Souza shares favorite photos, White House experiences during Mondavi Center Distinguished Speaker Series event

Pete Souza, the former chief official White House photographer, spoke in Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Center on Dec. 1. Souza was also the official White House photographer during the Reagan administration and is a freelance photographer in the Washington, D.C. area as well as a professor emeritus of visual communications at Ohio University.

The event was part of a speaking series in conjunction with Souza’s new book, “Obama: An Intimate Portrait.” Prior to his presentation in Jackson Hall at 8 p.m., Souza offered a student-oriented moderated discussion where students and professors asked questions backstage in a more intimate setting.

Shelley Holt, a third-year transfer student and cognitive science major, attended the student-oriented discussion and said that she was interested in Souza’s role in documenting Obama’s presidency as compared to Reagan’s presidency.

“Obviously [Souza’s] enthusiasm for Obama is really high, so I’m curious to see how that progression went from the Reagan era to playing such a prominent role in Obama’s image,” Holt said.

At the backstage discussion, Souza shared his observations of former President Obama and his experiences as a behind-the-scenes White House staff member.

“I knew [President Obama] for four years before he became president, when he was senator and I was working for the Chicago Tribune,” Souza said. “And I didn’t think he changed that much between when he was first senator and even throughout his presidency. The sort of core character of him stayed the same. The one thing that’s changed since he’s left is it’s as if […] the weight of the world has been lifted off his shoulders — you forget how everything that was going on in the world and in the United States was on his shoulders when he was president.”

During his presentation in Jackson Hall, Souza shared some of the prominent photos from “Obama: An Intimate Portrait,” which is currently No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestsellers list. The photo slideshow was grouped into categories that included best and worst moments of the presidency, family photos, photos of Obama’s interactions with others and images of the final weeks of his presidency.

In his time as Obama’s White House photographer, Souza captured 1.9 million photos — sometimes up to 2,000 per day. Souza explained to the audience how he was able to capture so many intimate moments of the presidency.

“With President Obama, I asked to have access to everything he did,” Souza said. “I thought that was the only way to really document his presidency for history. I was trying, when I could, to also show the big picture of the presidency. From a photographic standpoint, you’re trying to capture candid moments, but you’re also trying to do scenes that are everyday. Sometimes those are little moments — they’re not at big events, but they’re little moments that tell you a lot about him as a person.”

After Souza’s slideshow presentation, Scott Syphax, the executive producer, head writer and host of “Studio Sacramento,” moderated a Q&A session with the audience.

An audience member asked Souza what the most difficult part of photographing the president was, and Souza said it was the grueling daily schedule. In eight years, Souza only took three weeks of vacation and one sick day, mostly because he was worried that he might miss an important moment in history while he was away.

“I was literally with the president from 9:30 in the morning ‘til he went home at like 6:30 or 7,” Souza said. “The grind of the job, the 24/7 aspect of it, that was the hardest thing. But in terms of these stressful situations that maybe the people in the pictures were experiencing, I wasn’t under the same kind of stress they were. Over time, people came to appreciate what I was doing, and they took it seriously.”

Syphax was curious about Souza’s observations of President Obama as a figurehead.

“One of the things that’s interesting as you go through the book is that it’s a wide cross-section of people,” Syphax said. “But when I look at, for instance, the entertainers, the celebrities and the athletes, it almost seems more like they’re the fans and he’s the star rather than the other way around.”

Souza explained that people gravitated toward Obama in a way that he had rarely seen.

“I think people just saw hope when they saw him,” Souza said. “I don’t mean to sound cliché, but they saw a man who was genuine, who truly was thinking long-term, thinking about what was best for the country.”

Reflecting on his time with Obama, Souza said that historical documentation was the most important aspect of his job. Although there were boring and tiresome meetings, he said that the Osama Bin Laden raids, the success of the Affordable Care Act and the debt ceiling crisis were some of the most rewarding moments to photograph.

“Hopefully I captured what the Obama administration was like, what he was like as a president, what he was like as a person [and] what he was like as a dad,” Souza said. “Hopefully people think that I presented a well-rounded view of his presidency.”

Written by: Olivia Rockeman — campus@theaggie.org

House tax plan would eliminate graduate student tax exemption

On the morning of Nov. 29, graduate students, undergraduates, faculty members and community members organized at UC Davis, as well as nationwide, to protest the Republican tax plan with a walkout over the taxation of tuition waivers. These waivers allow graduate students to teach and research in exchange for tuition exemptions. UC Davis graduate students and the UC Davis chapter of UC Student-Workers Union (UAW) 2865 — the largest student worker union in the United States — coordinated the event.

About 80 participants congregated by the Quad flagpole, some holding signs which read “Tax Me Like Trump” and “Higher Ed is Already Classist Enough.” After several speakers addressed the audience, there was an organized write-in/call-in at the Graduate Studies Office to urge congressional representatives to vote against the tax plan — which has since been approved in both the House and the Senate.

Lindsay Baltus, a graduate student researcher in the English department, spoke at the protest representing the Women’s Resource and Research Center.

“We’re outraged,” Baltus said. “Graduate students are part of the university’s invisible and cheap labor force. This tax reform will bring tax cuts to the wealthy while pushing the burden onto students and workers. We would lose tax exemptions on education that serve to incentivise students to further their education and allow us to subsist while pursuing our degrees.”

Averyl Dietering, a co-organizer of the UC Davis Grad Tax Walkout event and an English graduate teaching assistant, explained how an erasure of low-income graduate student workers creates a teaching assistant force of the independently wealthy. Dietering talked about the impacts of the bill not only on graduate students, but also on undergraduates.  

“What I want undergraduate students to know about this rally and about this tax bill — if they want to go to grad school and this tax bill passes — [is that] they are going to have to pay those taxes as well,” Dietering said. “Even if they don’t want to go to grad school, losing graduate students from the university is going to change your education more than you can possibly imagine right now. Especially if those graduate students are replaced by graduate students that are wealthier, it’s going to change your education in ways you can’t imagine.”

The GOP tax plan, which includes the grad tax, is part of the recently-passed Senate and House tax plan. In addition to the removal of tuition waivers, interest paid on students loans will no longer be tax deductible under the tax plan.

According to The New York Times, Republicans characterize the changes on higher education brought forward in the tax plan as simplifying national tax code — allowing more room for cuts in the middle class income by eliminating individual tax breaks. Critics argue, however, that the elimination of individual tax breaks levied on graduate and doctoral students will ultimately heighten the financial burden of higher education and student debt, targeting low-income and middle-income families who can’t afford unsubsidized higher education.

The bill also lowers corporate taxes from 35 percent to 20 percent to create trickle-down “windfall”. Underrepresented and impoverished graduate students largely depend on tax-free tuition waivers, according to CNN, while independently wealthy students who do not need subsidized education will be unaffected.

Gabi Kirk, a UAW organizer and a geography graduate student worker, introduced the speakers at the event. Kirk talked about her surprise at UC Davis’ recent administrative support for graduate students protesting the tax plan; Chancellor Gary May wrote an op-ed in The Sacramento Bee speaking out against the GOP tax plan and signifying himself as a supporter of the Nov. 29 walkout.

“I am really grateful for the grad students here and around the country that turned this into a national issue enough that the administration had to come out and support it,” Kirk said. “When this was called for a week ago, the UC put out one really brief sentence about [the graduate student tax exemption]. But they had four paragraphs about how they were upset about getting taxed on capital building projects.”

Kirk told the audience it was “surreal for [her] to be at a UC protest that was endorsed by the chancellor.” However, sociology department teaching assistant and UAW 2865 officer Emily Breuninger reminded the audience that not endorsing the GOP’s tax bill was profitable for a public California university.

“If the optics are good, and it’s against Trump, they’re willing to come out and pay lip service to the economic benefit and value of grad students,” Breuninger told the audience. “We all saw that anti-unionization email. They try to stop our organizations and continuously try to block us and send out anti-union propaganda.”

Roy Taggueg, a graduate student studying sociology and the President of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association for Sociology, spoke about how being undocumented intersects with his fight for subsidized education. According to Taggueg, education should rely on proving oneself through merit and motivation, not finances or nationality.

“I am undocumented,” Taggueg said. “It seems as though every month something new pops up — the people I work with everyday, we feel attacked. And as graduate students, we have one thing going for us that no one else does: we’re really friggin’ smart! All of us are going to be affected. You all made it here to grad school on the virtue of the narrative that you push forward to show other people why they should care about you, and you have to keep on doing that.”

Connor Gorman, a graduate student worker in the Department of Physics and a UAW member, emphasized the value of graduate student workers at UC Davis. According to Gorman, the money graduate workers earn for the school through teaching and research falls into the pockets of administration.

“It is not the administrators who do the bulk of the work that makes the university what it is,” Gorman said. “The university is great because of the workers, because of the faculty, because of the students. As graduate students, we are both workers and students. We deserve to be justly compensated for our labor, [but] we do not actually ever see this money. They need to stop compensating administrators so highly and instead start compensating the workers — the graduate students — who make the university run. They need to give us a living wage.”

According to Baltus, graduate students already face financial stress even with the tax exemption.

“We work much more than 40 hours per work and we are also full-time students,” Baltus said. “Many undergo poverty, food insecurity [and] homelessness. From my own experience as a graduate student with a child, I have already faced financial hardship as a result of the university’s failure to provide affordable health care or quality affordable housing for grad students families.”

Graduate student worker and president of the Anthropology Students Association Mayowa Adegboyega spoke about how the bill affects international students. According to Adegboyega, the bill will strip away newfound access to opportunities and financial capital from many marginalized students.

“Many amongst us are disproportionately affected by this bill,” Adegboyega said. “Many of your your fellow grad students come from really underrepresented communities. Many of us are breadwinners in our families. We have been left out for generations and are just now building our wealth [and] building our families. Apart from being a scholar [and] a black women, I am also an international student. Because we cannot apply for in-state tuition, it will be almost impossible for many of us to come here [without tax exemptions].”

Written By: Aaron Liss — campus@theaggie.org