Gregg Herken

A personal message to students

I was born in Richmond, California, in 1947, and grew up in the Bay area, in San Mateo. Although I started college at UC Davis, in 1965, I had friends at the new “experimental” UC campus in Santa Cruz, and they were enthusiastic about the place. Pretty soon I was driving down to Santa Cruz every Friday afternoon, after my classes at Davis ended, returning to UCD early Monday mornings. While visiting UCSC, I slept on the floor of my friends' trailer--the dorms weren't open yet--and attended the late-night “discussion sections” in the A-frame cabins that substituted for a student center. Quite simply, I was enthralled--not so much by the physical beauty of Santa Cruz, as by the intellectual excitement of a place where the unofficial motto was: “The pursuit of truth in the company of friends.” I transferred to UCSC in 1967 and graduated in the so-called pioneer class in 1969.

Although I would spend most of the next part of my life away from the west coast--first in graduate school at Princeton, and later, teaching in non-tenure track positions at Oberlin and Yale--California remained my home, and I always planned to come back.

In 1988, I joined the research staff of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C., where I was chairman of the Space History Department and curator of military space. My main job was collecting spy satellites, and it was exciting work: a highlight was when we “exchanged” missiles with the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But when I heard, in 2001, that UC was opening a new campus in the Central Valley, I was eager to return to California, and to teaching, and so became one of the founding faculty at UCM.

My aspiration for UCM is to realize here the same kind of intellectual excitement and sense of pioneering, adventuresome spirit that characterized the other “startup” I'm familiar with: UCSC in its early days, almost forty years ago. Thus, while “The pursuit of truth in the company of friends” may sound impossibly idealistic from the perspective of today, I still believe that it is the best expression of what an undergraduate education should be--and, I hope, will become--at UC Merced.