UC-Santa Cruz -- Students Smoking Over Rolling Stone Article

When you think of Santa Cruz you imagine picturesque beauty; the rolling hills filled with redwood forests, Highway One which snakes its way along California's westernmost shores past steep cliffs and ocean water dotted with sea stacks and unrivaled sunsets.

Now, after a recent article in one of the nation's foremost magazines that covers mainstream music, some readers are picturing the city and the popular college campus perched in the redwood forests above the city, under a thick cloud of smoke.

This month, Rolling Stone published an article which heralded the University of California at Santa Cruz as the "highest college campus on Earth." Let the complaints begin.

Students who have seen the article are drawing a line in the sand questioning the relevance to the school and its heritage as a university stepped in a tradition of academics. The school is ranked as the 27th best public college in the country with a score of programs ranking in the top-ten nationally.

To those outside the mountains and the coastal town, the college and some residents of the town seem like a combination of carefree surfers and granola-eating, tree-hugging liberals who often embrace quirky ideals, political reform and have a zest for life and questioning conservative politics.

In any event, both sides are now questioning the article, and some are making the distinction that they consider it fluff or hack journalism and poorly represented sides of the issue at hand.

Let us first realize that the article is not news; it is not hard news, soft news nor is it any representation of a newsworthy event. No event was covered, in fact the article follows a couple of UCSC students known only by the titles of Molly and Moppy. Does this sound like something that would appear in a newspaper, and if so what section and what title? Molly and Moppy get high?

Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis outlines the campus in a mostly cloudy light as she follows both Molly and Moppy as they traverse the campus from party to open mountain meadows complete with pot-smoking drum circles and hazy rituals of celebrating marijuana on April 20, the zenith of celebration to those who use the drug (the fourth month and the time equal 4/20 -- a popular symbolization of the pot counter-culture). Grigoriadis does not inflect her opinion or even the word "I" at any point throughout the story. Readers need to realize that the picture she paints is that based on the interviews of her sources and not an accurate depiction of the entire university as a whole. Jumping to that conclusion is not only misleading and unfair to the writer as it is to the university.

This article is more of a feature encompassing details of the two students and their encounters along the way -- it crosses the stark line of a story which covers news or politics into the world of editorial opinion, or in this case, what seems more like an excerpt from a book. Rolling Stone has often times featured sections of books appearing in the magazine separate from their news segments.

Let us keep the perspective of the story at just that, a story which fails to cover both sides of a particular event or one which in all likelihood holds much credibility outside of the two students who guide the writer. The story seems to attempt to vividly paint a picture of the events on a particular April night, in the meadows high above campus, but what percentage of the campus is truly involved in this? A few hundred, in a campus of more than 15,000.

Let's hope that students, faculty and the rest of the readership who has happened upon this story in one form or the other, maintains the frame of mind that this piece, (although the magazine in the interest of attracting readers has declared the campus as the highest college on Earth in a method of its "sexy" headline on the cover) is no different than a story.

Drawing the correlation that while it attempts to give the school some sort or ranking, that this story is not even in the same stratosphere as the annual articles that pigeon hole colleges across the country in a tiered ranking system based on student's submitted opinions of the school's binge drinking and partying. Scientific research and opinion polling most likely would paint the picture that a majority of students do not choose a college because of it's rankings in the party spectrum and they doubtfully would choose Santa Cruz because a writer and two pot-smoking students who cavort and frolic in the woods rather than studying dub the school a mecca for marijuana.

Let us not blow that out of proportion and fail to realize this "literary" account of a few does not make it grounds for incriminating the journalism world and its principles.

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Rolling Stone article appeared, Sept. 2004

San Francisco Chronicle online news, sfgate.com -- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/09/10/state1235EDT0061.DTL