As classes resume and we return to campus, reminders of the diversity of our student body are all around us. Some students have arrived freshly inspired by the beauty and culture of foreign countries, and some emerge from the depths of backbreaking jobs and seemingly endless hours of internships; still others sit in the very same classrooms they frequented during long days of summer school, while some just soaked in the sun and enjoyed the peaceful bliss of doing absolutely nothing.

But while many of its students wandered far from their campuses during the summer months, the wheels of activity continue to turn at the University of California. The governing body of the University, the Board of Regents, continued to hold its bi-monthly meetings at the University of California San Francisco. And in July, we were privileged to take our seats at the table as Student Regent Saifuddin and Student Regent-designate Oved.

Allow us to introduce ourselves.

The UC Board of Regents can be a distant, removed body of authority; few students on our campuses across the state have any direct interaction with the Board of Regents. Meanwhile, the influence and impact of the Regents, while tangible and omnipresent, is often misunderstood. It is our goal to change that.

As the Student Regent and Student Regent-designate, we are privileged to represent students across the University of California. As representatives to the Board, we advocate for the student agenda on the Board of Regents. Regardless of your major, age, race, gender, sex, nationality, religion, disability, identity or expression, we are here to listen, and we are here to amplify your voice.

The Student Regent derives his or her power from the people that he or she represents. We are not here to advocate for our personal beliefs; our agenda is shaped by the general opinion of the UC student community.

We are here for you.

Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves, and to one another, to ensure that the UC is the best institution that it can possibly be. Together, we want to encourage all students to embrace our diversity, set aside our differences and come together to bring positive change to our university. As the Student Regents, we have one purpose in mind: to serve the students of the University of California.

Reach out to us. Email us. Come see us during campus visits. Contact us with your concerns, your questions, your vision for a better University of California.

We are the UC Student Regents. How can we represent you?

Sincerely yours,

Sadia Saifuddin                                                             Avi Oved

UC Student Regent                                                       UC Student Regent-designate

saif.sadia10@gmail.com                                             ucregentoved@gmail.com

If you subscribe to the notion that “music was so much better back then,” then I really don’t blame you. I too have seen a hilariously fallacious comparison between legendary ’60s pop masterpiece “God Only Knows” to Nicki Minaj’s throwaway promo “Stupid Hoe.” So, perhaps the only solution to the dearth of substantial music is a steady diet of Bob Dylan, Beach Boys and The Beatles.

But, I have to confess, I’m not a Beatles fan. They’ve made an indelible mark on the industry, and on many peoples’ lives. I am not one of them. So just because someone grew up with a rotary phone doesn’t mean that they should happily hand over their smartphone for “the good old days.” The times, they are a-changin’.

A discontent Esquire Magazine list aptly titled “Eight Reasons Why Old Music Is Better Than New Music” exemplifies the aggressive stubbornness of its faulty logic. Some items on the list simply are not true, such as the claim that there are “more artists to choose from” (OK, technically, if you want to start from Gregorian chant, then yes, there are more artists, but there is no mention of classical music on the list). Some items reflect a severe case of nostalgia-goggles, such as the notion that “music used to be much classier” (complete with a black-and-white image of a Frank Sinatra-looking crooner). The author probably skimmed over that very minor point on pop culture when Elvis’s breakout hits and hips made picket-fence family-dinner moms and dads go into moral cataclysm all the way back in the ’50s. Or when the Beatles inspired undergarment-throwing riots in the ‘60s. Or when sex began choke-holding the ‘80s mainstream through Madonna, Olivia Newton John and Tiffany.

Another awful generalization from the list is that “technology makes music watered down.” The author of the list, Beware (which is either a pretentious alias or a sincere warning for the quality of the work), naively suggests that “back in the day, if you wanted to make music, you had to know how to sing or play an instrument,” implying that no one in the musical modern age is capable of either. Not only do people still play instruments (like, basically everywhere), but technology is a beastly instrument that deserves respect; the fact that a sound can be manipulated down to a microscopic fragment of a sound wave opens endless possibility upon sonic possibility. Successful music producers are technology’s virtuosos, but it can be easily concluded that the most famous producers prioritize profit at innovation’s expense.

But innovation is far from over, thanks to postmodernism. It’s what happens when there seems to be nothing left to invent except for the things that already exist. So yes, even though many musical ideas are repeated and burnt out, new and exciting ones are always being born from their ashes. ’80s dance pop is seeing a resurgence in the form of musical acts like The Knife and Chvrches. The pulsing, laid-back spirit of classic rock lives on through Mac DeMarco, Band of Skulls and Jack White (and his many side projects). Endless new ground is being charted by experimental groups, like Little Women, Swans and Shabazz Palaces. And there are so many more sounds left to discover.

Mr. Beware deems any music that has “not debuted on the internet” as “old music.” This is a foolish definition, considering that he encourages his readers to use Spotify and Pandora to “discover” “old” music. I first heard Stravinsky on YouTube many years ago. “Infernal Dance” debuted in 1910, but for me, it debuted one night in 2008. I am no less a fan of the music because of this. All music, old and new, coexists on the internet. Once, I listened to The Tallest Man on Earth, unaware that Pandora took me 50 years earlier to an obscure Bob Dylan song. Music is music, and it’s just as exciting as it’s ever been.

Search, sample, look everywhere you possibly can; listen until you fall asleep making lists of artists that you want to explore more of, until you are content at this treasure trove you’ve amassed, embracing the overwhelming feeling of the sheer amount of music that you will never listen to, never know and never experience, because the beauty of this golden age of access is that everyone can be their own explorer. “Old” is relative, but anything can be new as long as you take the time to find it.

Pondering the future of music is the funnest, most exciting type of existential crisis! STEVEN ILAGAN (smilagan@ucdavis.edu) promises!

When talking about ways to improve the value of education, most debates center on what teachers and institutions can do to improve a student’s experience. Less is said about how students can help themselves. As illustrated above, Calvin seems to be suffering from a lack of intellectual curiosity in the classroom. He vocalizes a certain inevitability in education — that students are ultimately in charge of whether or not they take an interest on a subject.

Engaging students is an uphill battle, but it’s not impossible. Professors can, and often do, interest students in their fields. The best professors are visibly enthusiastic about their fields; they make their teaching inclusive and accessible. This enthusiasm acts as a prerequisite for making a student curious. Without this type of engagement, the entire onus is put on the student.

While students are largely responsible for their own academic interests, some policies and technological trends are making it harder for true engagement. This difficulty starts in lower education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 established a system in which primary and secondary institutions receive federal funding that is contingent on states administering their own standardized tests and developing their own curriculum.

NCLB can be held partly responsible for stifling curiosity in the classroom. In order to make sure each school performs well, teachers may “teach to the test” or develop their own curriculum to match what will be tested, and only what will be tested. Consequently, students are not exposed to the more imaginative, non-tested facets of their teacher’s knowledge, which leads students to become complacent. This is especially damaging when compounded with the increasing pace of technology and its potential to decrease attention span.

For Calvin, the classroom is his vice. He values a self-taught experience. In one comic, he takes pleasure in reading a book about dinosaurs until an authority figure praises him for it. It’s clear that a large component of intellectual curiosity comes from an individual’s desire to invest their own time.

When students don’t take their own time to appreciate a given topic, the teacher is tasked to fill this responsibility — to make students appreciate. Calvin demonstrates that this is less than ideal for both parties (two packs of cigarettes? — sounds taxing).

Despite all the problems associated with intellectual curiosity, I am more optimistic about potential solutions than pessimistic about the issues. One practical response starts in the classroom. UC Davis offers personalized majors, and many professors will let you create your own essay topics. And while these options are not mandatory, perhaps they should be. They would force students to ask themselves what they find interesting.

This free-range attitude might be most effective in our NCLB school system. I would imagine that an English professor would find more pleasure in reading a diverse set of essays written with more care than dozens written on one stale topic. Each topic would likely have to be approved in advance, and a single rubric would become obsolete, thus making the whole process less efficient. But what should we value more: efficiency or engaged students?

In the long run, education must become a priority for policymakers. Children and young adults follow models. I recently read an article titled “The Cult of Elon Musk,” describing the zealotry of those who follow the Tesla Motors CEO. Education needs its own Musk. The Nobel committee awarding Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi the Nobel Peace Prize shows an increasingly global awareness of the importance of education and curiosity.

Take a look, Calvin: Malala’s only eleven years older than you. You’ve got a standard cut out for yourself.

To share your own interests, you can reach ELI FLESCH at ekflesch@ucdavis.edu or tweet him @eliflesch.

Photo by Courtesy

I’ve noticed that there is a lot of stigma around people who choose to wear clothes that aren’t made particularly for their assigned genders. Male bodies wearing dresses, or female bodies rocking suits and ties, for example. Despite this stigma, there are individuals who attempt to express themselves in a way that defies the limiting gender binaries that have been set in place.

There is an argument I’ve heard more than once that attempts to justify who gets to wear what, and it’s a big part of why I wanted to write this column in the first place. The argument, which is that “it’s only natural” that boys don’t want to wear dresses and girls do, is ridiculous and, according to history, absolutely not true. Furthermore, if you take a look at the types of clothing that people wear around the world even today, it’s clear that this divide is a learned behavior, not some kind of inherited trait. Nevertheless, this argument gets used often and creates a huge stigma around individuals who don’t conform to the gender binary that our fashion industry has helped set in place.

There is a pretty clear divide between the types of clothes that men and women typically wear here in the United States. Nowadays, a majority of the clothes you’ll find made for female bodies generally consist of tighter, smaller garments, with dresses and skirts being a staple. Clothes made for men’s bodies, on the other hand, pretty much always include looser fitting garments. Skirts, dresses and anything deemed overly-feminine are nowhere to be found for men.

Go back in time, however, and you’ll find that this was not always the case. There are tons of instances in history where men in dresses and skirts were the norm. The ancient Greeks, for example, wore chitons, which were basically large pieces of fabric draped across their bodies. Viking men used to wear long tunics over tight-fitted pants (so tight that it was a huge struggle to get them on and off everyday — I feel you, Viking dudes). And don’t forget kilts, the traditional garments that are similar to knee-length skirts, which are actually still somewhat prevalent in Scotland.

Many of these clothing choices had to do with a person’s social or economic status. For example, Chinese peasants could be punished for wearing silk kimonos, so they dressed in pants instead. But now, the clothes we choose to wear have much less to do with our social status and more to do with asserting our masculinity or femininity. We may wear skirts to assert our femininity or a pair of baggy pants to assert our masculinity. Rather than choosing our clothing based on our class, we choose it based on our gender, which is fine for those folks who identify with their assigned genders, but not so much for those who do not.

Fashion has changed in recent years, and it’s definitely not because we’ve become more open-minded about gender identities. In fact, it seems as though it’s kind of the opposite. In a previous column, I talked about how men and women’s clothes are separated in clothing stores, and how not everyone necessarily identifies with the gender that they are placed in. Furthermore, if you don’t identify as a man or a woman, it’s like you don’t even exist to the fashion industry. It’s also nearly impossible to cross boundaries if you attempt to shop in the section of the opposite gender. I say this because there are virtually no dresses and skirts designed to fit male bodies and only a handful of suits and the like designed to fit female bodies (although more and more have been popping up in the last few years).

I use the history of fashion as a relevant example of how, despite a much more complex gender spectrum, the gender binary gets perpetuated through everyday things we may not usually take note of. But this binary reduces masculinity to men in male bodies and femininity to women in female bodies, which is not the case for all individuals. So limiting certain kinds of clothes to only one type of body by claiming that it’s in our nature is not only impractical, but also historically inaccurate.

Defy the limitations of time and gender with CHELSEA SPILLER by contacting her at ctspiller@ucdavis.edu.