Higher Ed | Daily Report

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"This is a time of peril for the university we all love."

So read a fundraising pitch sent to alumni of the University of California from Russell Gould, chair of UC's Board of Regents and its president Mark Yudof, imploring them for their support.

New York-based UC Santa Cruz alumna Laurie Garrett received that pitch and many others from her alma mater. She wants to help out. But she balked when she received an invitation to a $250-a-head fundraiser held in New York last night – to raise funds for UCSC's Grateful Dead archive.

The event consisted of a gathering at the home of a UC Santa Cruz alumna on the Upper East Side, followed by a private viewing of the first public display of materials from the archive at the New York Historical Society, which got a lengthy write-up in the New York Times.

Garrett is author of the best-selling "The Coming Plague," and one of the few people to have won both Pulitzer and Peabody awards. A UCSC official from the school's development (read "fundraising") office described her as "one of the schools most distinguished alumni." But Garrett feels that at a time of crisis for the university there are more pressing needs than an archive to a rock icon. She sent me this email:

Hey, I drove over the mountains on Highway 17 so many times to catch the Dead when I was at UCSC that I memorized the curves of the highway and all the words to Sugar Magnolia at the same time. But spending money to build a Dead archive, and doing $250 fundraisers in NYC for Garcia memorabilia feels pretty awful at a time when I am getting letters from kids in the biology department begging me to send cash for purchase of lab rats and pipettes.

What also irks Garrett, a renowned expert on the AIDS epidemic, is that she attempted to donate her archive of her research on AIDS in Africa and related material, dating back to the earliest days of the epidemic, to UC libraries, including UC Santa Cruz, and got no takers.

Many of us have serious archive material to offer, but have been told the library – all the UC libraries, actually – are so underfunded and understaffed that they literally cannot accept the materials. So a generation from now kids at UCSC can study LSD trips taken by Dead Heads, but they will not have access to my original 1980s documents on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Few would disagree that the Dead archive has cultural significance.

"We're connecting with the culture of America through one of the great musical icons of the '60s," declared UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal when he accepted the archive two years ago at the Fillmore Auditorium, the site of too-numerous-to-mention Dead concerts.

But should the struggling University of California, in 2010, be raising money for an archive on cultural icons, or for more pressing university needs?

Absolutely it should, said Christine Bunting, head of special collections at the McHenry Library, of which the Grateful Dead archive is by far the largest. 

"We think the archive is a very valuable collection for research, and has cultural value," she said. "There are many, many worthy causes (at the university), but this is just one."  

The university, she explained, is only halfway to raising the $2 million that it needs to sustain the archive. Precisely because the state is cutting back on funding, she said, the university has to seek private donors like those at last night's New York soiree.

Bunting gets some support from screenwriter and media entrepreneur David Talbot, another distinguished UC Santa Cruz alumnus – who happens to have been a roommate of Laurie Garrett's when they were at the school in the 1970s.

"I don't see any downsides to this at all," said Talbot, founder of the Internet news pioneer Salon.com, and author of "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Brothers," told me when we talked via telephone today.

In fact, Talbot thinks fundraising for the Grateful Dead archive could help UC Santa Cruz  raise even more money for its other programs.

I know the pie is limited, but institutions that have a high profile attract more dollars.  I can't imagine the UCSC administration consists of a bunch of Deadheads, but I imagine they see this as a way to keep UC Santa Cruz's name trucking. Archives help put places on the map, and they draw more buzz in the media.  You can't escape a certain amount of show business in academia. That's a fact of life.

He acknowledged the conflict between raising funds for more immediate university needs and other university functions. "That can be a good tension," he said. "It doesn't have to be all one or another."

The two former roommates may disagree, but what's not in dispute is that the archive has gotten the stamp of academic respectability. There's even an emerging field of Grateful Dead Studies. The university received a $615,000 grant from the federal government to help digitize the massive collection, which includes instruments, illustrated fan letters, concert posters, backstage passes, stage props, and videos of interviews and TV appearances.

And last month, after an exhaustive search, the university hired Nicholas Meriwether, a highly regarded librarian – and Deadhead – to be the collection's first archivist.