purpledays

Suite de l’affaire université… j’ai démandé des informations à  un prof du Center for Cultural Studies (un “informateur” en qui j’ai confiance)…

Mon mail :

I would like to discuss with you a question, a student told us that UCSC was built with the clear aim of putting the students in disconnection with the possibility of political mobilization. An urban plan then. Meanwhile she also said that they were lucky to have very radical and interesting faculty.

But I don’t find good info on this on the internet. The infos i find make me reflect on the differences and connections between political truths and historical truths, but it is too long for email…. and i was also thinking on geophilosophy, geographies, thought, the things we were discussing…
It seems that the uni was planed in the late 50s, founded in 65, and I discovered that one of the têtes pensantes was Clark Kerr, the theoretician of multiversity… And then i read an interview with him where he told about the way some radical students throwed their degrees to him in the commencement ceremony in 69, and how he felt so bad because they never thought about things like isolating students from revolt but only to put the students in the best environment possible to study. I don’t know if I told you that i was four years part of a research project on the future of universities, so I know a bit on these issues and i am still very interested (and i read Kerr’s book). So so I would like to know more about the history of ucsc… so if you have a reference, of a book of history, but there is no hurry, next time we meet for drinks we can see.

Maria,
Let’s talk soon. Much to discuss.
On UCSC history:
The idea that UCSC was built to prevent student protest is, as your history and timeline indicate, pure mythology, and it embarrasses me that people say this so often, when it is so obviously false. UCSC was founded under rather utopian impulses, under the model of Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale university– the small, de-centered, undergraduate-focused alternative to the alienating mega-universities that were the norm in the postwar public university scene. Jean Baudrillard, in his sometimes interesting but mostly idiotic book AMERICA (Europeans often display stunning ignorance about this country and I’m glad you’re trying to avoid this), has a section about the difficulty of mounting protest at UCSC, when no one would see the protest. There is some geographical truth in this of course, but it’s not a matter of intentionality. A political scientist who used to teach here, Richard Hofstadter, wrote a book many years ago called The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It isn’t a perfect analysis, but it might teach you something important about this country. Here’s an excerpt:
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/The_paranoid_style.html

à  suivre…

Posted by maria on January 28th, 2006 in: Université University.