UC Mercd Magazine-Volume XVI, Issue 2

The founding ceremony took place on a warm autumn day with a bright sun glinting blindingly off the tent. As nearly 200 gowned academics marched in and took their seats, the Merced College Concert Band played the “Coronation March” from John Phillip Sousa’s orchestral suite Tales of a Traveler. Davis, whowould lose a recall vote a year later, told the crowd, “My administration worked with you like a laser beam to make sure this campus got underway. We all know the obstacles, the objections, the legal challenges, but we are standing here today . . . and we aremaking progress." To cheers from campus supporters, Davis then proclaimed that UCMerced would open in 2004, a year ahead of schedule. I don’t remember any of the UCMerced employees present letting out audible groans, but I ampretty sure our collective thought bubble read, “Oh, no. No. No. No.” (As it turned out, UC Merced barely managed to open in 2005, and even at that the entire contraptionwas held together with duct tape and baling wire.) The keynote address was given by Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin, a physicist who in 1998 shared aNobel Prize for his work in explaining the “fractional quantum Hall effect.” (It involves electrons. I don’t understand it either.) Laughlin apologized for being on the Stanford faculty despite having completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley. A native of Visalia, Laughlin vividly described the experience of flying West over the Sierra Nevada on the way to the Bay Area and seeing below the “harsh savannah” where he had grown up and where UC Merced would bring opportunities unavailable in the Valley of his youth. Following the keynote, UC President Richard Atkinson inaugurated Carol Tomlinson-Keasey as chancellor. Dignitaries armed with gold-painted shovels broke ground to heartfelt cheers and applause. In my memory, the highlight of the entire ceremony was a parade of local children dressed in costumes representing the diversity of the peoples who have come to call California’s Central Valley their home – Mexican, Hmong, Dutch, Philippine, Miwok, Italian, African, Portuguese, Yemeni, Punjabi, plus more I’m sure I have left out. As someone who was new to the Valley and had yet to comprehend the astounding diversity of this place, seeing all those costumed kids was a remarkable and memorable learning experience. After the ceremony, there was a “y’all come” barbecue at Lake Yosemite. I sat at a picnic table with a group of local K-12 teachers and administrators, most of them Hispanic, who talked excitedly about an upcoming Fresno State football game. Through such encounters, we UC Merced long-haulers slowly became part of a Merced community that is very different from Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, and the other “college towns” that educated and shaped so many of us.

ChancellorTomlinson-Keasey, Gov. Davis and other dignitaries break ground.

Our being part of the local community certainly has a dollar value, in that UC Merced employees spend their money here, but I’ll leave that to the economists. The greater, and much richer, value is found in the ways we who came here because of UC Merced and those who made this community their home for other reasons rub off on each other. We learn from each other and broaden each other’s horizons in ways that cannot, and probably should not, be measured. At the time of the founding ceremony, the local community had a lot of expectations for UC Merced. Many of those expectations had grown from understandable mixtures of altruism and economics. In a Merced Sun-Star article, several local agriculturalists expressed both their enthusiasm for the good UC Merced would bring to the area along with their desire it would not lead to the end of agriculture inMerced County the way the growth of Silicon Valley had devastated agriculture in Santa Clara County. Jim Cunningham, a farmer and member of the UC Merced Foundation Board of Trustees, said of the challenge of balancing growth with agricultural production, “I have confidence that it'll be handled fine. People will make the right decisions." Diane Crisp, who at the time was a trustee on the UC Agricultural Committee, said, "Because the university is located in prime agricultural land, I think it should have the study of agriculture in mind." Although UC Merced has no School of Agriculture, its faculty have conducted research in areas that contribute directly to agricultural profitability and sustainability, including such areas as energy production, water conservation, soil science, precision agriculture, and agroecology. The university is in the process of establishing a 40-acre experimental smart farmon campus, while theUC Merced Library has created the California Agricultural Resources Archive to preserve, organize, and provide access to records of enduring scientific and historical value. (continued on page 4)

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