A Small Taste of Student Fists: The UCSC Campus Shutdown
Legend has it that the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz was designed by a prison architect who, in response to student riots at UC Berkeley, created a campus grid without a central point. Lacking a major quad or lawn, demonstrations would be dispersed to the individual colleges, defused and controlled. While this legend is certainly not true – UCSC was conceived of as an experiment in “human-scale” education whose existence was to challenge the dehumanizing size of state universities – the layout of UCSC does present this challenge to student activists.