Allan J. Dyson: Managing the UCSC Library, 1979-2003

Allan J. [Lan] Dyson was appointed University Librarian at UC Santa Cruz's University Library in August 1979, and retired in July 2003. This oral history, conducted as part of the Regional History Project's University History Series, is a singular contribution to the documentation of twenty-four years of history, not only of UCSC's University Library, but also of a period of extensive technological and cultural transformations in academic librarianship in the United States

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

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

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

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

Michael Nauenberg, Professor of Physics: Recollections of UCSC, 1966-1996

Michael Nauenberg, Professor of Physics: Recollections of UCSC, 1966-1996, is the edited transcript of a single interview conducted by Randall Jarrell on July 12, 1994. Nauenberg received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960. Prior to his appointment as a professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz in 1966, he was an assistant professor at Columbia University and a visiting associate professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Stanford University.At UCSC, Nauenberg served as department chairman of physics from 1970 to 1972, and again from 1983 to 1985. He was instrumental in developing both Stevenson and Crown Colleges, but in 1973 shifted his focus to building a graduate program in physics. He also founded and served as the director of the Institute of Nonlinear Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.Nauenberg's primary research interests are in particle physics, condensed matter physics, and nonlinear dynamics, and he is the author of numerous publications in these areas. His most recent work is on a new quantum mechanical treatment of neutrino and neutral meson oscillations and on the dynamics of wave packets in weak external fields. He has had a long standing interest in the history of physics and mathematics, particularly during the seventeenth century, and published about a dozen articles on the works of Hooke, Newton and Huygens, and several reviews of recent books on Newton's Principia. He has a particular interest in the history of physics and has helped to bring historians of science and physicists together.In this oral history narration, Nauenberg shares his impressions and critical evaluation of UCSC as an experiment in public higher education, particularly the tensions between the college-based model and the pressures of the faculty tenure system within the large research University of California system. He points out that the founders of UCSC appear to have overlooked or underestimated the demands building graduate programs would make on faculty members' time. He discusses faculty appointments in the physics department, as well as other key faculty members on campus. He provides a sweeping and cogent assessment of the strengths and achievements of the physics department, and describes the struggle to establish the very successful Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, as well as his frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful political battle to attract the Institute for Theoretical Physics to UC Santa Cruz. This oral history is an invaluable and insightful historical contribution by a senior faculty member with an extensive and distinguished history on the Santa Cruz campus

Robert B. Stevens: UCSC Chancellorship, 1987-1991

The Regional History Project conducted six interviews with UCSC Chancellor Robert B. Stevens during June and July, 1991. Stevens was appointed the campus's fifth chancellor by UC President David P. Gardner in July 1987, and served until July 1991. He was the second UCSC chancellor (following Chancellor Emeritus Robert L. Sinsheimer) recruited from a private institution.Stevens was born in England in 1933 and first came to the United States when he was 23. He was educated at Oxford University (B.A., M.A., B.C.L., and D.C.L.) and at Yale University (L.L.M.) and became an American citizen in 1971. An English barrister, Stevens has strong research interests in legal history and education in the United States and England. He served as chairman of the Research Advisory Committee of the American Bar Foundation, has written a half dozen books on legal history and social legislation, and numerous papers on American legal scholarship and comparative Anglo-American legal history.Prior to his appointment at UCSC he served for almost a decade as president of Haverford College from 1978 until 1987. From 1959 to 1976 he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as provost and as professor of law and history at Tulane University from 1976 to 1978. He also taught at Oxford University, the London School of Economics, Stanford University, and the University of East Africa.Stevens begins his narrative by describing the circumstances surrounding his appointment, and his reasons for joining a public institution. His commitment to access-- that students from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds have an opportunity to attend a UC campus-- and to the undergraduate college system which characterizes this campus, were major motives in his decision to become chancellor.In these interviews he comments on the major policy areas which he addressed during his tenure, provides a critique of the institution as he found it, and explains the numerous changes he initiated. He describes the context for the strained nature of town-gown relations he faced upon his arrival and his efforts to establish a more harmonious relationship between the University and the city of Santa Cruz. His dilemma was to meet the obligations of the UC system in providing education for its students, while mitigating the impacts-- most notably, traffic congestion and housing-- which the growing campus student population had on the city. He describes the negotiations between city and campus officials which resulted in limiting the rate of growth and the size of the campus to 15,000 students, a precedent-setting agreement for a UC campus. He also discusses in detail the history of the Long Range Development Plan and the Report to the Committee on the Year 2005.Stevens speaks about the steps he took to decentralize the campus administration, to reinvigorate and reorganize the workings of the college system, and to establish a comprehensive budget process. These reforms stood the campus in good stead in light of the severe budget cuts which affected UCSC and the entire UC system during the state's recession.He discusses the many issues which engaged him during his tenure, including multiculturalism and the undergraduate curriculum, faculty teaching loads, his evaluation of the various academic disciplines and their faculties, his administrative appointments, and his efforts at fundraising and development. He also describes his relations with students, his thoughts on student activism, the development of the performing arts complex, and how his official social life was an opportunity for outreach to constituencies on the campus and in the community.Stevens recounts how he and his staff followed the campus emergency plan during the Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 17, 1989, when the campus suffered some $7 million dollars in damage, but fortunately no loss of life. When UCLA sent police and medical personnel to assist UCSC, Stevens saw that these resources were directed to the city and county of Santa Cruz in his efforts to be a good neighbor during this devastating period for the community.He described these interviews, held several weeks before he retired from the chancellorship, as a sort of de-briefing opportunity to reflect on his tenure. Stevens was unusually candid in assessing his chancellorship, freely acknowledging what he perceived as several missteps on his part as he came to better understand the culture of UCSC as a public institution

Robert L. Sinsheimer: The University of California, Santa Cruz During a Critical Decade, 1977-1987

Randall Jarrell, documentary historian and head of the Regional History Project, conducted seven hours of taped interviews with Sinsheimer, UCSCs fourth chancellor during 1990-91, as part of the Project's University History series.Sinsheimer was appointed chancellor by UC President David Saxon in June, 1977. Formerly chairman of the division of biology at the California Institute of Technology where his work as a molecular biologist had earned him a distinguished international reputation. When approached with an invitation to consider heading UCSC he had come to the end of a long period of research and was receptive to a new challenge. His pre-eminent knowledge of the social implications and potential hazards of recombinant DNA technology and cloning methods in biology had deepened his concern about the necessity of promoting scientific literacy among non-scientists. Thus the UCSC chancellorship appealed to him since as a public institution it would give him a forum in which he could address these concerns.Sinsheimer was UCSC's first chancellor from outside the UC system. His predecessors included founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry who had presided over the planning and building of the innovative campus from 1961 until his retirement in June, 1974. McHenry was succeeded by Mark Christensen, a professor of geology from UC Berkeley, whose brief tenure was concluded by his resignation in January 1976, after only a year and a half as chancellor. Angus Taylor, a veteran UC administrator, was appointed Chancellor in February 1976, and during his tenure stabilized the fledgling campus while a permanent chancellor was selected.Sinsheimer arrived to find a campus in need of direction with serious systemic problems. As an outsider he saw UCSC's organization and administration undermining its relationship with the larger UC system, of which it was a small and to some, rather insignificant member.UCSC's promising academic reputation and innovative early identity had significantly deteriorated by the time Sinsheimer arrived. The outside world (as well as segments of the Santa Cruz community) had come, however wrongly, to view UCSC as a flakey, hippie school, with a questionable academic reputation. Vietnam War demonstrations, drugs, and the campus's counterculture increasingly strained town-gown relations and UCSC's reputation throughout the state. Enrollment figures were down and there were rumors (unfounded) that the campus would be closed for budgetary reasons.In this volume, Sinsheimer describes why his tenure was a critical decade for the troubled campus. He discusses the many problems he encountered -- the campus's lack of a sense of direction, its ambiguous academic reputation, its complicated administrative structure -- and the changes and reforms he initiated to solve them and bring the campus more into line with the way other UC campuses operated. He also discusses his role as chancellor and the contributions he made to the campus's development, including the Keck Telescope and Human Genome Projects. He also talks frankly about controversies engendered by the Research and Development Park Initiative, college reorganization, the anti-apartheid and divestiture movement, and student activism. His narration includes a prescient analysis of why the UCSC of the 1970s needed to be more closely related to Silicon Valley and the region's proliferating high technology industries. His goal of establishing an engineering school was not realized during his tenure, but the work Sinsheimer accomplished in reorganizing and revitalizing the campus paved the way for one day having such schools at UCSC

Malio J. Stagnaro: The Santa Cruz Genovese

Mr. Stagnaro's father, a native of Genoa, Italy, arrived in Santa Cruz in 1874 and began commercial fishing. Toward the end of the century he brought his family and relatives to Santa Cruz, and they in turn encouraged others to come; eventually sixty Genovese families comprised the Santa Cruz fishing fleet. His son, Malio, headed the C. Stagnaro Fishing Corporation's various operations (two restaurants, deep-sea fishing trips, and an excursion boat) and was widely regarded as the "mayor" of the wharf. In this volume, Mr. Stagnaro discussed the arrival of the Genovese; the Italian life in Santa Cruz; the operations of the old fishing fleet; early methods for wholesaling and retailing fish; the changes in the tourist industry from 1900 to the present; the effects in Santa Cruz of Prohibition, the Depression, and World War II; the new Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor; and the post-war development of the family corporation

Henry J. Mello: A Life in California Politics

In an article summarizing his career, one newspaper characterized him as the "great graying grizzly bear of California politics," an old-style moderate Democrat whose career was animated by his dedication to his local district and his tireless efforts in behalf of its economic welfare. GOP legislator Bill Campbell once described Mello as "the only Democrat in the Senate with any experience as an entrepreneur," and one of the last of a dying breed of citizen legislators. Mello claims his approach to politics was derived partly from his mother--an openhearted, socially liberal Democrat, and partly from his father--a fiscally conservative Republican.The volume is divided into four sections, including Mello's early family life; his experiences in local politics as a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors; his election to the State Assembly; and his tenure as state senator from the 15th District.He begins the narration with anecdotes about the local Portuguese community in Watsonville, his high school years, and work in his family's apple-farming and cold-storage business. His initial foray into politics began in 1950 when he was a Democratic volunteer during the senate campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. His local public service career began when he served as a member of the California Agricultural Advisory Board and as a fire commissioner.His discussion of his early political career covers his tenure on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and the issues that faced that body, including the preservation of agricultural land and related environmental issues; the founding of the UC Santa Cruz campus; town-gown relations; and his relationship with UCSC's founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry.Mello's progressive agenda has included such issues as land preservation, gay rights, an assault-weapons ban, senior citizens rights, and the environment. His reputation for "bringing home the bacon" to his district has engendered both praise and condemnation; notwithstanding the criticism, he discusses how he paid scrupulous attention to his constituents' needs, never took anything (or any election) for granted, and in a Republican district, never faced a serious election challenge.Mello served two terms in the State Assembly, where he began his long involvement in senior issues as chairman of the standing Committee on Aging and also became an influential member of the Ways and Means Committee. During his tenure as state senator, Mello had a distinctive legislative record, frequently having more bills signed into law than any other senator. His legislative legacy includes a remarkable record of initiating senior citizen programs. He authored over 120 bills dealing with seniors, including the establishment of the California Senior Legislature; the first programs focusing on Alzheimer's, including respite care, adult day health care, and multipurpose senior service programs; important changes in laws affecting conservatorship and elder abuse; funding for senior meals programs; and nursing-home reform. Seniors throughout the state hold him in high regard for his work in their behalf.He describes his role in obtaining assistance for his district after the l989 Loma Prieta earthquake, in creating a visionary plan for the conversion of Fort Ord, and his efforts in behalf of UCSC--all of which demonstrate his consensus-building skills and his great imagination in crafting bills. During his tenure, Mello carried 727 bills and resolutions, 456 of which the governor signed; many of the others were integrated into other bills.The volume also includes Mello's thoughts on the legislative process; the role of lobbyists; the use of media in campaigns; the culture of the State Senate; and his reflections on the governors with whom he worked, from Edmund G. Brown to Pete Wilson. Mello also discusses his relationship with United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, Chavez's historical legacy, and his own views on relations between growers and migrant farmworkers

George Barati: A Life in Music

George Barati was a distinguished cellist, conductor, and composer. Born in Gyor, Hungary, Barati lived in the United States from 1938 until his death in 1996. His recollections include highlights of his international career as cellist, conductor, and composer spanning some 60 years, and reflections on the state of the musical arts in the United States since the end of World War II.Barati graduated from the Franz Liszt Conservatory of Music in Budapest in 1935. During the 1930s he was a member of the Budapest Concert Orchestra, where he played under the most celebrated conductors of his era. He was a founding member of the Pro Ideale Quartet and studied or performed with Bartok, Dohnanyi, and other eminent faculty members at the Liszt Conservatory. While still a student he became first cellist with the Budapest Symphony and the Municipal Opera. Barati settled in the United States in Princeton, New Jersey in 1938. There he taught cello at Princeton University and studied composition with Roger Sessions from 1938 to 1943.In 1946 Barati moved to San Francisco, where he was a member of the San Francisco Symphony during the tenure of Pierre Monteux. He was also a member of the California String Quartet and founding conductor of the Barati Chamber Orchestra of San Francisco from 1948 to 1952. Barati also began to achieve recognition for his own compositions at this time.From 1950 to 1968 Barati was music director of the Honolulu Symphony and Opera. During this period he also began an extensive international conducting career that included guest and visiting conducting appearances with some 85 orchestras on five continents, including Japan, Europe, and Latin America.In 1968 Barati returned to the mainland and became executive director of the Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts and conductor of the Villa Montalvo Chamber Orchestra in Saratoga, California. From 1971 to 1980 he was music director of the Santa Cruz County Symphony.In addition to his conducting career, he was a juror for the Mitropoulos Competition for Conductors from 1957 to 1970, and participated as a juror for both the Metropolitan and San Francisco Opera Competitions. His honors and awards include the doctor of music, Honoris Causa, from the University of Hawaii in 1955, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965-66, the Ditson Award in 1962, and the Naumberg Award for Composition in 1959

Page Smith: Founding Cowell College and UCSC, 1964-1973

This oral history chronicles the late Page Smith's experiences as founding provost of the campus's first college and his major contributions in shaping the college system here. His narration includes chapters on student culture in the 1960s and 1970s, the pass/fail grading system, his educational philosophy, town/gown relations, campus architecture, the History of Consciousness Program, his relationship with founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry, arts on the campus and the role of his wife, Eloise Pickard Smith, in the founding of the art gallery at Cowell College which now bears her name. The volume is a candid narration which conveys Smith's contrarian perspective on higher education and the flavor of the campus in its early pioneering years.Smith joined the faculty in 1964 and embarked on the adventure of creating a new UC campus. The formative concepts shaping UCSC were an emphasis on undergraduate teaching and the creation of small human-scale colleges around which campus intellectual and cultural life would be organized. Smith became deeply involved in creating a close-knit community at Cowell College, and in promoting a number of innovations during the campus's first decade, perhaps the most significant of which was the narrative evaluation or pass/fail system, an abandonment of the old letter grade system.Smith's interviews are organized into three sections. The first includes Smith's commentary on his controversial appointment as the campus's first provost, early faculty appointments, his efforts to recruit women and minority faculty, and college life. In the second section he discusses issues he confronted as provost, administering Cowell College, establishing the pass/fail grading system, his teaching and curriculum philosophy, the conflict between boards of studies (now designated as departments), and how he defined the provost's role. In the final section, "UCSC's Development", Smith discusses campus-wide topics, including his relationship with founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry, his opinion of campus architecture, the origins of the History of Consciousness program, and town-gown relations. He also discusses the role of his wife, the late artist, Eloise Pickard Smith, in the founding of the art gallery at Cowell College that now bears her name.In the final chapters of the volume, Smith candidly discusses his resignation from the University in 1973 after his colleague and friend, Paul Lee, a professor of religious studies, was not given tenure. Smith used this occasion as a symbolic protest against what he considered the rigidity of the "publish or perish" system governing University faculty promotion and tenure. This issue was a major and paradoxical bete noire in Smith's attitude towards academic life since he himself was uncommonly prolific and published over two dozen books. His Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (1990) provided an elaborate critique of contemporary academic life.Smith's legacy lives on in his scholarly work, which he continued after his retirement from the University, with numerous publications, including the 8-volume People's History of the United States, in his many contributions to UCSC and Cowell College, and in his untiring work as a community activist on behalf of the homeless. He was a co-founder (with his friend Paul Lee) of the William James Association in Santa Cruz, the Homeless Garden Project, the Penny University and the Prison Arts Project