Gallant Promise Dead at 49

I don't post much here about my job except for the occasional piece about the Planetarium. I'm not exactly sure why that is, since I love my job dearly, think it's important, and can't imagine doing anything else for a living. Possibly it's just that it is my job, and this blog is for recreation, I don't know.

But something happened at my job in this past week that I would be derelict in not mentioning. It is not pleasant. It is saddening, and perhaps ultimately demoralizing, but it is significant.

It is the end of a grand, 49-year-old promise to the people of the state of California by their government: that every California resident, regardless of financial status, who could benefit from higher education would be able to enroll in a California college or university that would suit his or her abilities and needs.

In 1960, the state legislature enacted the California Master Plan for Higher Education, a truly revolutionary, integrated strategy for accommodating the anticipated crush of "Baby Boomers" once they reached college age. From my perspective, it was not only a Master Plan, but a masterful one, generally credited in large part to the vision of two people, Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, then Governor, and Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California system.

The Master Plan was implemented quickly, and has served California superbly for nearly half a century. Its details are succinctly laid out in the Wiki article linked above. And, possibly with isolated exceptions, its promise has been kept: every California resident who could benefit from higher education has been able to enroll in a California University, State College, or Community College.

Until last week.

Above: San Francisco ABC television story from the first day of classes. If you click on this, you'll have to put up with a 15-second advertizement.

DeAnza College is one of the largest of California's hundred-plus community colleges, enrolling 20 to 25 thousand students each term. Our schedule is also unusual: our Fall term starts later than almost every other college and university in the state. That means that any student within commute distance of Cupertino who was not able to enroll in a State college or university, or couldn't get needed classes in any of the other dozen community colleges in the area, can use DeAnza (and its much smaller, less easily reached sister institution, Foothill College) as something of a safety net.

The "perfect storm" of denied opportunities elsewhere happened this Fall. California's budget meltdown caused draconian cuts in the UC and CSU systems, slashing enrollments in those two legs of the Master Plan's tripod, which shifted a tidal wave of students to the Community Colleges. That system, however, also had its financial resources gutted, causing massive cutbacks in course offerings, so students by the thousands in the San Francisco Bay Area alone couldn't get all of the courses they needed or wanted at other community colleges.

That left DeAnza, the late-start, huge campus of last resort.

This week was the first week of classes. It was probably one of the worst weeks of our professional careers for those of us who work there; worse than that for the thousands of students who were told "no" one last time, with nowhere else to go.

The promise of the Master Plan was dead. Not officially, of course. Nobody in Sacramento will say that, because nobody in the capitol building had to look hundreds of students in the eye and tell them there was no opportunity for them here or anywhere else. It's not part of official policy that the Master Plan's promise is no longer valid, but, in reality, it's as dead as Caesar.

Numbers from DeAnza's first week of the 2009-10 school year:

Total number of students enrolled in at least one course: More than 25,000
Number of those who could not enroll in as many courses as they wanted/needed: 8,400
(These will not qualify as "full-time" students as a result, and financial aid they receive may be in jeopardy because of their part-time status. Moreover, those who are carried on their parents' health insurance under a "full-time college student" clause will lose that also.)
Number of students who could not enroll in any courses at all: 2,300

Two thousand three hundred students went to the trouble and expense of registering in my college this quarter who were denied any service whatsoever. All they got was a hunting license for a griffin or a chimera. And, if they bought a $70 parking permit, they also got a hunting license for a parking space, only slightly less abundant than griffins.

For those 2,300 students -- who will now not be students at all -- the Master Plan's promise is not only dead, it's a cruel joke. Since I was almost certainly the last one to say "no" to more than a few of them, I was their ultimate agent of the promise's violation. I'm not going to have a wonderful weekend, but it will probably be a better one than theirs will be.

We could see this coming, at least a little bit. During the week before the beginning of classes, during pre-term meetings and planning sessions, my division Dean told us that, even at that time, there was not a single seat available in any science class section, and that only a handful of openings were still available in our very large number of mathematics sections. By the beginning of the week, the total number of student names on waiting lists, campus-wide, was over 14,000 -- and that's just the students who went to the trouble of signing up on a waiting list instead of simply giving up.

And so, since we are the last ones a student sees when he or she still has hope of getting into a class, we teachers became the ones who had to bring the final "no" down: No, you cannot enroll in this class. No, there are no other classes I can suggest. Please try again next quarter.

A more complete piece from Inside Higher Ed online. Click on the logo to read it.

I'm not anxious right now to try to analyze how we got here, or to cast blame, or to assess whether or not the promise was a good idea to begin with. I'll do all of that -- all of us at DeAnza will do all of that -- once a short period of stunned numbness is over. But right now I'm just overwhelmed by the reality of the violation of an ideal that has guided my entire 36-year career.

We let them down.

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Links and statistics courtesy of DeAnza President Brian Murphy.
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One Dome, Two Skies

Path to the main entrance of DeAnza College's Fujitsu Planetarium, whose blue dome can be glimpsed through the redwood grove that shelters it.

While I have posted before about the installation of remarkable new technology in the planetarium I'm privileged to work in, I have not until now posted any images of what that technology can produce. In part, that has been due to the imaging challenges involved: the planetarium simulates the night sky in all ways, including darkness. That and the odd geometry involved in shooting photos of images projected on a hemisphere was enough to keep me from learning how to manage it for a while.

But I'm starting to be able to do it.

Mars and Phobos, seen from about a hundred kilometers above the latter, as they would have been seen at about 2pm, Pacific Daylight Time, this afternoon.

The "Two Skies" part of this post's title refers to the two sky simulation systems at the heart of the planetarium's renovation. I refer to them as the "space simulator" (SkySkan's all-digital system) and the "sky simulator" (Konica-Minolta's new-generation Infinium-S optical-mechanical system.) Each does a different job in magnificent fashion.

The Space Simulator

SkySkan's digital system provides me with the ability to "fly" through a huge database which includes, among much else, accurate information about the locations, angles of illumination, and orientation of thousands of solar system objects at any time within several thousand years of now, both forward and backward in time.

Jupiter's inner satellites' orbital paths and their locations at about 2:15, PDT, June 25.

It's important to note that the images in this post are actual photographs of part of the inside of a planetarium dome, not screen captures from a computer monitor. Unless otherwise noted, each of the images here cover the same area of the dome, a slice about 25 feet wide and commensurately high. The dome itself is a hemisphere 50 feet in diameter, and the camera's location was about 35 feet from the point of aim. This means that, while not particularly evident, the edges and top of the frame are fairly significantly closer to the camera than the center and bottom (which is just above the bottom rim of the dome.)

Simulated Ganymede with Jupiter in the background, June 25, 2009. This and the other "space simulator" images in this post are 20-second exposures with a Nikon D70 at ISO 400 using an 18mm lens stopped to f/8.

It is also important to note that the images here are not frames from a movie. The operator of the system is completely free to specify location, time, and direction of view of the "camera." Navigation is remarkably simple -- but what goes on under the surface isn't. The database is manipulated by a stack of ten quad-core Intel computers. One computer orchestrates the other nine, one is dedicated to managing sound for applications that have it, and the other eight each manage one "channel." Each visual channel is projected on a "tile" that covers 1/8 of the dome, and the ensemble is remarkably seamless in appearance. Projection is done by a pair of cinema theater grade Sony digital projectors with special optics, each of which handles four of the channels.

Looking back toward the Sun from Saturn on June 25, 2009.

The detail and accuracy in the database (which is frequently updated by SkySkan) is astonishing -- and very, very useful as a teaching tool. The above image of Saturn, for example, shows some interesting things in the shadow of the planet across the rings toward us. (Click on the image to see it larger.) Notice that you can see some stars through the rings in the shadow? That's not a mistake: there are places in the rings where the material is thin enough for that to happen... and places where it isn't. If we shift our position a little down and to the right...


... the two stars that shone brightly through the "Cassini Division" in the previous view are now blocked by the more richly-populated A Ring (the brightest component of the system in reflected sunlight.)

View toward the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have color. Those colors (based on the stars' spectral types) are not usually evident to most planetarium patrons except for the very brightest ones -- as is the case in the real sky -- but they're there, nonetheless.

The Sky Simulator

The other system, the Konica-Minolta Infinium-S, can't fly us around the solar system, but it provides a much more realistic simulation of the night sky as seen from right here on Earth.

The optical-mechanical projector at the heart of the Konica-Minolta system is an engineering marvel, and I don't have a clue as to how it performs its magic.

Until very recently, all planetarium projectors achieved different brightnesses for their projected stars by a very simple, but very innacurate, method for all but the very brightest ones: by having the "stars" be different sizes: bigger "star" --> brighter "star." That's also the way that the digital Space Simulator that we've been looking at so far does the trick.

But that's not the way the real universe looks.

Unless your eyesight is really bad, the stars in the real sky all look the same size: pinpoints of light. Their brightness differences are entirely due to different intensities. That's the heart of why planetarium simulations never looked very real to me: different brightnesses were achieved by different sizes of images which all had the same surface brightness.

Here's an expanded view of Canis Major in the space simulator system, the one that does brightnesses the old-fashioned way:


... and here, to the same scale, the constellation Lyra in the Konica-Minolta sky simulator system:


If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have exactly the same size, no matter what their brightness -- just the way the stars appear in the real sky. (As an added bit of realism, the 20 brightest stars in the Konica-Minolta sky can be made to twinkle!)

The realism of the sky simulator system is such that I still haven't figured out how to capture its view very well with my camera. Here's a two-minute exposure toward the Great Summer Triangle at f/8:

(the lights at the bottom are inside the projector itself.) And here's an eight-minute exposure:

I was baffled by the red glow here: to my eye, the dome was pitch black except for the pinpoints of the stars' images.

But the camera doesn't have the same spectral sensitivity that our eyes, do, evidently. Where the faint red in this long time-exposure came from is evident in this trial shot at a lower angle for the space-simulator system:

Saturn, its rings, and some of its satellites' orbital paths.

See the bright red rectangle near the bottom about 3/4 of the way from left to right? That's an infrared broadcast station for the planetarium's assistive listening device system. Its radiation is invisible to the human eye -- but not to the D70's sensor! (This was the first time that I realized that my old digital camera records a significant amount of infrared. That's a little disconcerting.) So the pervasive red glow in the very-long time exposures is IR from these devices reflected from the dome.

The next time I try this, I'll turn off the ALD system... but I ran out of time this afternoon.

The cities shine like stars.

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Martha, My Dear!

Martha Kanter's Facebook Face

My friend Martha will probably be going to Washington soon, as the Obama administration's new Undersecretary of Education.

Martha Kanter is currently the Chancellor of the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, in which I have been employed as head of (and, for a while, the only member of) DeAnza College's astronomy department for the past 20 years. I first met her in 1993, when she came to DeAnza from just down the 280 freeway. Previously VP of Instruction at San Jose City College, she had just been tapped to be only the second President of DeAnza College, succeeding the locally-legendary A. Robert DeHart.

We all looked at her like she had come from some Mel Brooks version of Mars. DeHart had been dignified and almost aloof; Martha is gregarious and joyful. DeHart was very tall and almost forbidding; Martha is about five-foot-nothing and as welcoming as your favorite auntie. DeHart had established a clear chain of command; Martha takes everyone's opinions very seriously, even students', for God's sake. DeHart accomplished magnificent things for DeAnza College. Martha Kanter did not shy from that legacy. Her ten-year term as DeAnza President terminated only by promotion: six years ago, she was designated Chancellor of our District (which we share with the older and smaller Foothill College.)

It took her about five minutes, it seemed, to win us over in '93, and it seemed like she did it one person at a time. When she arrived, I was beginning my stint as an officer in the Faculty Senate. By the time she had really hit her stride as President in '95, I had entered my term as Senate President. As a result of our positions, we served and worked together a great deal, and I had a chance to see first-hand her remarkable skills in working with smart, contentious people with high opinions of themselves (faculty, in this case, but it would later become evident with other groups, too, like CEOs of Silicon Valley principalities.)

She's a superb politician, in other words, in the best sense.

But she's also a person of great dedication to her cause: making sure that society doesn't waste its ability to benefit from any person's potential because that person couldn't go to college. She has dedicated her working life to the cause of making higher education available to as many people as possible who might otherwise have been denied access, and she has achieved astonishing things in that effort throughout her career. As Chancellor of our District, for example, she has energized the Silicon Valley high-tech community to support public education in substantial and unprecedented ways, has orchestrated a partnership with NASA and UC to transform part of the former Moffett NAS into an innovative shared technology education campus -- and has convinced the voters of our District to overwhelmingly approve more than half a billion dollars in capital expenditures for our two Colleges (including my beloved new Planetarium renovations), a record by any measure for a Community College district.

Martha is not only a believer in what community colleges can do for society, she has become a prime mover in allowing that potential to be realized in California.

And now she will be able to bring that joyful energy and vision to a national stage. Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that Martha Kanter is their choice to be the new Undersecretary of Education, a position that has public higher education as a major focus. While her nomination is subject to Senate ratification, I can't imagine that she would be rejected. I'm pretty sure she's paid her taxes.

I'm biased, I'm prejudiced, sure. But I really, honestly think that there couldn't possibly be a better person alive for that job.

God bless, and God speed, Martha.

Chancellor Martha Kanter (left) with her two Presidents: Brian Murphy of DeAnza and Judy Miner of Foothill.

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