Disorientation Guide to UC Santa Cruz 2009-2010

There’s just one problem: The stories the University tells about itself--its dedication to higher knowledge, its liberalism, its openness--are MISLEADING and OPPRESSIVE. Its merits, prestige, positive stereotypes…are LIES.

Throughout the course of this Guide we will do our best to dispel these illusions, to disillusion and disorient you, ultimately opening the way for a stronger, clearer, more independent understanding of yourself, your university and what lies behind this all. We have interrupted these myths by remembering and recording UCSC’s decades of empty promises, shady fronts, and projects in the service of mechanical socialization and exploitative capitalism (markets?). Within these pages, you will find the research and analysis, art and humor we have collectively gathered in our efforts to expose the structures of our life and reorient our understanding of them. Some of it has taken years to research; some you can find with five minutes and a wifi connection.

This is free information which we’ve crafted into a Guide, a framework for navigating the complex of global systems which have created the University as we know it today. These systems are highly interconnected and create a network-- the University--of cuts, exchanges, proposals and external investments, entangling and constructing a range of actors, some of whom sit atop and others who struggle from the bottom. We call this the UC Machine. So, welcome. And prepare for your Dis- and soon-to-be-Re-Orientation to the University of California at Santa Cruz.

DisorientationGuide.wordpress.com