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, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located in 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 2024, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,940 undergraduate and 1,998 graduate students. 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, along with administrative control of the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the Diablo Range and the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Founded in 1965, UC Santa Cruz is a collegiate university, using a residential college system consisting of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge university system.

Among the faculty are Nobel Prize laureates, Rhodes Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipients, 16 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 29 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 46 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. UC Santa Cruz alumni include 13 Pulitzer Prizes for 11 recipients, 7 MacArthur 'genius' Award fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, and Marshall Scholars, amongst others. UC Santa Cruz is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The university is also a member of the Association of American Universities.

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.

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. 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. 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. After another year of study, the Regents finally selected Santa Cruz as the location of the next UC campus.

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. The formal design process for the Santa Cruz campus began in the late 1950s, culminating in the Long Range Development Plan of 1963. 1963 was also the year when the Regional History Project, an oral history project and the first major research project of UCSC, was started. Its purpose was originally to interview longtime residents of the Central California Coast area in order to help better understand the history of the region. Originally concentrated in the economic history of the area, it expanded to also cover the social and cultural history of the region before expanding its scope in 1967 to include a series of interviews on the history of UCSC and the Lick Observatory. These series of interviews later expanded in scope and lead to a two volume series, Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz. UCSC is one of only two UC campuses to have an oral history projected dedicated to covering the history of the area around the university and the university itself.

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. The second plan, conceived by Thomas Church, put the colleges into the redwood forest at the top of the hill above the Great Meadow. This was clearly the better idea, but presented the problem of how to place the colleges inside the forest. 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." 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.