UCSC LRDP and the San Francisco Contado

In Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco, Brechin fleshes out the concept of San Francisco's contado, as well as elaborating on the variety of ways in which it functions. While the contado is defined originally and primarily as a region in which the trade of material goods occurs, another function of the contado is the dissemination of ideas. In his book, Brechin closes with an illustration of the function of the original University of California, now UC Berkley, as a part of the San Francisco's imperial contado. Brechin emphasizes the importance of the commercial and corporate influences that directed the growth of the University of California, influences that are the more prevalent in the modern climate. However, Berkley is not the only school to come into the San Francisco Imperial Contado. While many schools are much more clearly related to the San Franciscan Contado, schools such as Stanford, San Francisco State, UC San Francisco, Cal Maritime, as well as many of the others in the immediate Bay Area, the University of California Santa Cruz has also shown an increased willingness to join in the Contado.

The continued development of the University of California Santa Cruz has followed a similar path to that of Berkley in the late 19th and early 20th century. With a vested interest in research and scientific study, UCSC is further integrating itself into the San Francisco Contado with its current Long Range Development Plan. The LRDP serves as a general guideline for the continuing and changing development of the campus, in both physical and ideological terms. The current LRDP, even more so than previous versions, shows the subtle influence of the San Francisco Contado in many important aspects. The most important of these aspects is the focus of the LRDP on the growth of the Science and Research facilities.

In the LRDP’s draft outline, an emphasis is placed on the importance of UCSC’s research; the product it produces. In the Executive Summary, the LRDP describes the need to expand the student population, campus size, and number of facilities, “is based on UC Santa Cruz's aspirations to expand its academic, research, and professional programs and to increase its graduate student enrollment ... ensuring UCSC's role as a comprehensive public research university within the University of California system. This requires continued evolution and expansion of existing programs, maturation of others, and implementation of new areas of inquiry."

The subtext of this statement is relatively clear – UCSC, in order to continue to receive state funding as well as private donation, must have something to show for itself. In an age more concerned with material production than intellectual progress, UCSC focuses on what it can integrate into the public sphere as a more commidfied product – Scientific Research. For further evidence into this claim, one need look no further than the Universities Public Relations website.

On the UCSC Relations website, there are three headlines. Two of these headlines are directly concerned with accolades to UCSC’s importance as a contributor to current scientific discourse. The first of these is about a professor at UCSC has received an award from Princeton. The fact that this article is one of the more available links on the University Relations website (the same site potential financial supporters would access) indicates the UC’s complacency with a science-oriented image. The school wishes to advertise its position as a prominent member of the scientific community, further supported by the next headline. The second headline is concerning a symposium to be held at UCSC on November 14th.

This symposium heralds UCSC’s advances in the different fields of chemistry. Interestingly, one of the speakers mentioned in the article is James McKerrow, director of the Sandler Center for Basic Research in Parasitic Diseases at UCSF. The link here to UCSF, a medical school quite obviously a part of the San Francisco Contado, is yet another example of the UC’s desire to be incorporated into the techno-science-industry that has arisen from San Francisco capital. UCSC shows a willingness to involve itself with San Francisco in a similar way to Silicon Valley, as a sort of outsourced information-processing site. With a need for funding, UCSC has depicted itself as what the first president of Berkley wanted from his school, a shrine for science.

Along with an increased importance placed on the expansion of programs in the LRDP is an emphasis on an expanded campus. Despite the fact that the UC is met with great protest from students, environmentalists, Santa Cruz residents, and others, the LRDP proposes further expansion of the campus into the northern forest sections. Most of these new buildings will be for the sciences, as they provide the school with the greatest amount of tangible evidence to support further funding. The LRDP, as a sort of ideological compass for the school, seems to be greatly complicit with the current industry centered on technology. One of the LRDP’s goals is quite clear – the school wishes to participate in the scientific discourse of today. It acknowledges that to do so, it must cater to the needs of the contado, and follow the path of schools before it that have joined the San Francisco Imperial Contado – schools like UCSF, Berkley, and Stanford. Although it may not be crystal clear UCSC’s relationship to this contado, the schools willingness to be accepted as such, is all too apparent.

Ferlinghetti's San Francisco

Through his long span as a poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has presented many different views of the city of San Francisco through his work. In his poet laureate series, these disparate images of the same frontier city are presented together in one body of text, San Francisco Poems. Among these poems are Ferlinghetti’s initial impressions of the city, his changing observations with the passing of time, and his hopes and aspirations for what the city can become. These themes are spread through the entirety of the text, but found in comfortable proximity within the poem “Great American Watershed Poem.” In this poem, Ferlinghetti casts light on the many wonders of San Francisco, while simultaneously unearthing the paradoxes that plague the city’s core.

One of the most prevalent themes in San Francisco Poems is the conception of San Francisco as a frontier city, a point at which the lines between east/west, past/present, are blurred. Ferlinghetti introduces his poem with the lines, “San Francisco land’s end and ocean’s beginning … the place where the story ended the place where the story began … Beginning of end and end of beginning” (55). Immediately, the temporal space of the city is prepared in a paradoxical juxtaposition of itself. Ferlenghetti presents an idea of San Francisco as a nebulous space, without definite boundaries. It’s sense of time and space is its own construction, resistant to outside influence. Simultaneously, San Francisco is full of potential – not only a place of endings, but of beginnings as well. It is powerful in its symbolic potential to both create and destroy.

This image is further supported by the description of the city as “The first frontier the last frontier” in the passage as well, for while the city is still just that, a city, and therefore part of civilization, it still provides the author the option to “[spend] most of my divorce from civilization in and out of water front hangouts” (55). With its position as a frontier city, it provides the space in which one can comfortable be both within, and outside the constraints of society.

Due to San Francisco’s precarious position as a frontier city, it is subject to rapid progress. While the city one time presents Ferlinghetti with an image of a Mediterranean village, a city of white, time and progress have since covered this image with soot. The once glorious city is commodified, suddenly its glamour and prestige up for sale. Ferlenghetti presents the correlation between the cultural loss of important lands to the coercive forces of capitalist expansion in the image of “An Arab on the bridge his turban flying Passing Alcatraz he buys it The Last of the Mohicans reels in his line On the end of it a string of beads once lost in a trade for Manhattan Island” (57). Here, even some of the key iconic things that make San Francisco are up for capital trade. These poems propose that these changes in the city have come with a devastating cost.

It is unclear at the end of the poem what it is that San Francisco truly offers. While providing the space for counter-culture, the city has changed itself, into a less progressive space. “Will they let Man be free or won’t they … The tide is at the ebb The phone rings,” the poem ends on these hollow notes (58). Like the space of the city, the conclusion of the poem is nebulous, providing the readers with more questions than answers. Ferlenghetti’s frontier city of San Francisco is a city of possibility and wonder, but with these benefits come threats as well, and no where is this dichotomy presented as clearly as within “Great American Watershed Poem.”