University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students.[8] Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara.
Founded in 1965, UC Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.[9]
Among the faculty are Nobel Prize laureates, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipients, 12 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nine UC Santa Cruz alumni are Pulitzer Prize winners, with a total of 11 Pulitzers awarded.[10] UC Santa Cruz is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".[11] The university is also a member of the Association of American Universities.
History[edit]
Prior to campus development[edit]
Prior to Spanish colonization, the Uypi tribe of the Awaswas Nation, who spoke Mutsun Costanoan of the Ohlone peoples, lived in what is now the campus of UCSC. During this time, the missionaries of Mission Santa Cruz removed a part of the forest to build a vineyard on top of what is now the Great Meadow.
After the California Gold Rush, many mining firms came to the area. The Cowell Lime Works operated on the entirety of what is now the Santa Cruz campus until 1920.
Site selection and campus planning[edit]
Although some of the original founders had already outlined plans for an institution like UCSC as early as the 1930s, the opportunity to realize their vision did not present itself until the City of Santa Cruz made a bid to the UC Board of Regents in the mid-1950s to build a campus just outside town, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.[12] During the mid-1950s, there was widespread public sentiment in favor of the establishment of a new UC campus somewhere south of the original campus at Berkeley. In 1957, the California State Senate passed a resolution asking the Regents to consider the Monterey Peninsula, and that same year, the California State Assembly passed its own resolution asking the Regents to consider the Santa Clara Valley.[13] In December 1959, the Regents voted to focus their site selection process on the Almaden Valley in San Jose (i.e., within the Santa Clara Valley and the larger region now known as Silicon Valley), but the public announcement of the Regents' decision immediately caused property values throughout that area to increase to the extent that the Regents could no longer afford to buy the necessary land.[13] After another year of study, the Regents finally selected Santa Cruz as the location of the next UC campus.[13]
However, Santa Cruz was selected for the beauty, rather than the practicality, of its location, and its remoteness led to the decision to develop a residential college system that would house most of the students on-campus.[14] The formal design process for the Santa Cruz campus began in the late 1950s, culminating in the Long Range Development Plan of 1963.[15]
Planning the new UC campus was just as hard as picking the site. The first plan was to build the campus on what is now the Great Meadow, so it would be close to the existing city of Santa Cruz.[16] The second plan, conceived by Thomas Church, put the colleges into the redwood forest at the top of the hill above the Great Meadow.[16] This was clearly the better idea, but presented the problem of how to place the colleges inside the forest.[16] The original design for College One (Cowell College) scattered its buildings among the trees, which was sarcastically compared by one regent to "a series of motels on the shores of Lake Tahoe."[16] Having recently visited Aigues-Mortes, UC President Clark Kerr was inspired by the layout of that French medieval town to suggest concentrating each college's buildings into distinct clusters in the forest, and that is how UC Santa Cruz was actually built.[17]
Construction started by 1964, and the university was able to accommodate its first students (albeit living in trailers on what is now the East Field athletic area) in 1965. The campus was intended to be a showcase for contemporary architecture, progressive teaching methods, and undergraduate research.[18][19][20] According to founding chancellor Dean McHenry, the purpose of the distributed college system was to combine the benefits of a major research university with the intimacy of a smaller college.[21][22] Kerr shared a passion with former Stanford roommate McHenry to build a university modeled as "several Swarthmores" (i.e., small liberal arts colleges) in close proximity to each other.[21][23] Both men were well aware that Santa Cruz "was located in the shadow not only of Berkeley but also of Stanford, and was bound to remain in their shadows for a very long time to come and perhaps forever."[24] Therefore, they hoped to shape a "distinctive personality" for the Santa Cruz campus and let it "flourish as first rate within its own type."[24]
The "Santa Cruz dream"[edit]
In his memoirs, Kerr ruefully recounted the myriad errors made by himself and McHenry in launching the new campus.[24] They had created Santa Cruz as the "most experimental" of the UC campuses, but opened it just in time for their cherished "Santa Cruz dream" to die amidst the counterculture of the 1960s.[24] Santa Cruz quickly became the "counterculture campus" where students and faculty either "mellowed out" among the redwood trees or turned into "activist-radical[s]".[25] For example, when Kerr came to deliver an address at UC Santa Cruz's first commencement exercises in 1969, the ceremony was hijacked by students who denounced Kerr and McHenry for having "planned and created Santa Cruz as a capitalist-imperialist-fascist plot to divert the students from their revolution against the evils of American society and, in particular, against the horrors of the Vietnam War."[26] The students then tried to award an honorary degree to Huey P. Newton (who was in jail at the time, although he went on to earn his bachelor's and doctorate degrees at Santa Cruz).[26] Kerr later recalled this episode of "guerrilla theatre" as "one of the worst afternoons of my life."[27]
According to Kerr's account, during the 1970s, the quality of UC Santa Cruz's incoming freshman classes deteriorated as Me generation students increasingly chose to matriculate at less experimental UC campuses in order to major in subjects such as engineering and business administration (both absent from Santa Cruz).[28] Another major factor behind the decrease in quality was a series of "grisly murders" around Santa Cruz,[28] which at the time was labeled the "murder capital of the world".[29] The average SAT scores of UC Santa Cruz's incoming students dropped from 1250 in the early 1970s to 1050 by the early 1980s.[28]
Sinsheimer Reforms[edit]
A series of major reforms were implemented by Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer (1977–1987) at the cost of making Santa Cruz less experimental and more conventional.[30][31][32] In 1981, after a two-year battle, the faculty narrowly voted to give students the option of receiving grades for the first time, in lieu of Santa Cruz's traditional narrative evaluations.[31] By the fall of 1984, 45% of Santa Cruz students were already majoring in the sciences, and that year, the campus offered computer engineering as a major for the first time (in order to take advantage of its proximity to Silicon Valley), followed by business economics a year later.[31] In May 1985, Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist, welcomed several scientists to Santa Cruz for one of the first meetings at which the idea of a Human Genome Project was discussed.[33]
Sinsheimer got Santa Cruz involved in intercollegiate athletics for the first time as part of NCAA Division III. In 1981, he supported student athletes' preference for the sea lion as the campus mascot, but was forced to back down in 1986 when the student body voted to support the banana slug instead.[32]
By the early 1990s, the campus was still inefficient in that average teaching loads were still light compared to other UC campuses, but SAT scores had stopped falling, the faculty was performing good research, and the campus was beginning to rise in university rankings.[30] In 1997, an engineering school was finally launched.[30]
In 2019, the University of California, Santa Cruz was elected to the Association of American Universities (AAU), the most prestigious alliance of American research universities.[34] Along with UCI, UC Santa Cruz was the youngest university to gain admittance to the AAU.[35]
Sustainability[edit]
Students established the Student Environmental Center (SEC) in 2001, have held annual Earth Summits, and established a sustainability funding body, the Campus Sustainability Council. In 2004, the UC Policy on Sustainable Practices was released, stating that the University of California Office of the President was committed to minimizing its impact on the environment and reducing its dependence on non-renewable energy. In 2006, a Committee on Sustainability and Stewardship (CSS) was established and a campus-wide Sustainability Assessment was completed. The following year, the pilot Sustainability Office was created to help institutionalize sustainability, coordinate communication and collaboration between the many entities already engaged in campus sustainability activities at UCSC, support policy implementation, and serve as a resource for the campus.[157]
Notable alumni of the University of California, Santa Cruz include co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton (BA 1974, PhD 1980); actress and comedian Maya Rudolph (BA 1995); founder of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed Jonah Peretti (BA 1996); filmmaker Cary Fukunaga (BA 1999); marine biologist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Stacy Jupiter (PhD 2006); acclaimed author and cultural theorist bell hooks (PhD 1983); acclaimed author Geoffrey Dunn;[159][160] musician Sven Eric Gamsky (BA 2015), known profesionally as Still Woozy and several Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists. Notable attendees include actor and comedian Andy Samberg and filmmaker Miranda July.
