Porter College
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Benjamin F. Porter College, a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is located on the lower west side of the university, to the south of Kresge College. The college was founded in 1969 as College Five and formally dedicated on November 21, 1981. On that day the college was given the motto Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (Life is short, Art endures), and a series of college symbols, including a faculty mace and a college bell, were inaugurated.
The faculty of the college has had a distinguished leadership. The provosts of the college have included the writer James B. Hall, the painter and psychologist Pavel Machotka, the filmmaker Eli Hollander, and the composer David Cope. In early years, the college community was famous for Friday-afternoon sherry hours and afternoon croquet matches on the lawn of the dormitory quadrangle, suggesting that "l'esprit de Santa Cruz" was not far from that of Oxbridge.
Situated on a meadow overlooking a commanding view of Monterey Bay, Porter's original focus was on the visual and performing arts with a unique college major in aesthetic studies (including areas like criticism, creative writing, film, photography, and crafts which were not covered by the more traditional boards of study). Although Porter was designed as a traditional dormitory with a centralized dining hall, Porter students soon gained a reputation befitting their artistic background by staging outrageously bohemian parties, including Halloween, "Step on My Face", "The End" (initially understood as "The End of the World", later revised by tamer generations to "The End of the School Year"), and, for a time, a parodistic Prom ("for all those who missed their High School Proms").
In the same vein, many students from this college take part in the First Rain yearly tradition, which is, as the name implies, celebrated when the first rain falls after the start of instruction in the Fall. Students run naked through all colleges, much to the amusement of other students, to return to Porter College for warm showers. This tradition may, in fact, have developed from the practice of naked sliding down a warm-jello-filled slip'n'slide, which first occurred at "The End" in 1982.
Entertainment aside, Porter/Five has long been a center for fine and performing arts. The college complex includes three active galleries, and various spaces in the complex have frequently been used for musical, theatrical, and dance performances.
Just to the south of Porter is one of the signature public art pieces of the UCSC campus, a massive red abstract sculpture which has been endlessly portrayed on UCSC's promotional literature. This is known on campus as the Squiggle among most students, the 'flying IUD' by fun-loving alums, and in official literature, the Porter wave. It is officially "Untitled."
External links
- Porter College home page (http://www2.ucsc.edu/porter/)
- UC Santa Cruz home page (http://www.ucsc.edu/)
- UCSC statistics by residential college (http://planning.ucsc.edu/irps/enrollmt/FACTS03/Default.htm)