James,

Thanks to you and your students for sharing your course work with us. Don’t be too hard on the dreamers, you never know what they might do.

I’ve been following these threads with especial interest because once upon a time some equally quixotic people at UCSC hit up my family to give them a ridiculously large, half-baked scheme called Merrill College . How screwy was that?

I detect in your class threads a lot of the same bizarro optimism. Please keep it coming, you Slugs!

Social: They asked my family what they should study there. We told them to study whatever they wanted to study. They decided to study poverty, foreigners in the Third World, Hispanics and exotic stuff like that. Then they decided it would be even wackier if they actually brought in students from those backgrounds to study there.

Econ: They’d started building it before they had anywhere near the money to finish it. How much did they need? They asked us for $500,000. We gave them $650,000 for starters.

Technology: Somebody had the wild idea to teach students classes where they lived. Architecture for the win!

Obstacles: Inviting Timothy Leary was a little hard to do since he was a felon at the time.

From some early campus history on the controversial campus activities that brought us our first tangible return on invested capital:

“McHenry: Well I think if they do so as individuals, it's up to them. I think it's unfortunate when they represent themselves as coming from the University. It's bad in public relations and substantially in effect it ...take the grape boycott -- I have a tremendous emotional sympathy and great personal admiration for Cesar Chavez, and no grapes have been served at our table for more than a year ... and yet when Peter Braun, now at Merrill, organized this park-in at Lucky's and some of the other markets, it tripled the sale of table grapes in Santa Cruz.

[Extra--bite--the--hand--that--feeds--you--LOL! My family was leading the planet in sales of table grapes at the time, thanks to a retail deal in the boondocks of California that my great-grandfather botched and then got stuck holding the bag. Today we call that ill-planned adventure Safeway. While my family was funding some of the first Latin American Studies programs anywhere, Cesar Chavez was picketing us all the time. :-D ]

“And they generated an enormous amount of ill will towards the University. And when I say this to Peter, he says, "Well, we're making converts; in the long haul it's going to do some good." But really all they've done is get rid of a certain amount of their own aggression and frustration. They haven't helped the cause any. If they'd go out and work on Saturdays and contribute the money they earn to the strike fund, it would be a lot more constructive in my opinion. And I can't believe that they're so stupid not to see this.

“Calciano: But yet they're not doing it.

“McHenry: No. Well they... this park-in and all was just calculated to get the dander up of people, of very moderate people who might have been sympathetic if things had been handled politely. Shave off the beards and dress like human beings, and hand out circulars in town and ... but obstructing sidewalks and filling up parking lots with their jalopies and all this is just calculated to make people detest them. And I can't understand it; perhaps it's because I never studied abnormal psychology.”

Oh how I miss the '60s!