During this time Edgar also became interested in the processes of human communication and brought the practice of T-groups and Encounter sessions to the Caltech Biology Department.
Edgar joined the University of California, Santa Cruz faculty in 1970, where he taught and carried out research for twenty years until retirement in 1990.
[2] At UCSC he was the founding provost of Kresge College, where he helped design the campus in the style of an Italian mountain village and the student living quarters as apartments rather than the traditional dormitory bedrooms.
Academically, he created programs that offered students a much greater role in the planning of the curriculum and the design of their major fields of study.
He also founded the Worm-Breeders Gazette, which provided a rapid mechanism of communication among researchers using this organism in the days before the internet.