Talk:University of California, Santa Cruz

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I notice that my edits were rejected by someone, and they reverted to an earlier version without discussion or explanation. Accordingly, I have reverted back. [AT] May 2, 2006

...And I've had to do it again [AT] May 8, 2006

Contents

[edit] Affiliation

I read somewhere that the UC system was dropping UCSC, UCSB, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC Riverside. Is this true? ArchonMeld 16:58, 29 March 2006 (UTC) No, they are all established campuses of the University of California System.



Perhaps there should be some mention of the science departments- especially astrophysics- as it's very good, and has some top people in it? oh, and about the drum circle- probably a cross over with first rain, but the rumors I heard was that on the warmer evenings, it was a naked drum circle. I wouldn't be surprised. I could often hear them drumming in the dead of the night from the 9/10 apartments. Novium 04:24, 17 March 2006 (UTC) Well, i am a student at UCSC, and I can tell you some things about here that won't be in this offical description. A few places of interest if you've never been:

  • Tree 9 - This is just above Crown/Merrill. It is a huge tree with many branches that is climbable. At the top you can see for miles around.
  • The Medow - Every full moon people gather in this medow, from dozens to hundreds, to dance and hang out and smoke.
  • The Pogonip - Huge nature reserve the size of campus (which is already huge). Just head east and you'll hit it from campus.
  • The Arboretium - Beautiful plants from all over the world, and its a large place. I think it's even famous. You can get to it between the west and main entrance of UCSC on high st.
  • The Knoll - This is a great overlook of the East Field and the Monteray Bay. It's just in back of Stevenson.

A few things I can tell you about UCSC:

  • It has a great psychology department (developmental and social). Some great proffessors are Pratkanis, Tonay, and Quinn.
  • People here are very relaxed and real. This ain't Santa Barbara people, no Abercrombie crap here. People are approachable and nice. Racial and especially sexual tollerance here are strong.
  • There isn't a terribly active greek life, but it is getting much bigger and stronger. btw: if you watch MTV, that stupid show Fraternity Life; don't mention it on campus unless you want an enemy. The fraternity killed the Porter Fish, a 20 year old pet fish for about 15000 of the students here.
  • I don't know what you were expecting, but smoking pot here is very very popular. I'd expect that you'd have heard this. Hell, it's college, there is always going to be some drugs.
  • Vegitarians abound! Lots of dinning hall alternatives, but the dinning hall is still the dinning hall, if you know what I mean. The meal plan is also required if you live on campus (have to first year). btw...
  • Living on campus is very expensive, expect $850+ for housing and more for meal plan a quarter. I paid $1029 all together when I was a freshman, and its a hundred or two more now.
  • Class sign ups are online. Computer required for most everything on campus. Lots of time material (ERES), homework, quizes and papers are done online. Again, it's college, i don't know what you were expecting.
(as to assignments etc online, I think that depends on your department. I think I would die of shock if any of my classes did quizzes and papers online. Novium 23:11, 23 April 2006 (UTC))

I'm not sure what your overall impression of how I feel about UCSC is from all this is, but i'll say it now. I love it here. People are awsome. The classes are great and interesting. The beaches are close, abundant, and often lightly populated. Great surf, skimboarding, bodyboarding etc. The downtown is wonderful. You should go if your looking into it. JoeSmack 19:17, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)


Rebecca Romijn

I want to say somewhere that Rebecca Romijn went here, but since she didn't graduate, she's not qualified to be listed under "Notable alumni". What to do? --Atario 01:35, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Sluggo

I am a alumnus of UCSC, Stevenson. I made a few changes based on personal knowledge of events while I was on campus including the return of the Slug. I owned one of the original Sluggo shirts with the logo depicted on the page. I would note that the authors comment that traditionally the names to colleges were not sold is simply untrue. Stevenson did not sell its name, but Cowell was named for the family that gave the land, Merrill for the founder of Merrill Lynch, Crown for Crown Zellerbach (Zee toilet paper etc.,) etc. Veniceslug1

[edit] Humor

This whole section was removed. Some of the other UC sites have humor sections, why not Santa Cruz?

[edit] Humor at UCSC

There have got to be a thousand humorous references about UCSC. I could probably come up with a couple dozen myself, if I could jog my memory. Many of these may be inside jokes, but funny nontheless.

Here are some for starters:

  • College Eight was going to be named "Ronald Reagan" college. I would love to move that cruel rumor from the College Eight page to a UCSC Humor page
  • The Flying IUD sculpture sitting between Porter & College Eight
  • The references to College Eight & Spam. As one of the original co-conspirators I can ellaborate this

-= Gigglesworth 00:27, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] First Rain

I'm pretty sure the first rain run goes further than a mile, especially since they go by all the colleges, and often into them. As I recall, it's about a half mile from SSI to Cowell, for example. Novium 23:08, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Szyslak's revert of 68.15.19.216's edits

I reverted 68.15.19.216 (talk • contribs)'s edits a few days ago, which he changed back with the reason that my revert was "unexplained". My edit summary said "rv non-NPOV edits", but I'll give a more detailed explanation here: the edits by 68.15.19.216 removed perfectly good, sourced content, and replaced it with non-neutral statements, like "As a campus of the prestigious University of California, UCSC's academic reputation was always assured". Plus there were no sources whatsoever, and no wiki formatting. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. szyslak (t, c, e) 00:25, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comment on Szyslak's revert

^^ Okay, instead of editing, I'm going to point out the weaknesses in your version. First, it reeks of the very POV you accuse me of -- "This surreal blend of Texas rah-rah and Santa Cruz ironic detachment..." All most criticisms of "POV" on Wikipedia mean is that the critic doesn't share that particular point of view. Try to come up with something better than that for your excuse. Next, practically every university in the U.S. is coeducational; all-boy and all-girl universities are a thing of the past. So it is ridiculous to point out that UCSC is "coeducational". It is also ridiculous to trumpet at the very beginning of the article that UCSC is rated 28th -- or whatever -- by U.S. News and World Report. Big deal. U.S. News is hardly a reputable source. The American Council on Education would be more credible. But mentioning UCSC's academic "rank" at the beginning of the article would, in either case, only be appropriate if it were one of the top five or ten most highly rated universities in the nation. Being 28th among "regional universities" (or whatever it was) is hardly a notable fact about UCSC. You should talk about the things that make it unique -- like the redwood trees on campus, not the things that make it just another university. You should also talk about the REASONS why it it came to be and the personalities involved (as I did), mentioning the early professors, where they were from and why they gave up professorships at Ivy League schools to come to UCSC; also, why the first students came. Not talking about Kenneth Thimann, Maurice Natanson, Albert Hofstadter, and others shows that you do not understand the founding vision of UCSC and how that vision has been advanced or compromised in intervening years. And, considering the number of unsourced references in your version, criticizing mine for not being wikified is a red herring. You're free to wikify it; instead you eliminate it. Last, your prose is clumsy, talking about building an experiment for example, and the endless chatter about student traditions and pranks would bore anyone who hadn't gone to the school and many who have gone. Come up with something better, or I'm going to revert back to my version. [AT] 19 May, 2006

[edit] Szyslak's recent edits

I've been making some substantial changes to this article, so I thought I'd give an overview of my recent edits, plus some thoughts on the current state of this article:

  • In the blurb about the residential college system, I selected Rice University and UCSC's sister campus in San Diego as schools with similar college systems. Previous versions have used Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge as examples. UCSC's college system isn't all that similar to Harvard's or Oxford's as far as I can tell; plus I think it sounds a bit gassy to throw names like that around, as if to say "Lookit us, we're just like Oxford".
  • I've commented out a number of unsourced statements about how UCSC ranks "first in the world in such-and-such field". It's hard to find sources to back up claims like that, which read like they're straight from the admissions office. I have been trying to find sources, though.
  • A while ago, an anon at the IP 68.15.19.216 made some excellent edits, trimming a lot of fluff and improving the lede, which was barely one sentence at the time. I'm glad my reverts of his earlier edits didn't scare him off.

Compared to many college articles, this one's halfway decent. Most of them are full of inflated language about how "prestigious" or "distinguished" such-and-such school is. They're also notorious for unverifiable, meaningless gossip and stereotypes, like "Dorm Block C is the hangout for emo kids and scenesters; across the quad is Block D, the hippie dorms..." Thankfully, a good portion of that kind of content has been removed or rewritten lately, though much of it remains in the articles on the ten colleges.

I think this article's biggest problem as it stands now is that it's lacking some important information. Among a few other things I'm probably missing, I think the following needs to be added or expanded upon:

  • More information on important academic programs and their impact, besides just "first in the nation" and "second in the world" types of claims
  • Information on the cost and logistics of a UCSC education, including housing and transportation
  • Images: in the main article and the articles on the individual colleges, there are images of each college except Crown. (I took most of the pictures about a year and a half ago; although I took one of Crown, it was so blurry it probably would've gone straight to IFD if I'd uploaded it.) We should probably have some images of other key campus buildings and locales, such as the McHenry Library, the Upper Quarry and the entrance, or "base", of campus.

For a while, I've had the lofty goal of getting this page up to featured quality, but I'm lazy. Still, I think it can be done. I don't claim to own this article, so feel free to take my recent changes for what they're worth. szyslak (t, c, e) 08:39, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] University of California, Riverside Survey

I'm posting this survey request Talk:University of California, Riverside#UCR Survey on all the UC talk pages in order to gather outside opinion on ongoing issues concerning the POV of this article. Please read the article and add your insights to the survey to help us identify any points of consensus in the UCR article. Thanks--Amerique 21:14, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Survey closed, thanks--Amerique 19:32, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Denton's Suicide

I've edited the paragraph on Denton's sucide to make it more NPOV. Several comments that were in the paragraph (the parenthetical comparison regarding home remodelling with UCSD's chancellor, the concluding part in which the paragraph stated WHY she actually committed suicide [which is speculation, as is now noted], etc). I've also shortened the part on Larry Summers' comments and linked to his article instead, where most discussion and description of his comments belongs. Jawlz 16:18, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Which banana slug?

Is the school's mascot Ariolimax columbianus, the Pacific banana slug, or Ariolimax californicus, the California banana slug? The university's website doesn't seem to specify. Simões (talk/contribs) 06:33, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Just found it at [1]. It's Ariolimax dolichophallus.


[edit] Campus Publications

I noticed that many other university pages on wiki have Campus Publications sections, so I added one. I also noticed that there was no article on either CHP or FRL, so I started them. Have at it! Slugmaster 19:42, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changed redirect

Figured that most of the stuff linking to UCSC was about UC Santa Cruz, so I changed UCSC to redirect here and added some text at the top for the University of Colombo. ParticleMan 05:51, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Major changes

I just reorganized this article to reflect the standard format at Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities. szyslak (t, c) 22:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removed unencyclopedic "student traditions"

I have removed most of the portions of this article regarding "student traditions" for the time being. I'm all for a discussion of UCSC student traditions, but it must be rebuilt as sourced and encyclopedic. First, most of the "traditions" listed seem limited to the campus' hippie subculture. Second, things like smoking weed in abandoned buildings are more in the vein of "what me and my friends do", and are not true student traditions. The removed content does nothing but denigrate the overall quality and authority of this article. szyslak (t, c) 22:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

To clear up any potential confusion: I do NOT object to marijuana use or its discussion in a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is not censored, and censorship is not the goal of my edits. szyslak (t, c) 22:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Added to category Universities and colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area

Although Wikiproject San Francisco Bay Area has stated that Santa Cruz County-based articles should not be included within the scope of the project and should be included instead in the proposed Wikiproject Central Coast unless absolutely necessary (Discussion here), UCSC's administrative presence in the South Bay-proper (Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett, etc.) is so extensive that I think it merits inclusion in the category, independent of whatever other unofficial ties students and faculty have with San Jose and environs, however strong they may also be. Dynaflow 04:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

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