University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UCSC or UC Santa Cruz, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California. Located 75 miles south of San Francisco in the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,000 acres of gently rolling, redwood-forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay. Founded in 1965, the same year UC Irvine had opened, UCSC was one of the most recent of the University of California campuses until the opening of UC Merced.

Academics

The university offers 61 undergraduate majors and 31 minors, with graduate programs in 32 fields;

popular majors include art, business administration and psychology. (Note: Registration required)

The undergraduate program is based on a residential college system. Upon admission, all students join one of ten colleges, which they generally stay with for their entire undergraduate career.

Most faculty members are affiliated with a college as well. The individual colleges provide housing and dining services, while the university as a whole offers courses and majors to the general student community. Other universities with similar college systems include Rice University and UCSC's sister campus in San Diego. The ten colleges are, in order of establishment:

Each college has a distinct architectural style and student housing, along with at least one resident faculty provost. Incoming first-year students take a mandatory "core course", with a curriculum and central theme unique to each college. College sizes vary from about 750 to 1,550 students, and roughly half of undergraduates live on campus within their college community. Coursework, academic majors and general areas of study are not limited by college membership, although colleges host the offices of many academic departments. Graduate students are not affiliated with a residential college.

The McHenry Library houses UCSC's arts and letters collection, with most of the scientific reading at the newer Science and Engineering Library. In addition, the colleges host smaller libraries, which serve as quiet places to study. The McHenry Special Collections Library includes the archives of Robert A. Heinlein, the mycology book collection of composer John Cage, the Hayden White collection of 16th century Italian printing, and a photography collection with nearly half a million items.

As of 2006, a renovation and expansion program is underway at McHenry, scheduled for completion in 2009. The library will remain open during construction, with brief closures as needed.

For most of its history, UCSC employed a unique student evaluation system. The only grades assigned were "pass" and "no pass", supplemented with narrative evaluations. Beginning in 1997, UCSC switched to a conventional letter grading system, but course grades are still supplemented with evaluations. The pass-no pass system is still available, but many academic programs limit or even forbid pass-no pass grading. Overall, students may earn no more than 25% of UCSC credits on a pass-no pass basis.

In general, graduation and retention rates are above national averages but below the mean among UC campuses. Among students who entered in 1999, 70% graduated within six years, ten percentage points below the UC average. Earlier statistics show that the six-year graduation rate is above the mean for both NCAA Division I schools and a sample of major universities throughout the United States.

About half of graduates pursue further education, and 13 percent proceed to advanced degree programs within six months of graduation.

As of 2004, UCSC's faculty included two members of the Institute of Medicine, twenty members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, eleven members of the National Academy of Sciences, and one MacArthur Fellow. The young Baskin School of Engineering, UCSC's first professional school, and the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering are gaining recognition, as has the work UCSC researchers have done on the Human Genome Project. UCSC administers Lick and Keck Observatories as well as the Long Marine Laboratory.

According to a 2005 report by SCI-BYTES magazine, UCSC ranked second in the United States for academic research impact in the field of space sciences between 1999 and 2003, behind Princeton University.

Of all the UC campuses, UC Santa Cruz has had the highest percentage of upper-division students participating in UC’s Education Abroad Program for the last five years.

In September 2003, a ten-year task order contract valued at more than $330 million was awarded by NASA Ames Research Center to the University of California to establish and operate a University Affiliated Research System (UARC). UCSC manages the UARC for the University of California.

Setting

The 2000 acre (8 km²) UCSC campus is located 75 miles (120 km) south of San Francisco and has an elevation change of about 900 feet (275 m) from the campus entrance at 285 feet (87 m) to the upper boundary at 1,195 feet (364 m). The lower portion of the campus primarily consists of the Great Meadow, and most of the upper campus is within a redwood forest. The campus is bounded on the south by the city's upper-west-side neighborhoods, on the east by Harvey West Park

and the Pogonip open space preserve,

on the north by Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

near the town of Felton, and on the west by Gray Whale Ranch, a portion of Wilder Ranch State Park.

The northern half of the campus, while originally intended to house ten additional colleges, has remained in its undeveloped, forested state apart from hiking and bicycle trails. The heavily-forested area has allowed UC Santa Cruz to operate a recreational vehicle park as a form of student housing (see link below).

History

Although the original founders had outlined their plans for the University in the 1930s, the opportunity did not present itself to realize their vision until the City of Santa Cruz made a bid to the University of California Regents in the mid-1950s to build a campus in the mountains outside town. The formal design of the Santa Cruz campus begun in the late 1950s and construction started in the early 1960s. The campus was intended to be a showcase for contemporary architecture. The first university structure on campus to be completed was Hahn Student Services Building. Not long after opening, a fire gutted the building, which was then rebuilt over the undamaged concrete sub-structure.

Roads on campus are named after the UC Regents who voted in favor of building the campus. Clark Kerr Hall is named after the then-President of the University of California, who wanted to build a university as several Swarthmores (i.e., small liberal arts colleges) in close proximity to each other.

When UCSC opened, student protests on college campuses across the United States were common. According to popular myth, the campus was designed on a decentralized plan, with no central quadrangle or central administrative buildings to serve as rallying points for protests. However, the architectural plans and layout for the campus were already completed by the early 1960's, so there is no truth to this supposition. According to the founding chancellor, Dean McHenry, the purpose of the college system was to combine the benefits of a major research university with the intimacy of a smaller college.

A large and growing population of politically liberal UCSC alumni in Santa Cruz has helped to change the electorate of the town from predominantly Republican

to markedly left-leaning, voting nearly three to one for Democrat John Kerry over Republican George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Mike Rotkin, a UCSC alumnus, lecturer in Community Studies, and self-described 'socialist-feminist,' has been elected Mayor of Santa Cruz several times, and the City Council of Santa Cruz recently issued a proclamation opposing the USA PATRIOT Act.

In January 2006, UCSC was the subject of an article in The New York Times discussing the school's opposition to military recruiters and allegations of spying on one of the campus's anti war groups.

On June 24, 2006, Denice Denton, UCSC's ninth Chancellor, committed suicide by jumping from the rooftop deck of The Paramount high-rise apartment complex in San Francisco where her partner lived.

Geology

The geology and history of the campus are closely tied together. The campus is built on a portion of the Cowell Family ranch, which was given as a gift to the University of California. The original living quarters for ranch employees are still standing at the base of campus, as is the stonehouse which served as the paymaster's house. The stonehouse was home to the campus newspaper, City on a Hill Press, from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. Many of the other original ranch buildings have been renovated into comfortable modern offices in spite of their antiquated appearance.

The Cowell Ranch was a part of the Henry Cowell Lime and Cement Company. The limestone that runs under most of campus was pulled from one of several quarries, the most notable being the Upper Quarry. There is an amphitheater in this quarry that is used for most of the large gatherings on campus. The original campus plan included a stadium in the Lower Quarry, but this was never realized. Once the limestone was quarried, lime was extracted by burning it in limekilns adjacent to the quarries. The fires were fueled by the redwood trees that were logged from adjacent land. Although most of the kilns are fenced off, they are visible in several locations on and around campus and in Pogonip.

Creeks traverse the UCSC campus within several ravines. Footbridges span those ravines on pedestrian paths linking various areas of campus. The footbridges make it possible to walk to any part of campus within 20 minutes in spite of the campus being built on a mountainside with varying elevations. At night, fog shrouds the ends of the bridges, so that one can be in the center without being able to see either end or the bottom of the ravine below. Only the orange lights along the path twisting away into the woods provide any sense of place.

There are a number of caves on the UCSC grounds, some of which have challenging passages.

The combination of porous limestone bedrock with torrential coastal winter rains can lead to sinkholes; there are two such 'bottomless' pits across from the Science Hill complex. The Jack Baskin Engineering Building, formerly known as the Applied Sciences Building, began sinking shortly after it was built; in the late 1970's, hundreds of tons of concrete were poured underneath its foundation to prevent it from sinking.

The UCSC campus is also one of the few homes to mima mounds in the United States. They are extremely rare in the United States, and, indeed, in the world in general.

Athletics and student traditions

UCSC competes in Division III of the NCAA as an Independent member. There are fourteen varsity sports (men's and women's basketball, soccer, water polo, volleyball, swimming & diving, women's golf, and women's cross country). UCSC teams are nationally ranked in tennis, soccer, water polo and swimming. They have won five men's tennis team championships (most recently in 2004) and were runner-ups in men's soccer in 2004. UCSC is one of the largest NCAA Division III members.

UCSC's mascot is the banana slug. In 1981, when the university began participating in NCAA intercollegiate sports, the then-chancellor and some student athletes declared the mascot to be the "sea lions". Most students disliked the new mascot and offered an alternative mascot, the banana slug. In 1986, students voted via referendum to declare the banana slug the official mascot of UCSC—a vote the chancellor refused to honor, arguing that only athletes should choose the mascot. When a poll of athletes showed that they, too, wanted to be "slugs," the chancellor relented. A sea lion statue can still be seen in front of the Thimann Hall lecture building.

Notable people

Points of interest

University of California, Santa Cruz, Arboretum
The UCSC trailer park
The Kresge Food Co-op - student run natural foods store

Notes and references

External links

University of California | University of California, Santa Cruz | Educational institutions established in 1965 | Santa Cruz County, California | Western Association of Schools and Colleges

University of California, Santa Cruz | Université de Californie à Santa Cruz | カリフォルニア大学サンタクルーズ校

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