February 18, 1998 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408) 459-2495; mckenna@cats.ucsc.edu

UCSC PROFESSOR RETURNS TO HOMELAND TO RECEIVE HONORARY DEGREE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--One of Europe's oldest universities, the 650-year-old Charles University of Prague, Czechoslovakia, has presented a University of California, Santa Cruz, professor with its highest honor.

Pavel Machotka, professor emeritus of art and psychology at UCSC, was named the recipient of the degree of Doctor of Education honoris causa, bestowed on him, according to the university announcement, "as an expression of high esteem for (his) lifelong contributions to the psychology of art and empirical aesthetics, and the study of art as a means to socialization and the humanization of the world."

Machotka will receive his degree in early April, during a conference titled "The Role of Universities on the Threshold of the 21st Century." The conference takes place at Charles University, which was founded in Prague in 1348 by Charles IV, King of Bohemia and of the Romans.

Machotka came to UCSC in 1970 and retired in 1994. He continues to teach psychology and research the subject of art and personality. Machotka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States with his family at the age of 12. His landscape and figure paintings and photographs have been on exhibit in the U.S. and in Czechoslovakia. Among publications are Cezanne: Landscape into Art, The Nude, The Articulate Body, and Style and the Man: Siegriest and St. John (in press).

Machotka notes that, "The Velvet Revolution in 1989 made it possible for me to return to Prague for the first time since my childhood. Although I arrived first as a visitor, I soon developed contacts with sociologists, art educators, and fellow psychologists, with whom it was easy to make an immediate connection through our essentially shared education." "My contacts now are both scholarly and practical. There was, for example, a need to build up the library in the psychology department, which many of my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz helped me do by donating some of the best books in the field. Now I try to help knowledge flow the other way, by reviewing books dealing with Czech contributions to psychology, for example."

"I am very moved by this honor, which connects me with the period when universities first developed in Europe. To be present 650 years after the founding of Charles University by an enlightened king--almost to the day, actually--is particularly poignant."

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