Professor, minority rights champion to leave UCSC

By J.M. BROWN
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

Paul Ortiz, a high-profile labor rights expert at UC Santa Cruz who is widely known for championing affordable faculty housing and campus diversity, is leaving the university for a job in Florida.

The 43-year-old associate professor of community studies at Oakes College said the decision to leave was "agonizing" because "there are no better students in the country"

Ortiz, who left Duke University in 2001 to join UCSC, said he would direct an oral history program at the University of Florida beginning next August.

"I'm deeply disappointed Paul decided to leave," said Quentin Williams, chair of the Academic Senate. "These things do happen in academia, but that doesn't keep it from being a painful thing for the institution"

As chair of UCSC's faculty welfare committee, Ortiz was a vocal proponent for more affordable housing, better pay and improved child care — issues he says the campus is still grappling to address. The Washington state native, who is married to local peace activist Sheila Payne, directed the city's Reel Work May Day Labor Film Festival.

Ortiz is a favorite among activist students, for whom he intervened during an October 2006 clash with police who used pepper spray and batons to control student demonstrators during a rare Board of Regents visit. Using a megaphone, Ortiz calmed the crowd of about 150 who were protesting academic cuts in the humanities and elsewhere.

Dennis Tibbetts, who directs UCSC's American Indian Resource Center, said he was "still kind of reeling" from news of Ortiz's departure because he feared the negative impact on students of Chicano and Latino descent.

With his hands-on style of meeting eager learners outside class to cultivate their passions for culture studies, Ortiz has transformed many students from community college transfers into confident, award-winning scholars, Tibbetts said.

"He takes the time to do that — he serves as role model for being a really good classroom teacher," Tibbetts said.

"He's had a huge impact," said Max Krochmal, a graduate who won UCSC's top honor for senior theses, the prestigious Steck Award.

Krochmal, who is now working on his doctorate at Duke, remembers how Ortiz convinced him that he didn't need to use the work of other scholars to test his thesis on a labor movement in Ecuador's banana fields. Ortiz told him he had done enough valuable research on his own.

"He gave me permission to trust my own instincts and my own ideas and really push them," Krochmal said.

Another former student, Lucio G. Cloud Ramirez, called Ortiz's departure "a tragedy"

"I think he is one of the most committed professors at this university," said Ramirez, who won a UCSC Dean Award and went on to work as the program coordinator for the American Indian Resource Center.

"Paul has the amazing ability to see something in everybody," he said. "If they're willing to work, he will bring it out of them in time"

Ortiz said his goal is not to "teach students a certain body of knowledge, but having them reach a point where they can interpret the world for themselves"

He said UCSC needs to create an ethnic studies program "to catch up with other top research institutions" offering well-developed research initiatives centered on historically disenfranchised cultural groups. "The students have been asking for it for years"

Ortiz said the main reason he took the new job in Gainesville, Fla., was because documenting Caribbean and Latin American history for an oral history program was simply "an incredible offer" he couldn't turn down.

But, Ortiz said the lack of affordable faculty housing and ethnic studies program at UCSC were additional reasons he was willing to leave. He said these issues have partly contributed to several other faculty of color leaving — a sentiment echoed by colleagues and former students.

"It's disturbing to me to see so many top scholars of color leave here," Ortiz said.

Jim Burns, UCSC's spokesman, said the school ranks fourth among UC's 10 campuses in its percentage of minority faculty, which he said is currently 23 percent. In the last four years, Burns said only 11 of 38 faculty members who left the university for reasons other than retirement were people of color.

Still, Burns said, "When faculty leave, especially faculty of color, it's a real loss"

Williams agreed, saying, "Keeping excellent people we've recruited is always hard. Keeping people who contribute greatly to the diversity of the institution is even harder. It's a major loss for the campus. I'll miss him"

Contact J.M. Brown at jbrown [at] santacruzsentinel.com.