Recent rhp_rw items

Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz--Volume 1

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the 1960s, a small team of innovators gathered on a stunning sweep of land overlooking the California coast. They envisioned a new and different kind of university—one that could reinvent public higher education in the United States. Through this two-volume oral history of the University of California, Santa Cruz, we hear first-person accounts of the campus’s evolution, from the origins of an audacious dream through the sea changes of five decades. More than two hundred narrators and a trove of archival images contribute to this dynamic, nuanced account. Today, UC Santa Cruz is a leading research university with experimental roots. This is the story of what was learned, what was lost, and what has grown along the way.

Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Volume II

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At the University of California, Santa Cruz and across the world, 2020 was a year of not just the COVID-19 pandemic, but pandemics, plural. While the pandemic can be mapped and tracked and tallied with numbers, for it to be understood and felt for many, if not most people, we need stories. This collection of twenty-two oral history interviews, gathered in late 2020 by UCSC students under the auspices of the Library’s Regional History Project, is an impressionistic illustration of an unstable present, exploring a range of ways people have encountered and interpreted this time. Some narrators speak primarily of racism and racial justice; for others, COVID-19 is in the extreme foreground. Others raise questions of economic justice in America and more locally for graduate students at UCSC; still others address climate change, since the CZU Lightning Complex fires also exploded across Santa Cruz County in 2020 and nearly consumed the campus itself.

A hardback version...

Student Interviews Fifty Years Later: An Oral History

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Regional History Project at UC Santa Cruz has rich collections of interviews with generations of narrators, ranging across the administration, faculty, and staff. In the early years of the campus, founding director Elizabeth Spedding Calciano conducted two rounds of interviews focused on the student experience at what was then the newest campus of the University of California. Those interviews, conducted in 1967 and 1969 as the campus was still adding a new college every year, give a window into the original UCSC experiment, and into a time of sociocultural transformation as students responded to the Vietnam War and other social justice issues of the time. While the Project’s archive includes various individual interviews with students conducted in the intervening years, in 2016 a decision was made by director Irene Reti to launch a follow-up endeavor focused specifically on the student perspective at UCSC today.

The ensuing project, Student Interviews:...

The Early History of UC Santa Cruz's Farm and Garden

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Early History of UCSC's Farm and Garden documents the emergence of the organic gardening and farming movement in Santa Cruz. It includes interviews with Paul Lee, Phyllis Norris, Orin Martin, and Dennis Tamura, who were involved in the early years of the Garden. Maya Hagege, a former Farm and Garden apprentice and UCSC alumna, conducted the interviews, which were edited by Jarrell.
Established in 1967 by master gardener Alan Chadwick, the original site was a neglected 4-acre plot at Merrill College which he and his student apprentices transformed into a magnificent terraced garden. In this pioneering realization of organic gardening Chadwick taught students French intensive horticultural techniques, including the back-breaking labor of double-digging garden beds, the use of composting for enriching the soil, and the elimination of pesticides. The recollections of Chadwick describe the quixotic founder of the Garden, who inspired a generation of students who went on...

UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, a Time of Transition, Volume II, Professor George Von der Muhll

Mon, 9 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000
On January 23, 1976, UC Santa Cruz’s second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned from office. He had served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. This second of two oral history volumes devoted to the Christensen era, is comprised of two interviews with Professor George Von der Muhll. The first was conducted by former Regional History Project director Randall Jarrell in 1976; the second by current Project director Irene Reti in 2014. Both set Christensen’s resignation within the broader context of a tumultuous and transitional moment in the campus’s history and Von der Muhll’s incisive reflections on UC Santa Cruz as a “noble experiment” in public higher education. George Von der Muhll is now an emeritus professor of politics at UCSC. He arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1969, affiliated with College Five (Porter College), where he was acting provost at the time of the interview conducted by Randall Jarrell in 1976. Von der Muhll earned a BA from Oberlin College; MSc from...

The Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 17, 1989, A UCSC Student Oral History Documentary Projec

Fri, 6 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas Fault shook the Central Coast of California and lasted for fifteen seconds. The epicenter of the quake lay near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about ten miles northeast of the city of Santa Cruz, deep in the redwoods of Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. The focus point was at a depth of ten miles. This earthquake killed sixty-three people and injured 3,757 others, and caused an estimated six billion dollars in property damage. It was the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas fault since the great San Francisco earthquake in April 1906.
While the national media covered the damage in the San Francisco Bay Area extensively, far less attention was paid to the effects of the earthquake in Santa Cruz County, where the earthquake was actually centered. In the city of Santa Cruz much of the downtown Pacific Garden Mall, composed of older brick structures located on unconsolidated...

Crossing Borders: The UCSC Women's Center, 1985-2005

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000
Founded with a broad vision far beyond that of most academic women's centers, the UCSC Women's Center has served not only students, but also staff and faculty, as well as the surrounding community. Conceived of and completed for the twentieth anniversary, of the Women's Center, this oral history volume features seven interviews with narrators who address the vision and achievements, as well as the challenges faced by the Women's Center over time. The interviews are with two of the founding faculty, Helene Moglen and Marge Frantz, as well as five staff women who served as either directors or assistant directors, or both: Kathie Olsen, Beatriz Lopez-Flores, Arlyn Osborne, Shane Snowdon, and Roberta Valdez.

Student Interviews: 1967

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000
A series of fifteen- to thirty-minute interviews was conducted with eight members of the first graduating class of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and with four sophomores who were members of the first four-year class to graduate from the Santa Cruz campus. The students spoke quite candidly about the strengths and weaknesses of the University, administration, faculty, classes, and general campus life, and commented on the changes that they thought should or would occur as the campus grows larger.

Student Interviews: 1969 v.1

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A series of interviews with twelve members of the first four-year graduating class at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among the twelve were two students who had been interviewed in 1967 and four who had transferred into the class at the junior level. As in the 1967 series, the students were asked to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the University, administration, faculty, classes, and general campus life. This they did very candidly. By happenstance, the interviews were scheduled over a two-week period that included the campus's first serious student strike and first building takeover. Thus the interviews tend to give the anatomy of the student strike as it developed. The philosophy of the students interviewed ranged from conservative to radical and their participation in the strike ranged from inactivity to leadership roles in the strike organization.

Student Interviews: 1969, Volume II

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000
A series of interviews with twelve members of the first four-year graduating class at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among the twelve were two students who had been interviewed in 1967 and four who had transferred into the class at the junior level. As in the 1967 series, the students were asked to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the University, administration, faculty, classes, and general campus life. This they did very candidly. By happenstance, the interviews were scheduled over a two-week period that included the campus's first serious student strike and first building takeover. Thus the interviews tend to give the anatomy of the student strike as it developed. The philosophy of the students interviewed ranged from conservative to radical and their participation in the strike ranged from inactivity to leadership roles in the strike organization.

The UCSC Arboretum: A Grand Experiment

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000
The UCSC Arboretum grows nearly ten thousand plant species from around the world, has imported over 2,500 ornamentals, and enriched countless gardens by introducing native plants to the nursery trade. Arboretum staff and volunteers teach undergraduate classes, make presentations in K-12 classes in area schools, offer plant consultations to members of the community, provide legal testimony on rare species, and participate in international research efforts and local conservation initiatives. But how did this unique arboretum come to flourish at UC Santa Cruz? The UCSC Arboretum: A Grand Experiment: An Oral History addresses this question. This volume includes three oral histories, a historical introduction, a timeline, photographs, and other archival material; it chronicles the development of the UCSC Arboretum over the past forty years through interviews with Brett Hall, Phyllis Norris, and Daniel Harder, three key individuals who have shaped the Arboretum's history.

UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s: A Time of Transition, Volume I: John Marcum, Sigfried Puknat, Robert Adams, John Ellis, and Paul Niebanck

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On January 23, 1976, UC Santa Cruz’s second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned from office. He had served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. These two oral history volumes, comprised of interviews conducted between 1976 and 1980, set Christensen’s resignation within the broader context of a tumultuous and transitional moment in the campus’s history. Founding Chancellor Dean McHenry had brought to fruition his singular vision for UC Santa Cruz as an innovative institution of higher education that emphasized undergraduate teaching centered in residential colleges, each with a specific intellectual theme and architectural design, within the framework of what he envisioned as a major public research university. McHenry oversaw the planning and building of UCSC from 1961 until his retirement in June 1974. In the early years, UCSC drew high caliber students and gained considerable national visibility as an innovative university. But by the mid-1970s, applications were...

Oakes College: An Oral History

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

College Seven (Oakes College) opened in at UCSC in 1972 with the vision of creating a multicultural community dedicated to the goals of equality and freedom from oppression. Student-faculty interaction was encouraged, as well as a strong counseling component, to address personal issues. Quotas were rejected in favor of recruiting a diverse student
and faculty body, and the core curriculum focused on cultural pluralism. Much of the core curriculum focused on teaching writing and science skills, both of which were neglected in the education of historically marginalized students. The idea was that students would take these acquired skills back to their home communities.
These oral history interviews were conducted in 1982, ten years after Oakes College opened, by Roseanne Shensa, a UCSC student under the mentorship of then- Regional History Project director Randall Jarrell. Publication was delayed due to lack of resources for transcription.

Heidi Skolnik: Pioneering Apprentice, UCSC Farm and Garden

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Heidi Skolnik grew up in California and graduated from Santa Cruz High School. At age nineteen, she volunteered at the Chadwick Garden on the UC Santa Cruz campus, working with Alan Chadwick and Steve Kaffka in the very early 1970s. Her memories of the Garden, as well as of the neighborhood buying co-ops, buying clubs, and natural food stores of that time, are detailed, conjuring up the early history of organic foods distribution. When the Student Garden Project expanded to include a farm at the base of campus (on the great meadow), Skolnik and a group of students and non-students who called themselves “The Home Farmers” lived in teepees on the Farm. In this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer at Skolnik’s home on the San Francisco Peninsula on May 17, 2007, she shares her recollections of these early years of the Farm and the Garden, as well as her time with Santa Cruz Trucking, a wholesale organic food distribution company associated with the natural foods collective...