In order to provide a focal point for Academic Senate interactions with the development of the University's 10^th campus, the Academic Council established its Universitywide Academic Senate Task Force on UC Merced. The Charge and Membership guidelines for the Task Force were approved by the Council on Sept. 9, 1998. The principal elements of the Charge are:

1. Coordinate issues that should be brought to the Council or to relevant Senate committees.
2. Ensure that faculty are significantly engaged in UC Merced developments.
3. Formulate the process for development of an Academic Senate Division for the Merced campus.
4. Provide academic direction for UC Merced implementation plans.
5. Serve as liaison for the Senate to other UC Merced planning committees.

The Task Force has interpreted this charge as meaning that the members essentially are the shadow faculty for UCM to be replaced in the long run by Merced faculty members.

The Task Force is composed of:

Task Force Chair, Vice Chair of the Academic Council, leaders of CCGA, UCAP, UCEP, UCPB, and UCORP, and one representative from each of the nine Senate divisions.

The actual members are: Fred Spiess (UCSD), Larry Coleman (UCD), Chris Calvert (UCD), Donka Minkova (UCLA), Peter Berck (UCB), William Sirignano (UCI), Allen Zych (UCR), and campus representatives Lily Wong-Fillmore (UCB), Robert Flocchini (UCD), Christian Werner (UCI), Joyce Appleby (UCLA), Justin Roberts (UCR), Katja Lindenberg (UCSD), Michael Drake (UCSF), Elliot Brownlee (UCSB), Wendy Brown (UCSC).

My reason for giving you the names of the members is not only to help you recognize which of your hardworking colleagues are contributing to this effort, but also to encourage you to generate local interactions with them on any aspect of UCM activities. This is important - we do not want to work in a vacuum.

Durations of the appointments of the Chair and the campus representatives are three years and are renewable. The Academic Council and Systemwide Committee representatives serve for one to three years. Appointment of the members was completed late in October of 1998, and the Task Force held its first meeting in December. To date, the Task Force has met four times and conferred extensively by e-mail. Our next meeting will be at Merced on June 17, and will include an in-depth tour of the site and surrounding area.

Our first major effort was to learn about, and react to, the significant amount of UCM activity within the UCOP over the preceding years. Activity started in 1988, but became more intensive beginning with final selection of the Merced site in 1995. Our initial review focused on the University's first official exposition of UCM background and vision - this is a report submitted last October to the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) - as input to the State's mandatory review process for the establishment of any new higher education campus. The Task Force reactions to that document were the subject of our first formal report, which became a central part of the UCOP supplementary input to CPEC in March 1999. That report was distributed as part of the call to today's meeting of the Assembly.

Our second major thrust has been the activation of shared governance in the ongoing UCM activities in UCOP. Our basic philosophy for implementing faculty consultation is that involvement of the faculty in the process of formulating initiatives is preferable to involvement in reaction to plans that have already been formulated.

Prior to the existence of the Task Force, there had been no central point for timely interactions between the Senate and the Administration. Once the Task Force was in place, consultation began on a number of topics. At our first meeting, it was agreed with Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the President's Senior Associate for Merced, that Task Force members would be included in the various planning groups organized by her office.

At this point, there are four planning groups: Student Support, Engineering (including interactions with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Sierra Nevada Research Initiative, and the Social Sciences/Humanities/Arts Group. Two members of the Task Force are participants in each of these groups, and each Task Force meeting has included reports from our representatives and resulting discussions of the activities of each group. A further level of consultation is provided by Tomlinson-Keasey's including the Task Force Chair in the weekly telephone conference meetings of her senior staff. This involvement has brought out significant items for discussion within the Task Force, as well as providing inputs to the staff about potential academic concerns.

The Task Force has referred several topics to the Council or its standing committees, and is working with them to solve particular problems. These include the means for handling UCM academic appointments, planning for use of electronic means in the faculty appointment and promotion process, procedures for involvement of the Senate in the acceptance of endowed chairs, and expeditious handling of approval of graduate degree proposals.

A central aspect of UCOP planning for the Merced campus has been strong emphasis on extending the benefits of UC into the San Joaquin Valley as a whole. This has included a concept of distributed learning centers that would support a wide range of outreach activities, as well as education programs (degree, certificate, remedial, continuing education, etc.) that would be of the style usually included among Extension Division functions. Substantial effort has been ongoing in this area since before the Task Force came into being. This effort includes many aspects that interact with the establishment of the campus itself, and with academic considerations in general. In agreement with Tomlinson-Keasey and her staff, we have recently established a three-member committee in the Task Force to work with those leading the distributed learning effort to provide advice, academic perspective, and liaison with the Task Force.

Academic planning has, from the start, been a topic of central interest to the Task Force members. Our overall position is that the most constructive thing for us to do at this time is to assemble ideas that will facilitate program decision making once a Chancellor is on board. This has motivated our participation in the existing planning groups, and has triggered initiatives led by individual Task Force members to bring planning ideas to the Task Force subsequently to the UCOP UCM staff. This approach has been encouraged by the UCM office, and resulted thus far in the organization of two workshop efforts, one to generate ideas that could stimulate development of Humanities activities and the other to assemble options for agriculture-oriented biotechnology.

There are also ongoing discussions about how to organize General Education programs. This topic has been considered seriously on several other campuses in the recent past, and we hope to be able to synthesize their concepts with our own perspectives to provide a firm General Education base for UCM.

All of these activities are ongoing and should produce preliminary results by this fall. These activities are also fragmentary, leaving numerous gaps, particularly in the social sciences and the arts. With that in mind, we are starting a dialog with Tomlinson-Keasey and her staff to establish a framework such that these initial planning efforts do not leave any major area at risk of falling behind.

Our meetings have included discussions of budgetary aspects of UCM development, and UCM's role in relation to the University as a whole, particularly in the context of anticipated growth of enrollment in the coming decade. There are many legitimate causes for concern. Our position, however, is that there WILL be a UCM and that it is our job to do what we can to make the other nine campuses proud of the tenth. The prospects are exciting and challenging. The Task Force members feel most fortunate to be given the privilege of taking part in establishing the academic nature and content of the UCM enterprise.

Respectfully,

Fred Spiess, Chair

Academic Senate Task Force for UC Merced