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EYE: Can you give a little bit of back-ground information about yourself and your relationship with CalArts? Also, possibly a little bit about the impetus of the movement and how it came to surface at this present time?

LYDIA: I was born in Ohio and grew up between there and Oswego, New York, where my mom moved us when my parents split up. She went back to college and held three jobs in order to take care of us. We had to live in government housing and receive food stamps in order to get by. I still don’t know how she managed. I’m still close with both of my parents. They are very proud and supportive of everything I do but have never been able to offer financial assistance. As far as I have seen though, their emo-tional support is more liberating than the expectations that some people I know feel from being taken care of financially by parents, it can become a burden very easily.

I never thought about prestigious schools until a friend of mine encour-aged me to check out options for an MFA. Those schools just never occurred to me because of cost and my own perception of the quality of my work. I applied to CalArts twice. I came to visit the same day I got my first rejection letter and fell more in love with it. After I visited here I knew it was the right place for me and I immediately worked on revamping my application.

The Occupy Open-Letter to the insti-tution touches on the things that built into my move-in but it was actually a speech Fran Bennett gave during one of our diversity committee meetings that put me over the edge. She was so passionate, as usual, about the impact of student voices. She talked about how her entire mission here was not to teach speech for art but to empower student voices. I almost cried (I cry a lot) but it really was the last log that I needed.

EYE: I’m particularly interested in the faculty response to this - how have faculty reacted; how has their role impacted the movement?

LYDIA: Faculty and staff have re-sponded similarly to students: very positive and very diverse. They have shown support from all schools and in different ways. Many walked by and whispered ‘I support you’. Some elab-orated that they didn’t feel comfort-able sitting at the couches because they were afraid of repercussions.

Tisa Bryant (Critical Studies) for-warded my letter on as soon as she received it which greatly effected the reach. Susan Stole (Theater) attended several meetings with us. Some brought their classes to be taught in the space, more said that they dedicated time in class to the topics of Occupy and art mak-ing. Some staff contributed to other collective displays that were around the couches. A Financial Aid staff member brought dollar bills to add to a toilet that someone brought to the space, and the first night Rebecka and I were woken up by Campus Security talking about how much they liked the letter. They were all very supportive and asked if there was anything we needed on a regular basis. The Film Video faculty (also my school) showed overwhelming and unanimous sup-port. Mostly all of them stopped by, in-cluding the Dean, Steve Ankor. Betsy Bromberg made an announcement of support for Occupy during the closing

of our showcase events at RedCat, and for me personally, saying that I had the voice of the school. Last week the Film Video faculty made a unani-mous vote of support for Occupy and its efforts and scheduled a meeting so that we can talk about initiatives for next year. Rebecka’s theater facul-ty did not show as much support and the ones who did seemed a lot more hesitant to participate. We also saw a direct correlation between the number of supportive faculty per school and the areas that people were strug-gling with at CalArts. The schools with visible faculty had more students that were upset about institute wide or larger problems like miss-man-agement and scholarships. Schools with less faculty showing support for Occupy had more students coming forward about inter-school problems like mentor abuses of power, discrimi-natory practices with projects and funding, and not feeling safe showing support for Occupy.

EYE: In your letter you address CalArts’ students past and present, and say that you also represent other faculty and staff, alongside student council. You write, “Some of us are in positions where to make public announcements such as these would be risky.” Would this movement shift dynamics and raise more awareness if others, especially faculty, rallied alongside you? The idea of them be-ing “too busy,” represents a way for them to silently support without any consequence of their position. Isn’t the same “lack of accountability,” you speak of in regards to CalArts’ poor management being mirrored in this “silent support” method?

LYDIA: It would shift dynamics, but it isn’t necessarily the same as lack of accountability. Many faculty are very active in speaking up for students, but they get tired. When I moved into the lobby, I didn’t necessarily have a solu-tion to the problem so it was difficult to ask people to rally around without specific demands. Much of our couch time was feeling out the collective voice. Faculty, staff, and students are mostly on the same page...even Administration acknowledge the prob-lems and say that they are seeking solutions. Now that we have specific actions though it will be easier to ask for and expect action.

EYE: How can change happen if there is still a majority of faculty continu-ing to support the fiscal “unattain-able model” you say that CalArts has implemented?

LYDIA: We change the model. I believe that even the faculty who sup-port the current model aren’t support-ing it because they strongly believe in it, but like the Administration, don’t see another option and are afraid of change.

EYE: A pamphlet I picked up from your table seemed to be concerned with one Critical Studies faculty member who, as I understood it, was forced into abandoning her position at CalArts due to unfair politics within the existing faculty pool. Can you expand on this?

LYDIA: The letter was brought by someone else and it contains all that I know of the situation.

EYE: Has the movement led to any tremors in other institutions? As I see it, this is a national problem, calling the education system as a whole into question, (or more specifically, the infrastructure surrounding it). What does the political climate around the country look like at this moment in regards to educational funding and the student debt crisis? I’ve been following this site cusos.org from the current students of Cooper Union NY who are fighting to return the school to its former Tuition Free status. The site documents letters from accepted students saying ‘NO’ to their offer be-cause of tuition fees. Have you man-aged to connect to any other student led protests around the U.S?

LYDIA: Cooper Union and Occupy Wall Street are following our move-ments via social media. Students and our supporters are very active around the country.

EYE: How can students support the cause? It’s such a tenuous situation because we all hate how much we are paying and at the same time, we all immensely value so much of what the institution offers in terms of creative community and opportunity. How can we most powerfully elicit change with-

out sabotaging our own educational needs? A common note I hear: I want to do more but I don’t know how!

LYDIA: Wear a purple heart to show support, read, be aware, use critical thinking skills and decide what you want to do about it. Get educated on activism and what it looks like. Everyone fits into this somewhere because we are a part of the same community. I’m at capacity right now as I also have an ambitious thesis and trailer renovation project going. Some people have said that the word isn’t out enough -well then help me get it out! Students have written blogs about it and you are interviewing me for the paper... This all helps. I’m not at all pretending or wanting to be the be all end all of Occupy. If you don’t know what to do be creative, I can offer some ideas but it needs to come from each individual.

EYE: How have the upper echelon reacted? Have you had any direct con-tact with the president, or any other administrators?

LYDIA: The Central Administration responded immediately. In the first week we met with the CFO, and the provost. The provost wanted a casual stop by but ended up emailing a re-quest stating that every time she tried to come by we were busy in deep con-versations with people. The president also stopped by the couches and said his door is open.

EYE: What’s the ideal outcome? Summer break is fast approaching, what will happen then, and how can students keep the momentum of this movement going?

LYDIA: The ideal outcome is that we get a strong, shared, governance body that is active. That means that many more students, faculty and staff need to come forward ready to make and stand behind ideas and initiatives that will improve our community. My first goal is to get more voting positions for students staff and faculty into our current model of governance. If we have more representation it will be easier to change other things and implement new ideas. We are not lacking in ideas but many of them get squashed...dust them off! Over the summer I will also be working on supplements to orientation. It is flimsy right now to say the least and the quicker we have students with more resources the more change we will see. People can stay in touch via the Facebook page, the blog, and the google group. Summer will be a plan-ning time, it’s going to be great.

EYE: It can be overwhelming reading your proposal, especially for those of us about to graduate. We all fear the compromise that awaits as we re-engage with a world outside of the comforts of CalArts. You say “The rest of the world is no better...” as you highlight that “We literally run this place, yet we are all so worn out that we don’t, sometimes can’t, take time to see what is happening.” I believe that many of us see what is happening but the responsibility is so grand that we become paralyzed. What is your vision for this project now and in the long run?

LYDIA: Become strong alumni, visit often and frame a new way that alumni can interact and support CalArts. We have heard from a lot of alumni as well who are supportive and feel that our actions are important and relevant. I don’t really have an answer for this except... Don’t be paralyzed.

With better shared governance, I imagine more initiatives going through, more sense of community and respect being supported, less needless wastes of funds. Eventually I’d like to see education that is free, I don’t think it is a handout, it is a mark of a healthy society.

Conceived by Brian Carbine, Alexan-dra Friedman, Jesse Garrison, Narae Kim, Aubree Lynn, Shannon Knox, and Ting Zhang.

This piece started as a final project for a collaborative performance class in the Fall of 2013.  As a group of first year students we were struggling with many issues surrounding the institute and we were looking for a way to en-gage with these concerns. We figured that we couldn’t possibly be the only students trying to navigate the CalArts experience, so we decided to open up the conversation to our greater student community. After many long and heartfelt conversations about the project, the group felt that there was something looming over this exciting place, something that was out of our control and something that is broadly understood- the idea of cost.  

Financially, attending CalArts can be a crippling experience for many stu-dents- but what are the other types of cost that our peers are facing?  Leav-ing home, moving halfway across the world; abandoning sick family members; missing holidays, births and even deaths… In the midst of this struggle we acknowledged the dif-ficulty of these thoughts. Many of us had dreamed of attending CalArts for years despite the costs and this led us directly to our question of inves-tigation, “How do you reconcile the cost of your experience at CalArts?”

We used this question to collect 60-90 second audio interviews with interested students, allowing them to share their personal stories and ex-periences. For our first installation we collected nearly 100 interviews and connected them to mp3 players that were attached to hand held telephone sets- we chose the telephone based off of the phone in the Disney memo-rial hallway near financial aid (if you pick up the phone you hear the voice of Walt Disney talking about CalArts) so we wanted to place the voices of the students (the ones keeping this

Over the past three weeks I have been living in the main lobby of California Institute of the Arts along with Re-becka Jackson-Moeser and a constant flow of other temporary supporting visitors. The mission of this action was to call attention to the need for transparency and accountability at Cal Arts in terms of budget management and general administrative manage-ment.Rather than confronting the Death Star what we have dug into is more like the Emerald City. Who knows which is worse, but it is what we have. Due to an overwhelmingly supportive response from students, faculty and staff, our administration acted quickly and have met most of the demands that they can in this timeframe. We have moved out of the lobby but we will continue to stand with this letter and other documents outlining the next steps. Please read through them and pick up a purple heart to wear as a sign of support and solidarity.There are a lot of things that need to be worked on. Thankfully we have been invited to the table. First, there are bridges that need to be built. At-tached to this letter is a comprehen-sive list of issues we face in several areas of the institute. It is meant as a record of our collective voice. We want an institution that takes on the financial and social risk to help us de-velop as artists. Our alumni have giv-en CalArts a track record that proves Calartians are worth it. Our job as a community is to prioritize the list and develop initiatives; the more people involved the more we can get done faster. My first goal is to develop a better system of shared governance that requires students and faculty involvement in fundamental planning processes of our school.We are facing similar finance prob-lems every other school is but if we apply the same formulas (as our cur-rent administration is doing) we will only become a corporatized education factory. The most telling divide is subtle yet clear in all the administra-tive language if you can focus long enough.This is how it goes: We are presented with the problems. They are accu-rate and hit home. We feel a sense of comradery… dare we say trust? The challenges are presented. They seem

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place alive) right next to his as a part of the history.

The installation was up for only a few hours before we were required to take it down by the administration.  The hallway is not considered a student space and therefore we were not al-lowed to use it as such.

When the 2014 New Works Festival came around we saw it as another opportunity to engage with the com-munity and create a new installa-tion.  We canvassed the student body with the same question, using our “Confession Tent” to allow people a space to tell us what was on their mind.  The tent was used as a sort of play on the confessional booth- as this subject can be very sensitive for many people. It became a huge part of branding the project as well as developing the second version of the installation. During this second attempt we were not granted access to the Disney Memorial Hallway, so we needed to re-think how we were going to share the interviews. We decided to develop the “Confession Tent” further and use the interview location as the installation.  We set up two tents, one of which was situated by the Main Entrance, and one under the stairs by the cafeteria. Inside we had speakers playing the voices of the participants on loop. When you walked by you couldn’t quite decide if there were people inside the tent talking or not- which we thought was a good way to connect the product (the installation) to our process (the investigation).  

We have set up a hotline phone number where students can call and leave a message if they do not feel comfortable interviewing in pub-lic.  #347.658.5411

-Brian Carbine

Dear Eye,What Lydia Hicks and Rebecka Jackson-Moeser started is fundamen-tal to preserving the school and I fully support their calls for shared gover-nance. As it is, the school is headed full speed for a financial cliff. Raising tuition has been the stop-gap solution for every problem and it has to stop. Tuition is so high that it has reached a tipping point. American student loan defaults are getting out of control and those loans will be gone. Tuition is too expensive here at CalArts, even with student loans for anyone who isn’t wealthy to pay for it. The lack of fund-ing and high tuition rates hurts the diversity of the student body and cre-ates an art school echo chamber. Hav-ing an economically diverse student body creates diverse work and feeds the practice of every students. As of next year I will be on Student Council and I will continue to work on divestment, fiscal transparency and shared governance. The administra-tion needs to open up more to student input and realize that they aren’t only working for CalArts but they should be working with the students. Also, I believe very strongly that we need strong student voices, which can be heard through publications, such as the Eye, alongside a strong online presence and more school funding for such a space. There is no way to bring up issues to the entire student body without a school paper. The administration AND board needs to be present at student functions, available and routinely seek out ways to collaborate with students. CalArts has a history of radicalism in educa-tion and in artistic practice. For over four decades this school has resisted top down structures and elitism. Charging over $40K in tuition with inadequate scholarships for students who aren’t wealthy, smacks of elitism. It is now up to the students to agi-tate, educate the administration and organize to save the identity of the institution that has shaped the minds and artistic practices of so many great artists.I am also working with administra-tors on divesting the endowment from fossil fuel. The school’s endowment should start being governed more ethically. Our tuition money is feeding investments in fossil fuels. The money is going to the same companies in our own back yard in California and our hometowns that poison our air, water and soil. A resolution guiding the school to invest ethically could keep us from contributing to climate change and human rights violations. It would be really great to see ev-eryone at graduation wearing purple hearts and demanding shared gover-nance. The link is below,

www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/04/1296842/-Tuition-Is-Too-Damn-High

Best wishes,Cori

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massive and confusing. We shrink. Solutions are presented. They feel off but because of the preceding setup and explanation of challenges – we often fold.I will present you with one detailed ex-ample from Don Mathewson the CFO (Chief Financial Officer). Don has agreed to be our contact person for the central administration, and to help establish a cohesive system of shared governance across the board. He has given a budget presentation to many facets of the CalArts community, which outlines the real issues we face if we remain dependent on tuition as our main ‘source of revenue’. Despite being a clear advocate for our cause I have been beating my head against the wall trying to figure out why Don thinks online classes and general ex-pansion of Cal Arts will improve any of the issues we face. Then it happened. During a public presentation of the budget Don said:“What do we do here? We produce educational programming”And there it was. The great divide. The reason it seems our only food options are factory farm product or overpriced organic food. The reason our pharmaceutical companies have a stronghold on our healthcare system. The reason students are convinced education is a necessity even if they can’t afford it.The bottom of this letter will have links to detailed goals and proposed initiatives broken up by the area that manages it. We ask that you sign in support for your applicable area and take a purple heart to wear through and on graduation in solidarity (avail-able in the main lobby at Cal Arts). If you are graduating we congratulate you and hope that you commit to being an active part of our alumni as-sociation as we work to redefine it. If you are returning next year we hope that you become an active member of our new effort to demonstrate shared governance of our school. You can do this by signing up for a commit-tee, making your own committee, or participating in student council.CalArts is known for its innovation and experimentation; this should be true for the management of our school as well.So lets give this another try…What does CalArts do?

CalArts is an incubator that shapes contemporary culture.As students, faculty, and staff we work together to create art in all of its disciplines, contexts, and media. CalArts seeks to function outside of a corporate business model. We do not seek to expand in numbers of campuses, students etc… We do seek to expand our ideas, our projects, and our community. CalArts is a physi-cal place where one can commune with the arts. We dedicate our time at CalArts to a rigorous focus on our individualized definition of artistic practice and pledge to carry that prac-tice with us throughout our lives. We understand that our time at CalArts is often finite and while it is a privilege we want it to be a place that helps us to replicate healthy aspects of the experience in the world.

Please share and comment on the follow links,

Best,Lydia

The CalArts Eye is an uncensored, multi-métier publication created, composed, and

constructed by students and for students of the California Institute of the Arts.

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In this delicate land of art-istry I’ve learned that to be is not to be unless being is somehow tormented and/or crazed and/or manically euphoric and/or question-ing whether or not to live in such a delicate land of art-istry is truly, really, honestly to be alive. I don’t really know what CalArts was but I know that it got me and I, it. Where to now? What to do after the rice and beans have been digested and hunger sets in? What will I eat; what will fuel me, I ask! What can I take along the long span of time between graduation and total self-actualization? One time, in the library, I picked up a book, closed my eyes, opened to a page, pressed a finger to a line, then opened my eyes to read: “We can watch the precision of the realassuming the attributes of the dream.” TO SOLIDS, TO LIQUIDS, TO LIFE.

-KT Browne / MFA Writing

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1 . ”I was walking in the hallways and heard people getting sick everywhere.” -CalArts Cinema Student 2. Molly Garber was voted Best Mom Jeans 3. Dakota Rose Wood and Bayley Mizelle were voted Cutest Couple 4. Toby Jacobs was voted Most Likely to Help

with Your Projector 5. Johanna Deeb was voted Most Likely to Burn Her Nipple 6. Alex Woods was voted WORST (Behavior)

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