UCSC’s East Meadow would be lost to needless growth

I am a professor who arrived at UCSC in 1970 and have taught educational philosophy, aesthetic education and poetry for some 35 years.

What I have taught my students that bears on the current decision to destroy the East Meadow: 1) we are stewards of the earth, 2) we have vast powers for good and ill in our stewardship, 3) a fleet of bulldozers can destroy a meadow and its creatures forever in a single day. 4) with a fleet of good ideas about the fragility, beauty and necessity of the natural world we can choose not to destroy a resource that will then be lost forever.

UCSC is a liberal arts university first and foremost. The liberal arts, founded in ancient Greek philosophy, deal with understanding the causes of ideas or assertions before acting on them. In modern parlance, we have the idea of cause and effect, which also puts understanding before action. Using this philosophical framework, how can we understand the cause of continuing efforts by university administrators and others essentially to destroy the iconic and irreplaceable East Meadow?

It would be unfair to say, for example, that the cause of the administrators’ resolve is indifference to the meadow’s beauty and ecology of plant and animal life. We know enough about the abiding culture of UCSC and its stewards to assume they value the natural splendor of the meadow landscape even as they want to build on it. We also know enough about the university’s stewards to dismiss monetary gain as a cause for their position building on the East Meadow. No one among administrative advocates will become richer if the meadow is built upon.

I could continue to consider causes behind the proposal at hand; but that won’t be because there is one essential, immediate and transparent cause: growth. Growth is a god worshipped by not only the university, but the nation as a whole.

If you doubt we’ve arrived at the essential cause of administration action against the meadow, consult university planning documents put forth since its founding: growth is deemed essential, and even inevitable in every one.

Why? We can’t seriously argue that growth of a college or university is vital to the quality of education it offers. We have many examples of small colleges and universities that provide their students as good an education as the megaliths among universities. Swarthmore is relatively small but offers as good or better undergraduate education than Harvard – I know from personal experience — nor does the University of Minnesota provide its students a better education than Pomona. Bigger is by no means necessarily better in education ... or in other endeavors I can think of, as varied as automobile production, wine making and medical care.

Back to the matter at hand, why is UCSC growth a basically uncontested value that in practice means more students, more buildings, more traffic and less meadow? Here we have foremost an undergraduate institution and cannot correlate better education with more undergraduates. How will more learned and wise liberal artists, our students, be created by destroying a meadow? How does university growth, following conventional educational practice of more lecture classes rather than seminars, and more teaching handed over to graduate assistants, abet the liberal arts education we claim as the raison d’être of our university. Last, how can there a modicum of educational or social justice in enlarging an already dangerously depersonalized and crowded university.

Let me suggest that while some change is destructive — think of global warming — change in itself is neither good nor bad. It is the cause of many consequences, one distinctly bad consequence being the loss of a meadow. A good consequence, a consequence recognizing growth as a cause both socially just and academically astute, is to stop crowding the state’s heavy necklace of by-the-sea campuses and instead build more colleges inland where communities want them. Merced, the newest UC, could be a model. Why not serve our state that clearly values education by building more new, relatively modest universities in towns and cities crying out for them. Each would have a head start on assembling a diverse student body, a return to student-centered teaching and learning, and the latest technology and engineering knowledge to create the most environmentally sensitive campus possible. One which sacrifices no meadow.

Why not serve our state that clearly values education by building more new, relatively modest universities in towns and cities crying out for them.