45th anniversary info-nuggets--fall 2010 UCSC Review

1964: The UCSC Arboretum gets started with a gift of 90 species of eucalyptus, the foundation for what will become the largest collection of Australian plants outside of Australia.

1965: Cowell College opens as UCSC's founding college. It is named for Henry Cowell and the Cowell family, who donated the land UCSC is built on.

1965: Undergraduate enrollment starts with 652 students; the following fall, it nearly doubles, to 1,267.

1966: UCSC enrolls its first graduate class—27 students.

1966: Stevenson College founded, named after Adlai Stevenson, an American politician and United Nations ambassador.

1967: UCSC's organic horticulture apprenticeship program begins. The program has trained more than 1,300 organic farmers who are now growing and teaching worldwide.

1967: Crown College founded, with facilities built through a partnership of public funds and a gift from the Crown Zellerbach Foundation.

1967: UCSC's renowned elephant seal research program is founded. The program has revealed the animals' phenomenal diving abilities (they can reach depths of nearly 5,000 feet and remained submerged for over an hour) and 3,000-mile migrations.

1967: Founding computer science department faculty member the late David Huffman arrives at UCSC. As an MIT graduate student in 1952, Huffman developed a data compression scheme called Huffman coding—which is now used in the MP3 files on your music player, the JPEG files on your digital camera, and on your high-definition television.

1968: Merrill College founded, named after donor Charles E. Merrill Jr., headmaster of the Commonwealth School in Boston.

1969: College Five founded; formally dedicated as Porter College in 1981. The college is named as a memorial to the grandfather of three UC benefactors: Porter Sesnon, Barbara Sesnon Cartan, and William T. Sesnon.

Kresge College founded

1971: Kresge College founded, endowed by the Kresge family trust. The trust's fortune came from Kmart, which had its roots in Sebastian Spering Kresge's opening of a modest five-and-dime store in downtown Detroit in 1899.

1971: Celebrated American short story writer Raymond Carver teaches poetry and writing classes as a visiting lecturer. Carver taught at UCSC for three years.

1972: Oakes College founded; major funding came from the generosity and philanthropic efforts of Margaret and Roscoe Oakes and the San Francisco Foundation.

1972: College Eight founded.

1973: Social psychologist Elliot Aronson wins the American Psychological Association's award for distinguished writing. Later he becomes the only psychologist to have won the association's highest awards in all three major academic categories when he follows with distinguished teaching (1980), and distinguished research (1999).

1974: Undergraduate enrollment reaches 5,000.

1974: The campus becomes one of the first schools in the country to offer a major in women's studies. UC Santa Cruz has developed one of the most highly regarded and longstanding programs in the nation— although it goes by a different name these days: feminist studies.

1975: The Santa Cruz Predatory Research Group forms at UC Santa Cruz. Only two nesting pairs of peregrine falcons remained in California then. Thanks to the group's efforts, the falcon was removed from the endangered species list in 1999.

1978: Acclaimed performer and writer the late Spalding Gray teaches a summer session course at UCSC. The experience helps spark his interest in dramatic monologue.

1981: Graduate student enrollment reaches 500.

1981: The Dickens Project is founded at UCSC, becoming the premier center for study of novelist Charles Dickens and one of the leading sites for research on 19th-century British culture.

1981: Shakespeare Santa Cruz founded. Almost 30 years later, SSC continues to be heralded as one of the nation's most innovative theater festivals.

1983: Cowell Provost House receives a donation of an Andy Warhol rug. The rug, which features a repeating flower image, has decorated the Provost House in different years, according to the taste of the provost in office.

1985: UCSC awards more than 1,500 degrees.

1986: After a five-year stalemate between two conflicting mascots—the sea lion and the banana slug—students sway the chancellor with an overwhelming pro-slug straw vote.

1992: Alumnus and Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Tobar wins a Pulitzer for his work as part of a team covering the Los Angeles Riots. Other Pulitzer-winning Slugs are author Laurie Garrett, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, photographer Annie Wells, and Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza.

1992: UCSC's doctoral program in international economics awards its first Ph.D. The campus's economics department is often listed among the top 10 worldwide in international finance.

1994: Graduate student enrollment reaches 1,000.

1996: Alumna Laurie Garrett, who graduated with honors in biology (Merrill '75), pens a groundbreaking series of articles for Newsday, chronicling the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire. The series wins 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism.

1999: Undergraduate enrollment reaches 10,000.

1999: While doing research at the University Archives, Anthony Misch, a support astronomer at Lick Observatory, discovers a 400-year-old manuscript penned by Johannes Kepler, one of history's greatest astronomers.

2000: College Nine founded.

2000: The first draft of the human genome sequence was assembled at UCSC on off-the-shelf Pentium III processors running a software program written in four weeks by graduate student Jim Kent.

2002: College Ten founded.

2002: UCSC awards more than 3,000 degrees.

2004/2007: Two UCSC alumni inducted into NASA's Astronaut Hall of Fame: Kathryn Sullivan (Cowell '73, B.S. Earth sciences), the first American woman to walk in space; and Steven Hawley (Ph.D., astronomy and astrophysics '77), whose five space shuttle flights included the 1990 mission to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope.

2006: Faculty in UC Santa Cruz's Jack Baskin School of Engineering launch a popular computer game design undergraduate major—the first of its kind in the UC system.

2006: Two geological features in Antarctica are named after UCSC biologists—Terrie Bluff and Costa Spur, named in honor of Terrie Williams and Daniel Costa, respectively, professors of ecology and evolutionary biology.

2006: Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson—the husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame—among the featured speakers at "The War on Terror: A Credible Threat," an educational teach-in at the Quarry Amphitheater.

2007: The complete archive of renowned science fiction author Robert Heinlein made available online. Heinlein donated his archives to the Library's Special Collections in 1968.

2008: Undergraduate enrollment reaches 15,000.

2008: The Grateful Dead donates its historic archives to McHenry Library's Special Collections.

2009: Astronomer Garth Illingworth leads a team that peers deep into the universe with the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal the most distant galaxies ever seen.

2010: Celebrated writer Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, wrote much of his new best-selling novel, Freedom, at Cowell College. Franzen, recently on the cover of Time magazine, and his partner live part time in Santa Cruz. Both are longtime friends of UCSC.