Chancellor Michael Drake's testimony before UC Regents

I spoke to this board in February and described our strategic plan and progress we were making on our mission. As you may recall, I characterized our campus as filled with young, energetic, motivated people who came to Irvine to make a difference, to shape the future.

Although we remain committed, let me give a few concrete examples of things that have changed over these past several months to make this more difficult:

Eliminated entirely our small capital projects program, which funds $5 million to $7 million in classroom and other physical plant renovations annually.

Cancelled the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellows Series, which has brought to campus heads of state such as Mary Robertson; Nobel laureates like Wangari Mathaii; legal scholars like Charles Ogletree, or humanitarian leaders like David Hamburg, all of whom have spoken to overflow crowds of students, faculty staff, and community members.

But in addition to the scholarly presence of these individuals, they also do real work with us while on campus.

For example: Vicente Fox visited our campus in April. In February, I described to you in some detail a variety of programs that we have that are making a real and tangible difference in peoples lives. One of those projects was the interaction of our engineering school with the Free Wheelchair Mission. We learned that the organization was having difficulty getting wheelchairs to Mexico due to import and other issues. We arranged for a brief meeting between the president and the local NGO director, resulting in the first shipment of chairs to Mexico that will arrive within a few weeks. Now, the program that brought Fox to us has been cancelled.

In March 2005, I delivered a report to this board regarding healthcare work force needs for California's future, and focused part of my talk on the active and costly nursing shortage that the state was facing.

The year after I arrived at UC Irvine, we approved a nursing science program, recruited an outstanding director, and admitted our first students, a small class of 40. I'm proud to say that 36 of those students graduated just one month ago, and fully 22 of them are employed in our new hospital as we speak. But rather than grow each year as was planned, the program is now frozen, with just a handful of faculty and only room for 50 students per year.

We normally hire approximately 75 faculty in a year, and lose perhaps 25 to retirement, recruitment etc. That leaves a net normal increase of roughly 50, and matches reasonably well with our normal growth of about 1,000 students per year.

This year we did not even hire enough to even to keep up with attrition, the head count decreased by 18. Because our successive classes have been larger, even though we reduced freshman by 700 slots this year, our enrollment still grew by 1250 students.

We have 18 fewer faculty, 1,250 more students, for a net gap of 80 faculty, and a further degradation of our faculty/student ratio. Our professors are willing to teach, but now are finding it hard to schedule their classes, because as class sizes increase, we find we don't have enough large classrooms to accommodate the students.

A story appeared in Inside Higher Ed this week that featured Vicki Ruiz, our dean of Humanities. She said: "The privates have come calling. I've lost very valued faculty members to Yale, to Northwestern, to Penn, to Pomona, to Scripps, as well as to Lehigh University and Fordham University. This never used to happen....
"We are not able to put together the counter offers that we have in the past," she says soberly.

In 2007, when she was named dean of humanities, she hired 17 new professors. This year she hired four, even though nine searches had been planned; and next year no new positions have been authorized.

We are down 309 staff from one year ago; 102 of these are from layoffs, through April 30, 2009. So not only do faculty have more work to do, they have less support. So our staff are working harder each year.
The Freshman and Transfer Seminar programs have been eliminated. These are critical programs. This is a real loss. Think for a moment about your own careers, and about those very few and very meaningful times you were touched and inspired by a special teacher. Those interactions didn't occur so much in large classrooms, but in hallways, office hours, or small group instruction. These seminars provided hundreds of opportunities for those interactions.

A few other examples:

• We have stopped admitting students to our Ed.D program.
• The vice chancellor for research suspended the DESK-TOP initiative, which funded new computers for each faculty member every four years.
• We have reduced the fund that supports faculty travel to academic meetings.
• We've had a 20 percent reduction in our library budget, cutting hours, librarian assistance and collections, including electronic collections. Libraries are still used very actively, even as paper volumes are less critical.
• We stopped heating the water in our public restrooms.
• ACE, the multidisciplinary masters concentration program in arts, computing and engineering is suspended.
• The Distinguished Professor Program is suspended.
• The Career Partners Program is suspended.
• The Faculty Career Development Awards Program is suspended.
• Support for the Visual Resources Collection has been eliminated.

There are many more...

I have been at this university, for 37 years, first as a student and resident, and now 30 years on the faculty. I have never been as concerned. A favorite mentor of mine told me once that I should always remember that "the difference between A and A+ is huge".

We have always, or almost always, been an A+ institution, and when we weren't, we felt we should be and worked, day and night, to get there. That has been the story for UC and therefore the story for California. The cuts we are making threaten that at best, and doom it at worst.