Introduction to the Cal Disorientation Guide
On a sunny spring afternoon in the spring of 2007, roughly twenty students involved and interested in student activism met on memorial glade to discuss “what is it that we could do together that we could not do alone?” These students crossed the diverse landscape of campus activism and included tree sitters, members of the ASUC and progressive religious organizations. Over the past few months, as this group has morphed into the Phoenix Coalition to Free the UC, one answer has emerged in answer to our prompting question: we can relieve ourselves of the alienating feeling that we are all working for social change by illuminating how our particular issues are interdependent and by organizing around concepts and tools that shed light on our interdependence.
The 2007 Disorientation Guide is one manifestation of the Phoenix Coalition’s work towards illuminating the interdependence of student and community struggles to create a University which, appreciates life in all of its diverse forms; that respects democratic organizing; and that reveres the nonviolent action that is required to make peace an inner-personal and intra-personal reality. The articles in this year’s disorientation guide aim to highlight both the various past and present campaigns that were/are organizing around one or more of these points and the issues of concern that have yet to be addressed by the public or the UC. Articles were written by dozens of students and community members across many organizations and campaigns. We have also benefited greatly from our relationship with the UCSC disorientation guide team who have inspired us and provided us with articles, which we have reprinted here. We believe that means and ends are fundamentally connected. Because our “ends” is an interconnected progressive movement, we built as many relationships as possible to make this a collaborative project of activists, writers and artists.
The Phoenix Coalition believes that there is currently a disconnect between how the University currently functions and how it would need to function in order to serve the spiritual, psychological, social and environmental needs of its students, faculty, staff and community members. Currently it functions like a machine instead of an organism. A machine has separate, inanimate and unchanging mechanical parts that were created separately and serve fundamentally distinct purposes. An organism is also composed of many “parts” but they are alive, constantly changing and function interdependently. Our University currently functions as an economic machine. Students, taxpayers and corporations pay money for job training and research. Departments exist in isolated enclaves, rarely interacting with one another and the courses offered by many of these departments treat students (often only known by their student ID numbers) as isolated units who are evaluated numerically and are expected to race through the system as efficiently as possible in order to get corporate jobs. What if the University was, instead, structured like an ecosystem where the rains of wisdom watered the diverse thirst of its community for meaning, connection and self-empowerment? What would it take to transition the University from its current condition to its glorious future?
We, the Phoenix Coalition, would like to see the university rise from its current state of building nuclear weapons, working for unethical corporations and refusing students financial aid due to their immigration status. We would like to see it soar like the Phoenix as it contributes to the happiness of its community, well being of our society and peace on our planet. But we can not and would not want to make this happen alone. So, let’s build our ecosystem of social, environmental and spiritual activists now and continue to organize and educate each other. The Phoenix Coalition has begun the work to build bridges and common ground but it will take your efforts to make this vision a reality. If we dream it together and build it together, it will happen.
Although the Phoenix Coalition was disbanded in December 2007, we hope that the original vision will live on in the form of students who are inspired by this guide, and those who will work for similar goals in the future.