TASK FORCE COMMENTS ON A COLLEGE CONCEPT FOR UC MERCED

The Task Force discussed general education and styles of campus organization during most of 1999. Our goal has been to provide some perspective 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 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. These include: presenting the students with a modest sized organizational structure, encouraging faculty participation in student affairs, and providing a flexible approach to the development and implementation of general education approaches while recognizing the realities of the strong departmental and ORU ties that exist in an entrepreneurial research university context.

In these discussions, we had the benefit of accounts from faculty representatives having experience in the UCSC and UCSD college types, as well as a report from the chair of UCEP after his committee had met at UCSD to learn, in more detail, about the functioning of that approach.

The approach that we visualize would not be a carbon copy of the UCSD model, which in itself evolved over the years from its inception to its present form. In particular, further modifications that would provide greater benefits for Community College transfer students should be sought. This is not a recommendation for a residential college in the narrow sense.

The short account below characterizes this approach in general terms, setting forth some principles and their consequences to describe the general concept as we visualize it.

1. GOALS AND REALITIES
1. The students should feel that they are facing a friendly and manageable entity in which both faculty and administration care about their success.
2. The faculty and administration should be organized in such a manner as to encourage interaction between students and faculty, while recognizing the need for faculty members also to have close ties to colleagues with whom they will interact in developing closely linked education and research programs.
3. The faculty structure should stimulate participation and innovation in the General Education process.
4. The realities of an eventual 18 or 19 to 1 student faculty ratio should be taken into account, as well as the fact that there will be wide variation among the faculty members with regard to their personal capability and interests in participating in the various aspects of education, research, and administrative activity needed to make the entire campus work effectively.
5. The structure should be easily capable of evolution.

2. BASIC PRINCIPLES AND CONSEQUENCES

The Goals and Guidelines lead to a set of principles for this hybrid college/discipline oriented approach to organizing academic activities and thinking of campus planning.

1. Faculty would be organized into "departments" that would provide the essential collegiality for research and major-oriented education interests, including appointment and promotion of their colleagues. The "departments" would be clustered into Divisions as discussed in other planning documents.
2. Faculty should also be organized into units ("colleges") that encompass a wide range of disciplines, representing most of the research and teaching areas of the campus. These groupings should have responsibility for developing and delivering general education programs. They should also oversee and be involved with the basic elements of student affairs functions that can be handled in a distributed manner.
3. Students should be similarly divided into college groupings related to the general education and counseling functions.
4. The scale of any one college should be about 2,500 students and 150 faculty. This takes account of resource requirements and recognizes that only a fraction of the faculty members of a particular college will be active participants in college affairs.
5. The Academic Vice Chancellor, in consultation with the Senate, should appoint a college planning committee for the first college, as soon as there are enough interested UCM faculty members in residence to begin to plan the general education character of the college. This group would logically draw upon the membership of the general education institute advocated in other Task Force deliberations. With the appointment of the college CEO (a tenured faculty member reporting to the Academic Vice Chancellor) an actual plan would be prepared for approval by the faculty. If the enrollment projections currently in place remain (about 1,000 new students per year), a new planning group would be put in action every two or three years.
6. Campus living arrangements should be similarly segmented in accordance with the concept that students should feel that they are dealing with entities of manageable size. Campus housing should be clustered by college identity. The respective college administrative and counseling offices, seminar/meeting rooms, and spaces attractive to those who live off-campus should be in reasonable proximity to the housing, creating a college-oriented whole, including some playing fields or other recreational elements. College housing should have enough diversity to attract transfer students as well as first year students, as discussed at the recent Student Planning Group meeting.
7. Faculty office and laboratory space should be developed to enhance discipline-oriented collegiality while, at the same time, being mindful that along with library and classroom space it should be easily accessible to all students irrespective of college.
8. Campus planning should take advantage of the incremental nature of the approach of establishing colleges one by one as the enrollment grows. The configuration of the Long Range Development Plan can thus be envisioned in blocks that would assure that the campus would be comfortable at all stages from a single initial college to full buildout.