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Kresge College sign

Kresge College is one of the residential colleges that make up the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1971, Kresge 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. Distinguished early faculty members included Gregory Bateson, former husband of Margaret Mead and author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind; John Grinder, co-founder of Neuro-linguistic programming and co-author of The Structure of Magic; and William Everson, one of the Beat poets.

In the early days, Kresge had a threefold focus: Humanistic psychology, Women's Studies and Environmental Studies. In the late 1970's, UCSC underwent a radical reorganization and most of what made the original colleges unique, was destroyed. Today, the college hosts the literature, women's studies and writing departments.

Kresge's idiosyncratic architecture, designed by architects William Turnbull and Charles Willard Moore, is based on a fantasy Italian village which winds up the hillside. Instead of dormitories, Kresge is a sequence of standalone freeform apartments which, in the early days, encouraged communual living experiments. Today most of the apartments serve the same purpose as dorm rooms, although they contain private kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms. The college is acclaimed in architectural circles. For example, it is included in G. E. Kidder Smith's 1996 book Sourcebook of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present (Princeton University Press).

At the north end of the college is the Kresge Town Hall, which has seen many groundbreaking performances, including the first Talking Heads concert on the west coast, and the legendary acid conferences which included appearances by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Owlsley. During the day Town Hall serves as a classroom, and it is still used for events such as concerts and films in the evenings and on weekends. Annual events include the Fall Film Festival and Halloween showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a live cast.

Kresge was originally endowed by the Kresge family trust, whose fortune was derived from K-Mart; one of the early (and very ironic) nicknames of Kresge was 'K-Mart' college; considering the counter-cultural orientation of Kresge in the early days, it was about as far from the middle American K-Mart image as could be imagined. The architects originally wanted to put a neon sign from an S. S. Kresge department store at the entrance to the college, but this idea met too much resistance.

One of the alumni of Kresge, Marti Noxon, went on to produce Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and managed to sneak in-joke references to Kresge as well as Santa Cruz into many of the scripts, most recently in the Angel spin-off where a supporting character (Eve) is described as a graduate of Kresge. Another alumni, Richard Bandler, developed Neuro-Linguistic programming with one of his Kresge professors, John Grinder. Alumni Doug Foster went on to become the editor of Mother Jones magazine and an Emmy Award winning TV producer.

Kresge may also be a place where the Jewish Renewal movement was advanced as Reb Zalman-Schacter visited Professor Michael Kahn, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, several times in the early 1970's.

• Kresge College home page
• UC Santa Cruz home page
• UCSC statistics by residential college

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