Denton's Death

I wrote a piece about my feelings about it which is in today's Metro, along with pieces by a number of community members, that represent my state of mind as of this past Sunday evening.

As the days pass I find my remorse deepening -- remorse that I didn't speak up nearly as much over the filthy treatment she and her partner recieved from the moment they reached this community.

I was silent during the period in which Gretchen Kalonji, an internationally recognized scholar who's conducted public presentations for the President of India, was repeatedly insulted as a hanger-on.

I was silent when cowards, under cover of darkness, threw large metal objects through, and smashed, the plate glass window of her home, tossing splinters of sharp glass into it while she was there at night alone.

I only began to find the courage to speak out when the hatemongering grew so virulent that her phone message machine and email account became filled with death threats.

As last night and today slowly pass, I finally find the remorse giving way to determination -- the determination that I will NEVER remain silent in the presence of this kind of fascistic level of harassment of a newcomer to this community again.

And that feels very good, and sits in my body as a solid and ethical determination.

Thanks for starting this thread -- it was, in my perspective, necessary -- and it's good that it's here.

Paul Wagner

it is definately sad that she killed herself. Nobody is arguing with that. That doesnt make the fucked up things she did when she was alive ok though. People have a way or glorifying people after they die, and putting them up on a pedistal. I honestly did not know her for anything positive, which is obviously not a reflection of her entirety, but it doesnt change the fact that the only reason i know much about her at all is because of the fucked up priorities she was implementing on ucsc. i feel for her loved ones, but im not going to suddenly become an apologist for her fucked up behaviors because shes dead now.

What's important now, more than anything, is that the Chancellor has died. She killed herself. Check out google news. On medical leave, most likely depressed, she flew off a forty-plus story balcony in a highrise in San Francisco and ended up on the pavement of a parking lot worlds below. This from a brilliant scientist, a brilliant female scientist, a proud lesbian, seemingly that exceptionally talented, energetic type. The lucid, holocaust-transcending scholar in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" who finshes it all, without explanation, in a suicide note: "I've gone out the window."

Stages of grief, or whatever, somewhere in there, at least for me, is that need to find meaning out of the whole thing. I've found that a lot of people seem to be more purely angry about this than anything else. Because . . . Denice Dee Denton (or "D3," as some student activists took to calling her: Santa Cruz Indy Media) spend $30,000 on a private dog run (for a campus that doesn't allow dogs). The cushy job for the lesbian partner (conservatives emphasize "lesbian" out of scorn for "the homosexuals," liberal media types play up the private perk at public expense. She represented at once a lefty university bent on "an agenda" and the face of the military-industrial-congressional-academic-office-of-the-secret-ombudsperson complex.

A toy, really, even in death. You see, folks from every political corner and every source of public anger have taken to burning the late chancellor in effigy, each group seemingly eager for a share of the flames. And it's not that I think Denton was a martyr or even a truly great leader, it's rather that, well, humane societies tend to their dead.

Yes, Denice worked in and thrived from a corrupt, unaccountable university. More on that later. But let's think beyond the University House improvements. She went through a snotty, elitist, heterosexist (perhaps, finally, a legitimate use for that word) and overwhelmingly MALE school in Cambridge, MASS, emerging as a dazzling female scientist with an armful of degrees and honors, earned academic positions like funhouse tokens, became many firsts--female dean of engineering at UW, (openly) gay chancellor at Santa Cruz. She could have made millions probably in corporate-land, but instead she stayed with academia and with working in her spare time to give women, folks of color and folks of gayness an easier shot at becoming scientists. All with apparently boundless energy. A hell of a life; a lot to admire, quite a loss so young.

Outside world and conservative self-styled pundits be damned (blessed are the morons, for they will always be with us), the real concern for me is within UCSC, and places like indymedia. It's troubling that well-meaning but truly angry, self-righteous activists are having a hard time feeling sorry, that, well, someone jumped to her death. You can liken her to a villian, or, well, you can grow up.

It's a tragedy for UCSC. What's happened is something like the worst of Santa Cruz--the mean-spirited activists always hunting down the wrong enemies, the soulless administrators unable to condemn unjust wage disparities as close to their eyes as color contacts--finally colliding--in the form of a lost chancellor. Not to say that pressures of scandal and institutional racism-sexism allegations drove Denice to this. We might never know what caused her to do what she did--it could have been all of it, or some, or simply that something clicked or that she felt her time was up; why would YOU jump 40 stories to your death?

Rather, it's what we as slugs can learn from what's happened. Santa Cruz is ultimately a humanist campus, we believe that, pathetic dirty creatures that we are, people are capable of good works and able to change the world around them into a caring, decent community. We're thinkers and feelers at once. So my hope, perhaps, is that we can understand as well as sense that something is wrong when students simply chant empty slogans and when we approve administrative salaries and perks so out of whack with what real people can earn--just as something is wrong when our chancellor kills herself.

The best of Santa Cruz doesn't come from the now-haunting photos on the indymedia website of students taunting and following Denice Denton, or from Denton herself simply grabbing perks for herself, her partner, her house, her dogs. Instead, what we hold onto is still that inagural class, Cowell, Fall 1965, students living in trailers alongside faculty fellows and a provost, working and studying **together** to make that neat little city on a hill, away from the corruption of slogans and bureaucrats as the original puritanical city on a hill dwellers sought to escape the corruption of the filthy secular world.

Is the point faith? Pray away the sins of empty UC materialism and narcissistic student activism? That could help. (Degree of sarcasm intended.) But really, the point is, like both cities on a hill, some actual work. Sleeves rolled up, feet in the mud. Can we take a break from the university expense accounts, put down the placards, and maybe talk together, students, faculty, admin, about how we can keep this great educational experiment going? Clark Kerr and Dean McHenry had a hell of a time starting UCSC, J. Herman Blake didn't set up Oakes in a day; Feminist Studies, HistCon, the GLBTI center didn't happen without work involved. But it happened. Santa Cruz happened, that great little campus in the trees.

There's this packing supply catalog with folksy getting-through-life stories. In a recent issue, the company owner wrote about her mother and father-in-law passing away in short succession. She said something, unexpectedly human for her industry, "Like all families, at times, you get through it because you have to. Later you make sense of it all." Right now, I suppose we're getting through it as a family of slugs, dysfunctional as it may happen. But soon, the time will arrive when we'll have to figure out where we're going next. "We" meaning all of us.

Denice Denton, thank you for your time here. Sorry for the hurtful things we said.

Slugs, let's get to work.

Hunter S. Thompson’s prophetic prediction, left to us in the form of a suicide note. Regarding the future of democracy in the United States, he was not noted for his giddy optimism. He did, however, have a very disturbing tendency to get this kind of thing right.

“Big Dark coming” seems eerily applicable now on a local level.

Bad news has a bad habit of getting around quickly; we found out, while attending a conference in Seattle, that UCSC Chancellor Denton had apparently killed herself. The report says her personal and professional life may have been to blame. In other words, we have no idea of the circumstances.

One thing is certain. No good will come of this. Nor can it. To point out the obvious personal tragedy this is for her mother, partner and other loved ones and colleagues seems almost as clinically detached as the all-too-frequent campus death notices we seem to get by email with alarming frequency (this time it was no different, apart from the signature). There will doubtless be much finger-pointing, as there is no shortage of blame, and she was hardly the perfect victim.

I can’t help feeling partly responsible, being one of a large chorus of vocal critics. Whether my personal responsibility is 0.00001% or 2% really isn’t the point. Rather, it is that the vicious, dehumanizing one-sided class war of attrition being waged by the university hierarchy upon those whom it smarmily claims are the future of the university has taken another victim, albeit an unexpected one, in unpredicted circumstances.

Denton walked into an unfolding disaster, perhaps blindly. The University of California in general, and UCSC (at or near the bottom of the hierarchy of UCs) in particular, was suffering the effects of the California state budget problems, further exacerbating the growing economic schism that deepens the class divide within the university community. No one could have walked into that job and had an easy time of it, but Denton was perhaps less equipped than some to deal with the stark realities that left her looking the part of an ineffectual, out-of-touch, and ridiculously irrelevant millionaire armchair progressive. I’ve sometimes wondered if she was being set up to fail, as a distraction from the myriad scandals contaminating the highest levels of the administrative power structure in the systemwide University of California. Unlike her predecessor, MRC Greenwood, who was a charismatic extrovert who reveled in the position and who relished nothing so much as a good political brawl, she was not a perfect fit for the job. In fact, she was completely unsuited for it, and those who picked her and installed her either knew this and cynically promoted her to this position, anticipating disaster, or else are unbelievably incompetent. Either way, they too have something to answer for.

I’ve already heard the convenient assessment that she was simply the victim of her own personal demons, and that it is fruitless to examine the situation further. Possibly, but no one who has held a position like that, however reluctantly, can completely separate their personal and professional lives. In her case, it was demonstrably impossible. Don’t we at least owe her the courtesy of asking the difficult, self-critical questions?

We will also hear that she was the victim of homophobia. Doubtless this is true to some extent, but some of her most ardent critics, locally at least, found her openness about her orientation to be one of her most redeeming features. We don’t give US foreign policy a free pass because Condoleezza Rice is black; to do so would in itself be a form of racism (albeit the liberal flavor). Similarly with Denton. And that I think is the lesson we must all keep in mind — criticism of policy is not criticism of the individual’s self-worth. If she stakes her self-worth and identity on her policies, that clearly complicates things, but it is always best to focus on the message, not the messenger.

But focus on the messenger we did, in part, because she was set up (by those who hand-picked her and placed her on display at a campus whose original purpose was to defuse and to neutralize dissent) as a target for our reaction to the vile stench of corruption, the greed, and a malignant disregard for those increasingly large numbers of students, staff and even junior and mid-level faculty who now find themselves forever stranded on the wrong side of the growing economic abyss at UCSC between the haves and the have-nots. That one of the have-mores, whom the haves have desperately and without regard to principle aligned themselves with in the hope that they too will one day pick the plums before the withering fruit tree shrivels up completely and dies, has herself become a tragic casualty of this universally odious and alienating one-sided administrative class war is ironic in many ways, all of which are deeply troubling to those of us who are still trying to convince ourselves that there might be something at least distantly resembling a viable future at UCSC.

Big Dark is coming.

I don't know what you guys singing the praises of UCSC, everyone holding hands as one big happy family are smoking. But clearly you aren't working up here. Or if you are you're getting one of those bigger paychecks. Do I give a damn if DeeDee was a nice person? What about Marcee Greenwood? How about Jean-Marie Scott? All are gay, in prominant positions of power on the campus (or were). But does their sexual orientation make a bit of different when policies they pursue result in horrific disparties in workload and income on the campus? All this hand wringing by liberals, wondering if somehow standing up for theirs or other people's rights helped contribute to someone's demise is a bit annoying. All I can say is this. DeeDee Denton though unfortunately suffering from depression, had the benefits and income to be able to take a month off for medical leave. And then she had a job, had she not killed herself to come back to. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in my current job on campus? Do you know what kind of $$ a clerical or custodian or temp worker can expect in a month on leave?

People are rising to positions of power in this UC system based on their ability to maximize work level on the lowest workers in this system. It doesn't matter if any high level administrator deep down is a good person, if the policies they promote serve to be against the very values of equality they all profess to support.

For family, friends, associates who worked with Chancellor Denton, it's a tragedy. To theorize..her death was like a death of a "corporate executive" or a warrior. Yes, she assisted learners. So do a lot of teachers. She was part of a highly political scene. And her death was sensational and possibly a statement of the moral conflicts she was aware of in being in the position she was...in every area of her life. As someone said to me, "she fell on her sword--an honorable way to take the heat off of everybody else."

I'm no expert on Denton's record. I'm just aware that students were wantonly abused without accountability by UCSC police during last year's Tent University--perhaps one of the deterrents that prevented a recurrence of Tent U this year. A half-assed namby-pamby statement by faculty, of course, didn't help. But Denton was in a position of power.

I'm reminded of Paine's comment in response to Edmund Burke's lamenting of Marie Antoinette's death by guillotine: "he laments the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." My impression of Denton is that she was a well-paid part of the same machine that Mario Salvio opposed forty years ago.

Perhaps those who are mourning her can specifically cite some of her achievements here at Santa Cruz and educate us.

Homeless activist Chris Brozda jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge this spring; dozens of homeless people die each year; instead of tears and speeches, you get silence.

All you grievers, please clue us in.

Denton made money. So did you you Robert Norse. The difference is that she came from littlle means and accomplished much. You were handed much and have done little but produce hot air. Get off your high horse and contribute something more than polemic tirades. You're boring.

Right on Watchdog! Amen brother!

Please go to the nearest 3 people that you know who teach, work in the offices and laboratories and administer in universities to ask them how things are at the places where they work. Of course, we always know how "the boss" should operate in every place of work, but there are many very important ways in which universities are "different". There are very good, fair, just reasons why the spouses of some university administrators are hired into senior level jobs. It has been happening since the middle 1900's--openly. Male administrators often made that as a condition of their accepting the job--that their highly qualified and successful wife be hired into a position in her discipline. Of course, her salary was then negotiated. For the life of me, I cannot see what is wrong with that. She certainly had nothing to do with the pay scale in UC.
Dr. Denton was a lesbian and she had a spouse who was highly qualified and successful--even more than that: extremely rare female engineer educated at MIT who is one of the most expert in the world in her speciality.
Students( I was one for 21 years), even faculty (I was one for 25 years), have very unrealistic expectations about how powerful a university president is.

This society is alienating to everyone, even people with lots of material goodies, and it snaps people.
it's too bad it claimed another, but then again i dont see what the big deal is...theres plenty of suicides everyday (and increasing thanks to innapropriate meds, thanks big pharma) and frankly, thats the least of it. plenty of people have their life taken by freezing to death, workplace accidents, police brutality, cars, and it goes on and on...

so why the commotion? may denton rest in peace if she can, the grief is for people with close affinity to her to deal with, not everyone who reads the news.

and to y'all attacking robert norse... what in the world are YOU doing thats positive?

even if he is from a privileged background (which i know nothing about anyways) hes putting a fair amount of effort defending people whos rights are consistently trampled on. in my opinion thats at least, if not more, worthwhile than the so called sucess of being an over paidfigurehead in some huge institution. but maybe you shittalkers judge sucess by income (hope you dont kill yourself when you realize the emptiness of material goods past food and shelter)

As one who did not know Dr. Denton and yet am very intrigued, I believe one reason that many of us are intrigued because it appeared that she had it all professionally and at her zenith she ended her life in a very dramatic way. The facts of her life as reported are interesting.

I think if she had been given an engineering faculty position with a typical on-scale paycheck, there would have been significantly less objection. The (male) partner of the chancellor at UCSD, for example, got a job in the chemistry department there. In that case, everyone wins. The department gets an extra member of faculty (to share the workload), the spouse has a very nice job, and the chancellor solved her two-body problem. This was different in that (a) the job was simply created, and it had nothing to do with engineering, and (b) her paycheck was slightly larger than that of Condoleezza Rice, at a time when rank and file workers are getting $30K. If staff and junior faculty were not struggling to make ends meet, I think this would have been less problematic.