It is hard to not get really cynical about the true workings that go on in the higher echelons of the UC administration. It is well documented that UC Regents use their position to gain filthy lucre at the expense of the students and the UC’s reputation as one of the best public education organizations in the world. The corruption runs deep.

Richard Blum, who is Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband, is a regent who also owns stake in two for-profit universities that the UC investment managers have chosen to invest $53 MILLION dollars in public funds. These people are not neophytes in the power and corruption arena.

With this type of blatant criminality going on unchecked, it is obvious that the UCD administration let the Domes fall into disrepair so that it could utilize a prime piece of real estate at its discretion. I wonder if we followed the money trail, which administrator (or their developer friends) would benefit the most from bulldozing this shining example of sustainability and putting in some high rise dorms managed by an “independent corporation” at student and taxpayer expense? 

Someday the UC Regents and administration must be held accountable for selling off our public education system to the highest bidders and we, the citizens of California and the students, teachers and alumni of UC Davis, must restore the honor and dignity of this tarnished institution.

Jake Couch

Environmental Biology, ’96

It is unfortunate that anyone who reads Lena’s opinion piece [in Monday’s issue titled “Mayday”], without any prior knowledge of the Whole Earth Festival, might assume it is an event that is centered around vapid drug use.

Throughout the year, a dedicated staff of locals and students work hard to collaborate with high-quality musicians, ethical vendors, engaging educational booths and interactive workshops. Despite the lack of ASUCD funding, these features are offered to festival-goers for free.

Unlike Picnic Day, which has received negative media attention for its ample amount of misdemeanors and excessive reliance on the Davis Police force, the Whole Earth Festival strives to maintain security by educating its staff and hundreds of volunteers in non-violence training. This approach allows the festival to minimize police presence, while providing a community-based prevention strategy.

To reduce the Whole Earth Festival to unoriginal hippie stereotypes and drug references discredits the 42-year-old tradition of the largest free music and arts festival on the West Coast, which has inspired other zero-waste events. The festival is rooted in an educational tradition; it began as a classroom project by the students of Jose Argullles, who passed away less than two months ago. 

Unlike Lena’s approach of “making friends on drugs that you won’t remember the next morning”, we encourage you to browse the program of events on the Whole Earth website and pursue ones that you may be curious about.

Also, feel free to stop by the Karma Dome on Northeast quad to engage with staff, volunteers, and other friendly participants and to possibly lend a hand. Even though some might choose to dedicate this weekend to debauchery, please take some time to appreciate the hard work and good intentions that your fellow students and community invest in the Whole Earth Festival.

Becky Michelson and Anne-Marie Litak

I am writing to request my objection to misquoting and misrepresentation in Jason Alpert’s “Peaceful Rally” piece from Tuesday.  

Alpert states that: “Flagg Miller said the killing of bin Laden is a moment for Americans to step back and take relief that the top member of al-Qaeda has been taken out.”  He also states that I said, “There is a lot of relief and gratitude toward the people for their work on this mission.”

Rather than commending Americans’ celebration, I made an observation during the interview that Americans from across the political spectrum were celebrating and that this was perhaps a natural expression of relief for news of bin Ladin’s death.  I added that a measure of gratitude for the “operation” (not “mission”) was due.  

In unmistakable terms, however, I linked these remarks to my hope that celebrants would not turn the occasion into a “pro-American” moment that excluded the many non-Americans and especially Muslims who have suffered equally under the brutality of bin Ladin and Al-Qaida.  

These individuals, acknowledged in my interview, have been instrumental in helping defeat bin Ladin’s ideology over the years, and his death should underscore our commonality with them rather than our difference.

Regards,

Flagg Miller

UCD Professor, religious studies 

The University of California is headed toward privatization. UC officials deny it, but recent data out of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) reveal a different plan.

Last year, UC enrolled more out-of-state students who can pay higher fees and help bail UC out of debt. At UC Davis, officials admitted 1,360 non-residents for Fall 2010, compared to 493 in Fall 2009. UC can charge these out-of-state students $23,000 in additional non-resident fees.

The plan to recruit more students who can pay higher fees makes financial sense. But this business model is used by private universities – not public state universities. UC faces a huge budget deficit next year. Admitting more non-residents is one solution, but the decision goes against UC’s stated mission.

According to the University of California Diversity Statement adopted by UCOP in 2007, “The knowledge that the University of California is open to qualified students from all groups, and thus serves all parts of the community equitably, helps sustain the social fabric of the State.”

This statement is no longer true. Non-residents with deep pockets are replacing Californians at UC Davis.

In an April 18 press release, Lora Jo Bossio, associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs and interim director of Undergraduate Admissions at UC Davis, claimed that out-of-state students are not taking spots meant for Californians. She pointed out that even though those 867 additional non-residents were admitted, UC Davis also admitted 438 additional Californians.

Anyone willing to wade through the numbers will find that UC Davis received 45,825 first-year student applications last year. Surely there were another 867 qualified Californians in that bunch. The situation is worse for other UCs. As non-resident admissions go up system wide, UC San Diego and UC Riverside expect to cut freshman enrollment.

Privatizing UC might help preserve the quality of education on campuses. With an extra $23,000 per student, UC Davis could afford to pay for its excellent faculty and vital resource staff. Privatization would release UC from dependence on the current paltry amount of California state tax money. If UC privatized, officials could enroll all the non-residents they want – and stop pretending to value struggling Californians.

The University of California and the union that represents teaching assistants and readers recently came to an agreement on a new contract. Despite this, some of the 12,000 graduate students represented by United Auto Workers 2865 claim they are consistently overworked by professors.

This is due to many factors, one of which is a flawed grievance process, which promotes an imbalanced power dynamic between graduate students and their faculty advisors.

This causes graduate students to feel reluctant to speak out against workload violations for fear of retribution so as to not burn bridges with that professor. This promotes an unhealthy working environment and puts TAs in a position they should never have to be in.

Yet this scenario happens quite often. But not all hope is lost. Alternative solutions must be implemented in order to combat these breaches of contract.

This starts with a more educated professor. We already know that all professors on campus are brilliant people, but many do not know the number of hours that their own TAs are contractually obligated to work. This involves professors taking it upon themselves to learn the contract and the union putting pressure on them to actually do it.

Professors, once educated on TA contracts, must then regulate themselves to ensure that they never require graduate students to work over the maximum number of hours. This should not be done out of obligation, but out of respect for the TAs who work for them.

Another solution is to inform TAs of their class assignments further in advance. Currently, they receive their assignments a few days before classes begin, making it more difficult to prepare.

More preparation time would cut down on the work that they have to do during the quarter and allow more time for them to give quality feedback to their students on tests and papers.

Some graduate students also claim that workload problems have occurred due to budget cuts, which have eliminated TA positions and increased class sizes. While this is an obvious problem and one the university has been dealing with for the past few years, reducing cuts isn’t a workable solution at this point, as they don’t look to be going away any time soon.

As a result, the university must educate professors and inform TAs of their class assignments earlier. While the grievance process can’t be 100 percent relied upon, it should still be in place for those instances when a faculty member needs to be reminded of the maximum workload.

It is important that university officials, professors and students stand behind these solutions because, ultimately, the victim of these violations is public education.

This week has been a veritable smorgasbord of media coverage on the death of Osama bin Laden, and for once, such a banquet is justified. Unlike Donald Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the circumstances surrounding President Obama’s birth, this story is a swift reminder that whether our President was born in America or not, his executive heart is with the families who lost their loved ones in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and there is simply nothing more American than that.

With a story as big and as shrouded in secrecy as this, the news should be doing nothing other than presenting objective information about the operation as they collect it. The news’ primary function is to offer the whos, whats, wheres, whens, whys and hows of such stories. It should not take a military operation 10 years in the making to remind them to keep the secondary partisan point-scoring to a minimum.

That being said, when the media (in a wild, yet brief, transformation of the status quo) is only presenting objective information, we become the mouthpieces for everything subjective. Each American becomes an opinion columnist when the media stops playing that role for us, and this week we’ve each expressed our opinion by how we chose to commemorate this event.

As Rachel Maddow pointed out on “The Daily Show,” the media’s job right now is simply to “give the information to an American public that is incredibly hungry to hear it … because even if you’re not one of those people who are singing in the streets about it, we are all having an emotionally cathartic reaction to it.”

This emotional catharsis has taken many different forms since Sunday. Students at The George Washington University showed it by congregating outside the White House and chanting, “cancel finals, cancel finals,” among other things. Some UC Davis students chose to organize a peaceful rally on the quad with celebratory signs. Others got shitfaced in their American flag board shorts they bought for Houseboats from Walmart.

Another UC Davis student chose to write to The Aggie to criticize all of these students publicly.

He claimed that these students’ responses are objectively “not the response of true American patriot[s],” and that he had never “been so ashamed of my fellow Aggies as I was in that moment.”

There is no right or wrong way to commemorate the tactical killing of a man responsible for thousands of American casualties. To claim sobriety (in both senses of the word) is objectively better than binge drinking in the name of one’s country and celebrating this man’s death is to do what the media does all too often – force one narrow understanding of an event down the throats of a public desperate first for objectivity.

When one becomes an opinion columnist, whether unwittingly as we each did for a few hours Sunday night, or consciously as Steven Sharp did in Tuesday’s paper, one’s job is the opposite of the news’. The occupation of the opinion writer is to present his or her understanding of an issue as subjective, as only one way the reader could choose to understand an issue, not as objective, or the best way to understand it.

By and large, I agree with the view that Americans can be politically arrogant and often fail to take into consideration the perceptions of those in the Middle East and abroad. But some, including Tuesday’s guest opinion, equally often take into consideration these foreign perceptions before those of their fellow Americans. This is objective fact. Which of these is better is not for me to decide for my reader.

I’ll never forget where I was when CNBC reported Osama bin Laden was dead. I was casually sitting in a living room in front of a television. I didn’t celebrate by planning an impromptu party and buying a keg for my 50 closest friends, but I certainly wasn’t surprised or disgusted that others were. For me, it was a lot like Picnic Day – live and let live.

In that moment, the death of Osama bin Laden was many things to many Americans, but using it as an opportunity to criticize how fellow Americans choose to grieve (if we can call it that) is putting an objective mask on one’s opinion. We get too much of that already from the media during the other 364 days of the year, so please don’t infringe upon others’ right to commemorate this day with whatever amount of fanfare they choose, and they’ll leave the others to do as they see fit.

JOSH ROTTMAN will be supporting his #24-ranked Swaggie Laxers in the first round of the WCLL Playoffs as they take on #22 Stanford this Saturday at Novato High School at 11:45. If you’d like a ride, reach him at jjrottman@ucdavis.edu.

It’s almost that time of year again: Mother’s Day. You nearly forgot, didn’t you?

We all love our mothers – well, we all should. After all, they did bring you into this world. Yes, Dad had a hand in your creation, too, but he’ll have his time in the sun next month. This Sunday is all about Mom and how awesome she is. Everybody is going to be spending quality time with Mom, right? Wrong.

Many will be spending time with this special lady.

“I’m going home for Mother’s Day,” said Joseph Marcelo, a junior from San Jose. “It’s the least I can do.”

Marcelo doesn’t mind the drive down, which clocks in at a little less than two hours, and looks forward to enjoying the weekend. “I’m really just going down for the dinner,” Marcelo chuckled. “Just kidding.”

And many aren’t fortunate enough to live close to their parents. People come from near and far to study here in Davis. Sometimes that six-hour road trip or overnight flight simply isn’t worth it. Well, your mother is always worth any trouble, but face it: sometimes you just don’t want to inconvenience yourself. That is completely understandable.

If it’s not just distance alone that’s keeping some of us away from our mothers, it could be other obligations such as jobs and, much more commonly, midterms. Mother’s Day just so happens to roll around midterm season every spring, and midterms are a drag – Mother’s Day or not. “I’m going to call my mom because I kind of don’t want to go home,” said Hanh Nguyen, a senior, as her eyes found the ground. “I have a paper and midterm next week and want to stay to work on them.”

It’s a fact: not everyone gets the chance to see his or her mother in person for Mother’s Day. There are other options for you to consider, however. You can toss her a phone call; that’s always nice. When’s the last time she’s had your voice grace her ears or vice versa? There’s probably a pleasant conversation to be had between the both of you. Catch up and let her know how you’re doing. She’s probably been worried – parents always worry.

If your mom is especially tech savvy (hopefully not savvy enough to have a Facebook), you could video-chat with her via webcam. It’s as close to talking face-to-face with her in the flesh as you can get, and if things get awkward or drawn out, you can just feign an internet connection failure and close the window; what a coincidence!

Don’t have any means of calling or a computer to video-chat or you don’t want to? You could kick things back into the Stone Age and send a postcard or letter. Just remember that mail isn’t delivered on Sundays, chief. A bad ass would arrange for a flower delivery. Do whatever you’d like for Mother’s Day – it’s the thought that counts (cheesy huh?).

You may be swamped with work this weekend and/or stranded in Davis, but you can, at the very least, muster the energy to phone your mom and let her know just how awesome she really is – ’cause she is. Your mom has toiled away for you and, damn it, she deserves to be celebrated for being the trooper she is. You owe it to her. It’s your duty as a child. Or, you could always be the person who “forgot.” I know that I won’t. I’ll be having a nice brunch with my mom and, if I can muster the courage to ask, have her pluck my eyebrows this weekend. I wish you all a Happy Mother’s Day!

LARRY HINH loves his mom. FEEL THE LOVE AND E-MAIL HIM AT lthinh@ucdavis.edu. YES.

Every summer, 130,000 nerds flock to San Diego for the event of a lifetime. With tickets that continue to sell out as quickly as *NSYNC seats in 2001, Comic-Con is the fourth-largest convention in the world. Contrary to popular belief, Comic-Con isn’t just about your Spidermen and your Green Hornets/Lanterns. In the last decade or so, the convention has become the ultimate place to be for all things pop culture.

Thanks to some extensive Harry Potter and “Lost” podcast-listening, I’ve just begun to see how influential this single weekend in San Diego can be. It’s the place where movie trailers are premiered, sneak peeks exposed and costumes flaunted.

More importantly, Comic-Con brings together thousands of people with shared passions. The event gives each individual the chance to interact with those who understand why they would wait in line for 17 hours to buy a DVD, or why they continuously enter the lottery with the same series of “lucky” numbers.

We believe in conventions. We believe in interacting with other people who aren’t afraid to “geek out.” The people who have experienced just how easy it is to become deeply engrossed in the lives of a handful of fictional characters.

But conventions aren’t just excuses for nerds (a.k.a. the enlightened folk) to get together and be their rockstar selves. Doctors go to conventions to familiarize themselves with the latest developments. Teachers gather to redefine education at conventions. And graduate students present their research at academic conferences.

Just as sixth graders have a hard time keeping anything to themselves, when we discover a new show or theory that makes our insides tingle, we have to tell someone. Maybe that someone is Mark Zuckerberg. Or maybe it’s your dog. Either way, when it comes to passions, sharing is absolutely necessary.

UCD sophomore physics major, Megan Clendenin has experienced the power of passion-sharing first-hand. She spent her middle and high school days in a mother-daughter book club. After I got over how exceedingly adorable the idea of 12 year olds eating cucumber sandwiches with their mothers is, I had the chance to talk to Clendenin about her experience.

“I grew a lot closer to my mom through the book club,” she explained, “because we read all the books out loud together.”

Not only did this small convention of book-sharing help Clendenin create a community of mom-supporters who she continues to keep in touch with, but it also helped her grow as a learner.

Maybe the mother-daughter book club of Palo Alto didn’t feature surprise appearances by Matthew or Megan Fox, but it is just as much of a convention as Comic-Con.

A New York Times article published before Comic-Con last year described the event’s attendees as people who “tend to be excited about a film when they think nobody else will be.” These “insiders” become the sole focus of big-name Hollywood “outsiders” for a weekend, forging an unexpected link between the fans and corporate machines.

In a sea of mass socio-economic diversity, forums like Comic-Con unify strangers on the premise of belief.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, UCD history major and proud all-star nerd, shared his experience as a Star Trek convention attendee at age 13.

“I greatly enjoyed being in a place where every nerdy inside joke I made was greeted by raucous laughter and a wistful recollection of the referenced episode, rather than the pointed stares I have become accustomed to,” he explained.

While they can definitely entertain, conventions can also serve as a source of aid for people seeking guidance and understanding. The International Autism Conference gives parents, doctors and non-profit leaders the opportunity to share their experiences with a disorder that is becoming increasingly prevalent in our world every day. Not only do they believe in their experiences, but they also believe in reaffirming what they’ve been through.

When my siblings and I joined thousands of “Lost” fans in a Los Angeles amphitheater the night of the show’s conclusion, I realized that it was okay for me to spend years re-watching seasons and picking apart facial expressions. For two and a half hours, I was immersed in a community of fellow island-loving, number-fearing fans who didn’t ask me to legitimize my love for the Lost-ies.

Conventions give us the chance to walk into a room as a stranger with a hidden passion, and leave as an ironic-T-shirt wearing member of a community. Embrace your desire to share what you think is totally rad and go to a convention. And while you’re there, don’t forget to give the guy with elf ears in the corner a high-five. He’ll probably be your boss one day.

MAYA MAKKER recommends that you avoid using the numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 for personal gain. If you’re down with the island life, let her know via mgmakker@ucdavis.edu.