The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California. Located 75 miles (120 km) south of San Francisco at the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (8.1 km²) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay.

Founded in 1965

History

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 University of California Regents in the mid-1950s to build a campus just outside town, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Santa Cruz site was selected over a competing proposal to build the campus closer to the population center of San Jose. Santa Cruz was selected for the beauty, rather than the practicality, of its location, however, 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 of the Santa Cruz campus began in the late 1950s, culminating in the Long Range Development Plan of 1963. Construction had 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. 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.

Impact on Santa Cruz

Although the city of Santa Cruz already exhibited a strong conservation ethic before the founding of the university, the coincidental rise of the counterculture of the 1960s with the university's establishment fundamentally altered its subsequent development. Early student and faculty activism at UCSC pioneered an approach to environmentalism that greatly impacted the industrial development of the surrounding area. The lowering of the voting age to 18 in 1971 led to the emergence of a powerful student-voting bloc.

to markedly left-leaning, consistently voting against expansion measures on the part of both town and gown. Mike Rotkin, UCSC alumnus, lecturer in Community Studies, and self-described 'socialist-feminist,' has been elected Mayor of Santa Cruz several times.

Expansion plans

main: Long Range Development Plan (UCSC) Plans for increasing enrollment over the next 14 years to 19,500 students, adding 1,500 faculty and staff, and, secondarily the anticipated environmental impacts of such action have encountered opposition from the city, the local community, and the student body. City voters in 2006 passed measures forcing UCSC to pay for the impacts of campus growth, which UC officials claimed to be exempt from. In 2008, the university came to an agreement with city, county and neighborhood organizations to set aside lawsuits and allow the expansion to occur. UCSC agreed to local government scrutiny of its north campus expansion plans, to provide housing for 67 percent of the additional students on campus, and to pay municipal development and water fees.