College Eight is a residential college

Residential college

A residential college is an organisational pattern for a division of a university that places academic activity in a community setting of students and faculty, usually at a residence and with shared meals, the college having a degree of autonomy and a federated relationship with the overall...

 at the University of California, Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...

. It is on the west side of campus, north of Oakes College

Oakes College

Oakes College is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is on the southwestern corner of the campus, south of College Eight and east of the Family Student Housing complex....

 and southeast of Porter College

Porter College

Benjamin F. Porter College, a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is located on the lower west side of the university, south of Kresge College and north of College Eight. The college was founded in 1969 as College Five and formally dedicated on November 21, 1981...

. The theme of its freshman core course is Environment and Society.

College Eight was founded in 1972 at the current location of the Kerr Hall lecture building. Before it moved to its present location in 1991, College Eight was the only UCSC college that did not have its own on-campus housing; residential students were then housed at the Porter College residence halls. At the time, its focus was on transfer students, who are usually less likely to live on campus than students on a traditional four-year plan.

The freshman core class Environment and Society, "examines education, identity, nature, community, livelihood, and livability at local and national levels as contemporary global transformations affect them." (All College Eight freshman must take it, but transfer students are exempt if they have more than 45 credits.) The course has been expanded to a year, the first quarter being an overview of environmental issues with an emphasis on social sciences and environmental justice, the second providing a strong grounding in biological and atmospheric issues (along with empirical and quantitative methods), and the final course emphasizes creative hands-on solutions, particularly in terms of energy issues. These provide the foundation for a new social entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the work of social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change . While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a...

 initiative.

Like the much newer Colleges Nine

College Nine

College Nine is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The university's first new college in nearly 30 years, College Nine was founded in 2000 although the dorms were not finished until 2002. It is located on the north side of campus, east of Science Hill and west of...

 and Ten

College Ten

College Ten is one of the ten residential colleges at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is on the north side of campus, west of College Nine and north of the Cowell Student Health Center...

, College Eight is unnamed as of 2010. Nearly every year, an attempt is made to find a name for the college, a process that requires a $5 million endowment. An attempt to name the college after photographer Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....

 came closer to success than previous efforts. There was also talk of naming the college after Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....

, the noted writer, scientist, and ecologist.

The current provost

Provost (education)

A provost is the senior academic administrator at many institutions of higher education in the United States, Canada and Australia, the equivalent of a pro-vice-chancellor at some institutions in the United Kingdom and Ireland....

 of the college is Dr. Ravi Rajan, an Oxford graduate from India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

.

External links

• College Eight home page
• College Eight Wiki has extensive green content
• UC Santa Cruz home page
• UCSC statistics by residential college