UC Santa Barbara alumni young and old converged on their alma mater over the weekend for the university’s 2016 All Gaucho Reunion.
Among the 10th annual reunion’s highlight events were Thursday’s GreekFest, a get-together for sorority and fraternity alumni; Friday evening’s Champions of Public Service panel discussion, featuring international diplomats who had graduated from UCSB; Saturday morning’s Gaucho Gallop 5K at Harder Stadium; and Saturday afternoon’s Taste of UCSB, which offered food, beer and wine from alumni and local chefs, brewers and vintners.
The Class of 1966, who attended UCSB during its push-cart race days and witnessed its appearance in college football’s Camellia Bowl, celebrated its 50th reunion Saturday afternoon at the Santa Barbara Club.
The University Center’s Corwin Pavilion was packed Friday evening for the Champions of Public Service discussion, the weekend’s keynote event, which featured four alumni who have served as foreign ambassadors, presidential advisers and even an under-secretary general at the United Nations.
“Each of them has made monumental contributions to the international arena,” Chancellor Henry Yang said during his introduction.
Moderating the discussion was UCSB sociology and religious studies professor emeritus Mark Juergensmeyer.
Giandomenico Picco, who received his MA at UCSB in 1971 and served as a U.N. under-secretary general, said he chose UCSB over UC Berkeley when looking at American universities when he heard about the 1970 Bank of America burning in Isla Vista, seeing it as a source for political “action.”
Former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman, who graduated in 1973, cited as the impetuses for getting into diplomacy the relative anarchy Isla Vista faced when he arrived, as well as the urging of a political science professor to study abroad.
All four diplomats also credited the political upheaval their university was facing during their studies as well as their experiences abroad — often through UCSB’s Education Abroad Program — as crucial ingredients to starting their careers.
“You find this desire to represent your country — or in the case of the United Nations, this great international organization — and to try to understand how other people live their lives and try to find common ground with people,” Grossman said.
All four diplomats briefly attended UCSB concurrently, though none of them had known each other, and all went on to work in the Middle East, often at the same time.
Picco played a considerable role in freeing captives in the Lebanon hostage crisis; Barbara Bodine, 1970, helped manage Baghdad early in the Iraq War after serving as ambassador to Yemen; and Joseph Wilson, 1971, was a negotiator with Saddam Hussein after Iraq had invaded Kuwait, before becoming ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Being a diplomat requires realistic optimism, they agreed.
“It’s the job of the diplomats to hold onto your aspirations and yet live in reality, and try to make reality move toward your aspirations,” Grossman said.
One of the diplomats’ primary messages of the evening was that there is no one way to come into this sort of career. Bodine said she had wanted to be a diplomat since age 15, while Wilson said he had worked as a carpenter and “beach bum” for several years following graduation.
“Passion is more important than the plan,” Juergensmeyer summed up.
On Saturday afternoon, attention turned to UCSB’s Science Green where more than 50 Isla Vista restaurants, local brewers and vintners, and alumni chefs, pitched tents for Taste of UCSB. Hundreds of recent and not-so-recent alumni wandered the lawn, sipped and socialized as local musicians played on a stage.
That morning’s Gaucho Gallop 5K, which wound through the campus and ended in Harder Stadium, was won by Santa Barbara resident Cory Smith in 16 minutes 20 seconds.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.