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.

Oakes was founded in 1972 as College Seven. In 1968, the Black Liberation Front, a black power group, demanded an all-black college. Professor J. Herman Blake, UCSC's only African American faculty member at the time, proposed a compromise in which College Seven's academic program would focus on ethnic studies. Though the term "ethnic studies" was dropped in the planning phases, the college has always stressed racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, along with the representation and support of students from historically disadvantaged groups.

Oakes is perceived by some students as a "minority college", partly due to its roots in radical elements of the American Civil Rights Movement. Comparative racial and ethnic statistics do show that Oakes' student body has slightly higher percentages of minorities than a number of other UCSC colleges and UCSC's student body as a whole. For example, 9.8% of Oakes's students are African American and 12.2% are Filipino American, compared with 2.7% and 4.5%, respectively, among UCSC's general student body. (pdf)

College Seven was renamed Oakes in 1975 after philanthropists Roscoe and Margaret Oakes, whose endowment contributed significantly to the founding of the college.

Noted political activist Angela Davis, an Oakes affiliate, is a professor of history of consciousness, an unconventional program centering on the history of struggles for racial, economic and social justice and equality.