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Show’s Not Over at Che Cafe at UCSD – Its Fate Likely Rests on Students

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By Andrea Carter

The struggle continues to keep the historic CHE Café facility open on the University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus. This battle over a rare public, all-ages arts, food, and music venue should concern us all as it represents the canary in the coal mine for additional onslaughts of this nature to follow.

Undergraduate and graduate student government councils, respectively the Associated Students (AS) and the Graduate Student Association (GSA) are set to soon issue reports and recommendations to the University as to the CHE Café, its facility and the other cooperatives at UCSD concerning the lease issues, upgrades and dispute resolution. Recently, the councils moved in favor of adopting a joint resolution rather than two independent ones. In the coming weeks then the councils will be synthesizing their input and accepting more from students on these issues as well as from the CHE and other cooperatives.   [Read more…]

La Jolla Shores Sundown

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By Karen Kenyon

You are rolled up in your blanket now,
perhaps 40 feet feet from my car
olive brown, army-colored,
here by the peaceful Pacific
tree-willow blue,
Paler near us, darker
near the horizon.

It’s almost time for the green flash,
but you don’t care. …
  [Read more…]

Few Are Left Fighting For The Ché

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By Kyle Trujillo, UCSD Undergrad

On Wednesday of finals week, June 11, I cut short a study session and hurried across campus to Scholar’s drive to the Ché Cafe Collective. I knew it as the Che. Besides, it had recently been stripped of its “collective” status. It was the first time I was going to a meeting and not a show.

As I approached the colorful building I slowed down to listen. The walls could talk. The faces of Rigoberta Menchu, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr., Karl Marx, former student Angela Davis, and a prowling black panther. In red and black, the face of Ché Guevara stares fiercely from an outer wall and looks out proudly on the inner courtyard. The many murals are not just the work of students, but also local artist Mario Torero and the designer and activist Shepard Fairey.

On the cooperative’s Facebook event page, about 120 had clicked to attend. My heart sunk when I saw that only 20 were actually able to join in. My heart sunk further when I learned only three of us were students. I should have expected this. It was finals week – people who weren’t studying were already flying and driving home.   [Read more…]

UCSD Graduate Students Strike After Just Demands Not Met

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Strikers disrupt classes and block public thoroughfares to get a decent raise while upper level administrators continue to receive exorbitant salaries and enjoy a culture of lavish living

By Daniel Gutiérrez

Graduate students at the University of California, San Diego represented by the United Auto Workers Local 2865 initiated a two-day strike Wednesday, April 2nd, that will end Friday, April 4th. The strike at UCSD is part of a statewide action occurring at all the campuses of the University of California for these reasons. Graduate students have been bargaining for months now and have faced an unresponsive University of California Labor Relation bargaining team that barely allowed a 3% increase in pay to Teaching Assistants, still leaving them below the poverty line and far behind competitor universities.

Graduate students and undergraduate supporters began to assemble in front of the university’s emblematic library at 8:30 am to begin their activities. Students were able to successfully close Gilman Avenue for nearly twenty-five minutes in an attempt to cause delays for the city and school bus services.

Strikers created human barricades along a busy pedestrian avenue that cuts through the heart of the campus. Later in the afternoon, strikers attempted to storm the Office of Graduate Studies, but the office locked its doors to them and even one of their own employees.   [Read more…]

UCSD Graduate Students Protest Controversial Employment Policy

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Doctoral students rally against the 18 Quarter Limit

By Daniel Gutiérrez

La Jolla, California — Students at the University of California, San Diego stormed the Office of Graduate Studies Tuesday, April 1, to protest a controversial employment policy implemented across the University of California. The “18 Quarter Limit” restricts doctoral students by only allotting them 18 quarters to be teaching assistants, readers, or graduate student researchers. Such positions, if secured, reduce a graduate student’s tuition from roughly $5,200 a quarter to a mere $196. The action came on the eve of the two-day strike that will be held April 2nd and 3rd at UCSD.

The 18 Quarter Limit greatly affects graduate students who begin their studies in MA programs and then transfer to doctoral programs. This is because their access to funding begins to expire after their first quarter in the university as Master’s students.   [Read more…]

When I Think of Lyric, Writing About Love is Very Necessary

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 By Ernie McCray

In response to what I wrote about how nice I thought it would be if the La Jolla Christmas Parade was named something that was more welcoming for everyone, a woman said “The article was meant to cause some drama, stir up some anxiety and really wasn’t necessary.”

That, I must say, came as news to me as my easy going nature won’t let me anywhere near anxiety. And I definitely was not shooting for drama at all although it would be nice if someone stood up and did a little dance and sang a show tune about a “Parade that Made Everybody Happy.”

But, it was very “necessary” for me to write an appeal to people’s better nature, to the love they hold inside of themselves. Promoting love and understanding is pretty much at the heart of everything I write, everything I do. Now, there’s a reason for it. In fact, making the world a better place is what I’m supposed to do.   [Read more…]

Support Local Artists, Artisans and Small Businesses, Buy Independent for the Holidays

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By Brent E. Beltrán

The holidays are upon us and the time for gift giving is here. Instead of shopping at the malls and giving your hard earned cash to a corporation why not purchase items from local artists and artisans?

Here is a short list of holiday art bazaars and small businesses that deserve to be patronized this holiday season.   [Read more…]

When is the Gospel Not the Truth? More on the La Jolla ‘Christmas’ Parade

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By Judi Curry

Several months ago I wrote an article about the possibility of changing the name of the “La Jolla Christmas Parade” to something that did not connote a religious theme. I pointed out that almost every parade during the month of December had changed their title from a “Christmas theme” to a more generic one, thus entailing more enjoyment and enthusiasm for the total population rather than a select few.

One of the references I used was a three paragraph summary of the anti semitism that had existed in La Jolla for many years. I found that reference in the “La Jolla” section of Wikipedia .

I was very surprised when one of the readers of my original article called to inform me that those references no longer existed; and, in fact, there was only a small paragraph where the three used to be and it practically negated the original paragraphs.   [Read more…]

Readers Write: Education

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By Tom Hunter

I’m an old hippy, who would have been a member of UCSD’s class of 69 if I’d stayed around for another year.  I had two great teachers in four years – Herbert Marcuse and David Fate Norton. I had three brilliant roommates and I was at the first march on La Jolla when that bastion of liberality first realized they had been traduced.

La Jolla has never recovered.  Even the birds do little but shit on the place.

I was a C student, although I was in four different departments in four different years.  Physics, Biology,  Philosophy and finally Art.  I was very young for my age and I worked 20 plus hours a week at the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (my office building is currently trying to do a header off the cliff above Scripps).

I may be somewhat tainted in my memories, but I’m fairly sure I got a well rounded education – for nearly fucking free.  Cut to UCSD of today.   [Read more…]

No More Ho, Ho, Ho?

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By Ernie McCray

I got a call on my message machine asking for my help regarding a “secular” matter. It was my first such request in all my 75 years so I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why me?” since I don’t, although I’m not religious, necessarily consider myself a secular human being, and also since this particular worldly problem pertained to La Jolla.

I mean when I moved to San Diego in 1962, I was, in and of my 6 foot five black self, a problem in La Jolla, feeling, whenever I visited, about as welcomed as a seal in the Children’s Pool, like an unwashed heathen in a pristine hallowed place.   [Read more…]

Politics Trumped History on Memorial Day in San Diego

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Press covers ceremony honoring death of paid mercenaries, traditional military sacrifice honors ignored

By Fran Zimmerman

Now that Memorial Day 2013  is over, let’s record how the red/blue politics of the day trumped history and tradition and every lemming newspaper in this Navy town went along.

Apparently the Los Angeles Times, U-T San Diego, San Diego Reader and La Jolla Light forgot that San Diego is home to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, final resting place for more than 115,000 servicemembers and their families from all branches of the armed forces and site of the largest Memorial Day commemoration in the city.

Each of those newspapers carried stories with photographs, some prominent on Page One, of ceremonies in La Jolla at the “Mt. Soledad Veterans’ Memorial” underneath the controversial hilltop Christian cross. Not one journal mentioned that the Supreme Court has upheld the U.S. 9th District Court finding that this towering cross represents an illegal and unconstitutional expression of religion in a public place.

And not one mentioned that there is no consecrated ground there.
  [Read more…]

La Jolla: Harbor Seals Vacate the Children’s Pool

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Unfortunately There’s a Much Larger Problem Now

by Steve Burns

La Jolla residents, long upset over the harbor seal rookery at the Children’s Pool, woke up last Friday wondering if nature had finally solved the “problem.” To their amazement, not a single harbor seal was to be found, neither on the beach of the Children’s Pool, nor on Seal Rock just a few yards from the shore line.

Could it be the controversy had resolved itself? Could the Children’s Pool finally be returned to its rightful owners; the people of La Jolla?   [Read more…]

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