Regional History Project Oral Histories

 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 of this book can be purchased online from Lulu.com at:

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/irene-reti-and-cameron-vanderscoff/the-empty-year/hardcover/product-2d5q98.html?page=1&pageSize=4

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.

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.

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: 50 Years Later, consists of fourteen interviews conducted in April and October 2017 in a conference room the McHenry Library. In many ways, it was a very different endeavor from the original Student Interviews. At the beginning of 1967, there were only two colleges at UCSC; in 2017, there were ten, and the student population had boomed exponentially from less than 1,000 to more than 18,000. UCSC has grown into a major research university, offering more than sixty undergraduate majors and dozens of graduate programs across the divisions. In selecting students, there were new challenges of scale, and the challenge of finding a scope of voices that could speak to meaningfully different and diverse experiences on campus became a project in itself.

            However, while many things have changed at UCSC, this was a venture of continuities as well. Like the original Student Interviews, we accepted from the beginning that it was neither possible nor desirable to strive for a group that could fully represent the student story at UCSC. In addition to that story being far too plural and varied, we know that surprise and singularity are as much an element in oral history work as trends and commonalities. This is a gathering of unique and powerful life histories. That said, we did seek a group that could illustrate distinct points along the range of student experience here. Taking our cue from the ’67 and ‘69 interviews, we contacted the provost of each college for recommendations, compiling a long list that we narrowed down to our final candidates. We also reached out to the directors of the resource centers, EOP, the graduate division, and selected student organizations. As a result, all ten colleges are represented here, as are many resource centers. While the group is mostly undergraduates, we do have graduate students as well. We also made certain that we had majors from all divisions, and strove for an intersectionally diverse and dynamic group, exploring relationships to place and space through the lens of racial and ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, class, and other markers of social difference. For 50 Years Later, this task was baked into our larger exploration of our narrators’ academic and extracurricular work at UCSC, as well as their life histories, inspirations, struggles, and aspirations.

One notable bias of our selection process is that, since we largely relied on faculty and staff recommendations, we tended to locate students that were exceptionally involved in their residential or academic communities, and were therefore especially visible to their recommenders. There are, of course, many other students who choose different spheres of involvement, or who, especially in the context of a growing research university, may simply not find the same recognition. For those who are struck by the thoughtfulness, eloquence, and importance of the stories included in this compendium, it is our hope that this reading can be the beginning of a greater curiosity and connection with the breadth of the student experience at UCSC. These are voices that need to be heard more widely and more clearly when it comes to the present and future of this campus.

            An unexpected parallel between the ’67 and ‘69 student interviews and this new ’17 project came through the rise of political awareness, activism, and debate at UCSC in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. The Sixties interviews took place in the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, a time when many students here were asking pointed questions about the priorities of their school, the Vietnam War, the nature of their education, and the future of justice in their society. These themes return in our 2017 interviews, as students share their life journeys of coming to this campus, their work finding a place here—more than one narrator describes our campus as a “PWI [predominantly white institution]”—and their hopes for how their UCSC education can shape their opportunities and outlook going forward. While some of their stories are particular to certain colleges or majors, many shine a light on deeper issues about this campus, including who is welcome here, how students adapt and make their way in their education, and what debates, dialogues, and differences mark the institution today. These are stories of community, stories of creativity, and stories of critique alike.

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 London School of Economics, and a PhD from Harvard University. He retired in 1994. Von der Muhll shares his thoughts, not only on the Christensen administration, but also on the reaggregation and reorganization programs of the late 1970s, in which he played a central role. He also contemplates UC Santa Cruz as an experiment in public higher education, from the perspective of fifty years after the campus was founded. 

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 declining and enrollments were on the verge of falling. Internally, the campus was fracturing along fault lines created by debates over the colleges’ academic role and over the relative weight to be placed on research and teaching, while UCSC struggled to weather a variety of external political and economic pressures and to hold its own as a distinctive campus within the traditional University of California.

Christensen’s tenure as chancellor rather tragically ended in controversy after only eighteen months. Although most of the faculty liked Christensen as a person, they lost confidence in his ability to govern the campus. The Regional History Project never conducted an oral history with Mark Christensen, who passed away in 2003. But former director Randall Jarrell completed a series of interviews with key faculty members and administrators who had been directly involved in the Christensen case. Jarrell decided to withhold publication of these oral histories due to their sensitive political nature at the time. Now, nearly four decades later, we are able to publish these volumes as part of the Project’s Institutional History of UCSC series.

This is a two-volume publication. The five oral histories in volume one not only illuminate the painful events leading up to the resignation of Chancellor Christensen, they capture and reflect on the “McHenry years” and on a complex and challenging period in the history of what was then a young, still experimental, and somewhat vulnerable campus of the University of California. The second volume contains a brief oral history with George Von Der Muhll conducted by Randall Jarrell in 1976 and then a much longer, follow-up oral history with George Von Der Muhll conducted by Irene Reti in 2014, in which Von der Muhll shares his thoughts not only on the Christensen administration, but also on the reaggregation and reorganization programs of the late 1970s, in which he played a central role. He also contemplates UC Santa Cruz as an experiment in public higher education, from the perspective of fifty years after the campus was founded. For reasons of chronology and length, we decided to dedicate a separate volume to Von Der Muhll’s interview. A third oral history volume, Daniel H. McFadden: The Chancellor Mark Christensen Era at UC Santa Cruz, 1974-1976, also originally part of this series was published in 2012 and is available on the Regional History website.

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 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 Community Foods.

Later, Skolnik trained as a health psychologist. She believes there is a strong connection between access to healthy food and the health of individuals and communities, thus connecting her years in the garden and trucking around organic food with her current career.

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.

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 river sediments, collapsed, killing three people and injuring others. Ten miles to the south in Watsonville, a largely Spanish-speaking city, buildings also crumbled and people were killed. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, landslides closed many roads including Highway 17, which traverses the rugged mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose, and for several days traffic was allowed through only in escorted convoys.

In the spring quarter of 1990 the Regional History Project sponsored a student internship class entitled, "An Interdisciplinary Oral History of the October 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake". Randall Jarrell, who was the project's director for many years, was the instructor for the class, which was co-sponsored with UCSC faculty members John Dizikes in history and Conn Hallinan in journalism. Five students signed up for the course. They completed eleven oral history interviews.

One of the interviews is with Barbara Garcia, who was director of Salud Para La Gente, a bilingual primary health care facility serving the greater Watsonville area. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, this community organization stepped in to address the enormous problems created by the lack of bilingual/bicultural volunteers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross. Diane Chang-Wilson interviewed eleven members of a fifth grade class at Rio del Mar School in Aptos. Chang-Wilson's oral histories provide candid reflections from children on how they felt and experienced the earthquake. Other interviews include Quinton Skinner, who was a UCSC student and an employee at Universes Records on the Pacific Garden Mall at the time of the quake; seventy-two year old Mayme Metcalf, who managed a small apartment complex in the Beach Flats area of Santa Cruz; Ramona Noriega, a UCSC re-entry student and mother of four children; and several narrators who had committed to a program of recovery from addiction to alcohol or other drugs when the earthquake happened. These oral histories illuminate the diverse subjectivity of this historical event in ways that are not captured in news photos and articles, and geological or engineering reports on structural damage.