McHenry Library

The Quarry Amphitheater is a 2,800 capacity outdoor events and concert venue located on the campus of University of California Santa Cruz. First used as a major supplier of limestone in the 1800s, the quarry would be repurposed as an amphitheater during the construction of UC Santa Cruz in the early 1960s. Since then, it has gone through a major reconstruction in 2017 and has become home to a number of campus events as well as hosting major musical acts as the largest outdoor venue in Santa Cruz County. Acts who have performed include Chicano Batman, Carla Morrison, and Orion Sun.

Shakespeare Santa Cruz was an annual professional theatre festival in Santa Cruz, California, which ran from 1981 to 2013. After losing the financial support of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the company was relaunched through crowdfunding as Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) 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. As of Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students.Founded in 1965, UC Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.Among the faculty are Nobel Prize laureates, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipients, 12 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nine UC Santa Cruz alumni are Pulitzer Prize winners, with a total of 11 Pulitzers awarded. 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.

John R. Lewis College, formerly known as College Ten, 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. John R. Lewis College is home to the University Center, a conference center located above the Dining Commons, and the Terry Freitas cafe, a student-run co-op cafe named after UCSC-alumni Terry Freitas, who was murdered in Colombia due to his work with the U'wa people to stop oil companies from drilling on U'wa land.In 2010, students and staff worked together to name the three residential halls. They are called Angela Davis House, after the American political activist and UCSC professor, Angela Davis; Ohlone House, after the native Ohlone people who are indigenous to the region; and Amnesty House, after Amnesty International and their work for human rights. John R. Lewis College was founded in 2002 as College Ten, making it the newest UCSC college as of May 2017. On October 27, 2021, Chancellor Cynthia Larive announced that the university will be renaming College Ten after civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. The name change was made official in Spring 2022.

The first of the ten residential colleges of the University of California, Santa Cruz, established in 1965, Cowell College (Samuel Henry 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. Hs

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. College Nine is composed of three residence halls (R1, R2, and R3); in the spring of 2006 the residence halls were renamed to emphasize and reflect the college's theme. As of Fall 2006, the new residence hall names are Hague House, Gandhi House, and Geneva House. These names however are temporary names and are subject to change once the college finds a benefactor.In the LRDP (Long Range Development Plan) for UCSC, Colleges 9 and John R. Lewis will be situated as the very center of UCSC by 2025. College Nine is also home to the International Living Center (ILC). The ILC is home to nearly a third of international students visiting UCSC while on study abroad and provides a space where international, transfer and domestic students coexist in apartment-style living. There also exists three International RAs as well as its own Coordinator for Residential Education.

Crown College is one of the residential colleges that makes up the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. Despite its thematic grounding in natural science and technology, like at all UCSC colleges, Crown students major in subjects across all disciplines. Crown has a favorable reputation for academically focused students, possibly due to both its reputation as a science college and its secluded location on the Santa Cruz campus. Because of its strong academic roots, Crown College is regarded as one of the quieter colleges on the campus. It is very close to Upper Campus, which is often frequented by hikers and mountain bikers. Residents of the college are informally known as "Crownies."

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. The school was formed in 1997 and endowed with a multimillion-dollar gift from retired local engineer and developer Jack Baskin.Although it is a relatively young engineering school, it is already known in the Silicon Valley region and beyond for producing prominent tech innovators, including the founders of companies Pure Storage, Cloudflare, Concur Technologies, Five3 Genomics, and a host of other startups. It is a leader in the field of games and playable media, and was the first school in the country to offer a graduate degree in Serious Games. The school is also renowned for its research in genomics and bioinformatics, having played a critical role in the Human Genome Project. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz were responsible for creating the UCSC Genome Browser, which continues to be an important open-source tool for researchers in genomics. In 2022, the Baskin School continued this work finishing first truly complete sequence of the human genome, covering each chromosome from end to end with no gaps and unprecedented accuracy, is now accessible through the UCSC Genome Browser.

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 (Art endures, Life is short), and a series of college symbols, including a faculty mace and a college bell, were inaugurated. The faculty of the college has had a distinguished leadership. The provosts of the college have included the writer James B. Hall, the painter and psychologist Pavel Machotka, filmmaker Eli Hollander and composer David Cope. In early years, the college community was famous for Friday-afternoon sherry hours and afternoon croquet matches on the quad, suggesting that "l'esprit de Santa Cruz" was not far from that of Oxbridge.

Adlai E. Stevenson College, known colloquially as Stevenson College, is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, the college is host to the Linguistics Department, as well as many humanities faculty. The college was named after Adlai Stevenson, an American politician and United Nations ambassador. The college was founded in 1966, a year after the establishment of the university and its first college, Cowell.

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.

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."