History and campus
Crown was founded in 1967 when the Chancellor Dean E. McHenry invited biologist Kenneth V. Thimann to come to Santa Cruz and head what would become Crown College and to build the science faculty at UCSC.
Located on the upper northern side of campus by Merrill College, Crown also borders the newly constructed Colleges Nine and Ten. Crown is made up of eight three-floor residence halls as well as having about half of the Crown-Merrill apartment buildings. The UCSC fire station is located at Crown.
Because of its strong science-related roots and continuing tradition, all of the student residence buildings have science-related themes and names: Gauss House, Galen House, Rutherford House, Harvey and Maxwell Houses, Leonardo House, Galileo House, and Descartes House.
Since 2009, Crown College started the popular College game of Humans vs Zombies attracting up to one hundred students when they meet, this is also the location where the UCSC zombie defense council will be formed.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is one of ten University of California campuses. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Kresge College is one of the residential colleges that make up the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1971, Kresge is located on the western edge of the UCSC campus. Kresge is the sixth of ten colleges at UCSC, and originally one of the most experimental. The first provost of Kresge, Bob Edgar, had been strongly influenced by his experience in T-groups run by NTL Institute. He asked a T-group facilitator, psychologist Michael Kahn, to help him start the college. When they arrived at UCSC, they taught a course, Creating Kresge College, in which they and the students in it designed the college. Kresge was a participatory democracy, and students had extraordinary power in the early years. The college was run by two committees: Community Affairs and Academic Affairs. Any faculty member, student or staff member who wanted to be on these committees could be on them. Students' votes counted as much as the faculty or staff. These committees determined the budgets and hiring. They were also run by consensus. Distinguished early faculty members included Gregory Bateson, former husband of Margaret Mead and author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Phil Slater, author of The Pursuit of Loneliness; John Grinder, co-founder of Neuro-linguistic programming and co-author of The Structure of Magic; and William Everson, one of the Beat poets.
Benjamin F. Porter College, known colloquially as Porter College, is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is located on the lower west side of the university, south of Kresge College and north of Rachel Carson College. The college was founded in 1969 as College Five and formally dedicated on November 21, 1981. On that day the college was given the motto Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, and a series of college symbols, including a faculty mace and a college bell, were inaugurated.
The first of the ten residential colleges of the University of California, Santa Cruz, established in 1965, Cowell College sits on the edge of a redwood forest with a remarkable view of Monterey Bay. The college is named for Henry Cowell and the Cowell family, who donated the land that UCSC is built upon, previously known as the Cowell Ranch.
Merrill College is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The theme of the college, and the name of its freshman core course, is "cultural identities and global consciousness."
Oakes College is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is on the southwestern corner of the campus, south of Rachel Carson College and east of the Family Student Housing complex.
Rachel Carson College is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Named in honor of conservationist Rachel Carson, it is on the west side of campus, north of Oakes College and southeast of Porter College. The current provost of the college is Professor Sue Carter, also a faculty member of UCSC's Physics Department. The theme of its freshman core course is Environment and Society.
College Nine is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The university's first new college in nearly 30 years, College Nine was founded in 2000 although the dorms were not finished until 2002. It is located on the north side of campus, east of Science Hill and west of Crown College. The college theme is International and Global Perspectives. All freshmen students are required to take a core course on this particular theme.
John R. Lewis College is one of the ten residential colleges at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is on the north side of campus, west of College Nine and north of the Cowell Student Health Center. The theme of its freshman core course is Social Justice and Community.
Denice Dee Denton was an American professor of electrical engineering and academic administrator. She was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
City on a Hill Press, originally launched in 1966 as The Fulcrum, is the weekly student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Designed as a magazine, the weekly tabloid-sized paper releases new issues every Thursday of the fall, winter and spring academic quarters, as well as a back-to-school issue entitled "Primer" at the end of the summer session, for a total of 30 issues per school year.
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.
Kenneth Vivian Thimann was an English-American plant physiologist and microbiologist known for his studies of plant hormones, which were widely influential in agriculture and horticulture. He isolated and determined the structure of auxin, the first known plant hormone. He spent most of his early career (1935–1965) at Harvard University, and his later career at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Jerry Earl Nelson was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work designing segmented mirror telescopes, which led to him sharing the 2010 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.
The University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC), based at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), is consortium of nine University of California campuses and three Department of Energy laboratories. The goal of the consortium is to support and facilitate original research and education in computational astrophysics, and to engage in public outreach and education. The UC-HiPACC consortium sponsors or co-sponsors conferences and workshops and an annual advanced international summer school at a UC campus. It promotes educational outreach to the public, and maintains a website featuring the latest UC news and findings in computational astronomy, a large archive of lecture videos and presentations, and a gallery of supercomputer-generated astrophysics videos and images.
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Banana Slugs compete in Division III of the NCAA, mostly in the Coast to Coast Athletic Conference (C2C). There are fifteen varsity sports – men's and women's basketball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, and women's golf. UCSC teams have been Division III nationally ranked in tennis, soccer, men's volleyball, and swimming. UCSC maintains a number of successful club sides.
The 2020 Santa Cruz graduate students' strike is a wildcat strike launched against the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Jean H. Langenheim was an American plant ecologist and ethnobotanist, highly respected as an eminent scholar and a pioneer for women in the field. She has done field research in arctic, tropical, and alpine environments across five continents, with interdisciplinary research that spans across the fields of chemistry, geology, and botany. Her early research helped determine the plant origins of amber and led to her career-long work investigating the chemical ecology of resin-producing trees, including the role of plant resins for plant defense and the evolution of several resin-producing trees in the tropics. She wrote what is regarded as the authoritative reference on the topic: Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany, published in 2003.
