This is the third report to the Academic Assembly from the Academic Senate Task Force for UC Merced. The Task Force was established by the Academic Council in September 1998, following the 1996 resurgence of Office of the President academic planning for the tenth UC campus. The prime purposes of the Task Force are to establish the normal aspects of shared governance in UC Merced operations and to carry out activities that will assure smooth development of the Merced Division of the Academic Senate, as permanent faculty join the campus. We have met monthly since our establishment, in addition to having extensive e-mail exchanges.

The Task Force is composed of a Chair, the Vice Chair of the Academic Council, Leaders of CCGA, UCAP, UCEP, UCPB, and UCORP, Chair of the special UCM CAP and one member from each of the nine existing Senate Divisions. Current membership is Fred Spiess (UCSD/Chair), Michael Cowan (UCSC, Council VC), Chris Calvert (UCD/CCGA), David Hoy (UCSC/UCAP), Peter Berck (UCB/UCEP), William Sirignano (UCI/UCPB), Peter Young (UCSC/UCORP), Geoff Mason (UCSC/UCM CAP), George Starr (UCB), Robert Flocchini (UCD/TF VC), Christian Werner (UCI), Chand Viswanathan (UCLA), Justin Roberts (UCR), Katja Lindenberg (UCSD), Michael Drake (UCSF), Douglas Morgan (UCSB), and Anthony Pratkanis (UCSC).

The reasons for providing the members' names are - first to note changes since our last meeting and second to encourage Division Chairs to ask Task Force members to report to your Divisional meetings at least once each year. The San Diego Division schedules two reports per year.

Much has happened since October, including the opportunity to consider topics noted in the minutes of that meeting (pages 21, 22, 23 in your blue books). The opportunities to address these topics were to a considerable extent triggered by Governor Gray Davis. At an Economic Summit convened in the San Joaquin Valley last November, he announced, unilaterally, that the campus opening date would be moved up from fall of 2005 to fall 2004. This allowed reopening of budget planning and created such an obvious workload that the Chancellor appointed Rod Park, known to many of you from his years as Executive Vice Chancellor at Berkeley, as a Special Assistant — taking over from the Chancellor some of the functions of Executive Vice Chancellor.

In February, Park and the Chancellor moved to start simultaneous searches for a permanent Executive Vice Chancellor and the planned three Deans: Engineering, Social Sciences/Humanities/Arts, and Natural Sciences/Mathematics. There was background information for Engineering from a 1989-1999 study group, and the Task Force had been in the process of preparing background material for the latter two Deans in hope that the three searches could be carried out in parallel. Search Committees for these four positions have been appointed using personnel from the several campuses, including two Task Force appointees on each, and position descriptions have been approved in the OP. Our hope is that these searches will be carried out aggressively and that time pressures will not force us into unfortunate compromises. Nominations for individuals to fill these positions would be welcome. Send them to Roderic Park, UC Merced, 1170 Olive St., Suite I, Merced, CA 95348-1959.

The plan is to identify the Executive VC by November and have all four positions in operation by summer of 2001, when serious faculty recruiting will begin. The plan is to have 5 faculty FTE available this summer, 20 more each of the following two summers, and 35 in the summer of 2003. At opening of the campus with 1,000 students we expect to have 100 faculty FTE, about 20 of which will be used for temporary assignments. The FTE are expected to be distributed about half to Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts with the other half in Engineering, Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

On the budget side, it was clear last October that initial planning had been carried out only in a preliminary way. When the Governor announced that the opening date would be advanced, he also asked what the cost would be. Generating a realistic budget thus became Park's first major task. The proposed budget was generated by working back from an operating budget for 2010. It considered necessary personnel recruitment as well as construction costs for initial infrastructure and first set of buildings sufficient to support about 5,000 students. This process has not only produced an improved picture of campus startup costs, it has provided us with a flow chart, which we are still assimilating, to guide timing of various academic planning and action steps. The Task Force was given an opportunity to comment on the budget and has established a Budget subcommittee to maintain interaction as the process unfolds.

While the Governor's action had the advantage of making UCM a special point of emphasis, nevertheless UCM's budget is still part of the Systemwide whole. There was thus serious consideration in the Office of the President as to how this UCM opportunity could be harmonized with other University needs. At the present time the entire budget is under consideration by the Legislature and the Governor's office.

Development of the necessary infrastructure, major facilities, and the surrounding community is a massive job. Simply generating the plans and obtaining the approvals from the many cognizant agencies is expected to take the coming year. As you may have read in the press, or heard on campus, there are significant environmental concerns. These were not unexpected. Environmental impact studies were made of the three final sites and, while the Merced site was evaluated as being the least complex in this regard, it clearly will require careful development.

Given the complexities of the process for development of the main campus, and the necessary time table for recruiting faculty for a 2004 opening, the Task Force has been concerned as to what staging area there might be in which early arriving academics could have their offices and carry on their research in temporary facilities, as they did during the development of the new campuses in the 60's. Fortunately, there is nearby Castle Air Force Base that closed in 1995, and which has a number of buildings built in about 1991 that would be quite appropriate for this purpose. The University, at the May Regents meeting, consummated a lease for a seven acre parcel on which there are two attractive research park type buildings totaling about 100,000 square feet of office and potential laboratory space. The Task Force had visited this site at our April meeting and were pleased that it appears to be quite a satisfactory complex in which to start UCM academic activities.

The Task Force discussed general education and styles of campus organization during most of 1999. Our goal is to provide perspectives on which the real faculty can build, as well as to provide input to site planning studies as they develop in the immediate future. One output of this discussion was a recommendation approved unanimously at our January, 2000, meeting that a college approach built on the scale and principles of the UCSD model would provide a number of benefits - presenting the students with a modest sized organizational structure, encouraging faculty participation in student affairs, providing a flexible approach to the development and implementation of varied general education approaches, all while recognizing the realities of the strong departmental and ORU ties that exist in an entrepreneurial research university context. A short report presenting our conclusions is available on our web site.

Discussions of general education focused on the hope that programs in this area would involve the full spectrum of campus academic interests. Given the planned distribution of faculty FTE and the importance of technology in our daily lives, this would mean involving engineering faculty to a greater extent than in most of our other campuses. We were also led to a proposal that a small General Education Institute be established at an early time. Such an Institute, with rotating membership, would also be compatible with the college approach as an instrument to highlight new ideas that could be incorporated into successive colleges formed as enrollment grows. Further discussions of this possibility with the Chancellor led to tilting the concept toward involvement of Valley Community College representation in such an enterprise to enhance the experiences and preparation of transfer students.

Planning for implementation of emerging instructional technology is on all our minds and we anticipate involving faculty from across the University in discussions during the coming year. To date we have established lists of individuals on each of the campuses who are active in developments in this field.

Student services topics are subjects of ongoing discussion. The Chancellor's Student Planning Group, including two Task Force members, will be putting together its final report in September and Task Force input to that process has been part of our agenda for the last several meetings. Our goal is to establish an approach that will encourage significant faculty participation, particularly in counseling and other aspects of student guidance. We anticipate that some of the record keeping and technical aspects of these functions can be codified and made easily available as data bases for faculty members, thus minimizing the need for student affairs professionals and enhancing opportunities for the strong student/faculty one-on-one interactions that can make the research university an exciting place.

We have interacted strongly with the UCM staff in planning a summer session. The Chancellor would like UCM to be recognized at an early time as attentive to the academic needs of Valley students. There was thus a push to generate summer session offerings as soon as possible. Given the complexities of recruiting quality faculty and carrying out the authority delegated to the Task Force for course approval, it became clear that to have UCM offerings of UC quality this summer would not be feasible. Administrators in charge of developing the summer program thus have worked with the Davis campus to present the courses and maintain the records, while UCM would provide some funding as well as facilities in Fresno and Merced. There are thus four courses offered this summer under the joint banner of UCD and UCM (Psych 1, Biosci 10, Econ 1A and 1B).

Finally, as a step toward formalizing the Senate side of shared governance and facilitating Task Force/Administration interaction as development activity increases, the Task Force is organizing itself by establishing subcommittees that would parallel an eventual Divisional committee structure. At this time we have subcommittees for Budget and Student Affairs. Educational Policy, Extension and Campus/Community Planning elements are being organized. These are in addition to the separate UCM CAP and an internal Task Force Committee on Committees. As the pace quickens we will be seeking members from outside the Task Force to assist us. We have already done this in staffing the search committees and are quite appreciative of the willingness of Senate members to join us in this challenging enterprise.

We are looking forward to playing our roles in recruiting UCM academic leadership, developing academic plans, and moving ahead on such mundane but essential tasks as producing draft divisional bylaws.

Respectfully,

F. N. Spiess

for the Senate Task Force for UC Merced