100TH ANNIVERSARY | SPECIAL EDITION ISSUE
the California Aggie
SERVING THE UC DAVIS CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY SINCE 1915
VOLUME 134, ISSUE 1 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2016
The untold story of “The Uncondemned”
PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLINE STASULAT
UC Davis Professor of Law instigated first conviction of sexual assault as a war crime BY EMILIE DeFAZIO features@theaggie.org
A century of celebration UC Davis alumna reflects on great-grandfather’s role as first student Picnic Day chair BY A NJAL I BHAT features@theaggie.org
Come spring, thousands of visitors will flock to campus to experience what is believed to be the largest student-run event in the country. For some, though, Picnic Day is more than just a day of ice cream, giggles and dachshund races — it’s a celebration of life and a long-standing connection to the university. This is especially true for UC Davis alumna Caroline Stasulat, whose great-grandfather, Robert Lockhart, served as the first student Picnic Day chair in 1916. “My grandmother was the keeper of all our family history,” Stasulat said. “Every year, my sister, parents and I had this tradition of going to our grandmother’s and she would cook us a big breakfast before we walked over as a family to campus to celebrate my earliest Picnic Days. That’s when she would tell me about her father’s role as chair.” Lockhart spent his last year as undergraduate at “The University Farm,” a UC Berkeley extension that eventually became UC Davis. Although Picnic Day debuted in 1914, students did not assume the chair position until 1916. This year’s Picnic Day chair, fourth-year plant biology major Grace Scott, believes she shares a connection with Lockhart due to his past position and history with the campus. “I can draw parallels between my life and Robert’s life,” Scott said. “He was an agricul-
tural major, and I study plant biology. He was the first student chair, and 100 years later his legacy still stands. I hope it does for another 100 years. It wasn’t even UC Davis at that point, and it’s cool to see how the campus and Picnic Day have changed under the leadership of students.” If Lockhart were alive today, he might be surprised to find that his role as Picnic Day chair was certainly not his only contribution to the campus. College students are notorious for finding creative solutions to their financial challenges — and apparently, things weren’t so different a century ago. Unable to afford horses of their own to ride out to the fields, Lockhart and his roommate built and rode the first bike ever used on the UC Davis campus. Amusingly, bicycles are now ubiquitous on campus, and the city of Davis is often listed among America’s best biking cities. Like Lockhart, several other members of his family have also left long-lasting marks on the UC Davis community throughout the last century. His daughter, Marilyn Lockhart Wilson, worked in the Botany Department on-campus, while Caroline Stasulat’s other great-grandfather, James French Wilson, was appointed assistant professor of Animal Husbandry in 1919. Caroline Stasulat’s parents, Edie and Joe Stasulat, both worked in various academic departments and the Internship and Career Center (ICC), with Ms. Edie Stasulat just recently retiring from the Activities and
Recreation Center (ARC) in July 2015. “The really interesting thing is that since my great-grandfather was there, every following generation has discovered UC Davis and developed their relationship with the campus on their own,” Stasulat said. “It was never ‘your grandfather worked there so you have to go there.’ It wasn’t a mandated tradition. It all happened organically.” As a teen, Stasulat never planned to attend UC Davis herself. Although she was brought up in close proximity to the university, she always dreamt of a future far away from home. That dream fell apart when her father passed away in her senior year of high school. Stasulat chose to stay local, and support her family as everyone healed. Today, she sees that decision as a blessing. “I got to have some exposure to the work he had done in the [ICC],” Stasulat said. “I worked all four years there as a peer adviser and I got to do meaningful work and learned about what he had done from his colleagues. I was in a place that, after a loss, still had a really strong sense of family collection.” Stasulat’s connection to her family’s history with UC Davis ended up finding its way into every aspect of her life. As an undergraduate, Stasulat found a passion in Native American studies, and went on to pursue a degree in the subject.
In 2013, UC Davis School of Law professor Lisa Pruitt received a phone call that would change her life forever. This call had to do with a memo she wrote 17 years prior, which — unknown to her at the time — would later assist in the first conviction of sexual assault as a war crime and serve as the basis for a major motion picture now set to debut in September 2016. “Part of the reason why I’m out as a rape survivor in the film and in life is [because] if we can’t talk about these issues, we can’t begin to de-stigmatize the status of these survivors,” Pruitt said. “Anyone who’s paying attention to what goes on in the world [will] know that there’s a sexual assault epidemic in our country, and if we can’t come face-to-face with the fact that it ‘happens to people like me’ — whatever that means — then we’re not really even taking the first step.” During writer and director Michele Mitchell and her late partner Nick Louvel’s search for possible documentary subjects, they came across the court case of JeanPaul Akayesu, former mayor of the Taba commune of Rwanda. Akayesu abstained from any attempt to stop the thousands of rapes and gender-specific war crimes during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “The story of the Akayesu case had never been told before,” Mitchell said. “When I wanted to tell the story of the first time rape was convicted as a crime of war, I thought we were going to Bosnia, because the case that I always heard about happened at the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) of the former Yugoslavia.” It was not until Mitchell began her research for the documentary, titled “The Uncondemned,” that Lisa Pruitt came into the picture. In 1996, Pruitt wrote a memo which included testimonies from key witnesses of the crime. At the time, the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR) deemed these unusable, claiming that there wasn’t enough evidence in the case against Akayesu to support the prosecution. In spring of 1997, investigators went back to talk to every witness in Pruitt’s report, which finally resulted in an amendment to the indictment which included sexual assault on the list of war crimes Akayesu had committed. This led Mitchell to contact Pruitt, surprising her with the news that the memo she wrote almost two decades ago had assisted in a major historical court case. “[Pruitt] started laughing and that was one of the best days of my career,” Mitchell said. “When you can call somebody who did their job and got crushed […] It was just so great to be the bearer of good news for once. Lisa’s story really resonates [because] it’s such a great thing to find out that doing your job did something wonderful.” As a gender consultant in the late 1990s, and with her past experience as both a rape crisis counselor and a victim of rape herself, Pruitt knew about the dynamics of the survivor and psychological trauma, which she was able to apply to the Akayesu case.
AGGIE FAMILY on 10
WAR CRIMINAL on 11
Letter from the Editor
SCOTT DRESSER Editor in Chief
Hello! Remember us? It’s The Aggie. You haven’t seen us in print in a while — or ever, depending on your class level — but we’re still here, keeping a low profile in our timeless (and windowless) basement office in Lower Freeborn, uploading new content onto our website and updating our social media pages daily. Thank you for picking up a copy of this special 100th Anniversary edition of The Aggie. Having the opportunity to publish a print newspaper as Editor in Chief of this esteemed campus institution is an incredible privilege.
My time at The Aggie over the past three years has been fairly tumultuous, filled with exhilarating highs and gut-wrenching lows. I took over as The Aggie’s campus news editor during Winter Quarter of my freshman year, and, within a week of being hired, I was spending my time sprinting across the Quad to go speak in front of 400-person lecture halls, campaigning for our 2014 “Save the Aggie” initiative. That initiative, as many of you may remember, initially passed with an overwhelming 73 percent “Yes” vote in the election. However, the ASUCD Court deemed the initiative invalid, citing ambiguous and incorrect language on the measure itself. Soon thereafter, The Aggie decided to halt printing, cut staff pay and move to an online-only format. For the first time since 1915, there was no print newspaper at UC Davis. The paper in your hands right now is the first print edition of The California Aggie since that decision was made. UC Davis is currently the only undergraduate UC campus without a regularly-printed school newspaper. This is an incredible disservice to our university on two fronts; for one, The Aggie cannot engage with the UC Davis community to its fullest capacity — which translates to a less-informed student body. The other is that there are hundreds of aspiring journalists on campus who
don’t get the fundamental journalism experience and training they need to be successful in the field once they graduate. UC Davis does not have a journalism program, so The Aggie serves as the best (and only) hands-on experience for student reporters, columnists, photographers, layout artists, businesspeople and graphic designers. To address these issues, we have created the “Print the Aggie” initiative, which will appear on the Winter Quarter 2016 ASUCD election ballot next week. Passing this ballot measure will enable The Aggie to once again be a print newspaper. If passed, quarterly student fees would increase by $3.73 — an infinitesimal 0.41 percent (!!!) raise from the $910.45 in student fees we already pay each quarter. Our fee expires after five years, unlike the others, which live on in perpetuity. The Aggie staff is currently comprised of over 100 incredible volunteer undergraduate students, and income from this initiative would allow The Aggie to provide compensation to many of these staff positions. This is important because The Aggie often loses out on talented students who cannot afford to work unpaid jobs. The fee initiative is all about sustainability. If passed, it would fund a professional business manager to oversee our finances and to ensure that The Aggie has a sustainable long-term future. Some people may argue that printing newspapers is wasteful. To address this concern, we have conducted environmental assessment stud-
R e d u ce . R e u se . R e cycl e Th e Aggie.
ies to determine how many copies of the paper to print on a week-by-week basis and where to strategically distribute print copies across campus. I’ve been asked why, if we can print this special issue, we need alternative funding. The answer is simple: while we could likely cover the costs of printing through ad revenue, we are mandated to pay $12,000 or so to ASUCD each year for our website and financial services. We simply cannot make that money in annual profit in today’s advertising market, in which digital ads are inexpensive. The Aggie is also the only ASUCD unit that receives zero funding from the association. You picking up this newspaper and reading through this letter is a testament to the fact that you are a curious and thoughtful University of California student. Newspapers have been a staple of American universities for as long these schools have been around, and they should still be ubiquitous on college campuses. You deserve to have all the services and access to information that your peers at other UC campuses have, and we can bring this to you, but we need your help. From Feb. 16 to 19, please head to elections.ucdavis.edu and vote YES on the “Print the Aggie” measure. The Aggie has been around for 100 years, and let’s be the generation of students who lays the foundation for it to be around for 100 more. Photo by Jay Gelvezon