A Plan of Creation
The person posting as Parliament of Rooks has an interesting, insightful, and passionate post about the tree sit over at the indybay website.
The poster didn’t like me saying that not protesting the 20 million dollar DANM building project was a bit hypocritical. Here is the deal. The University is expanding. Apparently if the University expands according to the LRDP, it is bad (you get tree sitters). If the Univerity expands according to no plan whatsoever… It’s ok? If I was a University official I would look at this and come to the conclusion that expansion plans should be kept secret and undisclosed or that the University should not have an expansion plan at all. Both of those options are unacceptable to me. The goal should be a more democratized system of questioning and approving the plan for the University. Greater student involvement in the direction of the University will yield a better University.
Parliament of Rooks basically said that anyone was free to start up a protest at the DANM building site, and that the tree sitters were making their stand against expansion at the biomedical sciences facility. Fair enough. So what is the plan? Stop the LRDP? That is not a plan. That is an anti-”The University” plan.
Here is my plan:
1) Expand by building more Universities at other locations. There are many places in California with cheap land that people care a lot less about. Build there. UC Merced is one example of implementing such a plan.
2) Make the process of directing the University more open and give the students more input in steering the University. I don’t mean give the students one representative. What I mean is put major plans up for a vote to all the students at the University. We have elections for student government officials, how about voting on important University issues such as the LRDP in the election. In fact, how about making the LRDP pass a simple majority of the students a prerequisite for its adoption. Better yet make more than just the LRDP come before the students. I would love for more student power in the budgeting process.
That is basically it. My vision for the University is one where the students have a hand on the wheel that guides the University. There can be other hands on that wheel as well (the supporting community, The faculty and staff, the taxpayers) but the one that I support most is the student.
Some of the tree sitters will not be on board with my plan. It does not take a specific stand on animal research, the role of corporate money on the University, or the favoring of sciences versus arts or humanities. The thing is that all of these questions can and should be posed to the students so that their voices can be heard in a democratic manner. I propose fighting for a framework instead of against certain issues. Fighting for that framework is more important than stopping the LRDP because it transcends the LRDP and empowers future generations of students. The cause is more noble when its goal is to create instead of to destroy.
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Hey Mark,
One thing to keep in mind is that it’s not easy to find cheap land in California that nobody cares much about. Your example of UC Merced is really a counter-example. Its initial construction and now its expansion have met with delays because of vernal pools and the endangered species they harbor. It turns out all that empty-looking land in the central valley is actually high-value agricultural land. I’m not saying the UC couldn’t find a place for another campus, just that it could be tough.
I tend to agree that students need to have greater input on issues like university expansion. How, though, do you balance the priorities of current students with the priorities of potential future students? If they had asked the UCSC graduating class of 1969 if the university should expand, I’m guessing the answer would have been no. What would UCSC be like if it hadn’t grown from its original size? Would you be there? I know that just because it expanded then doesn’t mean it should expand infinitely, but it’s much more persuasive to see arguments about why expansion needs to stop precisely now rather than why expansion is always bad.
When the University was first founded it was slated to be bigger and more expansive than it currently is. There were plans to have a road built that would dump people from the freeway onto the campus. Of course the land where the road would go is now owned by the county and is a park:
http://www.ci.santa-cruz.ca.us/pr/parksrec/parks/pogo.html
I don’t doubt that selecting new locations for Universities is hard. I don’t think it is an unsurmountable challenge. Considering that Santa Cruz county cannot absorb more strains on its infrastructure, I see expanding the number of Universities as a much better option.
While Santa Cruz county has a lot of constraints, there is plenty of good place to expand the university. Like downtown Santa Cruz. I know all the hippies won’t like this, but Santa Cruz is now part of the Bay Area sprawl, and it’s becoming increasingly suburbified. Having the university take a lead in transit-oriented high-density development in brownfields makes a lot more sense than sprawling out into the forest.
Well part of the problem is that the city and the UC don’t get along. The UC is proposing to add thousands of new residents without a surge of funding to create any supportive infrastructure. Santa Cruz county has been having water shortages with the number of residents it already has. The current set of people going to the UC causes traffic congestion problems that are not being offset enough by public transportation. The thing is that high density transit oriented development will need the University and the surrounding community to agree. The UC pushing its own plan and the community suing to stop them does not bode well for such a proposal.