I’ve written a lot about what it’s like being an international student in Davis, including the academic side. But I haven’t talked much about the practicalities of student living. So, how fun of a place is Davis from an outside perspective?

In Lithuanian, we have these two words: “studijuoti” and “studentauti.”  Both describes the activity of students, but while the first one simply means “to study,” the second one applies when studies become just a secondary activity and being at university is simply an excuse to party.

Before coming to Davis I was definitely in the first group. I wasn’t too nerdy, but going out three nights in a row was unheard of. Having fun is not a bad thing, but there needs to be a balance. I’ve been working hard on it this year and things have changed a bit since, even prompting my mom to blurt, “Finally you have some social life, too.”

To be honest, this comment was entirely based on the increased activity on my Facebook account (and yes, I still have my mom among my friends). People just feel the need to capture every single moment of our year abroad and, while sometimes silly, I think that’s completely understandable.

But excessive picture-taking is only part of the story. Me being in the picture — that’s what changed. I’m still studying a lot, and studies definitely come first. But I guess the “it’s only one year” thing is powerful enough to make me say yes much more often and to more things. And yet I’m staying in tonight writing this column, while others are having $1 pizza at Uncle Vito’s. Oh, the irony!

Let’s admit it, for many students going out and having fun are strongly associated with alcohol. Now in most countries the legal drinking age is 18, which seems reasonable. But then we come here and some of us are under 21. We can’t help but curse the seemingly stupid laws that don’t allow us to spend the night at the bar with our friends, even when we don’t have any interest in drinking.

American students have come up with a perfect solution to this “problem,” though — house parties! I haven’t been to so many house parties since middle school when everyone was having a mandatory birthday at their place. But who didn’t love those?

Same with house parties now. It’s much more casual (you can wear funky wool socks and drink from a cup that says “A nice Jewish boy”), there’s always lots of food (either salty junk or amazing homemade Chinese), discussions are often very interesting (from linguistics to Eurovision) and the DJ will always play the song you want.

We even had a house party for my 21st in February, where cakes were made, poetry written, salsa danced and karaoke played. What bar or club could offer all that in one night? Plus the thrill that police visits offer. I still vividly remember fleeing from our very first house party here due to a police scare. Fun times!

When I mentioned this week’s topic to one of my friends, she insisted that I also write about food. I love food but it also presents tons of problems, especially for students, such as eating healthy without spending too much money and trying to learn how to cook without giving up and eating out. Add the idealism of being a budding vegetarian or environmentalist, and each meal becomes a nightmare.

What I don’t like here is grocery shopping. I got used to that a little bit, but at first all that corn syrup, chemicals, hormones and GMOs looked very discouraging. As a result I’ve been eating out a lot, discovering all these new cuisines and tastes. Also, the fruit and veg stalls at Farmers Market are my favorites. I still can’t believe that oranges and kiwis are grown in the local area, and pluots and persimmons were totally new to me.

Of course, being a student is so much more than just drinking and eating. But it’s lunches on the Quad and pub crawls in downtown at night – not my classes, unfinished assignments or applications for internships – that I look forward to the most when I start my day.

You can reach KRISTINA SIMONAITYTE at ksimonaityte@ucdavis.edu.

The Labor Department recently released figures showing that record numbers of people aged 65 and older are still working jobs. With poverty rates for the elderly rising, many are holding onto their positions long past traditional retirement ages. Meanwhile, report after report confirms that Americans work longer hours than the rest of the developed world and that number keeps increasing. Even up to our deaths, our lives are being devoured by work.

Most of us hate work and would rather be doing something else. At the same time, labor-saving technologies have slashed the time required to produce enough for ourselves. Why, then, aren’t we enjoying more leisure?

Because our bosses won’t let us. Workers are always paid a fraction of the value they produce for their employer. (Otherwise, why would anyone hire them in the first place?) If labor-time increases, capitalists receive more value at the expense of workers. It is therefore in the capitalist class’ interest to expand work hours as much as they can get away with.

Under this social system, nearly all goods and services are obtained either through laboring for someone else as a worker or feeding off someone else’s extra labor as a capitalist. If you do not work, or force others to work for you, you do not count.

Naked coercion and the threat of poverty ensure the acquiescence of most workers, but it also helps that most have been instilled with a deep moral revulsion for idleness. For many, the most loathsome idea is that the state might provide bare subsistence to someone who can’t or won’t work. We pay workers to produce landmines and menthol cigarettes, but subsidizing someone to hang about strikes both sides of the political spectrum as obscene.

In recent years, however, a small but growing tendency of libertarian Marxists and anarchists has developed in opposition to the dominion of labor. Theorists ranging from the Italian Autonomists to the British journal Aufheben have rejected both the capitalist work ethic and the Leninist ideology of the worker’s state to call for an end to drudgery.

That is not to say that we should all just laze around. There will always be a need for some kind of useful activity, but, whereas capitalism demands more and more labor for its own sake, a democratically organized economy would strive to expand free time — the only real wealth.

This might sound like something out of “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but it’s the direction our economic system is lurching toward. Productivity gains are slowly eliminating necessary labor — the lifeblood of capitalism. For example, between 1976 and 2006, the labor-time required to produce a ton of steel dropped by 90 percent. And it isn’t just industrial labor that’s being automated out of existence. Now, even complex service tasks from paralegal work to marketing are being performed by inexpensive software.

The results of this have been clear: Capital is starved for exploitable labor. Since the early 1970s, the capitalist economy has remained relatively stagnant, unable to achieve the profit rate of the postwar period. While this trend continues, we will see growth in the “surplus population,” those no longer needed by the capitalist work machine. Barring some unforeseen technological breakthrough big enough to jump-start a new era of work – something on the order of the automobile – we will undoubtedly see ever-sharper crises.

Of course, as David Harvey often jokes, Marxists predicted 12 of the last three crises. Capitalism remains cunning, able to evolve and respond to new threats, however bad economic conditions may be. We cannot base our hopes on economic fatalism.

At the same time, I think it’s premature to declare the unemployed or precarious workers the new gravediggers of capitalism. Lacking shared social labor or collective institutions, these subjects remain atomized. Instead, any revolutionary movement will have to construct cross-class allegiances that bring together the energies of the unemployed and the strategic positioning of the working class. But what that alliance will look like is yet to be seen. Despite the claims of some tired, old, idealist organizations, there is no sure formula here.

Even on the left, we’ve heard too much about the dignity of labor and the need for more jobs. Unless we wish to perpetuate a system that sacrifices our lives to work, we must do all we can to abolish labor.

JORDAN S. CARROLL is a Ph.D. student who can be reached at jscarroll@ucdavis.edu.

For those who spent hours waiting in line outside the ARC Pavilion to obtain five pieces of paper for their family and friends to attend a commencement ceremony of equal length, one thing was evident: administrative efficiency is not present at UC Davis.

Tickets for the College of Letters & Science commencement ceremonies brought hundreds of people to the Pavilion on Monday.
It is safe to say it probably wasn’t the best day for those working the scant three-booth windows either, dealing with dehydrated and hungry students standing in the never-ending, sun-drenched line from hell, who most likely don’t want to sit through their own extremely long graduation anyway.

Students, with nothing but a bagel in their systems, became desperate for sustenance. These humans began to borderline worship those who offered them the prospect of a popsicle.

As time-strapped scholars who have responsibilities, we do not have three hours a day to spend waiting for something which we’ve already ordered.
Additionally, the University’s lack of communication skills contributed to this annoying situation. The school sent out an e-mail informing students to pick up their tickets a day before the first of the three pick-up days and proceeded to resend the same e-mail two more times within the hour. It’s pretty clear that with the two extra e-mails, notice was supposed to reach students much earlier.

Although it would have been wiser for these students to go pick up their graduation tickets the first day of distribution, students aren’t to blame. This problem shouldn’t even have arisen since the school should be smart enough to set up more convenient alternatives for students. Apparently, this happens year after year.

Adding to the frustration was the fact that an administrator came out to the line to inform students, some of which had been waiting at the Pavilion for over two hours, that they could pick up their tickets starting the next day at the Dean’s Office. Had students been informed that this was an option via e-mail, or really any other means of notification, prior to investing their little hearts and souls into this infamous line, they most likely would have waited a few days to try to get their tickets.
Here are some logical and simple solutions to prevent a similar debacle:

1. Scan our families into commencement: Movie tickets can be bought online through Fandango with few issues of fraud, why not graduation tickets?

2. Send them home: We would gladly pay the postage, so we don’t have to devote hours of our life to getting these tickets (the Engineering college automatically sends tickets to a preferred address).

3. List: Students provide the school with a list of names of people who will be attending under their name and guests can provide ID’s to confirm they are said guests.

We urge you, UC Davis administration, to think outside the box, in this case the ARC Pavilion Box Office, and save our toesies the pain of waiting in lines of pure bureaucracy.

On Wednesday, UC Davis held its first of four open forums that will allow students, faculty, alumni and members of the public to get to know finalists for the position of athletics director. While we most likely won’t know who Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi selects until after commencement, the new athletics director will have a tough task ahead, and will need to be decisive in the way they handle the position.

The purpose of collegiate athletics is to provide entertainment to the student body and to promote school spirit — something that Aggie teams have struggled to provide over the last few years. This needs to change. Since UC Davis began the move to Division I athletics in 2002, the University has placed itself in an unrealistic position that is the basic equivalent of athletic purgatory.

UC Davis has 23 sports programs, all of which receive funding from student fees, despite the fact that only a few of them have the potential to generate any revenue whatsoever, let alone break even. The result has been largely mediocre teams in major sports programs such as men’s basketball and football, which has been reflected in the lack of student attendance at games.

Students passed a fee referendum in 2002 to fund athletics as UC Davis began the move to Division I. Presumably, this was approved with the expectation that Aggie athletics would improve over the years. Instead, the athletic department has stagnated. As the main financial backing for the athletic programs, students should be able to get something out of them.

With this in mind, UC Davis has two options.

The first is to give up the dream of becoming a major athletic power and return to Division II. UC Davis was highly successful at the Division II level, winning national championships in multiple sports as well as Director’s Cups. This move would allow UC Davis to drop the student fees, and might even improve the school spirit as Aggie teams begin to win, even if it is at a lower level of competition. Still, Katehi has made it clear that the University will not consider a move backward, and it seems highly unlikely that any of the current athletics director candidates would be willing to take that step back either.

That leaves the remaining option of shifting funding to so called “revenue producing sports.” UC Davis currently spends more money on athletics than any other school in the Big West Conference, but due to the excessive number of sports, it pays among the lowest number of dollars per student-athlete. Furthermore, UC Davis has access to a largely untapped market for sports in the greater Sacramento area, and strong sports, if managed and advertised effectively, should ultimately be able to draw in enough money to significantly diminish – if not remove altogether – the need for student fees to fund athletics.

The unfortunate consequence is that in order to reach an appropriate funding level, UC Davis would most likely have to cut sports. While this is clearly a very serious and painful cutback for those involved in these sports, the overall impact would not be felt by the campus as a whole, as less popular sports do not receive much attention from students, no matter how successful they may be.

So whoever the new athletics director may be, we request that they make a firm decision immediately upon taking office, so that we can move out of athletic purgatory instead of being forced to relive this debate again in a year or two.

To the editor of the Aggie and the UC Davis Community,

The Youth Empowerment Program is very thankful for the article printed about our Immigrant Youth Art and Poetry Exhibit held on May 15. However, there were some incorrect statements made in that article that we would like to amend.

To begin, the purpose of the Youth Empowerment Program (YEP) is to work with the juvenile hall facility to provide the immigrant and local adjudicated youth in detention (not incarcerated) a mentor that can not only provide the youth with helpful information about jobs, colleges and scholarships, but also to assist the youth to recognize their full potential. Silvia Vargas and Roxanne Calimeris are the current co-coordinators of YEP and have worked with the program creator, Shay Fluharty, to ensure that the program assists the youth as much as possible. However, YEP as a volunteer group does not provide any legal advice to the youth in detention. In addition, YEP is not in any way gang affiliated and the vast majority of youth in detention are also not gang affiliated. While the Aggie article printed on Wednesday shared some of the stories of immigrant youth, YEP hopes to inform the public of the positive diversity of backgrounds of immigrant youth. Furthermore, if any member of the community has any questions regarding YEP and the youth we work with, please do not hesitate to contact Roxanne and Silvia (the program co-coordinators) directly at racalimeris@ucdavis.edu and silvargas@ucdavis.edu.

Thank You,
Roxanne Calimeris and Silvia Vargas
Youth Empowerment Program Coordinators