Denice Denton and the Politics of Ugly

On June 24, 2006, Dr. Denice Denton, Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, leaped to her death from the roof of the Paramount apartment building shortly after her release from the UCSF psychiatric hospital. "Didn't you meet Dr. Denton at Google?" asked my husband. "Sure did - I wrote about her" I responded as I struggled with the coffeepot (see UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology). "Why?". I was totally unprepared for the next sentence: "She killed herself this morning".

Prior to her death, I was aware of the intense animosity Dr. Denton provoked from political opponents along with the scrutiny of the local press. Much of the legit concern stemmed from what appeared to be the excessive benefits (remodeling the Chancellor's residence, a cush job for her partner) given to her by the Regents and Office of the President as part of her pay package at a time of budget cuts and fee increases. To his credit, UC President Dynes took responsibility for these decisions, and in the real world would be the one held to account. After all, he's the President, right?

But as frequently is observed, academia isn't the real world. UC Santa Cruz is a very ideological campus - far more so than my own alma mater UC Berkeley. Berkeley, for all of its fractious and exciting history, has a very large student body living in a very small footprint, it's very academically intense, and there's a lot of diversity right at your doorstep. People are everywhere, shops are crowded, and there's plenty of room for interaction or privacy.

UCSC, in contrast, has a smaller student body living on a very beautiful spread out campus. You can spend a lot of time wandering back and forth between the residence halls and classes and see more trees than people. It's almost idyllic. It's also a great place to harden viewpoints and actions into ideological abstractions. And Denice Denton, selected by the Regents as much for her icon status as a lesbian success story as for her excellent engineering and academic credentials, became an ultimate ideological abstraction.

I think most everyone was aware of all this prior to her suicide. It was no great secret, and it clearly chafed on Dr. Denton when I met her. When any man or woman works very hard to achieve professional or academic credentials, it is frustrating to discover you will be judged not for what you have done but for what you symbolize. In the case of a woman, that representation is reflected in her personal appearance - and nothing is more insulting to people than a woman who isn't attractive according to their personal ideals - whatever they may be.

Which comes to the jist of this little piece. Before I wrote that essay, I knew she had an image problem, but dismissed it as "the price of the position". But after it appeared (it was well-ranked) and before her suicide, I was able to observe how people accessed (searched) for the story. Search is a mirror on the psyche of the viewer, and the anthropologist in me always enjoys puzzling out why some search terms are valuable and others not. In the case of Dr. Denton, what began as a series of standard search terms like "Denice Denton" or "Chancellor Denton" or "Chancellor of UCSC" began to degenerate. One search entry I began to see more frequently was "Denice Denton ugly" (the term "ugly" actually related to a separate blog entry on search ranking and legal recourse).

I got intrigued enough to begin to traceback what I would call "mean" search terms. Unlike the generic searches, I found most of them originated from the Santa Cruz area - sometimes even UCSC IP blocks. Her most vicious opponents lived in her own back yard. And they thought she was "ugly". I guess nothing else - her ideas, her thoughts, her achievements - mattered. She was "ugly" and that was good enough to threaten her, frighten her, and insult her. No wonder she was depressed!

Now that the medical examiner's report on her death has been released and analyzed, and all of the laments, charges, excuses and honest expressions of sympathy have been aired, perhaps it is time to step back a bit and ask yourself a a few simple questions: "Did I think less, belittle, or run down someone today because of what s/he looked like? Did I stoop to name-calling because it was was an easy win?". We used to call this bigotry. But given what happened to Dr. Denton, perhaps a better term would be "the politics of ugly". Be as it may, it is important to remember that you are the sum of your words and experiences. Make sure they're good ones. Because you're not as anonymous in your hate as you might like to think.