REALITY: MTV-STYLE

Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi had a booth on the Quad on Picnic Day, and MTV was there. (Photo: Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis Mediaworks)

Yes, MTV: Music Television has come to campus. Its production crew spent the spring quarter filming the lives of UC Davis’ Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi pledges for a weekly series that begins June 23.

“We searched all over the nation for the best location and sorority for this show,” said John Miller, MTV senior vice president of Original Series Development & Current. “And we think that UC Davis is the perfect fit in terms of all it has to offer on its beautiful campus, as well as the strong Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi sorority.”
Most of the show was filmed at the Sigma house on Russell Boulevard and at a north Davis home where six pledges lived spring quarter. A limited amount of supervised videotaping was also done on campus.

Campus administrators admit to some unease about having the campus and its students in the MTV spotlight—in part because of the reality-based show’s divergence from reality: the TV crew rented the house (with pool) for the pledges selected to be the focus of the program.

The show’s creator and executive producer, Sergio Myers, told the Sacramento Bee that the show would make “Davis famous, for better or worse.”

Is there no such thing as bad publicity? Stay tuned.

ENSURING A FUTURE FOR EGYPT'S PAST

Egytpian antiquities like Luxor Temple’s Cattle Way are being threatened by rising groundwater, caused in part by the encroachment of urban areas.

To discover the answer, Egyptian visiting scholar Ayman Ahmed is spending two years on campus studying with Graham Fogg, professor of land, air and water resources, researching the deterioration of the pharaonic temples at Kom Ombo, Edfu, Esna, Karnak, Luxor and Dandara.

Ahmed conducted an extensive study of his own in deciding to come to UC Davis to study what Fogg describes as a “fascinating archaeological/hydrological problem.” He sent e-mails all over the world, talked with scholars and scoured Web sites, finally concluding that UC Davis had the strongest hydrology program around.

Preliminary findings by Ahmed and Fogg indicate that agricultural activities, urbanization and residential housing near the temples are causing rising groundwater. When the water table rises, the groundwater comes closer to the foundations, columns and walls of the antiquities, causing structural damage. The structures are made of sandstone, which can be weakened by water and salts.

“Probably the most dangerous factors affecting the pharaonic monuments are urbanization and agricultural development,” Ahmed said. While the millennia have taken their toll on the antiquities, those factors have dramatically increased the rate of degradation in recent years.

Complicating the issue, Ahmed said, in the Nile Valley there exist few regulations or management plans dealing with drainage and water usage.

Using a sophisticated computer model of groundwater beneath the Karnak and Luxor temples, Ahmed and Fogg are developing solutions to reduce the rising groundwater levels. They hope to help Egypt protect these treasured antiquities.

The Temple of Luxor was built on the site of a small Middle Kingdom temple by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III during the years 1391-1353 B.C. The temple complex of Karnak was built over a period of 1,300 years and includes several of the finest examples of ancient Egyptian design and architecture.

According to Ahmed, pharaonic monuments represent the most valuable source of information on ancient Egypt, covering the period from approximately 3000 B.C. to 300 B.C. The next 1,000 years of Greco-Roman influence saw the addition of many monuments that are valuable examples of architecture and interior decoration.

“These monuments,” said Ahmed, “constitute unique and invaluable documentation of one of the world’s most outstanding cultural centers.”

NAMESAKES: MRAK HALL

Emil Mrak, the chancellor of UC Davis in 1959-69, was known for his warmth, his accessibility and his straight talk. Having risen from humble beginnings, he admitted that he frequently felt inferior when he was a student at UC Berkeley and, perhaps because of that, he made sure no one ever felt that way in his presence—not legislators or UC presidents, not secretaries or, especially, students. As a teacher, he would ask his students the day before Thanksgiving if they had any plans. If not, he invited them to his home for dinner. As a chancellor he gave standing orders that, if a student came to see him, the student would be ushered in. Even if he was in a meeting with other campus administrators or faculty, he would excuse himself to spend at least a few minutes with the student and, for good measure, he would make sure everyone remembered campus priorities by declaring to his colleagues: “Excuse me, there’s a student. A student comes before you guys.”

ARTIST INSTIGATOR

The work chosen to represent 1978 in a new book about the 100 most important fine art prints of the last century was one that was banned from exhibition that year. The work was Anniversary Print: From the People Who Brought You Thalidomide (detail shown at left) by Conrad Atkinson, who eventually became one of Britain’s most influential artists and a professor of art at UC Davis. Then an instructor at the Slade School of University College, London, Atkinson was among the artists asked to create a portfolio of prints for the Queen Mother in honor of the 150th anniversary of the school. Atkinson, whose work has always been a commentary on social and political injustice, chose the occasion to criticize the royal family’s continued patronage of the Distillers Co., the organization that had marketed the drug Thalidomide and had still, after 20 years, not compensated its victims. The work, a hand-colored lithograph, is a still-life of bottles, with their royal mark circled, above text that details the history of Thalidomide. It caused an immediate uproar and was not, needless to say, presented to the Queen Mother. Today it is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum collection and is included, along with works by such artists as Warhol, Picasso and Chagall, in Impressions of the 20th Century, edited by Margaret Timmers.