In 2012, when founding Oakes College provost and distinguished sociologist J. Herman Blake traveled back to UC Santa Cruz to give a presentation, his students sought him out. They wanted to thank him.
Though Blake left UC Santa Cruz in the 1980s, those students never forgot him. Frances Henderson, (Oakes, ’80, East Asian Studies/history) remembered how Blake made her promise to return to UC Santa Cruz after she took a quarter off, in part because her father was ill. “Someone saw me crying, and he found out about it. He was very caring. As a provost he wore a mantel of power but he was very sweet and gentle.”
This month, Blake will be back on campus to receive one of the university’s highest honors. He will be one of three honorees at the UC Santa Cruz’s Founders Celebration Dinner at the Porter Dining Hall on Oct. 21 at 7 p.m., following a 6 p.m. reception.
Blake will be given the Fiat Lux Award in recognition for his many years of distinguished service. This will be a kind of homecoming for Blake, who taught at UC Santa Cruz for 18 years, gaining renown both as a professor and for his leading role in forming Oakes, the seventh college at UC Santa Cruz.
"When Chancellor (George) Blumenthal called me about the Fiat Lux Award, I was deeply moved,” Blake said last week. “It is an incredible honor and I am grateful to UC Santa Cruz for this consideration. It is a pinnacle for me.”
Blake is the co-author of Revolutionary Suicide, an autobiography of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton (Oakes ‘74, individual major; Ph.D. ‘80, history of consciousness), and many scholarly articles on institutional excellence, student academic achievement, and the unique Gullah Geechee culture along the Southeastern coast of the United States.
Blake’s standing and legacy on campus is so notable, his admirers even named an award named after him, presented to a graduate or graduates who best exemplify his commitment and service to Oakes as well as his academic achievement.
Guiding a successful campaign
Fundraiser extraordinaire Linda Peterson (Stevenson, history, ’70) will also receive a Fiat Lux Award for her outstanding service. Peterson, a UC Santa Cruz Foundation trustee and chair of the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz, presided over a fundraising effort that exceeded all expectations. Around the time of the campaign kickoff, she galvanized supporters with some words of wisdom: “It’s not just the right time, it’s about time. We’ve been too shy too long.”
Throughout the campaign, Peterson worked hard to engage trustees and donors. The campaign was a triumph, coming to its successful end ahead of schedule and surpassing its original goals.
More than 60,000 donors gave $335 million, raising money for the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, the Coastal Sustainability Initiative, the Quarry Amphitheater, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, academic divisions, the campus’s libraries, scholarships, fellowships and transformative student experience.
Recognizing research excellence
Carl Walsh, distinguished economics professor at UC Santa Cruz, will be on hand to receive the Faculty Research Award, the foremost academic honor bestowed by the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate. This honor is awarded annually to a faculty member who has a distinguished record in research.
Walsh is one of the world’s premiere researchers in the fields of monetary theory and monetary policy. His now-classic papers on central bank governance, optimal monetary policy, and inflation targeting have helped set the research agenda for monetary economists for over thirty years and have had a strong positive influence on the way the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and central banks abroad conduct monetary policy.
He has also written influential articles on how transparency in the conduct of monetary policy can improve economic efficiency.
More recently, he has integrated labor markets into monetary policy models in an elegant and insightful way. Walsh has been recognized internationally for the quality of his research and teaching. His many publications include Monetary Theory and Policy, required reading in most graduate courses worldwide in his field.
Tickets for the celebration dinner are $150 per person. Those who wish to attend may buy their tickets online.
The Founders Day festivities will kick off at 4 p.m. Friday, October 20 with the Convocation of Chairs at UC Santa Cruz’s Music Recital Hall.
At this special event, which is free and open to the public, the university will honor the holders of faculty chairs and the donors who created them. A major achievement of the campaign was the creation of 16 new chairs, nearly doubling the total number of endowed chairs. The convocation will honor the new as well as previous chair holders and donors.
