| Additional information
extracted from
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kresge_College"target="_blank">Wikipedia:
Kresge College is one of the residential colleges that make
up the "http://www.ucsc.edu/about/"target="_blank">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. 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.
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 housing consisted of apartments, suites (which
allowed students to have small single rooms), and octets. The
octets were large housing spaces intended for eight students, which
the architects deliberately left unfinished. When the college
opened, each group of eight students was given $2,000 to design and
build the inner walls and floors. The earlier octets had
significant open and communal spaces, but the ones designed later
had more walls and individual rooms. The openness created such an
interpersonal intensity that by the end of the first year, thirty
one of the thirty two original students had left the octets for
other housing. Also, in the first quarter, they went from octets
housing eight students, to sextets housing six students. Today most
of the apartments, suites, and sextets 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 its
traditionally counter-cultural orientation, 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. |