Don't even ask why I was invited.
During the ceremony, much will be made of the fact that UC Santa Cruz began on this very spot 43 years ago, when contractors hauled a clutch of house trailers onto this field; and a tiny student body and even tinier faculty began making like a university. Right here. It was all about small class size, one-on-one instruction, and an approach to scholarship that didn't involve letter grades.
I knew a guy who attended UCSC those first years, and he said that they all fried in those trailers -- no shade, no air conditioning -- and had most of their classes out in the field, sometimes just four or five students and a professor.
Not coincidentally, East Field has the most spectacular, awe-inspiring, mind-blowing view of the Monterey Bay that you could ever hope to see. Santa Cruz stretches away below you like a toytown, and then there's only that massive blue curve of bay and, brooding in the distance, the mountains of Monterey floating between the water and the sky. Tourists sometimes ask if that's Hawaii out there.
I can imagine some graying prof in a blue work shirt sitting there cross-legged on the grass 40 years ago, holding forth on modern lit to a circle of fresh-faced young people with longish hair and paperback copies of The Hobbit or Siddhartha or Stranger in a Strange Land stuffed into bookbags. With that crazy blue end-of-the-universe panorama stretched out at their feet. It must have been groo-oooo-vy. Truly.
In many ways, that was UC Santa Cruz at its best, and it's all been downhill from there. A 5- or 10-1 faculty-student ratio at a public university? Personal tutelage? No letter grades? How long could that last?
Security finally waved me through, and I took a seat fairly near the stage. As guests filed in I checked out the TV cameras, the large stage, the band pit, and a 20-foot projection TV playing taped tributes to the bountiful worthiness of George Blumenthal and the (carefullly-edited) achievements of UC Santa Cruz.
UCSC is very corporate these days; it's trying to cut itself loose from those halcyon days of foxtails and Tolkien and position itself as a world-class research university for the 21st century, more than worthy of any donations and grants that a forward-looking corporation would care to give it.
This is of course more illusion than reality. The Engineering Division is small, the Social Sciences Division is huge, and you can take classes on the Grateful Dead, the films of John "Escape from New York" Carpenter, Documentary Film-Making for Activism, and more.
Guests settled into their chairs in a casual manner. The atmosphere lacked urgency. Blumenthal has been chancellor for two years, since the last chancellor committed suicide by jumping off a very tall building (a probable victim of clashing prescription medications.)
George is an old campus hand, and everybody likes him well enough. He's also well-known in astrophysics, one of the few buzz-worthy disciplines UCSC has a claim to fame at; they're very good at finding extra-solar planets, for some reason. So George has a certain star power for the big donors, even if his style in clothing is Early Rumple and he drives a fuddy-duddy Volvo.
When all the guests had settled in, a long line of distinguished academics and regents and chancellors and honor students solemnly marched down the aisle and up to the stage in full academic regalia: gowns, stoles, mortarboards, tassels, and berets. There were robes of yellow, red and especially black, all with plenty of trim in of red, yellow, royal blue, purple, and white. It was like the Renaissance Faire, only free and not as much fun. And if you weren't close enough to get a good view, you could always see it on the Jumbotron.
That's the chancellor in the middle. Here's more or less the whole gang of them once they made the stage.
The guy checking his watch is Richard Blum, who is 1) chairman of the Board of Regents for the UC System, 2) Senator Diane Feinstein's husband, and 3) a filthy rich investment banker. Off on the right is the outgoing president of the UC System, who Blum recently gave the axe to. Once you know all the players, it's like a damned soap opera up there. Click on the image to see the big version, it's fun.
The speeches finally began. The speakers were mainly well-padded middle-aged white guys and selected tall, slim well-spoken students with good teeth. Most of them orated ponderously on the greatness of UCSC, the need for leadership, and above all, the need to raise more money. One graying academic went so far as to proclaim George "the donor's chancellor."
Just one speaker, a short, broad recent grad with brown skin and Latino accent, got off message. She had worked her way through university cleaning out dorms, among other things, and exhorted the university to pay its service workers a living wage, which they don't. And also to everyone else who provides services to the university.
The audience of notables responded with defeaning silence. She had Deviated from the Script. Her Words Must Be Ignored. And they were.
But not for long.
Just about the time that George swung into his acceptance address -- a long and rambling Clintonesque monster of a speech that carefully acknowledged a laundry list of interest groups -- a siren went off in the distance.
It was the service worker's union (plus a fair number of students), parading a couple of hundred yards off. I could see them clearly through the mesh tent wall, They cranked a hand-held siren, chanted, shouted, waved signs. George doggedly plowed through his speech without a pause. The audience ignored the demonstrators, too, as much as they could. "Disrespectful," the guy next to me muttered.
In the end, the demonstrators moved on and George finished his speech and the ceremony ended. The robed scholars marched out to the beat of a mariachi band to pay credit, I guess, to diversity. And everyone else piled out into the field to listen to mariache and graze on organic strawberries and mini-quiches and puff pastry and those cool rolled cream-cheese sandwiches that I can never remember the name of.
It was an interesting scene, almost surreal. Well, all society gatherings seem surreal to me, I don't get out that much. But take a look; interesting pictures a friend passed to me. Click on any of the photos to see them full-sized.
I particularly liked the Sammy Slug (UCSC's counter-culture mascot) ice sculpture surrounded by organic strawberries.
So people in heavy gowns and people in khakis and people in typical Cruzado casual attire ate and and drank and wandered around the reception area, which was separated from the rest of the field by a single yellow rope.
And then the protestors showed up again.
They ran right up to the yellow rope. And stopped. They chanted and yelled and waved giant banners, but did not cross the line. Apparently no one expected them to. On the other side of the line robed academics and others watched with mild interest but no apprehension.
A minute later, a squad of campus police in riot gear trotted up and formed a protective line on "our" side of the rope.
It was all choreographed on both sides, maybe even pre-arranged. Take a look at the picture: there's a line of union organizers with their backs to the fence, facing the rest of the protestors with their hands spread wide. They were there to make sure that none of their people got too worked up, charged the rope, and caused an incident. Or got beat by the police. It would have been nasty. No one wanted that.
So it's no wonder that the inauguration guests barely blinked; they knew the protest would be civilized, no matter how strong the rhetoric; this is laid-back Santa Cruz, after all.
But the service union has real issues. They've been working without a contract for a year system-wide, and the wages at UC Santa Cruz are among the lowest among UC Campuses. And living costs are through the roof. Food is way up, gas is way up, rent is already sky-high, and it costs $600 a year for a worker to park on the UC campus.
"How can we raise families on these salaries," one of the protestors shouted, and the answer is that they can't.
On the other hand, there's an old guard of faculty and white-collar staff who've been around for 20 years and bought houses long ago when they were cheap or glommed onto cheap UCSC-subsidized housing and never left it. They're also mostly non-union, educated, and white, and have seniority, and a great many chose not to have children. A really large number are USCS alums. They don't cause trouble, and many of them look down on the blue-collar workers. If they think of them at all.
The blue-collar workers are younger, increasingly Latino, mostly non-college educated, and paying through the nose for rental housing. They do raise families, and they aren't UCSC alums giving it up for the old school, and all they want is a living wage.
Welcome to the class divide.
You know, if you read this blog, that I think we're in for hard times economically. So does the state government, which is already short of cash. So in the face of these hard times, UC System is probably going to freeze wages and hiring. They're also making moves to break the unions. There's no way they can balance their budget on the backs of the grunts, but they're going to try. Because it's politically easier than consolidating or shutting down academic programs.
But what they may find is that, because of these same economic hard times, the union protestors will someday refuse to stay on their side of the yellow rope. Demonstrations will stop being symbolic because they'll be about real and immediate issues of survival. It'll get ugly. I don't say it's right. But if you think it won't happen, you may not have read the right history books.
In those books, the Man -- whether he be General Motors or UC Santa Cruz -- usually won't give concessions to the workers until he's convinced that he has to. And if boycotts or lawsuits don't work, the way that the workers usually choose is to get physical.
I don't think the UC administration is prepared for that, here at Santa Cruz or statewide. They're not out to oppress people, they just want to balance their budget and cut in places that harm the university's mission as little as possible. They don't even think they're the Man.
Oh, but they are. Get ready, George. You and the rest of the UC System may have a year or two. But... get ready.
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