Kresge College

Kresge was the sixth college established at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Founded in 1971, it was designed with concepts of collaboration and participatory democracy at the core of its identity.

At Kresge College, we strive to fulfill the traditional promise of a liberal arts college in the context of experimental, interdisciplinary, and conscientious approaches to living and learning. Kresge College creates opportunities for the growth and strengthening of whole persons and communities, fosters creative and critical thinking about media, representation, and justice, facilitates stewardship of a just and sustainable society. Kresge College embarks on these challenges by creating a living-learning community within a larger research university, and by helping students of the widest possible range of backgrounds and biographies, to succeed in their path to higher learning.

Kresge frosh are united in their engagement with its core course, Kresge 1 - Power and Representation. Kresge 1 introduces students to the discourses of higher learning, and empowers them to succeed in university life, through a range of readings that challenge preconceptions about media, social belonging, and justice, and through examinations of the many ways we constitute ourselves as individuals in relation to communities. 

Kresge is known for its creativity and independent spirit, and for students passionate about personal reflection, creative and non-fiction writing, journalism and filmmaking, and interdisciplinary learning about subjects ranging from natural history and agroecology to prison justice and narratives of immigration and citizenship. We house the Writing Program and the Science Communication Program, and our students have enjoyed a longtime association with the Literature major. Kresge College is the traditional host of the UCSC campus Pride Festival, Celebrating and Educating ourselves and our communities on the strong histories of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender-nonbinary, and Queer identities of sex and social belonging.

Kresge’s core course faculty are philosophers, activists, fiction writers, poets, musicologists, game-designers, scholars of film, television, and sound art, and critical thinkers across a wide range of disciplines . Kresge has offered courses in journalism, comic writing, and “Writers Read”, a course in which students receive credit for going to the Living Writers Series. Kresge's Faculty Fellows include National Book Award winning poet Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Award Finalist and California Book Award winning novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, memoirist Bettina Apthekar, Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Gary Young, and novelist Micah Perks, winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Kresge is the home of Rapt Magazine, the Writer's House Blog, as well as City On A Hill, UCSC's student-run newspaper. We also house the Common Ground Center.

Kresge's strong sense of community permeates throughout all of our student life and we have many ways of getting involved in our community. We feature leadership opportunities through our student groups Kresge Parliament and the Kresge Multicultural Education Committee (KMEC). We also house four different student-run cooperatives for students to build communities: the Music Co-op, the Food Co-op, the Garden Co-op, and the Photo Co-op. The Kresge Programs Office is your home base for extracurricular involvement.