Kresge College

Kresge College is one of the colleges that make up the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Located on the western edge of the UCSC campus, Kresge was one of the first colleges at UCSC, and originally one of the most experimental. Distinguished founding faculty members included Gregory Bateson, husband of Margaret Mead and author of The Ecology of Mind; John Grinder, founder of applied Neurolinguistics and author of The Science of Magic; and William Everson, one of the Beat Poets.

Kresge in the early days had a threefold focus: Humanistic Psychology, Women's Studies and Environmental Studies.

Kresges' ideosyncratic architecture is based on a fantasy Italian village which winds up the hillside. Instead of dormitories, Kresge is a sequence of freeform apartments which, in the early days, encouraged communual living experiments. At the top of the college is the 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 like of Alan Ginsburg and Owlsley.