Food as Resistance: Cooking up Community
Not many students at UC Santa Cruz spend their Friday mornings as line cooks. But in the kitchen of Cowell Coffee Shop (CCS), the smell of cilantro, the aroma of citrus fruit and the rhythmic sound of chopping greet you as you enter. On Feb....
More UCSC Students are Graduating in Three Years, but Why?
Finn Westley, an applied linguistics and education double major at UC Santa Cruz, wants to pursue a career in bilingual education. Double majoring while completing general education requirements on a condensed timeline is no easy feat. However, after only three years at UCSC, Westley is...
WestFest Music Festival Makes its Return to UC Santa Cruz
Flower crowns, picnic blankets and banana slug balloon hats strewn about the Oakes Upper Lawn — is this Coachella 2016? No, it’s WestFest 2026, the annual music festival hosted by westside colleges and student organizations at UC Santa Cruz. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the...
UCSC’s Newly Established AI Council is at a Crossroads
Over the past three years, generative AI has gone from an illicit homework helper used by students to a technology embraced by higher education institutions. Last year, the California State University system entered multimillion-dollar deals with multiple companies including OpenAI, Amazon and Nvidia to embed...
First Venezuela, Now Iran: Speaker Event Highlights American Imperialism
In a press conference following the U.S.’s Jan. 3 kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump said the word “oil” no less than 19 times. “And the word ‘democracy,’ anyone know how many times it was said in that press conference?” Gabriel Hetland...
Community Through Tradition: Celebrating Lunar New Year at UCSC
A warm glow radiating from red lanterns, the wafting smell of peanuts and dried fruit, loud festive music filling the College Nine/John R. Lewis Multipurpose Room — this is the scene of Lunar New Year at UC Santa Cruz. Students filled the room on Feb....
Family Student Housing Delay Leaves Residents in Limbo
UC Santa Cruz administration announced the development of a new Family Student Housing (FSH) complex in 2018. After pushing the project back repeatedly due to lawsuits and pandemic-exacerbated cost issues, they finally gave residents a move-in date of fall 2025. Then January 2026. And now,...
A Guide to UCSC Housing
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report, Santa Cruz County is classified as the most expensive rental market in the U.S., a title the county has maintained for the last three years. This can be daunting for prospective and...
Quarry Queries: Where Did the Quarry Plaza Go?
The Quarry Plaza has served thousands of students throughout UC Santa Cruz’s 61 years of history. Countless UCSC campus tours have begun at the Quarry Plaza — guides ready to welcome prospective banana slugs to their future home. But for the past several months, safety...
More Requirements More Fees More Money: Upcoming Changes to Campus Parking
This coming fall, increased parking prices will require hundreds of UC Santa Cruz students, staff and faculty to budget extra money to afford parking on campus — making it more difficult to get to class, meetings or even their work shifts. Again and again, drivers...