Bruce Lee's favorite dish was oyster sauce beef, and on the evening of May 7 it was on the menu at UC Merced, alongside a conversation about who Lee really was, why he still matters and what his story says about America.

Jeff Chang, cultural historian and author of “Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America,” was on campus as  the featured guest of two events: UC Merced Dining’s Food for Thought Speaker Series and "Storytelling with Jeff Chang"  at the Leo & Dottie Kolligian Library.

Students in a UC Merced course stepped off campus and into the real world, developing flyers, website pages and even a TikTok account for a downtown arts center.

Staff at the center became clients and the students contractors in a spring semester project that produced marketing materials, forged relationships with the community and gave students an experience that in-class exercises can’t provide.

em·pa·thy (noun): the ability to recognize, understand and share the thoughts, emotions and perspectives of another person.

It is a means of connection, a path to understanding. Can you see where I’m coming from? Walk a mile in my shoes.

Three Merced painters, united in friendship and in their steadfast determination not to compromise their creative values, are serving as UC Merced’s first locally based artists-in-residence.

The brushes of Ruben Aguilera Sanchez, Frank Ayala and Abel Corchado create surreal scenes of fieldhands and crops coalescing in blues and reds, of a rural street splashed in watercolor, of shark fins cutting through a beach as a sandcastle rises from the surf.

UC Merced Children’s Opera, a performance that delights and enlightens thousands of schoolchildren a year while giving Bobcat students experience in theater, has received support from a generous grant from the Central Valley Opportunity Fund.

Fifteen years ago, UC Merced was designated as a Hispanic-serving institution. And though recent developments at the federal government have left what that designation means in limbo, the mission of serving the university’s largest demographic has remained unchanged.

More than 53 percent of undergraduate students are Hispanic, and 71 percent of enrolled students identify as first-generation (a student whose parents did not complete four-year college degrees).

UC Merced Arts has announced its 2025-26 season of performances, exhibitions and public art programs, beginning with the return of East L.A.’s electrifying band Las Cafeteras.

The band’s Día de los Muertos-themed production, “Hasta La Muerte,” comes to Merced on Wednesday, Oct. 8 at the Art Kamangar Center at The Merced Theatre. The performance begins at 7:30 p.m.

UC Merced has debuted a writer-in-residence program with one of California’s premier chroniclers of its history, especially the titanic power plays for land and water that have shaped the state’s growth and loom over its future.

Mark Arax, a Fresno native, author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, will host workshops about his craft throughout the academic year. His presence on campus also will offer inside access to a working author.

Hidden for a year behind two large barn-style doors, a powerful new mural now adorns the walls of the Yablokoff-Wallace Dining Center. The latest piece of public art on the UC Merced campus explores Native past and future with themes of identity and representation.

If Arden, the sprawling, wild forest in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” were in the United States instead of the Bard’s imagination, it would certainly be a national park.

Like Yosemite.

That is why this light comedy is an ideal fit for the annual UC Merced theater project that weaves modern issues of environmental stewardship into the 16th-century playwright’s words.