You permitted the then 38 year old woman and young mother, with checkered and multiple school backgrounds acquired as a Shanghai Jewish refugee,- from Vienna to Shanghai (1938 to1947) to Berkeley (1951) to Monterey (1955) to UC Santa Cruz (1965) : 18 years after my immigration, I became one of the first older women to return to a campus – not to chaperon but to mix with the 18 year olds with whom I shared my classes.
I was one of the first women in my classes to unabashedly share my studies with my three children, then 6, 9 and 12 – and to delegate cleaning chores to my so supportive husband AND to our children.
So it was that when I I drove an old VW Beetle from Monterey to Santa Cruz, past artichoke fields, past broccoli plantings, past Moss Landing, three times a week, to spend the day on campus, to spend days going from class to class, that I was transported to a world that I had missed as a teenager (I quit school to work at 15 after Pearl Harbor) & after:
So it was that when Bert Kaplan designed the History of Consciousness program (which I did not get into) that I found a seductive mix of philosophy and psychology which has helped me in my later
career (I got a ph.d. in 1985 in psychology) and have applied in vivo– when I worked as a teacher to Hispanic farmworkers in Salinas,(English on Wheels, when my husband and I made a new video curriculum) ( for which I got a citation from UC Santa Cruz), when I became a practicing cross cultural psychologist to physicians at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, or when we founded Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life project in Monterey, and when I entered private practice in Carmel, Calif.
So it was when Paul Lee, teaching existential psychology and philosophy, invited students to hike, to share seminars outside the classroom, that included mixing this “older woman’ with the younger students that he made me overcome my separateness. I shared ideas and learned what younger students didn’t yet know they didn’t know: he was both keen, enthusiastic and wore his education lightly (he later also worked with homeless people) so he was dedicated to bridge communication gaps wherever he saw them.
But it was in the exquisite natural setting of UC Santa Cruz that I drove into and back home to Monterey -as I drove into it. into the cool shelter of the redwood trees; as I walked from class to class amidst ferns next to me and the softness of underfoot needles, as I found a swimming pool to take a quick dip… but most of all as I entered the Library – which today as then still risies like a cathedral from amidst the woods – that I learned the creative silence of reading and contemplation.
It is something that has stayed with me……. the Santa Cruz universe in the UC Santa Cruz university.
So Happy Anniversary UC Santa Cruz and I wish you that Calif. State continue to support an educational system initiated by Governor Edward Brown and that your ambience extend to the new generations to discover their future in the university years .
Lotte Marcus, ph.d. Class of 1969
