It appears that what took Stanford four years to do, UCLA was able to accomplish in four months.

In May 2007, The Daily reported that Elizabeth Okazaki, over the course of four years, attended graduate physics seminars, assumed a locker space, and, for months at a time, procured rooms in which to sleep in the Varian Physics Lab. Although she claimed to be a visiting scholar in the humanities and, at times, suggested that she was working with noted string theorist Prof. Leonard Susskind, Okazaki offered no proof to substantiate any of these claims and, within two days of The Daily investigation, University officials asked her to leave campus.

Her destination: UCLA. Enlisting the help of a faculty member in the UCLA philosophy department, Okazaki secured a BruinCard as a department “affiliate,” enabling her to access and loan library materials and store her possessions in lockers in the UCLA recreation center. After four months of posing as an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the philosophy of music, Okazaki was stopped by officers of the UCLA Police Department last Wednesday, and her BruinCard was taken away from her.

The quick action against Okazaki was spearheaded by the efforts of one particularly vigilant university employee. In an interview with The Daily, Edward Blancarte, a student affairs officer in UCLA’s ethnomusicology department, said that he quickly began to connect the dots between the somewhat eccentric individual he met in the music department in the middle of August and the impostor he had read about in The Daily last May.

“This girl came in, and I just started to make connections,” Blancarte said. “When I made that initial connection, it was just a really strange feeling, and when all the evidence started to back that up, I was really surprised.”

Unlike administrative officials in the Varian Physics Lab who, many doctoral physics students suggested, failed to investigate Okazaki properly while she was at Stanford, Blancarte followed through on his initial suspicions. In telephone conversations with Okazaki’s landlady in Bel Air, Blancarte confirmed that the individual who spent six to eight hours each day in the Music Library was, in fact, Okazaki.

In the end of August, according to Blancarte, Okazaki moved to a residence in Westwood and also began to use the lockers in UCLA’s John Wooden Center to store some of her personal belongings. Certain that Okazaki was about to make UCLA her home just as she had done at Stanford, Blancarte informed the philosophy department, the BruinCard office, the recreation center and the police department of his doubts about the circumstances by which Okazaki had been granted affiliate status.

While numerous calls to the UCLA Police Department were not returned and BruinCard office manager Nancy Tran declined to comment, Prof. Donald Martin, the chair of UCLA’s philosophy department, told The Daily that Okazaki appeared to be a credible scholar when she requested access to the library in early June, and he acknowledged that he signed her application as department chair.

“She represented herself as someone who wanted to work on a philosophy project in the summer here,” Martin said. “She wanted a library card, and a member of the faculty thought it sounded reasonable.”

But by the second week of September, the philosophy department and the BruinCard office both agreed to revoke Okazaki’s BruinCard, and, on Sept. 12, officers from the UCLA Police Department approached Okazaki at her usual spot in the Music Library and successfully obtained the student identification card from her.

Okazaki’s ties with UCLA have still yet to be completely severed, though. As of press time, Okazaki has 16 books and CDs checked out from the music library, and, although she promised to return the materials when her BruinCard was revoked, she has yet to return to the library.

“I don’t want to aggravate her,” said Bridget Risemberg, the library’s head of circulation services. “I don’t even mind if she uses the library. I just want her to return the materials.”

But it does not appear that Okazaki is ready to terminate her stay at the Southern California school; Henry Lim, the library’s technical services assistant, told The Daily that Okazaki contacted him just hours after her BruinCard was revoked and asked him to check library materials out under his name for her use.

That Okazaki seeks to take advantage of the sympathy shown to her by others was of little surprise to those interviewed by The Daily.

“She’s very manipulative,” said ethnomusicology department receptionist Carol Pratt. “She really plays on people’s emotions.”

While on the Farm, Okazaki capitalized on the non-confrontational attitude of graduate students and physics faculty members; at UCLA, she was able to enlist the support of staff members in caring for her dying cat. One music department employee told The Daily that he helped Okazaki administer subcutaneous intravenous fluids to the moribund cat, and Lim said that he later drove Okazaki to the crematorium after the cat died of renal failure.

To Blancarte, Okazaki’s story ultimately evinces the inefficiencies that pervade college campuses and administrations.

“I’m coming to realize how uncoordinated all of UCLA’s systems are,” Blancarte said. “UCLA’s bureaucracy is vast to the point that people can slip into the cracks easily.”

At the very least, Blancarte can still measure Okazaki’s stay in months and not in years — a luxury hardly available to those of us at Stanford.