Regional History Project Oral Histories

Theoretical chemist Frank Andrews was hired with tenure in 1967 by UCSC’s chemistry board, where he was employed for four decades before retiring in 2006. When this oral history was recorded eight years after his retirement, he was still offering two courses annually: not for chemistry, but for Crown and Merrill Colleges, focusing on the psychology of personal growth—a field he began cultivating shortly after arriving in Santa Cruz. Notwithstanding his enthusiasm for the discipline in which he was originally trained, it is this area of inquiry that ultimately became Andrews’s primary passion as a teacher and a learner, and it is perhaps the one for which he was most widely beloved by students.

Deeply interested throughout his career in pedagogical challenges and innovations, Andrews won numerous teaching awards, both on campus and from outside organizations. He also spearheaded the publication of Teacher on the Hill, a campus newsletter of “faculty conversations about teaching and learning at UCSC,” which appeared in fifteen issues between May 1977 and January 1981.