Ambassador Pham Quang Vinh discusses Vietnam and U.S. relations.

On Oct. 20, Vietnamese Ambassador Pham Quang Vinh delivered a speech on Vietnamese and American relations at the Memorial Union’s De Carlie Room. The ambassador’s visit to UC Davis represents an effort to bridge a connection between the U.S. and Vietnam that will benefit both countries economically, socially and culturally.

The one and a half hour long event, which was attended by approximately 70 people, was followed by a question and answer portion with the audience. The event was arranged by Asian American studies professor Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde. Ambassador Vinh’s visit is the first formal visit made by a Vietnamese Ambassador to a University of California. His visit marks the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S.

“[This event] is in large part for the students,” Valverde said. “I want students to know that they can have access to high-ranking dignitaries, and they can engage them in conversation […] I wanted the ambassador to know that Davis has bright, critical-thinking students [who] are not afraid to ask tough questions.”

Ambassador Vinh wishes to expand Vietnam’s relationship with UC Davis and the United States in several areas, including political relations, foreign affairs, economic cooperation, science and technology, security and defense, education and “people-to-people exchange.” People-to-people exchange, which includes tourist visits, studying abroad and working abroad, offers opportunities to citizens of both countries in a bicultural and bilingual experience, according to Vinh.

“For Vietnam-U.S. relationships, I think that this year is an important year,” Vinh said. “If you look back in our history of 60 years, it seems that our relationship has been related to what I call cycles of 20 years. 1955 to 1975 we have war, and then from 1975 to 1995 we have embargo and people cannot understand each other. Now from 1995 to this year 2015, we have been developing our relationship, we have diplomatic relations, and then we have a comprehensive partnership […] so I think all the progress we have achieved is so tremendous.”

UC Davis has had an established connection with Vietnam through the International Program under the College of Agricultural and Environmental Science, in which UC Davis helps Vietnam along with many other countries agriculturally. Valverde explained that Ambassador Vinh especially wants to expand this relationship with UC Davis to the social science and humanities department to correct the common American perception of modern Vietnam.

“The big reason is because there are misconceptions and misperceptions, and a lack of information and good writing and research about the modern Vietnam,” Valverde said. “So these [newfound understandings] will be important areas of growth for a relationship between the two countries, for those outside of Vietnam to learn more about Vietnam, and those inside Vietnam to have access to information and research and training.”

Valverde is working towards establishing a center for Vietnamese studies at UC Davis that will support social research on modern Vietnam in order to encourage critical thinking about the future of the country and its relationship with the U.S.

The U.S. and Vietnam’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a frequent subject of concern for many students during the question and answer portion of the event, which signaled its significance and controversy among the audience. The partnership is a trade agreement that includes the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries (excluding China). Among the audience members who raised question concerning the agreement was fourth-year Asian American studies major Ralph Vin Imatong.

“There are plenty of reasons why Vietnam chose to continuously build a strong relationship with the U.S.,” Imatong said. “However, just like any partnership of this scale, personal interests are inevitable. I have questions such as what will the U.S. get from this partnership? What will Vietnam do to the poor people that will be displaced by this economic partnership? How will the government make sure that these giant companies will not take advantage of the Vietnamese people?”

Despite such issues of contention, Valverde sees questions like these asked by the students to the ambassador as a positive sign that international issues matter to students. She noted that in the past, certain sectors of the Vietnamese American community have been known to protest events promoting U.S. relations with Vietnam. Valverde believes that the ambassador’s visit signals a change in the Vietnamese American community.

“A couple years ago, this would be unthinkable,” Valverde said. “There would [have been] lots of protests, agitators, berating, heckling about human rights…but there was none of that. That’s historical, that’s monumental, it signals a shift. It’s saying students want to learn, they want to know, they want to engage, to have access.”

Imatong echoes Valverde’s insight.

“I do wish to see more events like this on campus,” Imatong said. “I think it is important for students to at least have a sense of what is going on in the world stage because whether we like it or not, we are affected by it in some way […] I think these kinds of events provide a space for understanding and empowerment for the students, especially in the Asian American communities.”

Ambassador Vinh’s visit is the most recent in a series of steps towards establishing a connection between UC Davis, the U.S. and Vietnam. The first step towards U.S. and Vietnam relations began with Vietnam’s General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s visit to the U.S. last July. During his visit, he met with the Obama Administration to negotiate the TPP.

On a more local level, Trong met with California governor Jerry Brown to initiate the establishment of a sister city between Sacramento and Ho Chi Minh City, which led to Valverde’s visit to Vietnam this month to meet with universities and government officials in the country.

Valverde emphasised that the United States’ continued relationship with Vietnam depends on the support of the community, including faculty and students.

“Students don’t think they can ask for these things, so when they do, people listen,” Valverde said.

Planned campus expansion in result of increasing enrollment, growing research.

Over the course of the next one and a half years, UC Davis’ Campus Planning Committee will develop and solidify “Campus Tomorrow,” the university’s next Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) that will provide a framework for efficient land use, renovation and building projects from 2017 to 2027. The committee will host several public community events in order to update the community on the current planning stage, as well as to provide a space for the public to offer their input.

“This plan is not actually about specific buildings,” said Robert Segar, assistant vice chancellor and campus planner. “It’s really more of a big land-use development pattern; so where is housing going to go, where [are] academics going to go? But with this as a backdrop, we use specific planning for every building project. We project forward and we say we’re going to need this much housing, this much academic space, this much recreational space — everything.”

The first of these events took place during open houses at Nelson Gallery from Oct. 22 to Oct. 29. At the open houses, poster boards displayed the initial scenario plans, while committee members walked around answering questions and requesting attendees’ to provide their opinions on what they wanted the future campus to look like.

All the poster boards presented at the open house are available on the Campus Tomorrow website, where members of the UC Davis community can learn more about the development plans and submit questions via email. The campus planners strongly encourage students to take the website’s survey, submit comments on what is important to them and participate in the campus planning decisions.

“The Campus Tomorrow exhibit illustrates our initial planning concepts for the next LRDP here on campus,” said Campus Planner Lucas Griffith, in an email. “We designed the exhibit to demonstrate the complexity of issues when attempting to create a more sustainable future and to engage our community in that process. We included a wealth of information in the exhibit to provide more context for key planning issues and more clarity in the planning process.”

Out of the previous LRDPs that spanned from 2003 to 2015 came the Mondavi Center, the West Village Apartments and the Student Community Center, among other projects.

The next open house public event, “Develop Preliminary Planning Scenario,” is scheduled to take place in February 2016. The resulting campus plans will go through an environmental review and public comment period before finally being submitted to the UC Davis Regents for consideration in April 2017. At each stage of the process, the planning committee asks for the Davis community’s engagement and participation in making key-planning decisions.

“People getting involved is key to this,” Segal said. “[I]f you’re in a place where no one is involved, then nothing is going to happen.”

The main needs for a development plan for UC Davis are the university’s increasing student enrollment and growing research. According to Campus Tomorrow’s website, UC Davis has plans to increase student enrollment from the present 31,500 to 39,000 and faculty and staff from 13,000 to 14,500 by 2027 in order to “broaden international reach, boost regional economic development, and provide a stable financial foundation for UC Davis.” This in turn creates a need for more housing and classrooms to accommodate students, and more labs and offices for faculty to do their research.

The development of the future of the campus depends on three goals: supporting academic enterprise (which includes labs, classrooms and academic spaces), enriching community life (housing, student activity, etc.) and creating a sustainable future (energy, transportation, etc.). Each of the three goals is strongly interrelated, each with a domino effect on the others.

“Let’s say we don’t build much student housing and there isn’t much student housing in the city,” Segal said. “That means a lot of students are going to have to commute. So then there’s going to be all those commute miles, all those greenhouse gases. If we provide a lot of student housing, we make all that go away, […] but then we have to think about how to supply all that student housing with energy, water and all the resources it takes to host it. So there’s always these trade-offs. We try to put building a strong community of people first, so people want to be here. We try to make that scenario happen.”

Although current building constructions do have budgets, Griffith explained that since the LRDP is a land-use plan rather than a proposal for specific buildings, no concrete budget has been set for it yet.

“The people in our budget office really value numbers,” Griffith said, “But this is so far out that it’s really hard to associate a budget, so there is no budget. This is like a city’s general plan. It is basically saying, how many square feet are you going to anticipate?”

The overall map divides the campus into sections, each with prospective planning concepts. Examples of this include proposed student apartments on Russell Fields and additional classroom spaces on campus marked as the Civic Core. The development plans balance the three goals — academic enterprise, sustainability and community life — by utilizing what Segal calls compact growth. He defines compact growth as building in ways that keep the campus within a small area.

Segal explains that compact growth means replacing sites in the middle of campus like parking lots and short buildings with taller buildings to prevent a widespread campus and to keep people close together as programs and classrooms grow.

“[Compact growth means] basically a ten-minute walk of the library,” Segal said. “That helps two things. [It] helps create places where people can interact more successfully, and it also helps conserve resources and mitigate against greenhouse gas emissions. So compact growth is the message of this project.”

The implications of not having a campus development to accommodate the growing student population and research can already be felt presently.

“They are using the multi-purpose room in the ARC as a lecture hall right now because they don’t have enough lecture halls,” said Leslie Mancebo, a campus planner specializing in transportation services. “So even now we’re seeing some of the effects of this [population] growth happening, without there being a plan for new development.”

Segal hopes that the effects of the LRDP will fulfill his visions for the future UC Davis campus.

“If you were to see a long line of buildings in a row [or] a single tall, high-rise building, would you say that is a campus? Probably not,” said Segal. “A campus is where we assemble buildings around these public spaces where public life happens and student events happen and people can run into each other and you can hold events […] that allow people to have a different kind of experience. That’s what’s special about a campus.”

Students demand more from university police.

On Nov. 3, outside the Memorial Union (MU), students and staff gathered for the Divest, Disarm: Davis for Black Lives protest. Organized under the Davis Stands with Ferguson campaign, protesters rallied for administration to tackle the topic of systematic racial oppression present on college campuses.

The protest focused in on two demands. First, protestors demanded that administration demilitarize police from military-grade weapons. They also demanded the university to divest from private prisons.

The protest began at 12:00 pm by the Memorial Union flagpole. It started with speeches delivered from several students. Among the students who delivered speeches included lead organizers Brandon Buchanan and Kyla Burke.

Afterwards, protesters marched towards the university’s Fire and Police Department, passing through Olsen Hall and later by the Silo.

Once the group reached the police department, they posted flyers of their demands on the department’s entrance. Outside of the department’s building, students protested further about their demands to police.

The police did not respond to the protest outside of their building.

The protest ended outside the MU at 1:30 pm.

New center offers resources, safe space for African American students.

On Oct. 26, the Center for African Diaspora Student Success, a new resource location for African American and African students to find academic and community services, opened its doors at UC Davis.

The new center, located on the second floor of the South Silo, is part of the UC Davis African American Initiative, an effort focused on increasing and developing the presence of African American undergraduate students at UC Davis.

Kayton Carter, the director of Strategic African American Retention Initiatives, talked about the university’s development in creating the center and what it will mean for students.

“It started with concerned students and other groups of folks like the African Continuum and African American Faculty and Staff Association who were really looking at trying to make this space better for the African and African American student population,” Carter said. “If you talk with the students themselves, how they perform in class is sometimes a reflection of how safe they feel and how comfortable they feel outside of the classroom.”

Graduation rates at UC Davis are lower for African American undergraduate students than any other group. According to ASUCD Senator Kamaal Thomas, 33 percent of African American students graduate within four years. Retention and enrollment rates of admitted students have been major goals for the university.

The new center will include academic and professional advising as well as computer stations, on-site tutoring and student support services. Thomas, a fourth-year international relations and Chinese double major, who also works at the center, discussed what the center brings to students at the university.

“Since my freshmen year, a lot of African American students always felt like there wasn’t necessarily a place to call home, a sense of community where they could see people that have similar faces as them,” Thomas said. “African Americans students, we’re less than 3.3 percent of the overall school population and so oftentimes we go into classes and we’re the only person of our skin tone that we see. And so, we definitely wanted to create a safe space where students of the African diaspora could interact with each other, learn from each other, grow with each other and get educated with each other.”

The center hopes to work on a holistic development for students, looking at academics, mentorship, health, well-being and career development. Thomas says that the center hopes to improve the four-year graduation rate for African-American students from 33 percent to 78 percent within the upcoming years.

Dorian Kariuki, a first-year biomedical engineering major, discussed her experience as a new student at UC Davis and finding the center as a place where she could interact with members of her own her own ethnic background.

“I thought that this was a really cool idea so I’m really happy that this happened. I was aware of the fact that it’s going to be a little bit different, especially being surrounded by people who don’t look like me,” Kariuki said. “The notions I had were that it wasn’t going to be that important to be involved in the African American community or the African diaspora community, until I got here. That’s when I really learned why it’s important.”

Thomas notes that he also hopes to see students from outside of the diaspora feel welcome to come to the space and be a part of the center.

“This is for the university as much as it is for the African diaspora, so we’d love to see other students come. We’re very welcoming; we’d love to see their faces and to see them partake in some of our activities and programs,” Thomas said.

As far as what she hopes to see from the center, Kariuki says that she looks forward to helping incoming students with the new community that she’s found.

“You need help to be able to succeed here,” Kariuki said. “Especially growing up in my identity as a black woman and being able to create that support system for others who may be coming in too, to be able to realize that we are part of a community and that one person’s success will be another person’s success and our whole community’s success.”

Written by: Ivan Valenzuela – campus@theaggie.org