Jody Murray

UC Merced has debuted a writer-in-residence program with one of California’s premier chroniclers of its history, especially the titanic power plays for land and water that have shaped the state’s growth and loom over its future.

Mark Arax, a Fresno native, author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, will host workshops about his craft throughout the academic year. His presence on campus also will offer inside access to a working author.

Spirits were high and futures bright while all else was soaked in a summer storm that made Tuesday morning’s Scholars Bridge Crossing, UC Merced’s traditional greeting to new students, a welcome unlike any before.

Call them Thunder ‘Cats.

The ceremony embraced about 2,000 first-year and transfer students to a campus that this fall semester marks 20 years since the first undergraduate class began at the newly built institution, bringing the power of a University of California education to the Central Valley.

On laptop screens, televisions and social media feeds across the nation, images and words fueled by a fractured political landscape spout anger, frustration and resentment. Clashing ideologies burst forth in public demonstrations, family gatherings and digital echo chambers.

Red-hot rhetoric and finger-pointing memes are open expressions of emotions generated by engaging in politics. But there is another set of emotions far less incendiary but just as damaging to democracy. These feelings can push people to the sidelines and drive them to silence.

Temnee Wright (’08) has realized a successful career as legal counsel at several Silicon Valley companies. Her interest in law was forged at UC Merced, where she made the most out of being a student in the university’s first undergraduate class.

Wright is the senior commercial counsel for San Jose-based Astera Labs, a semiconductor company that develops connectivity solutions for AI and cloud infrastructures. She negotiates details of and drafts documents for things like software licenses, vendor contracts, real estate leases and strategic partnerships.

With cheers, hugs and leis, more than 1,500 UC Merced graduates received a celebratory sendoff to their bright futures as a prominent keynote speaker told them to make the most of the here and now.

Hundreds of families and friends joined the graduates in three days of commencement ceremonies at the university’s Recreation Field. White picket fences lined the processional path for graduates, faculty and campus leaders of the San Joaquin Valley’s only research institution.

Only 10 years after it began, the Ph.D. program in UC Merced’s Department of Sociology made an impressive debut in U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings of graduate-level offerings.

The Sociology graduate program tied for No. 64 nationally, sharing the position with UC Riverside, Temple University, the University of Florida and Washington State University.

Zachary Silva’s camera escorts us to extraordinary places. We see UC Merced from high above, the land around the campus warped by a fisheye lens. We look straight down a pole at a fluttering U.S. flag and two lonely tractors.

These eye-popping points of view are among other photographs by Silva on display at Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock. The UC Merced student is one of a dozen artists in an exhibition called “Valley Focus: Growing Talent.”

If Arden, the sprawling, wild forest in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” were in the United States instead of the Bard’s imagination, it would certainly be a national park.

Like Yosemite.

That is why this light comedy is an ideal fit for the annual UC Merced theater project that weaves modern issues of environmental stewardship into the 16th-century playwright’s words.

The Huntington Library in San Marino is one of the world’s greatest sources for independent research in the humanities, with documents and artifacts that span 11 centuries. Scholars from more than 30 nations visit its reading rooms or tap into its digital services.

Each year, the library awards 15 long-term fellowships for high-quality research. Of those, six are named distinguished fellows, an honor for exceptional work in their field of study.

Todo Cambia, UC Merced’s annual Human Rights Film Festival, is about more than film this year.