• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, a Time of Transition: Volume One John Marcum Sigfried Puknat Robert Adams John Ellis Paul Niebanck Interviewed by Randall Jarrell Edited by Irene Reti Santa Cruz University of California, Santa Cruz University Library 2014 This oral history is covered by copyright agreements between John Ellis (and John Ellis for Sig Puknat), Gwen Marcum (for John Marcum), Paul Niebanck, and the Regents of the University of California. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview) may be quoted without the University Library’s permission as long as the materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written permission of the University Librarian and a proper citation and may also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: Irene Reti [email protected] or Regional Oral History Project, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. Phone: 831-459-2847. Table of Contents Interview History 1 John Marcum 4 Coming to UC Santa Cruz 4 Searching for a New Chancellor 15 Acting Chancellor Angus Taylor 37 The Future of UCSC 39 Sigfried (Sig) Puknat 44 Coming to UC Santa Cruz 44 Administrative Service 46 Chancellor Dean McHenry 48 The College System 50 Reaggregation 51 The Role of College Provosts 53 The Early History of Consciousness Program 54 Dean McHenry’s Legacy 56 Faculty Appointments 63 Assessing UCSC and Chancellor Dean McHenry 68 The Search For Dean McHenry’s Successor 70 Impressions of Chancellor Mark Christensen 73 Chancellor Christensen’s Resignation 85 The Future of UCSC 104 The Enrollment Crisis 107 Robert Adams 111 Coming to UC Santa Cruz 111 Coordinator of Fiscal and Academic Planning 113 Early Impressions of UCSC 115 The UCSC College System 124 Chancellor Dean McHenry 132 The Search for a New Chancellor 144 Impressions of Chancellor Mark Christensen 147 The Enrollment and Budget Crisis of the Mid-1970s at UC Santa Cruz 158 Acting Chancellor Angus Taylor 175 John Ellis 180 Administrative Service at UCSC 180 Coming to UC Santa Cruz 182 Chancellor Dean McHenry 185 The UCSC College System 188 The Question of Graduate Programs at UCSC 198 Assessing Dean McHenry’s Chancellorship 201 Paul Niebanck 215 Coming to UC Santa Cruz 215 The McHenry Era 217 College Eight 220 The McHenry Legacy 224 Impressions of Chancellor Mark Christensen 226 Reaggregation 232 The Future of UCSC 234 The Events Leading to Christensen’s Resignation 237 Acting Chancellor Angus Taylor 245 Enrollment Crisis at UCSC 247 Recruiting a More Diverse Student Body 248 The Future of the College System at UCSC 252 Graduate Students 256 The Future of UCSC 258 UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, A Time of Transition 1 Interview History 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 UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, A Time of Transition 2 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 UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, A Time of Transition 3 Cruz, 1974-1976, also originally part of this series was published in 2012 and is available on the Regional History website.1 I want to express my special appreciation to John Ellis for reviewing and releasing Sig Puknat’s oral history; to Gwen Marcum, who reviewed and released her husband, John Marcum’s, oral history; and to all of the narrators who were patient with my rather sudden request to publish interviews they had participated in nearly four decades ago. Special thanks to my predecessor Randall Jarrell, for having the prescience to conduct these oral histories early in her own career, and to Professor Michael Cowan, who generously shared his memories and insights into this chapter of UCSC’s history and who assisted with the many logistical and editorial challenges I faced in completing this project. 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 Acting University Librarian, Elizabeth Cowell. —Irene Reti Director, Regional History Project, University Library University of California, Santa Cruz, May 2014 1 See http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/mcfadden UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, A Time of Transition 4 John Marcum John Marcum was a professor of politics at UCSC and was affiliated with Merrill College. He first arrived at UCSC in 1969 as a visiting professor and then became permanent faculty in 1972. Marcum was provost of Merrill College from 1972 to 1977. Marcum earned a B.A. (1949) and Ph.D. (1955) from Stanford University and an M.A. from Columbia University (1951). He served as the senior faculty member on the Chancellor’s Search Committee that hired Mark Christensen as chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. Marcum was interviewed by Randall Jarrell on May 20, 1976. Coming to UC Santa Cruz Jarrell: Why don’t we just start out with your background, when you came here. You were here at UCSC in 1969 for the first time? Marcum: Right, I was here as a visitor in 1969 when I was still on the staff of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Then I went from here to the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver, and I was there two years. Then I was invited back, [to UCSC] much to my surprise, and came here then on a permanent basis in July of ‘72. Jarrell: When you came here permanently, then, you already had an idea of the kind of unconventional institution this was? Marcum: I already had an idea, not necessarily of what life as a provost might be, but what Santa Cruz was about, yes. UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s, A Time of Transition 5 Jarrell: You were invited back not only with an academic appointment, but as provost? Marcum: As provost, that’s right. At that point, you see, they were still, and for one or two times later, going on national searches for provosts, bringing people in from outside, whereas now it’s almost always internal. Jarrell: Inside. Marcum: Stephen [E.] Toulmin came at the same time as I, as provost of Crown. And then a year or two later, I chaired the committee at Kresge that brought May Diaz in. I think May was the last outside appointment, because after that you had [Joseph F.] Bunnett and [Richard R.] Randolph and [Joseph H.] Silverman, all of them internal appointments.

Load more

  267

Copy Link