I. INTRODUCTION

This is the first report from the University of California Academic Senate UC Merced Task Force. It focuses on initial conditions and concepts relevant to academic planning during the period from today until about five years after opening. A Chancellor will not be on board to provide leadership until July, but the momentum he or she will need must begin to be built now. At this stage, then, the goal of the Senate Task Force is to provide a view of how the campus can be expected to develop, without introducing elements that would restrict the new Chancellor and Faculty from moving forward in creative ways toward our primary goal: to build an institution that will be an equal in education, research and public service among the general campuses of the University of California.

A new UC campus has both opportunities and obligations. The opportunities are that the campus will start with a new academic plan, a new faculty, a new physical plant, and a new surrounding community. This means that educational and research concepts now emerging can be considered without some of the encumbrances that inevitably develop in older institutions. UCM can mirror the best of the other campuses while taking a fresh look at what the future can bring. In this case there is a further opportunity - UCM represents a major move of the University into the San Joaquin Valley, bringing new breadth in service to, and challenges from, that rapidly growing and changing area.

A new UC campus also has obligations to build on the strengths that have made our existing institution the outstanding public university in the world. These strengths are not particularly in the University’s programs, but rather in the manner in which the University operates. Administration and faculty merge together to build academic strength through shared governance, facilitating support for new enterprises and viewpoints while maintaining the essential core of research university values, all within an agreed framework of high academic standards. Direct involvement of the faculty in peer review of appointments and promotions is the most obvious example of this sharing, and has been one of the essential building blocks underpinning our success.

In the startup period addressed in this report the foundations must be laid for UC Merced to become a comprehensive general campus, competitive with the existing UC general campuses and with other major public universities in the US. Our hope is that 15 years from now UC Merced will be a mature and growing institution, recognized in this country and abroad as outstanding in education, research, and public service across a wide range of academic fields. Realization of this hope requires coherent planning and a serious commitment to funding. Fragmented and deferred planning and financial support could compromise the quality of UCM.

Given that our Task Force has been in existence for only three months, much is yet to be done. The points made below represent an initial set of comments on Academic Organization, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education (including Professional Schools), Phasing, Libraries, K-12 Outreach, and the UC Educational Network currently being established in the San Joaquin Valley. Most of these topics will necessarily be supplemented by further studies in collaboration with the office of the Special Associate for Merced, relevant components of the Academic Senate, and, as soon as possible, the UCM Chancellor.

Since the faculty will initially be small, it will be important to proceed with a corresponding minimal administrative structure. The Bylaws of the Academic Senate (e. g. Bylaw Section 55) imply the existence of departments (or similar groups with different names) as the basic units involved in the search for, appointment of, and promotion of faculty members. Departments will thus be the basic organizational building blocks of the academic structure.

The first Chancellor will determine the nature of the structure between the traditional Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (VCAA) and the departments. The initial UCI Chancellor had a VCAA and 5 Divisional Deans. At UCSD the VCAA dealt directly with the Department Chairs (or later with representatives selected by groups of departments), and the first academic Dean was not appointed until the campus was nearly 20 years old (1982). The Simmons Study recommended three Divisions/Deans as the organizational structure, while the 1991 Academic Planning Study recommended distributing departments among colleges. This aspect of academic organization should be left for decision by the first Chancellor growing out of discussion with the Task Force and others involved in campus planning.

Initial recruiting of faculty should establish strong groups that can develop UC-level reputations within departments rather than attempting to cover all aspects of a particular field from the start. This, however, implies recruiting leaders whose collaboration with colleagues in a particular group would be strong, but whose vision would be broad enough that faculty input to campus planning would ensure that later arriving faculty would find their needs had been anticipated.

Whatever the initial phasing, by opening day there should be a diverse enough array of departments on campus to attract students to UCM and to ensure the ability to offer a strong general education program based on an outstanding academic staff with representation in the natural and social sciences, technology, humanities and the arts. Given the need for the small initial faculty to concentrate on building a general education curriculum as well as departmental majors, cooperation with the Community College System should be investigated as a vehicle for teaching in areas such as Subject A and basic foreign language and mathematical skills.

The undergraduate programs will include both general and specialized components. Development of the General Education component will be the single most important task for the founding faculty. Here the campus can take advantage, as did the 1960’s new campuses, of starting without encumbrances, but with a wide range of examples (good and bad) available for consideration. GE will set the tone for thoughtful collegiality within the campus and will establish the public’s view of what the campus really means - it will be the defining undergraduate educational element of UCM.

The GE program may take any of a variety of forms. At a minimum it would encompass the set of requirements (Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum - IGETC) negotiated in 1990 to facilitate transfers among and within the campuses of the Community College System, the CSU and UC. A wide variety of other examples exist in the UC general campuses, generally varying from college to college. In an era of growing emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches, the General Education curriculum is the ultimate example. The nature and style of possible General Education programs will be considered by the Task Force over the next few months to provide background for the founding faculty, taking advantage of recent and ongoing discussions on several of our campuses.

The specialized components (majors) provide the greatest opportunities for the hoped-for integration of the undergraduate experience with the research and other creative activities of the campus. Involvement of undergraduates in faculty research groups and in creative performance activities has been a long-standing element of UC education, and will be an important part of UCM. Where appropriate, this may extend to experiential learning activities off-campus. Initial faculty recruiting patterns will determine the majors available at startup, which in turn will influence the attractiveness of the campus to prospective students.

The bulk of undergraduate education will take place on campus to ensure the close involvement of the students as part of the academic community. This aspect will be enhanced by provision for students to live economically on or near the campus (a significant element of planning for the University area), and by enhanced arrangements to support commuting students. Selected elements of undergraduate programs may be made available at the UC Centers located throughout the Valley.

Society’s demand for individuals educated beyond the bachelor’s degree has grown over the past decades to meet the requirements for people skilled in engineering, business and international affairs as well as with demonstrated capabilities for creative activity across the full range of academic disciplines. UCM is expected to play a role in this educational arena comparable to that of the other general campuses, as laid out in the Master Plan for Higher Education. During the early years the graduate programs that can be developed and submitted for CCGA review most efficiently will be those growing out of the research areas of the lead founding faculty members. The leaders among the founding faculty will be recruited from environments in which they will have had well organized and justified programs and stimulating interactions with graduate students. Success in bringing senior people of UC caliber to the campus will depend on the early establishment of graduate programs in which founding faculty members will be involved. The costs of initiating these programs will be inherent in the startup funding requirements for faculty research and other creative activities - costs that will have to be addressed in the recruiting process, independent of the existence or non-existence of graduate programs. In short, by the 2005 target opening date, there should be broad graduate student involvement, and many opportunities for such involvement should exist prior to that time.

Administratively, the early existence of graduate degrees implies (e. g. Senate Bylaw 330) early establishment of a Division of Graduate Studies, and either a graduate Dean or the equivalent. Early faculty organization will include establishment of a Graduate Council or similar entity.

Development of professional programs could start soon after the opening of the campus, with Master’s Degree possibilities, particularly building on departmental strengths in engineering and social sciences including information technology and management and policy studies. The scope of these will be limited initially by the need for faculty to concentrate on undergraduate curriculum development and other functions related to the early development of the campus. As funding becomes available for faculty billets in graduate schools, consideration will be given to that function in areas such as business administration and education. Professional programs will be able to take advantage, where appropriate, of the existence of off-campus facilities in the network of distributed education centers throughout the San Joaquin Valley, particularly for continuing education functions.

The sequence of startup of particular departments before the entry of the first undergraduate classes will to a considerable extent be opportunistic, taking advantage of availability of the best leaders and upcoming young people who can be recruited. This opportunism must be employed, however, with a clear view of what the campus must look like on opening day.

One expectation is based on the fact that the distribution of faculty by broad discipline in the existing UC campuses is about half in science and engineering, with 25% in the social sciences and 25% in the humanities and arts. Given the goals of UCM it is expected that the same ratios will prevail at Merced. Further requirements for a reasonably balanced faculty distribution are the need to be able to formulate and put in place a strong General Education program and the requirement to provide an adequate selection of majors appropriate for a general UC campus.

Budgeting for faculty recruiting and the establishment of graduate degrees should start at an early a time. There must be significant action on this front at least 3 years before the opening date if campus development is to proceed in an orderly fashion. If adequate funding for initiating faculty buildup is not available at least by 2002, then opening should be delayed. Forcing a shorter time frame will take away the opportunity to negotiate for the best founders as they may become available. Budgeting must clearly include the substantial startup costs involved in bringing outstanding people in science and engineering to the campus. This consideration interacts directly with campus planning since, with foresight, the outfitting budgets of new buildings can defray some of these costs.

Recruiting success will be influenced by the availability of frameworks that will be attractive to faculty by facilitating their research or other creative activities during the buildup period. Such support structures are essential across the range of disciplines that must be represented at startup, since the newcomers will need to sustain their creative enterprises while at the same time they are developing curricula, recruiting new colleagues, and overseeing development of the campus structures and facilities. Existence of entities such as the planned Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the possibility of a Digital Arts Center, and exploitation of interactions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are examples of such support possibilities - other options will need to be visualized in order to cover the full range of disciplines.

A quantitative idea of phasing comes from the projection of student growth. To be successful the campus must have an enriched student/faculty ratio in its early days. Before opening the ratio may be about 1 to 1, given that only graduate students will be on board, and not all faculty will have yet brought in students. Starting in 2005 with 1,000 students, budget planning should ensure that the ratio would be about 10 to 1. By year 2115 the ratio should be whatever the UC average may be at that time.

The number of departments at opening (2005) could be anywhere from 6 to 10, divided equally between science/technology and social sciences/humanities/arts, with graduate programs covering most of the topics of serious departmental involvement. Startup with a small number of departments each with a wide range of disciplines (e. g. a department of natural sciences) would be expected to evolve over the years into more conventionally defined units. Given the need to budget for adequate billets for operating the general campus, professional school programs should only be established at this point if specific funds were made available to cover graduate school billets independent of general campus funding.

The enrollment projection for the fall of 2010 (Fig. III-4, pg. 21 of the initial report to CPEC) is about. 5,200. If growth at that rate is to be handled successfully, the increase in the number of departments should be fairly modest, since the development of the desired quality of undergraduate education will require that the programs existing at opening will need time to stabilize in such a way as to accommodate the desired number of students. Faculty recruiting at the necessary rate (about quadrupling in 5 years) will be much more fruitfully handled if it is concentrated primarily on strengthening the departments that exist at startup, thus an increase from 6 -10 departments to 10-15 should not be exceeded. The first graduate professional school should come on line about 5 to 8 years after opening, and the number of departments could reach 20 by the fall of 2015 (about 8,000 students projected).

The UC Merced libraries will be a key San Joaquin Valley resource for material in print form as well as a center for digital retrieval and storage of information. Print collections are particularly necessary for strong programs in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. While particular efforts will be made to link the outstanding library system at UC Berkeley with UCM, on-site resources will be essential to support the caliber of education and research activity in humanities, arts and social sciences compatible with the goal of having UCM achieve the excellence that characterizes existing UC campuses. A UCM library budget should be established in the coming year and the acquisition process should be started in collaboration with existing UC library elements. A UCM librarian should be appointed at an early time to provide a focus for the particular needs of UCM as its faculty members are appointed.

The UCM Library system should be the campus center for information technology, including use of high-end computing in this particular context. UCM library developers should move at an early stage to play a role in the future of the California Digital Library and other technological initiatives currently developing in library planning.

UCM is being established in part to improve the fraction of Valley students who take advantage of a UC education. K-12 Outreach is thus an essential activity for the campus. Given that there will be substantial startup demands on the time of the founding faculty, non-faculty staff members will have to carry the bulk of the load in delivering the effort that is essential in this situation. This requires, however, that strong mechanisms be established for faculty interaction with those formulating and carrying out outreach activities in order that the realities of preparing students for the UC experience will be accurately and effectively conveyed to K-12 teachers, advisors, and students. Initially this interaction is being implemented by participation of Task Force members in the Student Planning Group, the venue in which outreach efforts are being developed.

The advent of UCM has triggered expansion of University Extension and other outreach activities in the Valley, as outlined in the Needs report section IV E. On most campuses there is a Senate advisory committee for University Extension. It is essential that the Task Force work with the administration to assure that an equivalent mechanism is put in place at an early time to provide faculty input for these functions.

Many challenges remain requiring study and action by the Task Force. Several of these are underscored by the discussion above. Most important is the establishment of an effective level of shared governance to set the stage for later faculty members, many of whom will be new to the UC system. Specific problems will be the establishment of procedures for the appointment of new faculty and examination of the various approvals involved in establishment of graduate degrees to assure that these key elements of early faculty development can operate smoothly and effectively without undue burdens on the first faculty recruits.

In program development the Task Force will work with the administration to establish mechanisms to support early recruitment of faculty in all areas. It will also be important for the Task Force to assemble background information for use by the campus in planning an effective initial General Education program, and to participate in the planning of buildings and facilities. The Task Force will continue to participate in the various existing and future planning groups and will initiate further studies related to their activities.