Thank you Juvenal for composing and sharing your beautiful and deeply moving poem. Juvenal Acosta, professor of Writing and Literature, former Dean of the Humanities & Sciences Division and has been teaching at CCA since 1999. Thank you Juvenal

Hello everyone! My name is Annemarie Haar and I am the Associate Vice-President of Instructional Services. I am also the college's archivist, co-chair of the Oakland Campus Legacy Committee, and an alum, BFA in Photo 2003. I have spent 17 years of my life coming to this campus - I love this space and this place so deeply - and to be the one to welcome you here today is such an honor.

SO WELCOME!!!! Welcome to our last hurrah, our goodbye. Welcome to this very specific, very unique moment. Thank you all so much for coming - your presence is what makes the moment. Together let us show gratitude to our beloved garden campus. CCA, CCAC and CSAC has called this land home for one hundred years and we are here today to celebrate its roots, the lands’ roots, our individual roots, and collective roots - all the roots! - that we will carry forward in this new era of the college’s history.

This land, CCA’s other historical campuses as well as our current campus are located in Huichin and Yelamu, also known as Oakland and San Francisco respectively, on the unceded territories of Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who have continuously lived upon this land since time immemorial. We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in California and the Americas, including their forced removal from ancestral lands, and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. CCA honors Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future—here and around the world, and we wish to pay respect to local elders.

Decades ago, the bell was rung to call the CCA Community together during campus events and to mark the beginning and end of the academic year. A 1965 college brochure states that the bell came from the U.S.S. Tennessee and was purchased in the early 1930s. It hung in an archway that bridged two buildings along the path coming from Clifton. In 1965 when the resident hall, Irwin, was built, Gloria Sibila (BFA 1951, student body president) took it home for safekeeping and housed it in her garage until the bell tower was installed later the same year. This tower was designed and built by William Newbold Dohrmann (BFA 1964), who worked at Gensler & Associates

The bell currently hangs from a beam constructed by current Furniture chair, Katherine Lam, and former Furniture chair, Russel Baldon, both alums, (thank you both so much for the work and care you have dedicated to this bell), this beam I’d constructed out of wood harvested from the Coastal Redwoods that stood behind you and that some of you are sitting on, that we lost to disease.

To honor this moment of transition for us and for the college, we will ring the bell for the last time in Oakland before it’s transported across the Bay.

I’d like to now welcome President Steve Beal. Steve joined CCA as Provost in 1997 and became President in 2008.

Thank you!

Remarks delivered September 24, 2022