“Talk about trickle-down economics — my hardwood is ruined!” said one La Jolla resident.
Photo by Amit Roth
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) annex of UC San Diego reported the completion of further annexation of surrounding land, coinciding with the commencement of the academic year. The secondary Scripps campus initiative aims to increase the facility’s capacity to test water and host under-attended freshman seminars. However, the methods used to acquire said land have been targets of criticism.
The extended Scripps campus is known as SIO2 on official documents. In practice, project planners, biohydrochemists, and “formula haters” alike call it Quartz. Project Quartz relied on the buying out of multiple blocks of residential property. The decrease in housing options caused the median rent to spike by 18% over the course of the summer. According to realtors based in the San Diego area, this is “business as usual” as the spike is within the margin of regular fluctuations of the market, and “great for us, why would we complain?”
Newly neighboring neighbors of the campus formed picket lines around Scripps’ picket electric fence. Protest chants on the ground of “Literally in my backyard!” and “If I need to see college students I will get violent!” were joined by students’ sentiments online. “The land wasn’t the campus’ to buy,” argued thirdyear student Eda Rietzsche in the Sociology department Discord server. “I mean, it wasn’t the NIMBYs’ either. Will UCSD acknowledge each historic claim under that annex, or should we be content with the 70-word land acknowledgment on the UCSD website?”
Reception to the Quartz initiative was more positive among UCSD faculty, especially those who were promised offices with an ocean view. One such member of the faculty is Aaron Boeing Skipper, the newly appointed director of the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier. “Thanks to parking ticket payers like you, we were finally able to give our wet operations the makeover they so desperately needed. A hundred new labs, larger aquarium tanks, four new piers, and enough seawater to make a CHEM 100A student seize. To be clear, Quartz is not another living and learning neighborhood. In fact, by replacing staircases with sand dunes and elevators with the ingenious, albeit untested, Minecraft bubble columns, we’ve succeeded in making Quartz unlivable. For the unlearnable part, we repurposed the sprinklers for our liquid coolant air conditioning.”
“They were insistent on the ‘unlivable,’” said Lead Engineer Ray Theo. “So I lent my expertise in lead pipes, paint, gasoline… college kids are all about hallucinogens. We got to the fish too, we imported enough sand to smother Nemo’s anemone patch and a whole marlin… not Nemo’s dad but the actual 12-foot swordfish. We needed more labspace for seawater tast — I mean, testing. The only snag my engineering team encountered was that Oceanview Terrace in Marshall will have to change its name, but we all have to make sacrifices. I heard Chancellor Khosla had to relocate to a beachfront bungalow on Coronado that only has yacht and ferry parking. Poor guy.”
Quartz is the first of many proposed university projects to extend the UCSD campus toward the official San Diego city limit. In a faculty letter, Khosla vows for “no more UC La Jolla jokes. Ladies and gentlemen, we are on the move.”
Amit is a cog in this machine. But doesn't everything run on optic cables or something?
