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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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.