended to address crime, drugs and homelessness in Santa Cruz. Along with a decision to increase the budget of the Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD), allowing them to hire more police, the legislation also establishes a six-month-long citizen’s task force on public safety and will give $50,000 to the Parks and Recreation Department to be used in cleaning up parks and beaches marred by trash and criminal activity.

Mark Kruholz fell in love with computers at first, but his work in astrophysics garnered him an award from the American Astronomical Society. Photo courtesy of Tim Stephens.

“I was a nerd from a young age,” said UC Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics professor Mark Krumholz. “I wasn’t a kid who wanted to take my telescope outside and look up at the stars at night. I mean, it was cold!”

But the astrophysicist didn’t need to see the stars to know they were there. Krumholz’s research into star mass helped garner him an American Astronomical Society (AAS) award this year, but he calls it “a pat on the back.” The self-declared nerd has carved an unconventional path — and it echoes in his lectures.

“[Astronomers] are bullshitting you,” Krumholz said in a recent presentation. “Any star formation theorist who says [the cause of star mass is self-explanatory] is lying to you.” Having spent years searching for the actual cause of star mass, Krumholz’s conviction is justified.

Years ago, the programming marvels of stone-age computers gave a young Krumholz little need to venture outside. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Krumholz dove into physics and later, as a graduate student, into the issue of star formation at UC Berkeley.

Today, Krumholz still isn’t the kind of astronomer who hikes up to the University of California Observatories Lick Observatory and gazes at distant galaxies. Instead, his research is an ongoing conversation between the computer programs he writes and the simulations of reality that offsite supercomputers send back.

But the fusion between man and machine doesn’t stop at the laboratory door. Krumholtz has spent several years coordinating two vastly different institutions and has extracted a similar truth from both mergers.

It started casually. Early in his graduate career at UC Berkeley (UCB), Krumholz added himself to an email list for scholastic volunteer work. The first email he received described the Prison University Project at San Quentin state prison, a program that offers a fully-accredited associates degree to inmates.

His classes ranged from pre-arithmetic to calculus, but Krumholz said teaching inmates was not in total contrast to teaching at UCB.

“It’s not like there’s an armed guard with a shotgun standing at the back of the classroom,” Krumholz said.

The chance of an education at San Quentin inspired many inmates to transfer from other prisons — a move pulling them further apart from their families.

“That level of dedication is beyond the average of undergraduates I’ve encountered. And that shows up in the way they act in a classroom and in a class,” Krumholz said. “It’s different in that you’re teaching students who have a hell of a lot less confidence. You don’t show weakness in a prison … and raising your hand when you are not sure of the answer seems like weakness.”

After accepting a faculty position at UCSC, Krumholz joined the UCSC Project for Inmate Education, a small group of volunteers currently providing free classes at the Santa Cruz County Jail. Krumholz said the shorter detention periods for jail inmates translates to less support for education programming than at San Quentin. He said the experience has been difficult.

“If I want to teach a quarter-long class that’s supposed to last 10 or 15 weeks — well, there aren’t a lot of people who are going to be there for 10 or 15 weeks,” Krumholz said. “To do it successfully in a jail would require a higher level of institutional commitment.”

But after getting inmates engaged in math, Krumholz said,  teaching UCSC students has been easier.

“You have to be willing to look like a bit of a fool,” Krumholz said. “Nothing gets students engaged like the professor making an idiot of him or herself.”

To the contrary, Krumholz feels more pride than embarrassment when he exposes his discoveries about star mass to his students — because he has found a possible solution.

“One of my big insights that I’m proud of is understanding why [different stars are different sizes],” Krumholz said. “Stars, in a sense , determine their own mass — through [a] feedback process of young stars irradiating their environment.”

So while the recent award from the AAS will help fund Krumholz’s inmate education and astrological research, Krumholz said he hopes the recognition will inspire an universal commitment for the sciences in the Golden State.

“California has benefited enormously from being a center of science and technology,” Krumholz said. “And cutting your investment in that is the sort of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking at which the state of California has unfortunately gotten very good.”

In an era of constant budget cuts, Krumholz  has found a worldly motive for continued funding of astronomy.

“I do hope that in some small way the award can contribute to the idea that UC Santa Cruz astronomy is worth preserving and protecting.”

A UC Santa Cruz student was shot in the back of the head at a bus stop near Natural Bridges State Beach while being mugged on Monday evening. Santa Cruz Police said the victim, a 21-year-old female, was waiting at the bus stop when the suspect approached her and demanded she give him the contents of her pockets. The suspect pointed a rifle at her and the victim reported being hit in the back of the head with it, at which point she ran away up Natural Bridges Drive and eventually flagged down a passing car.

Police said the woman was taken to Dominican Hospital, where doctors discovered that she had been shot in the head. The bullet was removed and she is expected to make a full recovery.

The suspect was described as a light-skinned male, 5-foot-7-inches tall with a gruff voice and a red bandana wrapped around his face, possibly driving a white PT Cruiser, according to the police report. Police combed the area with search dogs and thermal imaging equipment after the incident but were unable to find the suspect. Police said the search is ongoing and encourage anyone with information relating to the case to call their anonymous tip line, given below.

SCPD Anonymous Tip Line: 831-420-5995 

 Santa Cruz local shot and killed outside of the Red Room bar

Pauly Silva, a 32-year-old Santa Cruz local, was killed in a drive-by shooting near the Red Room bar in downtown Santa Cruz just after midnight on Saturday. Silva, a martial arts instructor and plumber, was standing outside the bar when several shots were fired at him from a passing car, striking and killing him, Santa Cruz Police said.

Police identified a possible suspect vehicle as a gray or green ‘90s model Mercedes. Two suspects driving a matching car were arrested in Watsonville later that night, and a third suspect was arrested Sunday morning. Police said additional details regarding the possible connection between the arrested suspects and the Silva’s murder will be released at a later date.

There were several witnesses present during Silva’s murder, but police said many of them have refused to cooperate with the investigation so far. Police have threatened to arrest those witnesses under suspicion of shielding the suspects if they do not cooperate. Police said they believe the murder may have been gang related.

Police said that a clear understanding of the incident has not yet been reached and that their investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information relating to the case is encouraged to call the SCPD’s anonymous tip line.

Newton and Helen harrison’s new exhibit, currently on display at the Sesnon Gallery, explores global climate change through a variety of mediums.

The walls of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery are covered in maps. Some stretch from floor to ceiling, some bear scribbled notes and some hang between photographs and diagrams. These are the maps that make up “The Harrison Studio: On Mixing, Mapping and Territory.”

The work comes from Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, honorary professors-in-residence at UC Santa Cruz in the Digital Arts and New Media graduate program and pioneering artists in the ecological art movement — a term that refers to artistic work dealing with ecological issues. For more than 40 years, the Harrisons have explored solutions to support biodiversity and environmental consciousness through cutting-edge artistic practices.

“[The Harrisons] have encountered a lot of really influential artists we study today and they’re quietly living in Santa Cruz,” said gallery director and co-curator Shelby Graham. “We’re so lucky to have them here.”

The husband and wife team composes their art using maps to demonstrate their environmental concerns and question how the negative forces acting on the global climate have affected the planet.

“A map is an image that privileges one thing or another,” Newton said. “We will make a map that has subject matter we think is important such as river systems, mountains, forests or alternatively, things we disagree with.”

The Harrisons’ maps primarily focus on telling the stories of global warming, which they have dubbed a force majeure — a force with so much dimension that there can be no resistance.

“[The force majeure] is really a connection and combination of all the industrial processes and forces that work negatively together to contribute to global warming,” Helen said.

For the Harrisons, a project emerges when they notice a pattern. In the past, they have focused on issues such as urban renewal, agriculture and forestry, recognizing patterns in the environment that reflect larger global changes. By using maps, the Harrisons are able to present these changes in a way that audiences can grasp, as mapping and recognizing patterns are two key methods to building familiarity with places or concepts.

“Pattern recognition is almost the basis for survival,” Newton said. “Many things happen to you as you see a pattern change or distort.”

The artists might take out all the streets in a map to highlight the waterways, enlarge countries for effect or add elements to show the ecological forces acting on the planet. They can’t always articulate this goal themselves so they call on biologists, urban planners and historians, yet are wary to call their artistic process a collaboration.

“We need a lot of help,” Newton said. “Lots of people help us but so do books and so does the Internet. And also we help others. Collaboration is sort of a throw-away word for people helping each other to get from one place to another.”

The work itself is a marriage of various formal elements. Using maps, photographs and text, the artists reflect the complexity of these global issues and the multi-faceted efforts needed to overcome them. In particular, the written text accompanying these maps serves to enhance the exhibit’s storyline.

“Essentially the work is as narrative as it is visual,” Helen said. “In using poetic prose, the language has denotation but it also has connotation. It opens peoples’ imaginations.”

Particularly in the small space of the Sesnon Gallery, the text is essential to informing the audience and moving them between images and ideas presented throughout the work. The balance between text and image helps shape the story of the powerful environmental shift affecting the world.

“We try to strike a balance with a particular kind of poetic prose,” Newton said. “The value of [prose] is that it lets you condense information.”

Throughout the exhibition, the idea of paying attention continues to arise as a recurring theme. The writing on the walls of the Sesnon urges gallery-goers to “pay attention to the meaning of nature” and the first work that one encounters upon entering the gallery begs the question, “Who’s thinking about this eventuality?”

The world and its global climate are changing before our eyes. The Harrison Studio strives to recognize the patterns before it’s too late to stop this force majeure.

The Harrison Studio: On Mixing, Mapping and Territory will be on display through March 15, Tues.–Sat., 12–5 p.m., Wed. 12–8 p.m. The Earth as Metaphor eco-art lecture series takes place at the Porter Faculty Gallery Wednesday evenings from 4:30–6 p.m.

“This year, our theme for Random is ‘Synecdoche’ … used to represent the diversity in the dance community at UCSC,” said fourth-year and co-director of the dance show Chelsea Wells.

For the weekends of Feb. 15–17 and 21–24, Random’s annual dance performance returns for its twenty-first show at UCSC’s Second Stage Theater. This year, Random’s show “Synecdoche” will include a performance from Haluan, an on-campus hip-hop group, along with other pieces that explore jazz and contemporary dance.

Hip-hop dancers perform their routine, entitled “Swaggin’ With A Purpose” at the dress rehearsal for the Random With a Purpose dance show at UC Santa Cruz. Photos by Daniel Green.

The show is being directed by Wells and Adrienne Habiger, both of whom have been performing in the show since they were first-years at UCSC.

“That’s how we met and we’ve both been involved with this show for the past three years,” Wells said. “[We] decided that after choreographing and performing in the show in past years, we could take on the task of directing together.”

Wells said the UCSC dance program has evolved in the past four years. As of 2012, students are able to officially minor in dance.

“It’s been exciting to be involved with the dance community and see it develop so much,” Wells said. “The community’s really blossoming. We’re getting a lot of talented dancers and it’s an exciting time.”

Second-year human biology major Rachel Peterson decided she wanted a bigger role in Random’s production after dancing in the show her freshman year. Peterson, who is choreographing a piece this year, said taking part in the show helped her open up to the UCSC dance community as a whole.

“I love taking an idea and making it into something, and expressing that idea through dance,” Peterson said. “So I wanted to try it with a group of dancers and ‘Random’ was just the perfect opportunity to do that.”

For Peterson and her fellow dancers, Random is a space for them to develop ambitious performances. One student who’s had the opportunity to create an expansive dance is third-year Zoe Galle.

Galle is choreographing the piece “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” which is based off of the dance film “Pina.” After watching the film, Galle viewed public places, like the street or the sidewalk, as an opportunity for a stage.

“Every place in public began to look like this interesting space to engage with and play with through movement,” she said. “[I wanted to] explore this idea of public space and what that means … to play with this idea of space and how dancers move through space as a unit but also as individuals.”“Where The Sidewalk Ends” brings together a mix of ballet, contemporary and hip-hop dance. Galle said she wanted to examine people’s insecurities with movement through her choreography.

“I think it’s really important to create spaces where everyone can try to dance and not feel stupid about how they move, because everyone moves differently,” she said. “Dance is a celebration of our bodies and of life in general.”

Random opens Feb. 15–17 and 21–24 at 7 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets are $11 for general public and $10 for UCSC students and seniors. Discounts are available. UCSC undergrads will receive one free ticket with valid student ID. 

Few married couples commit to bringing their working aspirations home with them. But in the course of trying to change an academic discipline that reports an average 90 percent male student body nationwide, Charlie McDowell and Linda Werner have had their work cut out for them.

The two computer science professors have been married since 1985. They met several years prior at Werner’s going-away party.

“I asked him to dance,” Werner said. “We’ve been ‘dancing together’ ever since.”

Then, McDowell was unaware of Werner’s passion for advancing diversity within the field. It became a shared passion.

Now that he’s UC Santa Cruz’s Associate Dean of Engingeering, McDowell’s responsibilities range from approving computer science curriculum to conducting his own lectures and playing trombone with several different groups around the Central Coast.

But several times a year he convenes with specialists to conduct research, get involved and establish goals to increase women’s participation in the computer science community. McDowell serves with two other co-chairs of the National Center for Women Information Technology’s (NCWIT) Academic Alliance.

“[The Alliance’s] goal is to bring new women to a field that has historically reported a scarcity,” McDowell said.

To accomplish this end, NCWIT’s “Aspirations in Computing” award ceremony highlighted 25 high school female students from the Bay Area for scholastic achievement in computing this year. It was the fourth consecutive annual presentation of the award.

NCWIT’s K-12 Alliance also aims to increase young women’s involvement with technology. The program cultivates a heightened familiarity with programming before applicants reach the college level, a void that remains a stumbling block for many.

Werner is committed to advancing the same goals as her husband, a task she sees as closely related to public perception of the field.

“We need to change the attitudes of youth,” Werner said. “We need to help them see that computer science is as viable and rewarding a course of study as any traditional route.”

Werner works in conjunction with Education, Training and Research Associates (ETR), a local organization that collaborates with middle schools for that purpose. ETR uses a programming language called Alice, interactive software that superimposes objects such as furniture and snow to create visuals in lieu of lines of text.

Programming languages like Alice are designed to showcase the depth and range of computer science without the technical nuances generally required to access them. Werner recently spent time outside of the U.S. as well, promoting awareness of diversity with women of all ages.

“Groups with greater diversity solve complex problems better and faster than do homogenous groups,” Werner said. “Our work is to help youth become producers, not just consumers of technology.”

UCSC reports a marginally higher percentage of women within the computer science major than the national average. McDowell said based on the level of interest she’s seen recently among local youth, that number is headed to new heights.

“Our computer science major has typically had 12 percent women,” McDowell said. “This year we’re seeing upwards of 17 percent proposed in the freshmen class.”

For the man who wrote the university’s “Introduction to Programming” book, McDowell is in a position to gauge the influx more aptly than most.

“I don’t wish to draw the cause and effect,” McDowell said, “but we’re beginning to see results.”

Together, McDowell and Werner work to provide many hands-on opportunities for the advancement of women in computer science, from the classroom to seminars and conferences around the state. When asked the root of their motivation, the couple responded almost identically.

“I would love to look out at the students in my classrooms and see a more diverse population where everyone feels that they understand the material,” Werner said, “And they feel they belong in the class.”

Ke’ili Deal performs at the Kinetic Poetics Project.

The crowd looks and listens on as poets express their inner feelings through words.

Steven Domingo delivers a spoken-word performance. Photos by Daniela Ruiz

University prose is a craft riddled with guidelines, requirements and stylings of the “associated” variety. Those who master the rhetoric of academia do well to lecture, but poetry resides in materials that are often intangible to us.

Twice a month within the wooden frame of Cowell Fireside Lounge, a spoken scenery is rhythmically cultivated. Planted in the decade-old creative soil of UCSC’s Kinetic Poetics Project (KPP), the verse of the people springs from a grassroots organization — and it’s about as honest as the day is long.

“There are a lot of insecurities that we all have,” said Tariq El-gabalawy, a fourth-year linguistics major and one of KPP’s head organizers. “No one gets over them by bottling them up and burying them in the backyard. You have to talk about them and experience things with people. Poetry is an opportunity to do that.”

KPP is a student-run volunteer organization dedicated to sustaining the spoken word community by regularly holding poetry slams, workshops and an annual festival, all of which take place on campus. The slams feature local poets who often join the project’s volunteers in facilitating bi-monthly workshops for students to hone their lyrical word-smithing.

During the weekend of Feb. 4–6, KPP will be holding their 10th annual Kinetic Poetics Spoken Word Festival in the Porter/Kresge Dining Hall. Featured will be three Bay Area poet pros Sam Sax, Katelyn Lucas and UCSC alum David Perez, as well as performances from the Rainbow Theater and a student art gallery.

The two highest-scoring poets from every Kinetic Poetics slam qualify to compete in UCSC’s annual festival, thought to be the largest collegiate poetry festival in the nation.

“It’s so much different when you see it firsthand and you see someone acting out this piece of their life,” said Jacqueline Grohs, a second-year literature major and active poet in the KPP community. “[Poetry] is an alternate form of communication, a communal learning process. You’re not being lectured at — you feel like you’re a part of [someone’s] poem and a part of [someone’s] life.”

KPP slams, El-Gabalawy says, promote a sense of community across cultural boundaries by providing a creative means of self-expression, as well as a floor to discuss what would otherwise be taboo subjects in a university setting. From slam to slam, participants may wax poetic about misery and love one moment, only to strike the audience with unadulterated verses against gun violence and rape in the next — it is the volunteers, he said, that compose the rhythm.

“You have the hustle of the whole school week, and sometimes you just need to unwind and realize that life is more than these textbooks you’re looking at,” Grobs added. “When I come to this space, I feel like I can completely release everything that’s bothering me at the time, because I realize that life is so much bigger than me … it’s like tunnel vision — it’s overwhelming, but it’s beautiful.”

Next weekend’s festival will serve as the final competition this year to determine the top five KPP poets to advance on to the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), a national poetry competition involving upwards of 45 schools from across the nation. This year’s invitational will be held April 3–6 at Barnard College in New York, N.Y.

“[CUPSI] is a huge opportunity for students,” El-Gabalawy said. “There are so many big-name poets that came out of CUPSI and gained reputability … Santa Cruz has a reputation at CUPSI. They say we bring ‘the darkness’ because we typically talk about very serious issues that other teams don’t like to talk about.”

Jacqueline and Tariq are among KPP’s dedicated organizers that have made it possible for the organization to thrive for a decade as one of the most active slam communities in the nation — and the only one that put their CUPSI team together with a three-day festival.

“The competition is part of it, but mostly not why people come out here,” said Jaynik Bhukhan, fourth-year psychology and sociology double major and student poet with KPP. “The bigger picture would be to provide a space for people to be themselves, express themselves, verify and legitimize their experiences as people and provide alternative explanations to the dominant narrative.”

Apart from the slams every other Wednesday, KPP’s writing and performance-based workshops are an invaluable resource for a university organization. Because they are held either by organizers like Tariq or local poets with teaching experience, interested poets are welcome to plug in and speak out outside of classroom formalities.

“In a lot of ways, KPP is an outlet for people,” El-Gabalawy said. “It’s known on campus that you can come to this space and talk about whatever the fuck you want for three minutes, you know?”

The workshops are considered vital to the organization and the university at large, as they promote alternative dialogues to the dominant paradigms in academia and the American frame of mind.

“As much as university campuses like to rep themselves as forward-thinking or offering alternative perspectives, the UC is still very much part of the dominant culture,” El-Gabalawy said. “People feel excluded and silenced by the institution that they’re receiving their education from, and they use KPP as an outlet to express and learn about those things that they otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to.”

Adam Zawadzki poses next to in-progress restoration of the surrounding structure of Porter College’s “Muse.” Photo by Michael Mott

Standing 6 feet tall and 18 inches square, Porter College’s “Muse” is hard to miss. The bronze bell’s surrounding structure, made of concrete, is currently receiving repairs and a restoration.

College Five was created in 1969, but it was not until Nov. 1, 1981 that UC Santa Cruz’s fifth college officially became Porter College. It was on this dedication day that it was given the “Muse” — a bronze bell sculpted by Angelo Grova, an art major who graduated in 1974.

When the Porter College commencement ceremony was held in the Porter Quad, before the college outgrew the space and moved to the West Field to hold commencement in 2009, the college provost gave voice to the “Muse” by ringing the bell in the college courtyard. This sound was used to signal soon to be graduates to enter into the quad to receive their diploma.

Porter student Evan Engle said after seeing the “Muse” everyday for two years, he’s happy it’s receiving restorative work.

“[The restoration] is absolutely great,” he said. “This is the first thing you see when you move in to Porter with your parents and it’s really the cornerstone of the courtyard here.”

Before, the right top and back left corners were badly chipped. The concrete of two support posts was crumbling also, leaving internal rebar visible. The restorer Adam Zawadzki said all repairs should be finished by Jan. 10.

Illustration by Caetano Santos

Astronomers’ research can reach galactic proportions. A lifetime of such research may culminate in a medal that fits in the palm of the human hand.

The federal government will recognize UC Santa Cruz astronomer Sandra Faber’s achievements in the larger field of astronomy at a White House ceremony on Feb. 1, where President Barack Obama will award Faber the National Medal of Science.

“I don’t have much experience with the White House,” Faber said. “It’s all very grand. I expect to be very impressed and generate a whole bunch of memories that will last life long.”

According to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) website, the medal is awarded to those who are “deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to knowledge in the … sciences.”

“Dr. Faber was nominated by the committee and selected by the president because she meets the criteria for the medal,” said Mayra Montrose, an administrator in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) award program. “Her research and work with the community is exemplary and have helped move science forward in the United States.”

Faber’s numerous contributions to the field of astronomy merited national recognition, said Jason Prochaska, a UCSC astronomy professor and associate director of Lick Observatory.

“She’s played a role in just about every major discovery over the last 40 years,” Prochaska said. “It’s the depth as well as the breadth. [Her discoveries] range from understanding the dynamics of individual galaxies, supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, how populations of galaxies formed and evolved over the past 10 billion years and the large scale structures that they inhabit in the universe.”

Over the course of her career, Faber has focused on what she describes as the “lumpiness” of galaxies.

“The earliest universe was almost uniform,” Faber said. “And yet, today, we see that matter is divided into these lumps with practically nothing in between, with empty space. I’ve been involved in this aspect of the history of the universe: why did the universe get lumpy?”

Starting in 1992, Faber headed the team for the development of the Deep Extragalactic Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS), instruments attached to the Keck telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. These instruments allow researchers to detect the spectra of galaxies, without which a galaxy’s distance from Earth cannot be known.

The development of DEIMOS allowed Faber and her collaborators to conduct the first survey of large galaxies as they existed in the past.

UCSC has been highly conducive to her research, Faber said.

“The University of California has created a fantastic set of facilities and environments in which to do this kind of research,” Faber said. “At UCSC [there is] a great intellectual atmosphere, a very fertile think-tank where we talk about these topics.”

Faber’s work has also been promoted through grants provided by NSF.

“[Faber] has been very successful,” Montrose said. “That means, to me, that NSF chooses its grantees wisely. Eleven of the 12 Medal recipients have received funding from NSF.”

Federal agencies such as NSF exist to promote scientific progress through funding, Montrose said.

“The federal government science agencies are proud of funding basic and applied research that makes an impact on our nation’s economic and knowledge base and helps society,” Montrose said.

In terms of funding, the medal is a reflection upon both the scientist and those who funded the scientist’s research, Montrose said.

“Because the National Medal of Science is a lifetime achievement award, not a single achievement award like the Nobel Prize, it reflects the vision of the individuals and their funding organizations, whether government or private,” Montrose said. “[The award is for]the individuals because they had the genius to come up with novel ideas, and the funding organizations because they had the foresight to trust the individuals and their genius.”

Faber said this medal affects the larger scientific community in the United States because it motivates young students to pursue science. However, she said the award fails to palpably promote scientific progress.

“This award is valuable,” Faber said. “But in terms of actually providing tangible support, it’s a drop in the bucket. It doesn’t actually contribute to the research that needs to be done.”

President Barack Obama addresses federal support of scientific research in his Budget Message, available for viewing on the White House official website. Obama writes, “In this Budget, we are sustaining our level of investment in non-defense research and development (R&D) even as overall spending declines.”

According to the budget breakdown on the White House official website, the Department of Defence will be allotted $525.4 billion in 2013. In terms of astronomical research, $7.4 billion will be allotted to NSF and $17.7 billion to NASA in 2013.

This funding — a total of $25.1 billion — is fractional compared to the funding granted to the Department of Defence, among other departments.

“I think that the federal government and the state government really haven’t taken proper notice of what a vibrant research program contributes to the intellectual life of the nation or the economy,” Faber said.

Astronomy would contribute to both the nation and the economy in its applicability to physical conditions upon this planet, Faber said.

“Astronomy and cosmology, they’re the sciences that set the stage,” Faber said. “They give us the backdrop against which we do all of our planning as human beings.”

The physical laws that govern astronomy and cosmology act upon humanity, Faber said, and they may predict outcomes to issues facing the human race today, such as climate change.

“People who believe in miracles think that we can continue to pollute the environment, and God will save us,” Faber said. “I don’t believe that. It’s very fundamental — it’s subtle, but its extremely deep. We have to take responsibility for ourselves. We are subject to physical law, and there’s no escaping it.”

Illustrated by Christine Hipp

Entrepreneurs bridge the gap between innovation and the marketplace. A new emphasis on entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz highlights the importance of this connection.

Narinder Kapany, known as the father of fiber optics, recently donated $500,000 to the Jack Baskin School of Engineering (Jack Baskin) to establish an endowed chair of entrepreneurship.

“My association with bright UCSC students and visiting lectureship by established entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, patent attorneys, financial experts and marketing persons made the entire process very attractive to me,” Kapany said.

The creation of an endowed chair will increase the opportunities for UCSC students to learn entrepreneurial skills.

“[The chair] can use [the endowment] to cede research, or they can use it for travel, or they can use it to bring in visitors,” said Arthur Ramirez, the dean of engineering at Jack Baskin. “It’s money that’s fairly unrestricted by other programmatic needs that they can use to develop the program.”

The creation of the chair required not only the donation, but also the approval of the campus provost, Alison Galloway. This reflects the university’s support of programs that teach students how to manage technology and information, Ramirez said.

That the chair was established through the school of engineering is no coincidence. Ramirez said entrepreneurship skills are highly useful to engineers, who design much of the technology demanded by the modern marketplace.

“Entrepreneurship has become one of the most commonly used routes to bring technology into the marketplace,” Ramirez said, “but it requires a different set of skills. It overlaps with traditional management, but an entrepreneur is a different kind of manager than you would find in a big corporation. And so, just like regular management need to be taught, we thought entrepreneurship would be a good match for this campus.”

Although entrepreneurship is not restricted to the field of engineering, the donation was given to Jack Baskin because it has a history of encouraging entrepreneurship.

“We’ve had the plurality of entrepreneurship activities,” Ramirez said. “We started the center of entrepreneurship two years ago, and there are several faculty and students in engineering who have started companies. I wouldn’t say the majority, but I think there’s more entrepreneurship activity in engineering than any of the other divisions.”

In addition, the Technology and Information Management (TIM) program is part of the school of engineering. This program offers instructional courses on technology and information management, which are integral parts of entrepreneurship in the sciences.

“These days, [science and technology] are the quickest routes to commercialization,” said Brent Haddad, associate dean of engineering for technology management. “Some of the obvious connections to the private sector will come out of engineering, chemistry, biochemistry and so forth because they’ll be medical and electronics applications.”

Kapany typifies a scientist who used entrepreneurship to move technology that he developed into the marketplace. His innovation in fiber optics revolutionized communication technology in the 1970s, and continues to have a major impact on computer networking and telecommunication technologies today.

“His own life provides a prime example of that because he did some of the seminal, original research on fiber optics,” Haddad said. “And then he was able to move that into the private sector and really change electronics by introducing these amazing innovations that took hold and became important products used all over the world.”

During the 1970s, Kapany worked at UCSC as a research professor. While at UCSC, Kapany taught courses in entrepreneurship. This was ahead of his time, Ramirez said.

“[Kapany] is a pretty inventive guy,” Ramirez said. “He invented the idea of bending light, carrying light in a very pure fiber, but then he went on to create companies after that.”

UCSC started to focus on entrepreneurship research soon after its founding, Haddad said. Kapany’s presence at UCSC enhanced this focus.

“[Kapany] saw the importance of moving good ideas out of the laboratories and universities and into broader use,” Haddad said. “There are uncounted great ideas that emerge from universities that just don’t go anywhere outside of universities … Dr. Kapany realized this is an area where you could actually take productive steps to move those good ideas into broader use, and everybody would benefit if we did.”

Kapany is most closely aligned with engineering, Ramirez said, which influenced his decision to donate to the engineering school. Entrepreneurship, however, is not exclusive to the hard sciences.

“When we think about entrepreneurship, we’re thinking campus wide,” Haddad said. “Anyone can be an entrepreneur, it’s just moving a good idea from the good idea stage to a practical application that helps society. That could be a good idea about anything.”

Haddad supports the spread of entrepreneurship to different departments on campus. “There are other areas of innovation, such as helping development projects in developing countries,” Haddad said. “That’s happening as well — here on campus, and we want to encourage that kind of entrepreneurship.”

While the possibilities created by having an endowed entrepreneurship chair are broad, currently, there are no candidates for the position.

“They have the requirement of having a PhD,” Ramirez said, “but also having been a successful entrepreneur and are at the stage in their life where they want to give back as opposed to starting another company.”

The search for someone who meets these requirement will not be taken lightly, Haddad said.

“It usually takes a long time to establish a new faculty member because the commitment is so long-term that you just want to take your time and do a really thorough job,” Haddad said. “It’s like you’re hiring a family member, you want to get it right.”

Photo courtesy of Irene O’Connell.

Often great art comes from outrage — at least it does for Irene O’Connell, a fourth-year art and Latin American and Latino studies major at Cowell college.

O’Connell was a main organizer for a project to repaint the Upper Campus water tanks along with Brandon Hayward, a creative writing and poetry major at Kresge, and other UCSC students. The repainted tanks show a series of murals designed by O’Connell that criticize the university’s proposed Long Range Development Plan (LRDP).

According to the website, voteondesalsc.org, the plan would construct three million square feet of new buildings, including two new colleges, on 240 acres of what is currently a natural reserve for the campus.

O’Connell is particularly worried that the plan, which intends to accommodate up to 19,500 students by 2020, will jeopardize UCSC’s commitment to promoting sustainable development of several vital natural resources.

“When you think about bringing in all those students, you have to think about water and energy,” O’Connell said. “We’re in a water crisis.”

The repainting project was inspired by the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) future hearing on Dec. 5, where a decision will most likely be reached on whether or not the city’s water services should be extended into UCSC’s Upper Campus for its proposed expansion under the LRDP.

O’Connell wanted to have the repainting completed before the LAFCO hearing on Dec. 5 to call attention to the future of Upper Campus because if the LAFCO approves this water service extension, construction will start.

Photo courtesy of Irene O’Connell.

“I had been thinking a lot about some of the incongruencies in official campus language and action, and I wanted to make sure people were at least talking about it,” O’Connell said.

After the LAFCO hearing on Dec. 5, the group of artists plans to modify the mural in order to include their opinions on the outcome of the decision.

The current mural art responds to several themes: “desalination, respect for nature, and the UC’s commitment to ‘sustainability,’” O’Connell said.

O’Connell sees her role in the repainting not just as an artist, but also as an activist who wants to spark new discussion and debate.

“I found this as an opportunity to realize visual art as a vehicle for raising awareness around an important issue that affects everyone,” O’Connell said.

Photo courtesy of Navdeep Kaur

Both Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike came together to heal and reflect at a panel discussion that took place at the Cowell Conference Room on Nov. 15.

The conference, organized by the UCSC Sikh Students Association (SSA), was held in response to the Oak Creek, Wis. shootings last August in which an armed man entered a Sikh temple and killed six worshippers at point blank.

“When a big thing like this happens, regardless of to whom it happens, there’s a reason to reflect on what it means,” said William Ladusaw, dean of humanities, “or what it should cause us to think about.”

The SSA organized the conference with Nirvikar Singh, chair of the Sikh and Punjabi Studies Program at UC Santa Cruz, during the months preceding Nov. 15. Holding the conference later in the quarter worked best for the SSA’s schedule, as well as for the purposes of reflection.

“It gave people time to think about the incident and bring forth ideas and concerns,” said Navdeep Kaur, a student member of the SSA.

According to Mark Juergensmeyer, author of the Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, Sikhs are a monotheistic religious group who follow the teachings of Guru Nanak Dev. Sikhism originated during the fifteenth-century in Punjab, the region between India and Pakistan. Since then, Sikhs have had a long history of peaceful worship — their religious philosophy prohibits the invoking of violence in all situations except that of self-defense.

The four panelists at the event included Seema Kaur Sidhu, UCSC alumna Amrit Kaur Sidhu, Nirvikar Singh and Nathaniel Deutsch, co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCSC.

Seema Kaur Sidhu said this violent act affected the entire Sikh community.

“The shooting that occurred in Oak Creek, Wis. was a tragedy that not only affected the Sikhs in Wisconsin, but whose impact reverberated throughout the U.S. and affected every Sikh household,” Kaur Sidhu said.

While the conference gave gatherers a chance to reflect on the tragedy itself, it also raised questions about larger issues of diversity and tolerance in the United States.

“We’re in some sense at the beginning of a period where the diversity of our globe is being reflected in American society,” Singh said. “And we have to figure out how to have a creative response rather than a destructive response.”

Seema Kaur Sidhu proposed pluralism as an alternative to violence. The panelists defined pluralism as the social practice of coexisting. In an ideally pluralist society, diversity not only exists, but diverse groups actively accept and encourage one another’s differences.

“This tragedy is not just something that exemplifies the growing resentment felt by [some] white Americans toward immigrants,” Seema Kaur Sidhu said, “but also exemplifies the inherent lack of pluralism in American society today.”

Amrit Kaur Sidhu said that pluralism requires active communication.

“This active dialogue entails a relationship that requires both sides to speak and listen,” Amrit Kaur Sidhu said. “They must be critical of one another and of themselves. In engaging in this process, society will be more open to realizing the commonalities that we all share and the true differences that we keep.”

The UC system labels itself as “diverse” and “tolerant,” Amrit Kaur Sidhu said it fails to truly engage in pluralism.

“In other words,” Amrit Kaur Sidhu said, “you are putting a bumper sticker with messages of diversity and coexistence onto the surface of your institution of learning and calling it pluralism.”

The panelists’ critiques were paired with prospective solutions. Singh and Seema Kaur Sidhu both said educating American youth from a young age about cultural differences — fostering mutual understanding between diverse groups — is the ideal route. However, Americans aren’t there yet, Seema Kaur Sidhu said.

“We, as members of the American society — members of an active American society — need to wake up and take charge,” Seema Kaur Sidhu said. “As young scholars, educators [and] advocates, not only are we letting our voices be unheard but we’re engaging in passive behaviors that will result in more innocent citizens being killed.”

Discussions such as the conference are steps in this direction, Deutsch said.

“[We are] hoping that moving forwards, the forces of good — gatherings like this — can make a positive difference,” Deutsch said.

Japneet Kaur, a third-year business management and economics major from Merrill College, is another member of the Sikh Student’s Association who helped organize the conference. Kaur was pleased with the turnout at the conference.

“It was really great to see that so many people showed up here who aren’t necessarily Sikh or might not even know anything about Sikhs,” Kaur said. “I think that kind of shows that we’re taking a step in the right direction.”

While the discussion was broad, grief in the wake of tragedy had a strong presence throughout the conference.

“We cannot afford another Oak Creek tragedy,” Seema Kaur Sidhu said. “We must heal. This is a sore wound that we have in our society and we have to heal from inside out.”

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 Christine Hipp

Election Day will be upon us a mere five days from today. With that fact in mind, City on a Hill Press set out to take the campus’ pulse on the election and the issues surrounding it via an informal and unscientific survey of students, faculty and campus employees. While our sample size was small compared to the campus as a whole and may not fully represent the entire spectrum of diverse opinions held here at UC Santa Cruz, it is nevertheless food for thought as the coming election quickly approaches.

The opinions expressed below are solely those of the individual respondents and do not necessarily represent the beliefs of the office or organization with which they are affiliated.

What issue is most important to you in this election?

“There are many issues of concern, but if pressed to choose one, I would say the economy. Too many people are out of work and are subsequently losing their homes, which is unacceptable for a nation of such

incredible wealth.”

– Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, Derek Conrad Murray

“Immigration, because I am an immigrant and a student. Immigration and education, mainly, because of what I see from my position as a student and a foreigner.”

– Tona Thiu, third-year astrophysics major

Which presidential candidate do you support and why?

“I don’t support either of them. Although I tend to side with Obama on social policies, neither are interested in uprooting the systemic injustice that I think is the real crux of America’s problems.”

– Jason Towry, fourth-year anthropology major

“Barack Obama. I believe he is a very thoughtful, brilliant man navigating a seriously damaged ship of state more successfully than he gets credit for. His efforts had the effect of keeping us from falling into a true depression, he has re-invigorated our damaged reputation in the world, and he has made changes in national policy despite dealing with the most polarized legislative process since Reconstruction.”

– Lisa Akeson, Director of Real Estate Office at UCSC

What do you think will be the most difficult issue faced by the next president?

“I think one of the most important issues is one neither of them seems to really want to face, and that’s climate change.”

– Anne Hayes, Sciences Development Office

“U.S. imperialism and the environmental crisis.”

– Emma Perez, fifth-year anthropology major

In your opinion, how does this 

election differ from others?

“I see it as different on a personal level. In 2000 when the last president was elected I was single, younger, and relatively new to my chosen career. I had less to lose. Now in 2012, I have a four-year-old and four-month-old, and I am thinking more and more about their future. I really believe that some of the cornerstone principles and programs that have made this country great are in jeopardy. I believe action needs to happen now in order to preserve and improve our country for future generations.”

– Wade Garza, Unit Manager, UC Santa Cruz Dining at Crown/Merrill Dining Commons

“This election … there are higher stakes out there, so I am feeling the energy and the sense of urgency but on a bigger scale than in 2008. Voting in America wasn’t always just going to a [polling place] and casting your vote. Many men and women, of many different hues, religions, etc., paid their lives for this act, which some take for granted … So wherever you land as to where your support lies … just let your voice be heard and vote on Nov. 6, 2012.”

– Marla Wyche-Hall, director of the African American Resource & Cultural Center

What direction would you like to see the U.S. moving toward over the next four years?

“I’d like to see us move toward a situation where we look back and we say ‘remember when most of the front page articles on prime news outlets were written by white males? Remember when you had to be afraid to admit your sexuality in public? Remember that time in the 2000s when we had that terrible recession? Aren’t we glad that we’ve settled down and we’ve learned better how to fit into a global economy and not to try and be isolationist?’ That’s what I would like.”

– Tracy Larrabee, professor of computer engineering

Additional video supplement to this story can be found at sctv28.com this week.

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

After two hours of training, the gloves come on. Tired students circle up for full contact fights. The room fills with excitement and tension as fighters test their knowledge for two long minutes.

The Thai Self-Defense class considers sparring as a gift for a long day of training . It’s the kind of gift they measure in bumps and bruises.

“We have constant supervision for sparring,” said club member Marlo Custodio. “We operate under the saying that ‘iron creates iron, steel creates steel.’”

The class is UC Santa Cruz’s newest martial arts club of the 11 different martial arts clubs registered with OPERS. The club practices a form of southeast Asian kickboxing called muay Thai, which has been popularized stateside through Mixed Martial Arts fights.

Club founder George Chen pointed out the practicality of the martial art beyond competitive use.

“Muay Thai is the most realistic martial art,” Chen said. “It’s a good style if you’re ever confronted on the streets or if you want to compete. It can be applied in any situation.”

Chen considers the Thai Self-Defense class to be an alternative to gyms that charge monthly fees in the area. The club is free, with money being spent only on gloves, shin and mouth guards for sparring.

Muay Thai differs from other martial arts because fighters adopt a more square stance and usually keep moving forward into their opponent’s attack, as opposed to moving around it. Club signer Travis Trinh believes that muay Thai is a more psychologically intense form of fighting.

“It’s more an in-your-face style,” Trinh said. “Once you get into your opponent’s head, that’s how you know you’ve won the fight.”

Fighters are allowed to clinch their opponents and use their knees and elbows, moves banned by other kickboxing disciplines internationally for being too rough.

For Chen, Custodio and Trinh, muay Thai is a passion each developed while in college. Chen found his passion for the martial art through his older brother, while Trinh and Custodio both fell into the sport unexpectedly.

Trinh found muay Thai through seeing someone practice the martial art on the East Field. Trinh discovered that he was a member of a prominent gym in San Francisco. Despite interest, Trinh had never practiced martial arts before.

“Everyone watched Jet Li or Jackie Chan movies when I was a kid,” Trinh said. “I wanted to properly learn how to fight.”

Custodio, a former high school wrestler, found the sport at what he considered to be the lowest period of his life. Custodio was battling anxiety from being in community college for four years, while his mother developed cancer. To compound his problems, Custodio was also broke.

“I told the sifu [a Cantonese term for master or teacher] that I’d wash the mats, I’d clean the toilets, anything to get the training,” Custodio said. “I began to train with them six days a week for nine months. It became my life.”

Custodio credits muay Thai for providing discipline in his life. Custodio became an amateur fighter, amassing a 1–0 competitive record before choosing to finish college at UCSC as a film and digital media major.

In his training, Custodio developed an interest in the spiritual side of muay Thai fighting. He spoke of muay Thai’s storied origins when a single sifu freed the nation of Siam from colonial Burmese rule in the 18th century.

Custodio believes that muay Thai offers empowerment through its learning.

“Muay Thai isn’t just fighting,” Custodio said. “In order to learn it you must practice poise, composure and self-discipline. Moderation is heavily emphasized.”

Club founder George Chen said the muay Thai community provides a strong experience for UCSC students.

“We look to build that sense of belonging,” said Chen. “There’s a real brotherhood with fighting.”

The Thai Self-Defense Class is every Wednesday and Friday from 5–7 p.m. in the OPERS Multipurpose Room. The club also practices from 12–2 p.m. on Sundays at the OPERS Martial Arts Room.

DURING HIS QUARTERLY MEETING with student media, Chancellor Blumenthal answered a variety of questions on topics ranging from Proposition 30 to the UC Davis pepper-spray incident. Photo by Sal Ingram

Chancellor Blumenthal spoke with student media organizations on Oct. 10, starting off by stressing the need for students to vote, especially with regard to Proposition 30. While the economic stability of UC Santa Cruz is uncertain, pending the outcome of Prop 30, Blumenthal said he and the administration have worked hard to identify and bring forth other funding opportunities to enhance the student experience at UCSC.

CHP: What are your goals for the 2012-13 school year?

Blumenthal: My goals for this academic year are severalfold. One, I’m hoping that we can do what we can to stabilize the funding of UC Santa Cruz. This is the biggest headache that we have right now, in terms of moving forward. Voters of California will decide what’s happening with Proposition 30 and I just want to remind you of how important that is. Proposition 30, if it does not pass, would cause another $325 million cut to the permanent budget of the UC. We at Santa Cruz would get our fair share of [the] cut, which is significant. To give you an idea of that order of magnitude, that amount of money represents the total state budget funds to UCSC and would fund the school of engineering plus the library. Funding is going to be a big issue for us this year. We’re trying to raise more outside money, and I have been devoting more of my time to private fundraising. One of my biggest goals is the student experience at UCSC. That would include money to fund research opportunities by students, extra curricular activities for students as well as student scholarships. Fundraising is a big issue and is a major goal for the campus. Another goal we have is to work on the retention of students, to make sure students can graduate in four years, to get the classes that they need to graduate in four years, and to do what we can to nurture our new programs, such as the new graduate programs, like feminist studies, American Latino studies, as well as what I hope will be a formal proposal soon for critical race and ethnic studies.

CHP: Looking at the budget and also Prop 30, what does the outlook look like in say, the next five years or so? Are we looking at more cuts in funding, slashing the budget further, or are we moving towards a more sustainable solution?

Blumenthal: I wish I knew the answer to that question. If you had asked me that five years ago I’m not sure I would have been right — in fact I’m sure I wouldn’t have been right. It’s hard to predict the future. But we can do a couple things. First, we can look at the past and see what has happened. I remind you of the [state’s] cutting of funding for public higher education in California, and that’s not just UC, not just CSU, but all the way [kindergarten] to community colleges. At the UC since 1990, the budget of the UC per student has dropped to 45 percent of what it used to be. So for every dollar that the state shipped to the UC to educate a student in 1990, the state is now shipping us 45 cents. That has led to a significant increase in student tuition. The state of California is going to have to decide what the state’s priorities are. The cuts to higher education have been serious, they’ve been damaging, and any of you as students already know that it’s harder to get in classes, the classes are more crowded, the homework assignments you get are maybe a little bit different, there are fewer TAs, et cetera. There’s already been a significant effect on your educational experience. This can’t continue, we can’t keep cutting back without making enormous changes. The state will have to decide how we’re going to go forward, whether we’re going to have these cuts every year, or whether or not there’s going to be a real commitment to devote a significant amount of resources to education. There has been discussion with the governor, the governor’s office and the legislature about finding a stable funding model for higher education. One proposal that’s been out there is a guarantee for a 5 percent increase in state funding per year over the next several years. It won’t last forever necessarily, but it will at least reverse a very unfortunate trend, and I strongly support that. On the other hand, I’m both an optimist and a cynic. I’m an optimist because I always do believe we should work for a better future, but I’m a cynic because until I see something in writing or I see a real commitment, dealing with Sacramento can be very frustrating, and I’m not sure I’ll believe until I have actually signed off on it.

CHP: Could you talk about the campus’ status as a Hispanic serving institution? What led to it, what steps did we take, and what’s the next project we take on?

Blumenthal: Based on federal law, to be a hispanic serving institution, there are several criteria, the most important of which is that the campus in question has to have 25 percent of its student population be of hispanic origin. We knew we were approaching that threshold but this fall we definitely shot past that projection. We are in the process of submitting the necessary documentation to get that status officially designated to us. I think I can safely say that we clearly do qualify and will continue to qualify for that status. What happens when it actually happens? We do get some financial benefit from the federal government, which qualifies us for certain kinds of grants for other things that make it a financial benefit to the campus. That’s one of the reasons we’re interested in doing it. I think that we’re the third UC campus to be so designated, behind Riverside and Merced. The real goal for me, in terms of UCSC, is to ultimately reflect the population of California. That’s where we need to be aiming as a long term goal for the campus. I think we’ve come a remarkable way toward that goal in a remarkably short amount of time. As you look around you see a more diverse population of students. But we’re not there yet.

CHP: In light of the UC Davis pepper-spray settlement, can you speak about protests, and how you think UCSC is handling them, or will handle them? Are there things on the system-wide level that the UC should be doing to more effectively handle protests?

Blumenthal: It was horrible. But what are some of the potentially good outcomes of the UC Davis incident? One was a much more serious look at how protests happen on campus, how the police responds to those protests, how the administration responds to those protests, what coordinations need to happen throughout the UC system, et cetera. I think that there was a helpful discussion that led ultimately to a most useful report, the Robinson-Edley report, which was just issued. The report will be going on to review now, by the UC and all its campuses. The report has issued a bunch of recommendations, which will now be extensively commented on by all constituencies including the academic senate, the administration and the students. Everyone gets a chance to comment on the report. Some of those recommendations were campus specific. I believe that if you actually look at our current practices at UCSC, you’ll find that we actually do most of the things that are recommended. I think we’ve come a long way, we’ve learned a lot over the years about student demonstrations. It doesn’t mean we’re perfect — there’s always an opportunity for something to go wrong. Even if we’re really, really good 99 times out of 100, I still worry about that one time because something can go wrong. Nevertheless, having said that, I think that the campus is largely in accord with the recommendations in the report. I certainly don’t think that we are immune from what happened at Berkeley or at Davis. Those events have implications for us as well, and we need to recognize that. I think that we have an interest as a campus for the entire UC system to respond appropriately. I think it can only help going forward.

Other questions not included in the print version of this article:

Burns: At some of the meetings in the past, Chancellor, you’ve talked about re-benching, and I was wondering if you could provide some background from last year and maybe an update.

Blumenthal: This has been a long story for me personally, when I became chancellor six years ago, I started looking into our budget and the fraction of the state budget that actually comes to UC Santa Cruz as opposed to other campuses and I was disturbed by what I saw. To my great surprise, the campus only got back a fraction of student tuition. The rest of it was shipped off to other campuses. So I kind of made that one of my causes. I’m pleased to report that as of a year and a half ago we finally got the policy changed so that when you pay the tuition at least it comes back here. Another issue that has been more difficult is the number of dollars sent off to the campuses by UCOP per student varies widely among the campuses. Some campuses got a lot more money per student than did other campuses, and guess where we were? We were near the bottom of that list. So I pushed very hard for the system to develop something, which is now called re-benching. The way that the UC worked for decades in terms of budgeting was if the state sent more money over to the university, say 10 percent more money, the university would give the campuses 10 percent more money, and if the state 5 percent out of the UC budget, then they would cut 5 percent out of each of the campuses budget. But what that did is that it perpetuated whatever decision was made 20 or 25 years ago that determined the campus budgets, without re-examining the underlying assumptions behind the budgets. The idea of re-benching was to start at zero and ask is there a principled way the UC should take the pittance, oh I’m sorry, the amount of money we’re given from the state and distribute it among the various campuses. Finally, I convinced the [UC] president that we needed to do re-benching. He set up a committee on re-benching last year. I served on that committee, as did the chair of our senate, Susan Gilman. The committee finished the report, issued it, and is now still being reviewed by various entities within the UC system. This year’s budget, assuming Prop 30 passes, will include some additional money for the campus based on re-benching. Re-benching will probably be phased in over a six year period. Of course I would like it immediately, but realistically, that isn’t going to happen. But at least we will get to a point where we will be getting a fair share of the UC total state budget. I think that re-benching is a success story and we haven’t reaped huge benefits from it yet, but I think over the next few years we will.

For filmmaker Daniel Eisenberg, the label “avant-garde” means very little. A purveyor of essay films on human history since 1976 and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Eisenberg does not subscribe to a single contemporary genre. His work, loosely referred to as “film meditations” on history, poses a series of inquiries into the shifting interests of the viewer, which try to examine the historical subject’s movement from expression to understanding.

On Oct. 22, Eisenberg will make a stop at UC Santa Cruz as he tours the West Coast for the screenings of his latest documentary, “The Unstable Object,” which will be the first installation of a three-part series. The film was screened last spring at UCSC as part of the “Moving Parts” film series, a collection of documentaries exploring themes of global capitalism, the movement of commodities and people across national and geographic borders.

“A lot of us [in the film department] have known about his work because he makes these amazing documentaries based in research and historical analysis …  it’s very thoughtful and beautifully made,” said Irene Gustafson, associate professor of film and digital media at UCSC. “When it came time for us to choose visiting artists, [Eisenberg] was an obvious choice.”

In his presentation, titled “The Uses of Subjectivity,” Eisenberg will be speaking about his film work excavations of recent history. Eisenberg will demonstrate how past events accrue new meanings and power with new forms of expression, through clips from his formal cinematic timepieces.

The evening will cover his film repertoire, especially in dialogue with “The Unstable Object,” an interrogative portrait of three factories with radically different models of labor. The film paints each scene with an emphasis on the subjects’ senses.

Eisenberg demonstrates healthy versus unhealthy labor, projecting both the archival sum of artifacts as an intermediary for the transmission of sensation, and the resulting radical shift in “the nature of making.”

Eisenberg stressed the importance of keeping the work open and unlimited to a single point of view, decidedly leaving it to the viewer to choose where to invest themselves within that context.

The multiple dislocations in contemporary working life are depicted in 20-minute portraits without narration, or intrinsic meaning. The proof, for Eisenberg, is in the paint.

“These are not narratives, they’re fragments, formal experiments where the viewer is positioned relative to the work itself,” Eisenberg said. “Truth is always contextual in media — there’s a world outside the frame … my duty is simply trying to understand the subject and interrogate the image.”

Eisenberg sees the urgency of the moment as a medium through which young filmmakers have the freedom to reproduce stasis, sounds and imagery.

“There is an enormous amount [in film] to invent, and you have the freedom to form and dispense ideas on a micro- and macro- level,” Eisenberg said. “I take risks in my work, and one of the most important things I communicate to my students is to invest themselves in their work completely. Failure is often your best friend … if failure isn’t possible, then risk isn’t possible.”

Daniel Eisenberg will give his presentation on Oct. 22 at 7:00 p.m. in Communications 150 (Studio C)

Chancellor Blumenthal gives his “State of the Campus” address.

Chancellor Blumenthal gave his “State of the Campus” address to a lecture hall filled with students, faculty and community leaders.

During the address, which took place on Sept. 24, he commended UC Santa Cruz students and faculty on their academic achievements and highlighted UCSC’s efforts to continue working closely with the surrounding community.

Blumenthal also warned of the possibility of “a hefty mid-year tuition increase,” contingent upon the results of the California ballot initiative Proposition 30 in the November election.

“We have so much in common, and there is so much at stake,” Blumenthal said. “That’s why we have come together today, to reflect on how we’re doing as a campus and how that relates to the world around us.”

Blumenthal also praised the UCSC faculty for their internationally recognized research, citing UCSC’s establishment of the Cancer Genomics Hub this year and the contributions made by UCSC professors to the discovery of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle last July.

“For our size, we are a research heavyweight,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also mentioned the thousands of volunteer hours logged by students at various local institutions each year and the $1.3 billion in economic activity that UCSC brings to Santa Cruz County annually as examples of the campus’s contributions to its surrounding community. He added that UCSC is the single largest employer in the county.

“We know that we’re a big neighbor,” Blumenthal said. “And we work hard to be a good neighbor.”

In 2008 UCSC reached a settlement with the city and county of Santa Cruz, and several local nonprofits regarding the impact the University has on traffic and water conditions. The final component of that settlement will not be decided until the meeting on Nov. 7 of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO).

“The city and the university have been fighting for years over this,” Duf Fischer said, an ambassador from the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce. “So I think the chancellor did an awesome job delineating the commonality between businesses, the city and the university, and how we can all benefit from each other going forward.”

During the Q&A that followed his speech, Blumenthal said he was unable to comment on the outcome of the LAFCO decision, but he did note that UCSC has reduced the amount of traffic to and from campus by 20 percent since 2005, and its water usage has fallen by 22 percent since 2002.

“And,” he said, “we have a lot more students today than we did 10 years ago.”

Blumenthal said providing the classes and services students expect has become much harder in recent years however, due to California’s fiscal crisis and subsequent cuts to the UC system.

“Trust me,” Blumenthal said, “its been increasingly, actually very difficult, to continue to provide the extraordinary student experience that’s been the hallmark of UC Santa Cruz.”

He said California’s contribution to the UC budget has declined by 45 percent since 1990, and that UCSC’s state funding has been cut by $59 million since 2008. Tuition costs at UC and CSU campuses have tripled in the last 10 years.

“The State has truly disinvested,” Blumenthal said.

He said that if California’s Proposition 30 doesn’t pass this November, it would mean additional cuts and tuition hikes. Proposition 30 would increase sales tax by .25 percent and raise taxes on all individuals making over $250,000 a year. K-12 schools would receive 89 percent of the revenue raised, while the remaining 11 percent would go to California’s community colleges.

None of the money raised by Prop 30 would go directly to the UC or CSU systems, but its passage would allow California to meet its obligation to K-12 schools and community colleges, precluding further cuts to UCs and CSUs. Blumenthal said UCs and CSUs would face $625 million in automatic cuts this year if Prop 30 fails to pass, potentially resulting in a 21 percent tuition increase this winter.

Blumenthal contrasted the nearly $5,000 UC students now pay quarterly to his own tuition-free UC education during the 1960s. Free education was a central tenet of the Master Plan that established the UC system in 1965.

“Its been hard for me and for other people at the university to realize that those days are over and that we need to accommodate ourselves to the new world in which we live,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also said that while a stable funding source was important, he would like to see the state’s contribution not just stabilize, but grow over the coming years.

Rosemary Anderson, a business continuity planner at UCSC, said that she thinks UCSC and the UC system are on the right track.

“We’re doing a better job on our offense, instead of just working on our defense,” Anderson said. “I think we need to capitalize more on what our university has done, to make people realize why a good education is so important to the solvency of our future.”

While the women’s tennis team lost eight players from the 2010–11 season due to graduation and time constraints, and was considered to be in a rebuilding year by some observers, they gained a 4-13 record with a 3-7 record in Division III play, which was good enough to finish No. 27 in the nation, and make an appearance at the NCAA tournament again.

“On paper we were weaker, but in the end we exceeded expectations better than anyone imagined,” coach Erin Ness said.

The number one and two players, sophomore Alexandra Scotten and junior Laura Wade, respectively, qualified for the NCAA national championships. This season is the first time UCSC has been represented in both singles and doubles matches since 2005.

Ness said the team will be bringing in an incoming freshman class in fall and hopes to improve on this season’s unexpected success.

“If we can get to the NCAA tournament this year, imagine what we can do next year,” she said.

Behind rookie coach Bryce Parmelly, the men’s tennis team finished with a 9-9 record, with a 6-5 record in Division III play. The team entered the regional playoffs ranked No. 6 in the national ITA rankings, before losing to fifth-ranked Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges in tournament play. The team did not have a ranking lower than 12th or higher than fifth place this season. Erich Koenig, Parker Larsen and Brian Pybas were awarded All-America honors.

Volleyball

An impressive semi-final appearance in the inaugural NCAA Division III tournament by the men’s volleyball team finished off their strong 17-7 season. The team ended the season in third place nationally, continuing their long run of success since 2004. The team’s coach of two years, Todd Hollenbeck, was awarded the Continental Volleyball Conference (CVC) Coach of the Year, while four players were awarded CVC All-Tournament honors: Sal La Cavera III, Paul Leon, Darren Tsai and Jake Dietrich.

Basketball 

Photo by Morgan Grana

Missing the NCAA tournament by one game, the women’s basketball team finished at 11-13, their best record since 1994. The team is losing four seniors this year but will return with four starters and will bring in new talent from the freshman class. Coach Kent sees a bright future, especially with the return of  freshman Sarah Mackey, who was named West Region Rookie of the Year. Kent looks toward possibly winning 20-plus games next season.

Men’s basketball finished with a 12-10 record, with a 4-5 record in Division III play. This year’s above .500 record makes the men’s basketball team the winningest team since their 2008–09 season.

Golf

Led by ninth-season coach Paulette Pera, the women’s golf team posted strong results all season long. Charlotte Gibson recorded the best low round versus par in UCSC history this season, beating her own record with a round of 74 and +2 above par at the Lady Bulldog Fall Classic. At the same tournament, the team put up its lowest 36-hole total in team history, scoring a 662, only +86 above par.