UCSC had a “Dress Like It’s 1965” Day on Thursday, 15 Jan 2015, to help celebrate the 50th birthday of UCSC. I participated in the festivities by dressing as I did in high school, with bright red pants, orange shirt, white belt, and Campbell soup tie. The tie, tie bar, and glasses were the ones I wore in high school, but the rest of the clothes I had to reconstruct, as I weigh about 60lbs more now than I did in high school. My head is also wider, which means my old glasses don’t fit very well. (They’re less than 1 diopter off in the prescription, though—good enough to get around in, but headache-inducing.)
The red pants should have been denim, but I couldn’t find any red denim pants—the red polyester from MoonZooom was the best I could do. The pants were the only purchase—everything else I wore we already had in the house. I was also cheating a bit, as the clothes I wore reflected 1969 or 1970, rather than 1965. I was in 6th and 7th grade in 1965, and I did not wear anything interesting then.
Here are some photos of what I wore:
The woman is the manager of the engineering advising office—she normally has short hair and dresses very professionally—but she looks good in the 1965 styles also!
The most distinctive part of my outfit was the shoes, which my wife painted (the color is mostly Sharpie, though, as she didn’t have time for paint to dry).
These shoes are not like anything I wore in the 60s, but I would have, if they’d been available!
The festivities were interrupted by a student protest:
One of the protestors with a cardboard sign saying “COPS OFF CAMPUS CAMERAS OFF CAMPUS”
A larger banner calling for firing the President of UC can be seen on the stage in back.
The front of the protestors’ parade, with a cowbell.
I was quoted in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
Kevin Karplus, biomolecular engineering professor, wore his old high school 1960s tie and taped glasses. He said he was glad the event was interrupted by a student demonstration.“It wouldn’t be the 60s without one,” said Karplus, who said in his 28 years at UCSC, he’s watched enrollment and fees grow and student resources and state funding drop.
I actually said a good deal more than that to the reporter—I’m actually in agreement with the students that raising tuition is the wrong solution to the continued reduction in state funding for the University of California, and that the game of chicken that Janet Napolitano has decided to play with Jerry Brown is not in UC’s best interests. But I don’t expect anything to change as long as we have such a dysfunctional legislature—I don’t expect to see UC’s financial situation to improve before I retire in a few years. I also gave more specific instances: that the enrollment has grown threefold while the number of librarians has been cut in half. (I now think that the actual numbers may be slightly more extreme than that.)
I doubt that firing Napolitano would do any good, though, as she is pretty much following exactly the same script as her predecessor. It would take an wholesale turnover of just about all the senior executives in the UC Office of the President (or firing and not replacing them) to get any significant change in policy there. It might also take replacing most of the Board of Regents, who seem hell-bent on privatizing the University—I don’t know if that originates with them, or whether they are just rubber-stamps for UCOP, but I suspect that the Regents and UCOP are in close agreement.
Gas station without pumps 
