The University of California, Santa Cruz 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 campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the US in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".
Kresge College is one of the residential colleges that make up the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1971 and named after Sebastian Kresge, Kresge college 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.
Barbara Rogoff is an American academic who is UCSC Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research is in different learning between cultures and bridges psychology and anthropology.
John Dizikes was Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He served as Cowell College provost and was a recipient of the UCSC Alumni Association's Distinguished Teaching Award. Dizikes was a founding faculty member at UCSC, which he joined in 1965, just before the university opened to students, and taught for 35 years until his retirement in 2000.
The Baskin School of Engineering, known simply as Baskin Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments: Applied Mathematics, Biomolecular Engineering, Computational Media, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Statistics.
History of Consciousness is the name of a department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz with a 50+ year history of interdisciplinary research and student training in "established and emergent disciplines and fields" in the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences based on a diverse array of theoretical approaches. The program has a history of well-known affiliated faculty and of well-known program graduates.
In philosophy, political science and sociology, elite theory is a theory of the State that seeks to describe and explain power relationships in contemporary society. The theory posits that a small minority, consisting of members of the economic elite and policy-planning networks, holds the most power—and that this power is independent of democratic elections.
Page Smith was an American historian, professor and author. In 1964 he became the founding Provost of Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz and resigned from the university in 1973 in protest. As an activist, he was a lifelong advocate for homeless people, for community organization, and for improving the prison system.
Anthony R. Pratkanis is a researcher, author, consultant, media commentator and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, and has published research papers in scientific journals on the topics of social influence, fraud, terrorist and dictator propaganda, marketing and consumer behavior, and subliminal persuasion.
Gopal Balakrishnan was a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he was fired due to allegations of sexual assault.
Calvin Springer Hall, Jr., commonly known as Calvin S. Hall, was an American psychologist who studied in the fields of dream research and analysis. He began his systematic research on dreams in the 1940s, and from there he wrote many books, A Primer of Freudian Psychology and A Primer of Jungian Psychology being the best known, and developed a quantitative content analysis system for dreams. Hall's work on temperament and behavior genetics is now only a historical footnote, but was an aid to scientific studies and theories of today.
Who Rules America? is a book by research psychologist and sociologist G. William Domhoff, Ph.D., published in 1967 as a best-seller (#12).
Mahlon Brewster Smith was an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association. His career included faculty appointments at Vassar College, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago and University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith had been briefly involved with the Young Communist League as a student at Reed College in the 1930s, which resulted in a subpoena by the U.S. Senate in the 1950s. That activity caused him to be blacklisted by the National Institute of Mental Health for ten years without his knowledge.
Craig Haney is an American social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted for his work on the study of capital punishment and the psychological impact of imprisonment and prison isolation since the 1970s. He was a researcher on The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella’s career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella’s research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, "I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans"Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Thomas Fraser Pettigrew is an American social psychologist best known for his research on American civil rights, and is one of the leading experts in the social science of race and ethnic relations.
Paul Lee was a professor of existential and religious philosophy living in Santa Cruz, California. He was chair of the Romero Institute. While an assistant professor of Humanities at MIT in the 1960s, Lee was a founding editor of the infamous Psychedelic Review, started by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard.
Geoffrey Dunn is an American author, film producer, film director, screenwriter, and investigative journalist. His films include Calypso Dreams, Miss…or Myth?, Dollar a Day, 10¢ a Dance and his books include, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, Chinatown Dreams, and Santa Cruz is in the Heart, Volumes l and ll.
