Arboretum at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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.Oakes was founded in 1972 as College Seven by Professors Herman J. Blake and Ralph C. Guzmán. In 1968, the Black Liberation Front, a black power group, demanded an all-black college. Blake, UCSC's only African American faculty member at the time, along with Guzmán, one of the few Mexican-American faculty on campus, proposed a compromise in which College Seven's academic program would focus on ethnic studies, particularly the studies of minority groups in California. Though the term ethnic studies was dropped in the planning phases, the college has always stressed racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, along with the representation and support of students from historically disadvantaged groups.Oakes is perceived by some students as a "minority college", partly due to its roots in radical elements of the Civil Rights Movement. Comparative racial and ethnic statistics do show that Oakes' student body has slightly higher percentages of minorities than a number of other UCSC colleges and UCSC's student body as a whole. For example, 9.8% of Oakes's students are African American and 12.2% are Filipino American, compared with 2.7% and 4.5%, respectively, among UCSC's general student body.College Seven was renamed Oakes in 1975 after philanthropists Roscoe and Margaret Oakes, whose endowment contributed significantly to the founding of the college. Noted political activist Angela Davis, an Oakes affiliate, is a professor of history of consciousness, an unconventional program centering on the history of struggles for racial, economic and social justice and equality.

The Grateful Dead Archive is an archive of materials related to music from The Grateful Dead. The archive was officially donated in April 2008, by band members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart.The Archive contains material related to the individual members, its live performances, productions, and business. The materials span a three-decade career that ran from 1965 to 1995 and included numerous albums and thousands of live performances.

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.

The Home of Peace Cemetery (also called Beit Shalom) is a Jewish cemetery in Santa Cruz, California. Consecrated in 1877 by the Hebrew Benevolent Society, it is located on Meder Street – named after Moses Meder, a Mormon businessman who gifted the land to the Society – on the west side of Santa Cruz, near the University of California, Santa Cruz. Temple Beth-El, the local synagogue in Santa Cruz, operates the cemetery. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Santa Cruz County, California.

The Cowell Lime Works, in Santa Cruz, California, was a manufacturing complex that quarried limestone, produced lime and other limestone products, and manufactured wood barrels for transporting the finished lime. Part of its area is preserved as the Cowell Lime Works Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. In addition to the four lime kilns, cooperage and other features relating to lime manufacture, the Historic District also includes other structures associated with the Cowell Ranch, including barns, a blacksmith shop, ranch house, cook house and workers' cabins. The 32-acre (130,000 m2) Historic District is located within the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, to either side of the main campus entrance. The site gets its name from the Cowell family, which owned and operated the lime works, quarries, ranch and large tracts of surrounding timber lands. Industrialist Henry Cowell acquired the ranch and the lime works in the late 19th century. He and his descendants remained owners of the ranch until the death of S. H. (Harry) Cowell, youngest of Henry's five children and last surviving member of the family, in 1955. Cowell's vast estate went to the S. H. Cowell Foundation, still in existence today. The Foundation sold part of the ranch property to the University of California for the creation of the new UC Santa Cruz campus, which opened in 1965. Several of the original ranch buildings have been renovated into university offices. The university's Women's Center is hosted at the Cardiff House, formerly the residence of ranch manager George H. Cardiff.The Cowell Lime Works is just one of many former lime-making sites scattered around north-western Santa Cruz County. Other sites featuring old lime kilns and quarries can be seen in the Fall Creek Unit of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Wilder Ranch State Park and Pogonip (a Santa Cruz greenbelt area).

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.

The McHenry Library is the arts, humanities, and social sciences library of the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was named after the founding chancellor of the university, Dean E. McHenry. The building, designed by architect John Carl Warnecke, was completed in 1968 and features a minimalist design intended to blend into its forest surroundings, with floor-to-ceiling glass set in coarse, granite-like concrete and exposed vertical columns suggestive of tree trunks. The building is designed around a four-story atrium surrounded entirely by glass walls. Over the last ten years the library has undergone seismic retrofit and renovations, amounting in $100 million in improvements. In fall of 2011 it fully reopened with a new café, increased study space, and special exhibit room exclusively for the Grateful Dead archives. The Global Village Café, which is located in the new wing of the library and offers smoothies, sandwiches, salads, and a full coffee bar. The McHenry Library is home to the archives of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the rock band, The Grateful Dead, the science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, and the architectural photographer Morley Baer. The exhibit opened to the public on June 29, 2012.

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

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. Distinguished graduates from the early days of Kresge College include Doug Foster, who went on to become editor of Mother Jones magazine, and Richard Bandler, who co-founded Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) with John Grinder.

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.

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.

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.