Suchergebnisse

The Regional History Project conducted this oral history with UCSC Chancellor M.R.C. (Mary Rita Cooke) Greenwood as part of its University History series. Greenwood was appointed as chancellor of UC Santa Cruz in July of 1996 and served until April of 2004. While at UCSC, she also held an appointment as a professor of biology. M.R.C. Greenwood was born in 1943 in Gainesville, Florida. She graduated summa cum laude in biology from Vassar College in 1968, and earned her PhD in physiology, developmental biology, and neurosciences from Rockefeller University in 1973. After graduation, she joined the faculty in human nutrition at Columbia University's Medical School, where she taught until 1978, when she moved to Vassar College. At Vassar she was the John Guy Vassar Professor of Natural Sciences, chaired the department of biology, and directed the Undergraduate Research Summer Institute. In 1989, Greenwood was hired by the University of California at Davis, where she was professor of nutrition and internal medicine, served as dean of graduate studies, and later vice provost for academic outreach. Her research interests are in developmental cell biology, genetics, neurosciences, physiology, women´s health, nutrition and science, and higher education policy. From November 1993 to May 1995, while on leave from UC Davis, Greenwood served as associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Bill Clinton. She spearheaded the creation of two major science policy documents: "Science in the National Interest" and "Meeting the Challenge: Health, Safety, and Food for America." In addition, she played a leadership role in coordinating interdepartmental and interagency science activities and co-chaired two National Sciences and Technology Council committees. The political savvy she developed in the White House, as well as her experience in the world of government-funded scientific research, was to greatly benefit the UC Santa Cruz campus. Under her leadership, the campus finally established its first professional school, the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, which had been planned since the days of Chancellor Dean McHenry, but cut for budgetary reasons. Her years also saw many other strides forward: the founding of the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics; an increase in the number of academic programs by 52 percent, from 63 to 96, including a 41 percent increase in graduate programs; the building and opening of Colleges Nine and Ten; the hiring of 250 new faculty members; and a doubling of extramural research support. Greenwood's tenure also saw the construction of nearly one million assignable square feet in academic buildings for the arts, the sciences and engineering; the founding of a UC Silicon Valley Center at Moffett Field; and collaboration with NASA Ames in developing the nation´s first NASA University Affiliated Research Center, the largest competitively awarded contract ($330 million) at the University of California up to that time. In addition, under Greenwood's leadership the campus raised more in private donations than the previous total for the campus´s entire history. She built strong bridges with the city of Santa Cruz and surrounding communities, worked to preserve what she saw as the best aspects of the UCSC residential college system, and to diversify the student body and faculty even in the wake of Proposition 209 and other backlashes against affirmative action. In this oral history she discusses her own experience as the first woman chancellor of UCSC and being part of the first generation of women to hold senior leadership positions in higher education administration. In a tribute honoring Chancellor Greenwood before the United States House of Representatives, Congressman Sam Farr said: "With the campus now reaching a regional annual economic impact of almost $1 billion, her leadership has proven advantageous not only to the students at the university, but to the local community as well." In an editorial, the Santa Cruz Sentinel said, "Relations between the university and the local community have been excellent during her years here—and that hasn't always been true." The first part of Greenwood's tenure took place during affluent years that saw a tech boom in nearby Silicon Valley, but later she encountered the budgetary challenges that continue to undermine the fiscal health of higher education. In her parting email to the campus community she remarked, "Both political pressure and budgetary constraints are making it increasingly difficult for all public universities, even the great ones like UC, to prosper. Whether California will honor the promises of the internationally revered Master Plan for Higher Education is a question we must face." It was that deep concern for the future of the University of California which inspired Greenwood to accept the position as provost and vice president of academic affairs at the Office of the President, the second highest post in the UC system. She became the highest-ranking woman in the UC administration and the first woman to hold this position. After her time at the UC Office of the President ended, Greenwood became chancellor at the University of Hawaii. Greenwood is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she served as president in 1998 and chair in 1999. In 1996, President Clinton nominated her to serve as a member of the National Science Board, a prestigious group comprising the nation's top twenty-four leaders in science and education, which advises Congress and the President on science policy issues. Her research on the genetic causes of obesity is recognized worldwide and she is the author of numerous scientific publications and presentations.

David Thomas was interviewed on November 8, 2001 at the Regional History office in McHenry Library. Thomas was a professor of politics at UCSC from 1966 to 1999. He taught Sexual Politics: Gay Politics , the first regular gay course taught by a faculty member at UCSC, and one of the first in the United States.

Wendy Chapkis was an undergraduate at UCSC from 1973 to 1977, a graduate student in sociology from 1985 to 1995, and lecturer in women's studies, politics and other departments. She was a co-founder of the Bulkhead Gallery, and is a queer activist and writer. Her book Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance was published by South End Press in 1986, and Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor by Routledge in 1997. She is currently a professor of women's studies at the University of Southern Maine.

John Laird came to UCSC in 1968, and graduated in 1972. In 1983, Laird was elected mayor of Santa Cruz, and became the first openly gay mayor in the United States. He was also a founding member of the Santa Cruz AIDS Project (SCAP). In 2002, Laird was elected to the California State Legislature as one of two of the first openly gay men to be elected to the Assembly. Laird was interviewed on September 13, 2001 in his office at the Santa Cruz County building. The timing of this interview was significant because it took place two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Julia Armstrong-Zwart was hired by Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer in 1981 as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Matters of Informal Grievance and Affirmative Action and served as the University of California, Santa Cruz's first ombudsman. In 1983, she stepped down as ombudsman, to assume the position of assistant academic vice chancellor for faculty relations, and continued to serve as special assistant to the chancellor for affirmative action. In addition to her work as assistant vice chancellor for faculty relations, she held the position of assistant chancellor for human resources, with responsibility for the offices of Academic Human Resources, EEO/Affirmative Action, Labor Relations, Staff Human Resources, and Title IX. She retired from UCSC in 2001. In this oral history, conducted by the Regional History Project in the summer of 2013, Armstrong-Zwart describes how she worked with other key UCSC administrators, faculty, and staff members to transform the cultural and politics of UC Santa Cruz and the University of California system. They accomplished this through vision and much hard work, strengthening existing affirmative action policies and creating innovative programs such as the Target of Opportunity faculty recruitments, establishing retention and faculty development programs, and founding a Title IX office devoted to sexual harassment prevention.

Professor Isebill "Ronnie" Gruhn arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1969 as a member of the politics department and an affiliate of Stevenson College. Before coming to UC Santa Cruz she had been teaching at Oberlin College. Born in Leipzig, Germany, Gruhn is the daughter of a partially Jewish (mixed heritage and religion) mother; her non-Jewish father joined the resistance and helped Jews escape from Germany. He spent much of World War II imprisoned in Nazi labor camps. Gruhn's early life was one of upheaval and dislocation; a background uncannily congruent with the interviewer's own family heritage. Gruhn immigrated to New York City with her parents when she was nearly twelve years old. Her experiences during the war led to an interest in "knowing how the world worked." She attended Dickinson College for her BA in politics; earned her MA in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD in political science from UC Berkeley. Gruhn became an expert and widely published scholar in international politics and international law, who has focused on Africa, international and transnational institutions, and relations between rich and poor states. One of very few tenured women during UCSC's early days and one of the first to serve as a high-level administrator, Gruhn was the first female dean of social sciences (1981-1983) and the first female academic vice chancellor (acting) from 1987-1989. This was during the period when UCSC was, as Gruhn calls it, "an essentially male institution." She never affiliated with UCSC's women's studies (feminist studies) department, yet she consciously chose positions of leadership at UCSC because she wanted to show that women could excel in administration. Gruhn served in diverse capacities at UC Santa Cruz over the past four decades. She twice chaired the politics department (1973-1975 and 1980-1981) and was an active member of Stevenson College, including founding and teaching in Stevenson's prestigious and interdisciplinary Modern Society and Social Thought major. In the 1990s (1994-1998), Gruhn directed the UCDC Program for UC Santa Cruz, a program that supervises and supports students who pursue internships and academic study in the nation's capital. Most recently, she chaired the Academic Senate Committee on Emeriti Relations and has continued to teach courses for the politics department and lecture for the UCSC Lifelong Learners Program. These varieties of experience on and off campus provided her with a wide-angle lens through which to observe and consider UCSC's trajectory from its early years as an innovative experiment in public higher education to its more recent configuration as a somewhat more conventional research university. Gruhn's opinions on the political, cultural, and structural changes at UC Santa Cruz over more than four decades are sometimes salty but it is clear that she is critical because she cares deeply about the Santa Cruz campus as a dynamic institution. This oral history was conducted in McHenry Library on the UC Santa Cruz campus in October of 2013, in two sessions of approximately two hours each. It is part of a series of oral history interviews the Regional Oral History Office is conducting with early UCSC women faculty.

The UC Santa Cruz Library announces its publication of a groundbreaking new book, SEEDS OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT: AN ORAL HISTORY OF UC SANTA CRUZ that weaves together first-person accounts of the campus's evolution, from the origins of an audacious dream through the sea changes of five decades.More than 200 narrators contribute to this two-volume collective chronicle, edited by oral historians Irene Reti, Cameron Vanderscoff, and Sarah Rabkin. Five years in the making, the book draws on the Library Regional History Project's extensive archive of oral history interviews with students, staff, faculty, community members, and campus leaders. The text is accompanied by some 250 images from the University Library's Special Collections and Archives.Seeds of Something Different sheds new light on UCSC's first half-century. In advance praise for this dynamic account, UCSC alumna and noted radio producer Nikki Silva wrote, "I kept marveling, 'So that's what was happening!' I could not put it down."The book offers useful insights not only for readers who know and love the campus, but for anyone who cares about the past and future of public higher education. As University of Pennsylvania Professor of Education and History Jonathan Zimmerman notes in his foreword, "the University of California, Santa Cruz [is] the largest—and, arguably, the most important—educational experiment in the history of American higher education . . . part of a remarkable wave of innovation in the 1960s, when at least forty different alternative colleges and universities sprouted across the United States."Since its inception, UC Santa Cruz has, like the cultural and political milieu it both reflects and influences, undergone profound transformation. In contrast to tales of either tragic decline or triumphant reinvention that the campus tends to inspire, Seeds of Something Different offers a nuanced telling of UCSC's complex and sometimes contradictory history. This is a story in multiple acts, featuring multiple perspectives, complete with recurring characters, surprising plot twists, unlikely endings, and new beginnings.

The genesis of the vision for UC Santa Cruz's newest colleges, College Nine and College Ten, dates back to the 1988 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) which responded both to faculty members who argued that the Social Sciences Division needed academic space in the campus core, and the demographic studies that demonstrated that UCSC would be experiencing rising student enrollments and would need to house more students on campus. The 1988 LRDP thus called for planning two new colleges that would integrate academic and residential facilities. Fast forward to May of 1999, when under the chancellorship of MRC Greenwood and the vice chancellorship of Francisco Hernandez, The Colleges Nine and Ten Planning Advisory Committee issued a report entitled "Opening College IX and X." Among its recommendations were for these two colleges to "continue the tradition of the current UCSC colleges concentrating upon community life and student affairs," while also "being centers of interdisciplinary curricula and courses, intellectual stimulation, research, conferences, and student projects." The proposal was also for these colleges to be affiliated with the Social Sciences Division, as per the 1988 LRDP. The authors of this report also stated, ".we have come to believe that the opening of Colleges IX and X represents a major new opportunity for UC Santa Cruz [which would build] upon the successes and learning from the failures of the past." Embedded in this allusion to the past lies a complex, and often contentious history of UCSC's relationship to its residential college system. In the early 1960s, the colleges were the vision and invention of founding chancellor Dean McHenry and then-University of California President Clark Kerr and were intended to make UCSC "seem small" as it grew because students would live and study in the intimate environment of their themed college. The idea was to combine the advantages of small liberal arts college (such as Swarthmore) with the resources of a major research university. Some of the inspiration also came from Oxford University and other British universities. Faculty were appointed half time in their college and half time in their board of studies, which had less institutional power and resources than a conventional department. Each faculty member was expected to teach both for the college and the board. While college teaching and service yielded a rich plethora of innovative classes and interdisciplinary collaborations that still benefits UCSC today, it was not given much weight by the traditional University of California in tenure decisions. As the relatively affluent and fiscally expansive era of the 1960s faded into the inflation, austerity, and more conservative 1970s that was less open to innovative public education and more interested in job training, UCSC entered a crisis marked by declining enrollment and financial pressures. Dean McHenry had also originally promised the Regents that the UCSC college system would not result in higher costs, but this was not proving to be the case. In addition, after UCSC opened, the funding formula allocated to the UC campuses per student was altered to allocate more money per graduate student than to undergraduates. This had a significant impact on UCSC, which had been founded with a focus on undergraduate education and had very few graduate programs. (The campus has yet to catch up in this area.) By 1974, Dean McHenry retired and was replaced by a chancellor who lacked leadership experience and left after eighteen months. Angus Taylor stepped in as acting chancellor and the search for a new chancellor began. Enter Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer, who arrived from Caltech in 1977 to a campus ringing with rumors that UCSC, which once held the distinction of being one of the most prestigious and attractive campuses in the United States, might be closed for budgetary reasons. Sinsheimer's response (he was educated at MIT to be a problem solver) was to develop and implement Reorganization, a plan which proposed a new vision for the UCSC colleges and ultimately was approved by the Academic Senate. This plan excised most of the academic role of the colleges (with the exception of a freshman core course) and assigned the academic mission of UCSC mostly to the academic divisions. (The exceptions to this plan were Oakes College and College Eight, which retained more of the original model.) The central mission of the colleges became residential life. Faculty members were relieved of curricular obligations to the colleges. Reorganization eliminated the McHenry-Kerr model for the colleges. It was and still is criticized as part of one might call a "narrative of decline" at UCSC, the loss of a unique creative, interdisciplinary vision, a brave new model for undergraduate education in a public university. Even now, forty years later, the pros and cons of Sinsheimer's Reorganization remain a heated topic in many of the oral histories conducted by the Regional History Project with longtime staff and faculty. In an oral history conducted in 2004, Chancellor Greenwood quipped, "Some people call it the third rail of politics at Santa Cruz. If you touch the colleges, you're dead."[3] The writers of the report "Opening Colleges IX and X" acknowledged this sentiment when they wrote, "While we can learn from some parts of the McHenry model, we cannot return to it. It has been rejected by the campus." Instead they call for a third model of how colleges could work at UC Santa Cruz, which they call the Greenwood Model. This model builds on the post-Reorganization college focus on community life and student affairs and "engages faculty members and students in a way that the current colleges do not." The writers were astute not to imply that the existing eight UCSC colleges should adopt this Greenwood Model, arguing instead that the two models could exist side by side. The vision for these two new colleges was soon realized, with the exception of the endowment for the colleges, which the writers of the report emphasized would be important to its success. To this date, these colleges are awaiting endowment. College Nine opened its doors in fall quarter of 2000 and College Ten in fall of 2002. College Nine's webpage articulates its philosophy: "College Nine has worked hard to successfully develop a strong community, build meaningful traditions, and emphasize our theme through co-curricular programming. College Nine's theme of International and Global Perspectives recognizes the importance of cultural competency in the 21st century. The College Nine community offers students a range of opportunities to explore these issues and to develop skills as dynamic leaders. College Ten's website states, "Consistent with UCSC's founding vision, College Ten creates an integrated living-and-learning environment through engaging academic and extracurricular programs focusing on the theme of Social Justice and Community." The two colleges retain a separate identity, but work closely together and share many staff members. This volume documents some of the history of College Nine and College Ten through two oral history interviews: the first with Deana Slater, who has served as college administrative officer for both colleges since their founding and was part of planning the colleges even before they opened; and second with Wendy Baxter, director of academic and co-curricular programs for both colleges, also since before they officially opened. By focusing on the efforts of these two longtime dedicated staff members in founding and building these new UCSC endeavors, we also pay tribute to the sometimes invisible contributions of staff to this enterprise of higher education. In this oral history Slater and Baxter discuss some of the key elements of the structure, philosophy, and programs at Colleges Nine and Ten, including the Co-Curricular Center (The CoCo), the Leadership Certificate Program, the Practical Activism Conference, the International Living Center, Alternative Spring Break and other service learning programs; The Garden Project, and the relationship with the Social Sciences Division. [1] Long Range Development Plan, 1988. Available in the UCSC Library's Special Collections Department. [2] A digital copy of this May 1999 report, "Opening Colleges IX and X" is in the College Nine and Ten University Archives at Special Collections at the UCSC Library. [3] See Randall Jarrell and Irene Reti, From Complex Organisms to A Complex Organization: An Oral History with UCSC Chancellor MRC Greenwood, 1996-2004. (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2014). See p. 52 for a discussion of College Nine and College Ten. Available in full text at https://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/from-complex-organisms-to-a-complex-organization-an-oral-history-with-ucsc-chancellor-mrc

Elba Rosario Sánchez was born 1949 in Atemajac, Mexico, a small town near Guadalajara. She is the oldest of three girls. Her father worked in the cotton mill until an accident injured one of his eyes. The accident sent him to the United States in search of work, first to Chicago, where the family had relatives, and then to San Francisco, where he worked as a bus boy at the Fairmount Hotel. After about eighteen months, he brought his family to San Francisco in 1960, where they lived at Divisidero and Pine, in a Black neighborhood. At the neighborhood elementary school, Elba was one of very few non-Black children; ironically, even as she struggled to adapt to a white-dominated country, in the racial definitions of that time she was considered white. She learned English quickly, and soon became the translator for her family. Within a few years of her arrival, the social movements of the 1960s altered the national landscape. Witnessing the brutal repression of Black civil rights protestors on television was formative for Sánchez's growing political consciousness and her eventual activism as a young supporter of the United Farm Workers movement. Her early activism with the United Farm Workers boycott on grapes was impressive, particularly since her family did not approve of her protest. This activism grew intertwined with her passion for writing and for language. In the oral history, Elba vividly recalls that her first pieces of poetry were written on small pieces of paper that she then crumpled up and hid in a drawer. Her first poem, "The Price of Color," was published in her parochial high school's yearbook. After graduation, Sánchez attended San Francisco City College. There she was inspired by the Chicano activist spirit of several classmates who had been taking courses at San Francisco State College, where the student protests had shut the campus down. But after a semester and a half she dropped out of college to marry and have a child. In the late 1970s, Sánchez and her husband relocated to Santa Cruz so that her husband could attend UC Santa Cruz. Sánchez became a bilingual counseling aide at Santa Cruz High School. In search of UCSC students who could serve as English tutors at Santa Cruz High, Sánchez met Paco Ramirez, a lecturer in Spanish who coordinated the tutorial program at Stevenson College and Paul Lubeck, a professor in sociology. Both encouraged her to return to college and finish her B.A., which she did, graduating in Latin American studies from Merrill College. At UCSC, Sánchez was a nontraditional student who lived off campus with her husband and her three-year-old child. This experience, plus the class and cultural differences between her and the mostly white middle-class student body of UCSC at that time, led to feelings of alienation and isolation. Professor Roberto Crespi, Sánchez's advisor in Latin American studies, encouraged her to go on to graduate school in literature at UCSC, which she did, earning her MA from UCSC. Crespi was one of very few Latino professors at UCSC in the early years of the campus. He was also one of the founders, with J. Herman Blake, of Oakes College. In 1979, Crespi also hired Sánchez as a tutor in the Spanish for Spanish Speakers Program (SPSS), which he had founded, and which was then only in its second year. Sánchez spent the next fifteen years teaching in, coordinating, and directing the multidisciplinary Spanish for Speakers Program. This pioneering, cutting-edge program, incorporated poetry readings, theatrical performances, cultural nights, political discussions, visual arts exhibitions, and small press publishing into its curriculum. Students studied Latin American history and literature in SPSS courses, and honed critical thinking, speaking, translation, and writing skills. Sánchez credits SPSS for higher levels of retention of Latino students at UCSC, and also for the successful careers of many of those students after graduation. Also while at UCSC, Sánchez was one of the founding and primary editors of REVISTA MUJERES, a bilingual literary and visual arts journal published at UC Santa Cruz from January 1984 to 1993. According to their mission statement, "REVISTA MUJERES: In Our Words and Work, Our Vision," REVISTA was dedicated to interviews, poetry, essays, as well as visual art work and set a page in the history, struggles, and contributions of Chicana and Latina undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty members…REVISTA was also envisioned and produced as a response to the lack of access in mainstream publications for Chicana/Latina bilingual, budding as well as experienced writers, whose work was unpublished. Its aim was to promote and encourage a community of writers and artists, to plant a seed of reality and creativity. Sánchez's commitment to honor the Spanish language, teach Latin American history, and to offer a keen critique of colonization is part of her legacy on the UC Santa Cruz campus. This commitment was particularly evident in her fervent dedication to SSSP and the co-production of Revista Mujeres. In her oral history, Sánchez describes the organizational work that went into funding, editing, producing, and distributing this groundbreaking journal, which was distributed far beyond UCSC and was the first of its kind published in the state of California. Sánchez locates REVISTA in a cultural effervescence of Chicano-Latino writing and publishing in the 1980s and 1990s. Sánchez recalls that at the time of her earliest publications, there were very few Chicana and Chicano writers who were published. Sánchez's own development as a writer flourished during that cultural flowering. She participated in a bilingual writer's workshop in San Francisco with several other key Chicana and Chicano writers. She is the author or coauthor of several books of poetry including Tallos de luna /Moon Shots (Moving Parts Press, 1992), From Silence to Howl (Moving Parts Press, 1993) and is a contributor to many anthologies, including Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2003), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (Aunt Lute Books, 1990). She continues to write and is currently working on flash fiction and children's books. Elba Sánchez was interviewed in three sessions by Susy Zepeda in several locations in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. The interviews took place on February 8, 2013, March 1, 2013, and April 5, 2013. The interviews were transcribed by Irene Reti and a transcript was returned both to Zepeda, who audited it for accuracy of transcription, and Sánchez, who edited it for flow and accuracy, corrected the Spanish. Both Zepeda and Sánchez added some footnotes. We chose not to italicize the Spanish in the transcript, a political decision that recognizes that italics can "other" Spanish words as "foreign," or non-normative. This is a style preferred by many Latino/a writers today. It was an honor and a pleasure to interview Elba Sánchez. Her storytelling was full of heart, joy, and animation. Her oral history offers a sense of her strength, vision, and dedication to forms of resistance.

Olga Nájera-Ramírez was born in 1955 and raised in the small town of Davenport, California. She is the fourth of six children. In the early 1950s, her parents came to the United States from the state of Durango, Mexico, part of a migration of Mexican-Americans to the North Coast of Santa Cruz County. Her father worked in the fields and at the Davenport Cement Plant. When Nájera-Ramírez was eight, her father died and her family labored in the fields along with finding other jobs to support themselves. Her mother worked in packing sheds and canneries in several places in Santa Cruz County. This oral history begins with Nájera-Ramírez's recollections of growing up in Davenport. Nájera-Ramírez's early labor as a farmworker and the importance she placed on creating familia within the community in Davenport grounds her later vision of facilitating access to the university system for people of diverse locations. Even as a small child in Davenport, Najera-Ramírez was interested in becoming a teacher. Her high school counselor held what Nájera-Ramírez's termed "a paternalistic view of the minorities" and discouraged her from pursuing an advanced education in academia. But Nájera-Ramírez persevered, and despite a lack of mentors or even financial advising, became the first in her family to attend a four-year college, entering UC Santa Cruz as a student in Merrill College in 1973. As a UCSC student, Najera-Ramírez danced with Los Mejicas which galvanized what would become a lifelong interest in conducting research on the dance and traditions of Mexico and Mexican folklore. She earned a dual degree in history and Latin American studies from UC Santa Cruz in 1977. Nájera-Ramírez remembers the Chicano/Latino graduation feeling like a family party—this speaks simultaneously to the small numbers of Chicanas and Latinos graduating in 1977, as well as to importance of music, food, and cultura within a university setting to sustain people of color. Her recollections of Chicano/a Latino/a life at UCSC in the 1970s, as well as her faculty mentors and classes, are an invaluable contribution to a little-documented aspect of UCSC history. Najera-Ramírez's involvement with Los Mejicas during her undergraduate career in 1976 gave her the opportunity to meet Rafael Zamarripa, a well known folklorico maestro, in Colorado. As a result of this life-altering meeting, Najera-Ramírez decided to attend University of Guadalajara and further study dance. After three years, she returned to the United States and attained her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas in 1983. She also married her husband, Ronaldo Ramírez in that year. In 1987, Najera-Ramírez earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas, with a specialization in folklorico studies. Nájera-Ramírez is perhaps unique among UCSC faculty in that she is a native of Santa Cruz County who attended UC Santa Cruz, and then returned to her alma mater for a lifelong career as a tenured professor. In 1989, Nájera-Ramírez was hired by UCSC's anthropology department, where she has now taught for twenty-five years. She is also a founder of UCSC's Latin American and Latino Studies department and has directed the Chicano/Latino Research Center (CLRC). Striking in Nájera-Ramírez's interview is her dedication to communities of color who are producing knowledge of "Greater Mexico" and beyond. This is evident primarily through her mentorship of graduate students of color, active guidance of Los Mejicas, and participation in cross-border projects of the CLRC. Along with being a published writer, Olga is a film producer who has created two major films, La Charreada: Rodeo a la Mexicana and anza Folklórica Escénica: El Sello Artístico de Rafael Zamarripa (Mexican Folkloric Dance: Rafael Zamarripa's Artistic Trademark). She describes the making of these two films in her oral history and demonstrates her dedication to visual arts and culture. Najera-Ramírez has also served as the faculty advisor for Grupo Folklórico Los Mejicas of UCSC since 1997, which has been dancing folklorico since 1972. Los Mejicas fosters a strong sense of community at UCSC, thereby helping with the retention of Chicano/a and Latino/a students. The group performs at public schools throughout California and in the process does outreach to potential UCSC students of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Olga Nájera-Ramírez was interviewed in three sessions by Susy Zepeda at her home in Santa Cruz County. The interviews took place on May 2, May 16, and May 30, 2013. Nájera-Ramírez's articulate reflections, warmth, and intellect facilitated powerful storytelling that offered a unique perspective from a lifelong connection with Santa Cruz County. The interviews were transcribed by Irene Reti and a transcript was returned both to Zepeda, who audited it for accuracy of transcription, and Nájera-Ramírez, who edited it for flow and accuracy. We chose not to italicize the Spanish in the transcript, a political decision that recognizes that italics can "other" Spanish words as "foreign," or non-normative. This is a style preferred by many Latino/a writers today. Copies of this volume are on deposit in Special Collections and in the circulating stacks at the UCSC Library, as well as on the library's website. The Regional History Project is supported administratively by Elisabeth Remak- Honnef, Head of Special Collections and Archives, and Interim University Librarian, Elizabeth Cowell. —Irene Reti, Director, Regional History Project, University Library —Susy Zepeda, Interviewer, Regional History Project University of California, Santa Cruz, April 11, 2014

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.