July 25, 2022
Welcome Incoming Tranfer Students!
Dear entering Transfer Students at Kresge College!
I’m the Provost of Kresge College, and I want to welcome you to Kresge and to UC Santa Cruz! Kresge is a community like no other. Students come to Kresge for its fierce independence, its highly participatory approach to community and learning, and the mutual respect students have for one another.
Kresge College has a rich tradition of supporting transfer students, and we welcome you and your families to make yourself at home at Services for Transfer and Re-entry Students (STARS) on the second floor of our Academic Building. STARS is dedicated to serving students from a wide range of backgrounds and needs, and provides mentorship, counseling, student leadership opportunities, events, and comfortable study spaces.
I also invite you to consider some of the other courses we offer at Kresge that can contribute to your growth as a scholar, activist, naturalist, and communicator.
A few other things about Kresge: for three decades we have been the proud host of UCSC’s LGBTQIA+ Pride celebration and education and a site for major campus events in media studies, student cooperatives, ecological responsibility and environmental justice. We offer practice-oriented enrichment courses in journalism, natural history and field observation, creative writing, and transformative justice in prisons. And here’s the most important part: all the way back to our founding in 1971, we at Kresge pride ourselves in being a college that constantly reinvents itself under the leadership of the newest voices in our community. What will Kresge become, now that you’re here?
Finally, don’t skip these crucial announcements—thank you for reading each one carefully!
-
By now you will have received detailed information about the Online Orientation Course: Kresge 1T: Introduction to Research Universities and the Liberal Arts, and we hope you have been making progress on the course. Here are a few reminders about this course; please read them carefully:
-
Instructions on how to access the online Orientation Course were sent directly to your UCSC email account.
-
Kresge 1T is required: you have been automatically enrolled in it, for Summer quarter. Access to its online materials began on June 21.
-
Kresge 1T is asynchronous: there are no scheduled meetings. There are some deadlines to meet, and web-based discussions, but you’ll make your own decisions about when to participate and engage with the course materials.
-
Kresge 1T is graded Pass/No Pass, and will earn you 1 unit toward graduation. You should expect to spend about thirty hours on the course throughout the summer.
-
The course orients you to our academic advising system, prompt you to explore your educational goals, and introduce you to habits and styles of engagement that have helped past students succeed and thrive at UCSC. You’ll also meet a team of Orientation leaders who will help guide you along the way. The course will prepare you to choose your fall classes, show you how to use your “MyUCSC” portal to enroll, and keep you on track to meet critical deadlines.
-
Kresge 1T is in three parts: Living and Learning Communities, Shaping Your Education, and Opportunity and Student Success. We strongly encourage you to complete course materials in a timely manner, meet all its deadlines, and maximize your flexibility and options in fall enrollment.
-
Kresge College is also the home of your Academic Advising Team — Preceptor Sarah Shane-Vasquez and Academic Advisors Casey Daubert and Kristyn Crouse. Sarah, Kristyn, and Casey provide you with all kinds of support—from your transition into research university learning, to helping you give shape to your UCSC experience, and your path toward graduation. They have rich experience and lots of ideas to support your academic success. Your questions to KresgeAdvising@ucsc.edu over the coming months are most welcome! The advising website linked above always has the most current information about in-person and Zoom advising appointments.
Finally - this is important! - please check your UCSC email account regularly (your “@ucsc.edu” email)—many crucial communications from UCSC will only be sent to that address. Required communications about your orientation course, enrollment, academic advising, housing, and essential campus policies will be sent to that address.
Stay tuned for more from the Office of the Provost (kresgeprovost@ucsc.edu), and from your advising team (kresgeadvising@ucsc.edu) in the coming weeks! Social media is not required but to help you stay connected to academic and social events at Kresge, please consider following us on Instagram (@kc_ucsc), Twitter (@KresgeCollege), or Facebook.
We’re thrilled that you'll be joining our community. Thank you for being the heart of Kresge!
Sincerely,
Mayanthi Fernando,
Kresge Provost
kresgeprovost@ucsc.edu
Sarah Shane-Vasquez,
Kresge Preceptor
kresgeadvising@ucsc.edu
July 7, 2022
Welcome Provost Mayanthi Fernando!
We are excited to announce that as of July 1, Associate Professor of Anthropology Mayanthi Fernando has assumed leadership of Kresge’s academic community as its newest Provost. Her appointment follows a rigorous recruitment process conducted by staff, students, college provosts, and other faculty, during the academic year 2021-2022.
Dr. Fernando (Ph.D. University of Chicago, B.A. Harvard University) studies the way religion and sexuality come together in political and legal conflicts over public space, citizenship, and minority rights in France. Her first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how Muslims are continually excluded from French society as well as how Muslim French activists nonetheless claim Islam as a practice of French citizenship. Professor Fernando has recently turned to questions of form and genre, and how to tell stories that exceed conventional academic narratives, and she is close to finishing a second book on “the secular uncanny,” which draws on Islamic studies and animal studies to rethink what we understand as the natural world.
Professor Fernando teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. Her undergraduate courses include Modernity and Its Others, Religion and Politics in the Muslim World, Religion/Gender/Sexuality, and Postcolonial Britain and France. Her graduate theory courses include Science, Secularism, Religion, Human/NonHuman Entanglements, and the Anthropology of Freedom. She often teaches theory courses in the undergraduate and graduate curriculums of the Anthropology department, and she has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies for the department.
Professor Fernando is an affiliate of the UC Santa Cruz departments of Feminist Studies and the History of Consciousness. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-directed the Center for Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary center bringing students and faculty from the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences into conversation and collaboration. She recently served as Interim Provost of College 9 and College 10 (now John R. Lewis College).
She will bring her broad intellectual and teaching interests and her rich administrative experience to Kresge. Kresge’s academic and residential life leadership knows that the Kresge Community shares their excitement about coming collaborations with Dr. Mayanthi Fernando — so please join us in welcoming Provost Fernando!
March 19, 2022
Dear members of the UCSC community,
I hope this letter finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy.
These past twelve months have been filled with exciting changes for Kresge College (not to mention for the university as a whole), with the campus reopening for in-person instruction and undergoing a historic renovation.
Additionally, this past year saw Kresge’s flagship lecture series, Media and Society, presenting a slate of talks by luminaries ranging from former San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin to members of UCSC’s own faculty, including A.M. Darke (Games and Playable Media) and Craig Haney (Psychology). As always, the series featured lectures and public conversations about the role of media, journalism, popular culture, and representation in contemporary society, although we’ve used the pandemic’s restrictions upon in-person events as an opportunity to increase our accessibility and reach an even wider audience through a variety of remote events, some of them co-presented by The Humanities Institute and Kresge’s core course, Power and Representation.
As part of our Spring Give campaign, I write to you today to humbly request your support for this vibrant series so that we can not only prepare an even more ambitious agenda for the year to come but also remain a magnet for campus’s intellectual energies and a powerful anchor for what it means to be a Kresge student. Please consider helping Media and Society by making a small donation.
In the past, your support has enabled Media and Society to host electrifying speakers on campus, including Teju Cole, Amy Goodman, José Antonio Vargas, Lawrence Bartley, Safiya Umoja Noble, and UCSC alumna Martha Mendoza. We’ll be closing the year with a historic collaborative concert-discussion featuring the great Pamela Z and co-hosted with IAS's Surge: Afrofuturism and the Department of Music's DMA program, and we hope you’ll join us then and in many events to come.
Thanks, on behalf of the Kresge community, for your consideration and generosity.
All best,
Provost Ben Carson
Kresge College
October 11, 2021
Returning to Beloved Kresge — In Myriad Ways
Greetings advancing aeronauts, bright bystanders, calmers and collectors, deliberators and daredevils, luminous litigators, long-lost friends, and cherished alumni of Kresge College,
I hope you received our summer message, about the exciting launch of our humble 50th-anniversary celebrations. Can you make it? Let us know! I’d love to have you join us as the potent words of San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, in conversation with our own faculty, launch our newest core course this coming Thursday, October 14. Or come to our hybrid (in-person and remote) discussion of Kresge’s future on Saturday the 16th … or both!
***
Believe it or not, Kresge is still here! As you know, over the past twenty months or so, Kresge’s fantastic faculty, staff, and students have worked harder than ever under conditions I’m sure no one could have imagined. As we take stock of where we’ve been, and chart a new path forward, I wanted to take this opportunity to reconnect with you and share some of our community’s stories.
And those stories go all the way back to the Fall of 2019—for many that era will seem like a time of innocence, but for Kresge, it was a time of tremendous challenge, that built new strengths into our lives. It was a time of communities damaged by thick smoke and fire, rolling blackouts, and demanding new creativity and imagination as we supported students and staff who confronted loss of family and friends, sometimes displaced from homes or needing to support family under unprecedented conditions. It was also a time in which we struggled to make sense of the events of May and June, as they redefined our nation’s sense of justice, and “equal protection under the law” in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Since 2015, long preceding these world-defining tragedies, Kresge’s core course has centered on questions of equity and criminal justice, and so our community felt a heightened sense of responsibility in making sense of a long-overdue reckoning of racial justice in our media environment.
You can imagine our sadness when another blackout struck, on the day of the first Media and Society lecture, led by the extraordinary Teju Cole, whose journalism is focused on just thoser issues. Teju Cole, a New York Times photography critic and professor at Harvard University, promised to galvanize Kresge’s legacy of critical thinking about media. We braced ourselves for disappointment, but ingenious and hard-working staff like Beth Herndandez-Jason, helped by the generosity of administrators across campus, pitched hard toward an unlikely solution: procuring generators and moving an audience of ~360 to a new location and time of day. And our reward was a wonderful coming together, and powerful conversation that — though wwe would all soon remember these as “before-times” — provosts and department chairs at several colleges and departments would not soon forget.
Believe it or not, 2020 began brightly for Kresge College. We leapt into UCSC’s first Deep Read (Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel of The Handmaid’s Tale) with unique energy and enrichment. Kresge faculty, staff, and students gathered — once in a group of dozens and other times just five or six — to read the work out loud to each other, traversing Atwood’s breathlessly paced story of Gilead, and all its dimensions and characters, in each other’s company, following it with open-ended critical conversation. Though we were interrupted, as March arrived, by the first restrictions on our abilities to gather, the resonance of Atwood’s story of justice forstalled stayed strong in our minds and hearts as awareness of issues of justice on our own campus ascended. The Cost Of Living Adjustment protests of February 2020 shook our campus even more deeply, and Kresge’s academic staff and faculty found it more challenging than ever to ensure we could deliver the extraordinary education that we’ve promised our students. Although the questions of how best to pursue justice for campus workers, including teaching assistants, divided us deeply, we were united in many of our deeper aims. After a series of dialogues with our students, both online and in-person, I collaborated with Oakes Provost Marcia Ochoa in an open letter, to ask that our administration maintain academic and intellectual freedom as the foundation of our community’s values.
I do not need to tell you that just a few short weeks later, SARS-CoV2 redefined our world— forcing us to adapt in ways we couldn’t have imagined even months prior. But Kresge also found resilience at almost every juncture of this pandemic. Our courses kept their vitality, and our faculty found ways to make zoom interesting. We had to shift our approaches in a dozen unexpected situations, often exhausting, and often tragic, to meet students “where they were” in their new-found challenges: displacements to care for aging relatives whose care diminished, lost loved-ones, lost income from lost jobs, itself intensifying the need to work and study remotely. And in early June, we were proud to keep Kresge’s tradition of hosting the campus PRIDE festival: Pride Was a Riot. This brought us a mixture of celebration and education that Kresge has fostered powerfully since the early 1990s, this time in the form of an open mic and “Zoom” dance party, co-hosted with Games and Playable Media’s Professor Micha Cardeñas—the first time any of us had ever tried this—but it worked! A grand, social-distanced time, with much-needed release and celebration, was had by all.
The disruptions of spring pivoted to a new 2020-2021 academic year, not without struggle, but much more gracefully. Thanks to core faculty leaders like New York police abuse investigator and frequent Los Angeles Book Review contributor Daniel Pearce, and transformative justice activist and sociologist Megan McDrew, we embarked upon an educational collaboration with the Marshall Project, and our individual and collective responsibilities to justice. And your entering class in fall 2020 was more energized and empowered than perhaps ever I’ve seen — whereas past Kresge classes have enjoyed numerous stages for their final projects and presentation at the end of the quarter, Kresge’s had to be happy with digital expression, and they certainly rose to the challenge! Check out their amazing publication, Creative Interventions: I know you’ll be as impressed as I was, by the dedication and imagination of Kresge’s entering class of 2020, to make real, and potent, their learning in our extraordinary course.
And now we commence a new journey - How do we welcome new frosh, and old frosh — last year’s class being newcomers to our physical space — at the same time? How do we safely rediscover our in-person potential, and the marvelous resource that is the physical campus, taking the best of our new skills and old to channel a great educational journey? Let’s get it started together. I hope we’ll be able to see you all virtually on the 14th, with Tongo Eisen-Martin, or on the 16th for discussion of our new campus-in-bloom—either virtually or in person. These events mark our 50th year as a college, and the beginning of a new era—an era in which I hope you’ll stay connected to us. They also mark the beginning of an exciting Media and Society lecture series, roaring back to life with Professor A.M. Darke on November 16th, Craig Haney on March 1st, and on May 14th the inimitable luminary of multi-media arts, Pamela Z. (All events at 7 PM, and for more on each of them, stay connected to our Media and Society webpage.)
I’m looking forward to shaping this new world with our community’s newest members. And what I hope is a forgivable hiatus, I’m looking forward to including you all in that conversation too. Until we meet again!
All best,
Provost Ben Carson
Kresge College
June 18, 2021
Welcome 2021 Frosh, to Kresge College At UCSC!
Greetings entering Kresge frosh!
On behalf of Kresge College staff, faculty, and student leadership, it is my privilege to be among the first to welcome you to UC Santa Cruz. I have some important announcements below—you need them, so make sure you read them carefully—but first, I hope you’ll allow me a little storytelling.
About Kresge: As you may already have begun to see, Kresge College is an extraordinary place. We’re famous as a community that leads from grassroots upward, with student-centered approaches to learning and living. We are the traditional host of UCSC’s LGBTQIA+ PRIDE celebration and education, a site for major campus events in media studies, student cooperatives, ecological responsibility, and we offer enrichment courses ranging from journalism, to observation in the natural landscape, to narratives of prison and policing. Known as “the writers’ college”, Kresge has a history of thinking outside the norms of what a college is1, and what it can do—and our student groups, staff, and faculty proudly search for new ways to expand the possibilities of higher education. Perhaps most important—all the way back to our founding in 1971, at Kresge we pride ourselves in being a college that constantly reinvents itself under the leadership of the newest voices in our community. What will Kresge become, now that you’re here?
Online Orientation: You have recently received detailed information about UCSC’s Online Orientation process. This orientation to UC Santa Cruz will be delivered in your first university course, Kresge 1A: Introduction to University Life and Learning. This required course will guide you through a wide range of opportunities and resources at UC Santa Cruz, assist you with the challenges of planning your education, and introduce you to habits and styles of engagement that can meaningfully contribute to your learning and success. Unlike most UCSC courses, Kresge 1A is online, and ‘asynchronous’, which means that there are no scheduled meetings required of you. There are some deadlines in the course, but you will make your own decisions about when to participate and engage with the course materials. The course is graded “Pass/No Pass”, and when you complete it you will have earned one unit of academic credit. Among its other outcomes, the course introduces you to the academic advising system at UCSC, helps you explore your educational goals, prepares you to enroll in fall classes, shows you how to use your MyUCSC portal to enroll in classes, connects you to your online Orientation Leader Team, and reminds you of critical deadlines. Engagement and active participation is expected to pass this course.
Now to those announcements — thank you for reading carefully!:
-
Our Core Course, Kresge 1: Power and Representation, marks the essential beginning of a contemporary liberal arts education, and sets in motion our work as an intellectual community. The course will orient you to new practices of reading, dialogue, interpretation, and constructive critical thinking that are crucial in the discourse of a university, and crucial to your success in the learning you’ll encounter here. At Kresge, we begin that conversation with reflections on the role of media—a variety of channels of public and private dialogue and culture—in struggles for justice in society. We examine multimedia journalism, non-fiction writing, music, film, and other popular culture. And we’ll begin right away—an aspect of this course will be introduced in your summer orientation course, Kresge 1A, mentioned above. Meanwhile, please watch your email in July for a message with more information on enrollment in fall-quarter Kresge 1.
-
Kresge College is also the home of your Academic Advising Team. Preceptor Sarah Shane-Vasquez and Academic Advisors Casey Daubert and Thao Mai provide you with all kinds of support—from your transition into research university learning, to helping you give shape to your UCSC experience, and your path toward graduation. They have rich experience and lots of ideas to support your academic success. Your questions to KresgeAdvising@ucsc.edu, over the coming months, are most welcome—we’re excited to answer your questions! And when we can’t, we’ll point you in the right direction. The links above help guide you on how to make an appointment with us or visit us in our Zoom-based “walk-in” hours.
-
In order to get an early enrollment appointment date (to enroll for classes), you must complete Parts 1 and 2 of the orientation process (in your Slug Orientation modules, part of the Kresge 1A course mentioned above), and submit your official test scores and transcripts to admissions by the deadlines. Official transcripts must be sent electronically or postmarked no later than July 1. The deadline for official test scores is July 15. You will receive Part 1 of Slug Orientation on June 21st. You will only receive Part 2 when you complete Part 1. The earlier you complete Parts 1 and 2 of the orientation process, the earlier you will receive your enrollment appointment date. Many UCSC classes fill up quickly so you are strongly encouraged to take advantage of early enrollment to maximize your chances of obtaining a spot in your preferred classes.
Instructions about how to access the Online Orientation process will be sent directly to your UCSC email account. Check your UCSC email account regularly (your @ucsc.edu email) as it is the official form of communication for the university. In addition to information about academic advising in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the Orientation process, you will get information about how to connect directly with your academic advisors this summer as well as contact information for other offices on campus.
***
Finally, as you may know, UCSC has transitioned back to an in-person model of learning, for Academic Year 2021-2022, though there are still provisions for some courses to work remotely. Emerging from a year of uncertainty and challenge (including many creative solutions!), it is our deep conviction that Kresge College can give you that sense of home as strongly as ever.
I'm thrilled you'll be joining our resilient and dynamic community on this journey. Again, a warm welcome to you, and thank you for being the heart of Kresge!
Warm regards,
Ben Leeds Carson
Kresge College Provost
1156 High St. / UCSC
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
kresgeprovost@ucsc.edu
831-459-4512
P.S. To help you stay connected to academic and social events at Kresge, please consider following us on Instagram (@kc_ucsc), Twitter (@KresgeCollege), or Facebook. (But yes, we’ll also send you emails.)
1. Molly Worthen, “The Anti-College Is on the Rise,” in the New York Times, 8 June 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/college-anti-college-mainstream-universities.html>
December 4, 2020
Greetings Students, Staff, Faculty, and passionate members of the Kresge College Community!
I write to you with excitement about four fantastic events this coming week -- Monday and Tuesday evenings -- organized by students, mentors, and faculty of Fall 2020's Kresge 1: Power and Representation.
A film festival, a cafe reading, a meta-exhibit, and a multimedia open mic.
Please spread the word, share the fliers and ... (really) mark your calendars.
Each is its own distinct exposition of lovely and amazing tilts toward benevolence, toward creative intervention, toward radical listening and seeing, and toward meaningful reflection on problems of power, representation, and justice in the present moment of our lives. So please join us for the conversation.
All best,
Provost Ben
Monday 7 Dec, 5:30 - 6:30 PM [Reception]
New film and video work addressing contemporary crises ranging from climate justice to domestic violence in the time of COVID-19
Monday, 7 Dec, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
ZOOM CAFE: A BIT OF ERA-COLLAPSING POETRY AND MUSIC
Words and sounds, and maybe a flickering neon sign just outside the window, an energetic something-or-other in the distance. Kresge frosh lyricize and narrate a unique historical moment.
Tuesday 8 Dec, 4:30-6:30 PM
NEW CREATIVITY AND ACTIVISM AT KRESGE COLLEGE
Gaming, Exhibits, Oral History, and More from Entering Frosh at Kresge College
Tuesday, 8 Dec, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
KRESGE 2020 OPEN MIC PLENARY
From prison industrialism to music therapy for mental health, Kresge frosh step to the stage to re-imagine contemporary issues of power, representation, literacy, and justice.
Dear Kresge Frosh: You're Almost Done!
Greetings magisterial artisans, indubitable neocreants, drifting anti-dreamers, optimistic naysayers, and otherwise incorrigible and still unrelenting frosh of Kresge College,
Is it only your first quarter? Almost unbelievable. We still have a few hills ahead of us, to climb in to challenges and possibilities of 2021, but my role, and your faculty's roles -- not just in core but in all classes -- are leveling, tapering, slightly, as your voices and your work starts to come forward. I want to thank you all for an inspiring first quarter so far ... a first quarter that has at the very least put something down on record as to what's possible, and given us some hopes to live up to. I especially those of you who took up my invitation, in our first plenary, to "lean in".
***
All that's left of this email is information I hope you'll take a close look at -- mostly information about how and where we have events at-the-ready to help shape your process in these final projects. But also some slightly more far-reaching information about where our community can go from here:
1. FINAL PROJECT WORK PARTY: Chelsea, Esme, Exodus, and Zofia hope to see you on Friday at 4 pm, as they host the second of two meetings designed to raise our awareness of each other's projects-in-process.
Get yourself to bit.ly/kresge1, passcode: m1rgqy (+ more information on the poster attached)
Friday, 4 pm (November 20), and we'll have a chance to brainstorm a little more, get more questions answered, and hopefully get some more inspiration going on what's possible and available to you as we round the corner to the big night(s) of your final presentations. UNTIL THEN:
don't forget about this important google sheet, which is where
we need info from you about your project plans, and where (optionally), you can share your proposal with the community.
2. PERFORMANCE-and/or-MUSIC ORIENTED FINAL PROJECTS: Along with 1-2 other faculty and navigators,
please join me Tuesday, 24 November 2020, to discuss options for performing your work live in the final week of classes. Some of you have class at 5 - 6:50 pm 11/24, but I'll be on the call until 7, and the vital information about performance opportunities will be repeated at the end of our meeting. Zoom info for this meeting will be added to the calendar event on Monday the 23rd.
Please RSVP (to
kresgeprovost@ucsc.edu)if you're interested in planning a performance for December 8, or if you're interested in co-organizing a zoom performance for a smaller audience at a different time. (
Time permitting, we may even discuss some methods for writing satirical song lyrics!)
3. A.M. DARKE'S RESOURCES for GAME DEVELOPMENT: As promised, last night's webinar was recorded; please feel free to access it here using your UCSC account (required for access); this is not for wider distribution. And LUCKY US -- we were able to keep the webinar going after 9 PM last night, so that the last 20 minutes of this video (start at about 1hr47min30sec)... will be useful to those interested in game development. Please also see a list of links below my sign-off, which are platforms and resources that Professor Darke refers to in her incredibly useful supplemental presentation.
For more than a decade, Kresge College has been the host of a coalition of students, staff, and faculty dedicated to work--echoing TJ Demos' presentation yesterday--on environmental justice, anti-racist education, and sustainable approaches to world democracy. The Common Ground Center specializes in fostering transformative and collaborative conversations like their popular World Cafe program, and several courses in transformative justice, transformative communication, and a speaker series dedicated to intersections of environmentalism and social justice. Their next World Cafe is titled "Gratitude" -- on Wednesday 25 November -- the day before Thanksgiving -- at 1 pm. (Please visit zoom event 919 6532 6712, passcode "worldcafe".) Contact Puja Vasan or Nona Golan at the Common Ground Center via the link or their emails (cc'd) if you have more questions.
Whew. I think that's about it for now -- thanks if you've read this far in a long email. There is so much more to say -- gratitude for tremendous panelists and conversation last night, gratitude for a sense of forward movement in an uncertain time. As always, please reach out to me if you need help, and let's work together to make the most of our education and community. I'm so excited for December 8, and for the exhibitions and performances ahead of us.
(Don't forget Professor Darke's resources are below!)
All my best,
Provost Ben
Ben Leeds Carson
Provost, Kresge College at U.C. Santa Cruz
Associate Professor of Music
Affiliate in Digital Arts / New Media
1156 High St.
Santa Cruz. CA 95064
NOTES AND RESOURCES FROM A.M. DARKE
My own game 'Ye or Nay? can be played online between 2 players. Make a room code and share it with a friend.
This was made using the Unity game engine and Photon plugin for networked play. Definitely too complicated to make, but it's an example of a creative intervention. You can read the artist statement by clicking on the game credits in the top right corner once you begin a game.
No programming or art experience necessary:
Twine: An interactive fiction engine for text-based branching narratives
Bitsy: entry-level tool for making small pixel-art games
Flickgame: super simple point and click game engine
Familiarity with basic programming concepts is helpful:
Processing: A tool for creative code that can make games and other visual interactive work.
Also P5.js for folks more comfortable with javascript. This one is easier to use.
Processing and P5.js Games:
Friday November 13,2020
Greetings to entering Transfer Students!
I’m so honored to welcome you to the University of California, Santa Cruz! If you’re getting this, you’re among our newest admits, and you’ve been assigned to Kresge College.
You’re set to enter our community in the winter quarter. And what a winter this will be! It hardly needs to be mentioned that your experience of beginning a UC Santa Cruz education will be unlike any we’ve known before. I want you to know that at Kresge College, we’re motivated and excited to make this a great start for you, and I hope you share my excitement.
Kresge is a college of writers and readers, scientists and poets, journalists and agro-ecologists... single parents, military veterans, life-long learners, immigrants, Santa Cruz locals, and mixtures of all of the above. Kresge is the home of Science Communication and City-on-a-Hill Press, and the roots of women's studies; we are a community that, for many generations, has been deeply committed to participatory democracy. We're a place for economists, artists, service-learners, and astronomers... and the home of UCSC’s LGBTQIA+ pride parade. But the true heart of our unique college can be found, dating back to the words of our very first course catalogues in the early 1970s: At Kresge, we pride ourselves in being a college that constantly reinvents itself to welcome the newest voices in our community. What will Kresge become, with you, our newest members, as our leaders?
Kresge College has a rich tradition of supporting transfer students, and we welcome you and your families to make yourself at home at Services for Transfer and Re-entry Students (STARS) on the second floor of our Academic Building. STARS is dedicated to serving students from a wide range of backgrounds and needs, and provides mentorship, counseling, student leadership opportunities, events, and comfortable study spaces. We also join forces with STARS to offer Kresge 25: Successful Transfer to the Research University, a popular and intrepid curriculum designed just for transfer students. This 2-unit course is designed to help you make a well-informed and supported transition into our university with a sense of purpose, and a greater awareness of the distinctive opportunities of a liberal arts education at a research university. (Complete this form by November 17th to express interest in the course.) When you enroll, you’ll have an opportunity to select a section with a distinct area emphasis relevant to your own disciplinary or interdisciplinary academic goals. I also invite you to consider some of the other courses we offer at Kresge that can contribute to your growth as a scholar, activist, naturalist, and communicator.
Kresge College Academic Advising Team — Preceptor Sarah Shane-Vasquez, and Academic Advisers Casey Daubert and Thao Mai. Sarah, Thao, and Casey provide you with all kinds of support—from your transition into research university learning, to helping you give shape to your UCSC experience, and your path toward graduation. Write to KresgeAdvising@ucsc.edu with any questions you might have, and we are ready to meet you--either by appointment or during our popular zoom “walk-in” hours.
https://kresge.ucsc.edu/advising/contact.html
I hope you will make powerful use of your new intellectual home at Kresge College. Students often fulfill many of their degree requirements with Kresge courses, on topics ranging from agroecology to media studies, from cooperative management to grant-writing. We hope you’ll explore Kresge deeply, and be involved in the many smaller communities that combine to weave the fabric of our college.
I'm thrilled you'll be joining us on this journey. Welcome to UCSC, and thank you for being the heart of Kresge!
July 1, 2020
Submitted by UC Santa Cruz faculty
On June 2, the Movement for Black Lives called for a day of action focused on university divestment from the police. By that evening, seventy UCSC faculty had signed a letter to UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive asking her to end police and ICE presence on campus; to establish an advisory board to monitor campus police activity; and to create offices of community nonviolence in conjunction with a transparent budgeting process.
The week before, University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel announced—in response to a powerful statement from UM Student Body President Jael Kerandi—the limiting of university collaborations with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). On June 2, Minneapolis Public Schools terminated their contract with MPD. And on June 7, Minneapolis’s City Council pledged to dismantle the police department and institute alternative structures. Black activists have long called for the demilitarizing, defunding, and dismantling of a police system that far from protecting all, actively reproduces racial violence and social inequality. As cities and campuses across the nation take up this call, our largest public university system should be a leader.
Two recent studies have shown that UC campus police disproportionately stop, search, and arrest Black and Latino members of their communities. Despite 200 incidents of reported use of force, the UCPD has disclosed almost no records in the interest of police transparency or accountability, nor has its transparency and accountability website been updated since 2016. Because the UCPD, like California Highway Patrol, enjoys statewide jurisdiction and authority, its actions extend beyond campus. Armed with military-grade respirators and canisters of tear gas, UCSC and UCB police were patrolling Oakland streets last week. On June 1, hundreds of protesters in Los Angeles were detained and processed, without university permission, at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium. When UCLA declared that none of its facilities may be so used, it recognized that the university is not a carceral space.
UCSC itself drew national headlines in February when—at a cost of $300,000 a day—it enlisted local and state police, equipped with riot gear and military surveillance technology, to contain peaceful demonstrations in support of graduate students striking for a living wage. Seventeen students were arrested, and some sustained injuries. Beyond the initial deployment of police, the culture of policing has become business as usual in UCSC’s response to the protests. Even as the campus has been almost entirely closed due to the pandemic, and in the midst of the national uprisings, UCSC has continued to pursue student conduct charges against several dozen strikers and protesters. A disproportionate number of Black, Latino, indigenous, queer, trans, and undocumented students have faced being banned from campus, dismissed from employment, and, in the process, they are suffering grave harm to their academic and financial futures.
Only last week, UCSC students engaging in protest actions were again targeted. A SCPD Instagram post on June 4 (“A Tale of Two Protests”) contrasted the previous day’s West Cliff gathering of 6,000 people with protest actions later that evening, and singled out UCSC graduate students as holding “a different intention of destruction.” For the university to maintain ties with a police force that sees our own students as bad actors diminishes its core mission. Education is not the same thing as “law and order” control, surveillance, discipline, and punishment. Surely now is the time for UCSC and the UC to redress punitive responses to the constitutionally recognized right to protest.
When we call for the university to defund and divest from the police, we are asking it that it acknowledge how its everyday operating practices reproduce underlying structures of racism and inequity. Resources moved out of policing can support the infrastructure of the university we want: Ethnic Resource Centers, anti-hate/bias training, offices dedicated to nonviolence and community justice, living wages for graduate student workers and adjunct lecturers, greater financial and academic support for undergraduates. The list is long; ending police and ICE presence on our campuses is the first step.
Submitted by faculty at UC Santa Cruz: Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, Christine Hong, Nick Mitchell, T.J. Demos, Karen Bassi, Ben Leeds Carson.
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/06/19/guest-commentary-ending-police-presence-at-ucsc-is-first-step/
We write to you as your Provost, Senior and Associate Directors, Groundskeeper, College Programs Staff, Housing and Housing Office Coordinators, Lead Preceptor/Advisor, and neighbors at Kresge College. We hope this note finds you well and we hope you are staying connected with friends, family, and loved ones.
We write to you about the repeated appearance of profane graffiti at Kresge, reflecting anger at the UC and anger at UCSC’s higher administration. The problem has persisted long enough that we feel we need to give some voice to our experience of it, and we hope you’ll raise your voices with us. We suspect that the perpetrators are not Kresge or Porter students—this is just not how we do things here—but we don’t know for sure, and we want it to stop.
The graffiti is cowardly. Meaningful protest reflects coalition and solidarity, and it speaks truth to power. The graffiti does neither—it lacks imagination and purpose, and if it is intended to afflict or annoy the UC administration, by vandalizing one of our most remote and tightly-knit communities, it has missed its target by a mile. Kresge staff and students have supported student orgs, unions, cooperatives, and others, who have protested meaningfully to demand accessible public education, racial justice, intellectual freedom, labor rights, labor equity, and more. We want to hear reasoned protest and dissent. We do not want our homes destroyed.
The graffiti harms students. Like all of us, students still living at Kresge—who are nearly the only ones who see the graffiti—are likely to be experiencing challenging reductions in security, community, amenities, and services.
The graffiti harms staff. It damages the work environment, and adds stress and burden, to workers who spend hours, some of them in harm’s way, to maintain a living environment already under exceptional duress.
We imagine that many of you share our feelings about this, and have more to say. We look forward to turning a corner toward sanity and comfort in our campus home. Thank you for reading and we invite you to spread the word.
Your neighbors,
Ben Leeds Carson, Kresge College Provost
Mike Yamauchi-Gleason, Senior Director of College Student Life
Kathy Cooney, Associate Director of College Student Life
Katharina Pierini, Groundskeeper at Kresge College
Aidan Johnston, Assistant College Programs Coordinator
Labris Willendorf, College Academic Programs Coordinator
Raven Iverson-Davis, Housing Office Coordinator
D.J. Bell, Housing Coordinator
Sarah Shane-Vasquez, Lead Academic Preceptor
February 18, 2020
Greetings undergrads of all stripes and strategies, uncompromising undertakers, fantastic fellows, and fabulously fired-up firebrands of Kresge College,
Just two reminders — in case these aren't already in your calendar:
- Come to our DEEP READ Tea and Cookies tomorrow!... Wednesday, February 19, at 4:00 PM — or if you're on the other side of the picket line, or just can't make it physically, follow this zoom link to be here digitally. We'll relax from 4-5, but around 5 we'll read a little of Atwood's The Testaments together. (Note: this was previously advertised with a different theme and date, but stay tuned for a correction on that one!)
- Don't forget that the Reyna Grande Scholarship deadline is March 2. See the attached flyer, and visit bit.ly/ReynaGrandeScholarship for more information. I really hope you'll take a risk — and submit a proposal!... even if you're still not 100% what you want to do.
All my best,
Provost Ben
February 10, 2020
To Kresge and Oakes Students, on Intellectual Freedom - from Provosts Ben Carson & Marcia Ochoa:
Dear Students of Kresge and Oakes Colleges,
Last week we learned that graduate students at UCSC will begin a strike this week to improve their compensation and working conditions. The strike started today, Monday, February 10th, and the strikers have not set an end date. This follows a grade strike that began at the end of Fall quarter. Both strikes were initiated independently of their union representation, in part because the union representing graduate students is bound by a contract affecting all UC System campuses. The concerns of our graduate students on this campus are specific to the cost-of-living issues we face in Santa Cruz. In a meeting earlier this month, the administration offered to pause its disciplinary actions toward striking graduate students, if graduate students would pause their strike action.
That de-escalation may still be around the corner, and we can hope for it. However, on Friday, February 6, in anticipation of this week’s strike, the administration took an additional action that deserves our special and critical attention at Oakes and Kresge Colleges. They asked you to report courses and their instructors, by name, to the administration, either
- if/when classes are canceled or re-positioned as a result of the picket line, or
- if/when the content of lectures isn’t what you expected according to the syllabus, including, for example, if the content includes any discussion of the strike or the conditions that led to it.
You have all taken core courses, at Oakes — Communicating Diversity for a Just Society — or at Kresge — Power and Representation, and with your experiences in those courses you might describe the administration’s request in rhetorical terms. The administration represented a concern with your education, and asked for information about classroom disruptions. In the same expression, the administration asked for information about the choices that your teachers make. Was the lecture aligned with the syllabus, did they teach you what you expected, did they make a decision related to a picket line, was it practical, or political, or both? We invite you to consider these questions through the lens you developed in Core.
As Provosts, we are here to provide guidance as you enter the University and make your way through your degrees. We are not here to compel you toward any one perspective in this difficult strike, but rather to encourage you to think critically. We think it is part of the privilege and duty of a university education to aspire to principles of free expression and free inquiry. You always have the freedom to express your thoughts and grievances to the administration — you can report the need for more electives that fulfill a particular GE requirement, more representation of trans- or non-binary histories, report an instructor’s discussion of the strike, or request more quarters of advanced Arabic. Alongside those freedoms, Kresge and Oakes Colleges also champion the same principles for your instructors — we believe that their freedom to teach, in the ways they deem most relevant and meaningful, to be part of what makes a truly great college education at UCSC. We are concerned that the reporting form creates a climate of surveillance for instructors, especially TAs and Lecturers, who choose to participate in strike actions or who discuss the strike in class. This goes against our principles of academic freedom.
You have all experienced a number of disruptions since you arrived at UC Santa Cruz. Our country continues to wage war, we have become used to the travel ban and inhumane immigration detention and border patrol policies. We’ve all experienced the effects of climate change in the PGE power outages of the Fall quarter. Many of you have done without grades in some of your Fall classes due to strike actions. These disruptions, of course, come on top of the big changes in your life that are part of starting college. We as Provosts want you to consider these disruptions as part of your experience of the social forces we’ve begun to understand through Core. We encourage you to use the critical thinking and reading skills you practiced in Core, as well as the communities of engagement and discussion you’ve developed so far to consider the disruptions facing you now. Be part of the conversation — ask questions and tell people what you think.
We want you to share your concerns with us when you have them. As your Provosts we would love to hear from you. Your Advising and Student Life teams, as well as many other campus resources, are also here to hear your concerns and help. As Provosts, we have already made accommodations for academic review given the grading strike. We support the graduate students who are taking a stand against the impossible cost of living in Santa Cruz, and we also see that this impacts our students. We believe the strikers are sensitive to these concerns, and we are here to support you, our students, through the strike. We expect the University of California to provide opportunities for education that are accessible, and that build the educated society in which we aspire to live, and we hope the strike is resolved soon in a way that allows our graduate students and TAs to focus on the teaching and research they are here to do.
Sincerely,
Ben Leeds Carson, Provost — Kresge College
Marcia Ochoa, Interim Provost — Oakes College
January 28, 2020
