| Title: |
UC Santa Cruz in the Mid-1970s: A Time of Transition, Volume I: John Marcum, Sigfried Puknat, Robert Adams, John Ellis, and Paul Niebanck |
| Authors: |
Reti, Irene H.; Jarrell, Randall; Marcum, John; Puknat, Siegfried; Adams, Robert; Ellis, John; Niebanck, Paul |
| Publisher Information: |
eScholarship, University of California |
| Publication Year: |
2014 |
| Collection: |
University of California: eScholarship |
| Subject Terms: |
UC Santa Cruz history; history of higher education |
| Description: |
On January 23, 1976, UC Santa Cruz’s second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned from office. He had served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. These two oral history volumes, comprised of interviews conducted between 1976 and 1980, set Christensen’s resignation within the broader context of a tumultuous and transitional moment in the campus’s history. Founding Chancellor Dean McHenry had brought to fruition his singular vision for UC Santa Cruz as an innovative institution of higher education that emphasized undergraduate teaching centered in residential colleges, each with a specific intellectual theme and architectural design, within the framework of what he envisioned as a major public research university. McHenry oversaw the planning and building of UCSC from 1961 until his retirement in June 1974. In the early years, UCSC drew high caliber students and gained considerable national visibility as an innovative university. But by the mid-1970s, applications were declining and enrollments were on the verge of falling. Internally, the campus was fracturing along fault lines created by debates over the colleges’ academic role and over the relative weight to be placed on research and teaching, while UCSC struggled to weather a variety of external political and economic pressures and to hold its own as a distinctive campus within the traditional University of California.Christensen’s tenure as chancellor rather tragically ended in controversy after only eighteen months. Although most of the faculty liked Christensen as a person, they lost confidence in his ability to govern the campus. The Regional History Project never conducted an oral history with Mark Christensen, who passed away in 2003. But former director Randall Jarrell completed a series of interviews with key faculty members and administrators who had been directly involved in the Christensen case. Jarrell decided to withhold publication of these oral histories due to their sensitive political nature at the time. Now, nearly four decades ... |
| Document Type: |
book |
| File Description: |
application/pdf |
| Language: |
unknown |
| Relation: |
qt175935jh; https://escholarship.org/uc/item/175935jh; https://escholarship.org/content/qt175935jh/qt175935jh.pdf |
| Availability: |
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/175935jh; https://escholarship.org/content/qt175935jh/qt175935jh.pdf |
| Rights: |
public |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.E296F846 |
| Database: |
BASE |