Featuring Oral Histories with:

J. Herman Blake

Roberto Crespi

James Gill

Don Rothman

Ray Charland

Gwen Lacy

Kathy Cowan

One of the reasons why the University of California, Santa Cruz is unique among most public institutions of higher education is that is organized as a series of themed colleges. UC Santa Cruz’s seventh college, eventually named Oakes, opened in 1972. These oral history interviews documenting the early history of Oakes College were conducted in 1982, ten years after Oakes College opened, by Roseanne Shensa, a UCSC student under the mentorship of then-Regional History Project director Randall Jarrell during the reorganization of UCSC’s college system. 

107 pages, Published in 2011; Interviews conducted in 1982.

For the complete text [PDF] of Oakes College: An Oral History.