ACADEMIC PLANNING
COUNCIL
Bulletin #54
December 14, 2001
1. UC Merced Academic Planning
Executive Vice Chancellor David
Ashley and Peter Berck, Chair of the Senate Task Force for UC Merced, informed
the Academic Planning Council about the status of academic planning for the
Merced campus. The campus is focused
simultaneously on serving the population of the 12-county region of the San
Joaquin Valley—an area growing at twice the rate of the California population,
but with a lower level of educational attainment—and creating an
internationally distinguished research university. The academic programs will similarly combine a focus on the
unique characteristics of the region with a broader focus on the global
context.
The campus will create core
disciplines, but will be organized to promote interdisciplinary research and
curriculum. In addition to fostering
individual faculty research, the faculty planners emphasized the need to start
with strong research programs involving groups of faculty; the campus will open
with two. The Sierra Nevada Research
Institute is the most developed. It
will focus on the inter-related ecosystems of the mountains and the valley,
with air quality, environmental sciences, and land usage as anticipated, early
major research topics. The World
Cultures Institute will focus on the “migration of peoples,” studying the
considerable diversity of the region from the perspectives of the humanities,
arts and social sciences. A third potential
area of research for the campus will be public policy.
The campus will open with three
academic divisions—Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences,
Humanities and Arts (SSHA)—but will delay the creation of departments until the
size and complexity of the campus justify them. Decisions have not yet been made about any professional programs,
but a management school is likely to be the first. In order to develop early strengths from which to build, each
division will start with two undergraduate programs: computing and
communications, and energy/environmental resources engineering in Engineering;
biological sciences and physical sciences in Natural Sciences; social sciences
and world cultures studies in SSHA.
With these major disciplinary areas
established, the campus is able to recruit its first 15 senior faculty, a
process that will be accomplished with the assistance of faculty from
throughout the University. By opening
day in 2004 it is expected that there will 60 faculty and 17 lecturers for the
600 freshmen, 300 transfers and 100 graduate students. Faculty recruitments are being handled
through the Task Force, with assistance from other UC faculty. Cohort groups of faculty are being
considered. A Dean of Engineering has
already been hired, and the other two deans will be selected early in 2002.
The planning recommendations for
undergraduate education are to create small, interactive teaching groups for
the lower division. There will be a
college system, but it will be different from those used by San Diego or Santa
Cruz. Lower division students in
Natural Sciences and Engineering will have a common curriculum, with a biology
requirement for all students in both divisions.
In addition to the traditional,
residential freshman experience, the campus is opening with three off-campus
Centers, located in Bakersfield, Modesto and Fresno. These Centers will provide lower-division students who choose to
live at home an academic experience, taught by UC faculty, that is integrated
into the academic and social life of the Merced campus. In addition, beginning fall 2002, there will
be a concurrent enrollment program in which students are admitted to UCM, but
take their lower division courses through one of four community colleges.
The campus has attracted a lot of
attention and support. For example,
there are already 13 endowed chairs, and interest from potential faculty is
promising. Two major academic planning
challenges facing the campus are to create a stronger “university-going” culture
than currently exists, and to educate the community about what a research
university is.
In addition to describing the
academic planning, Executive Vice Chancellor Ashley also described physical
plans for the campus, including the first three buildings, and efforts to
create a student-life experience that will be attractive to students.
Members of the APC congratulated
the presenters on the progress made by the Merced campus. Some of the
recommendations made by members included making sure the research focus was not
limited to the region, and developing a collaborative and synergistic
relationship with the community colleges in the region.
2.
UCTV
UCTV Director Lynn Burnstan joined
the APC to describe progress made in the first two years of the UCTV
contract. The University transmits its
own programs, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through a public interest channel
on EchoStar’s DISH network, a Direct Broadcast Satellite network with 6.5
million subscribers nationwide. In
addition to satellite subscribers, UCTV is available to many cable
viewers. UCTV has a budget that
supports broadcast operations, equipment, maintenance and overall
management. However, the station does
not have a production budget; campuses and the UC managed national labs produce
and provide their own programs.
UC controls both the content and
scheduling of the programs that are aired.
Core programming generally follows the unmediated CSPAN model, in which
the researcher or other presenter speak in depth on a subject. UCTV has been used to broadcast live
conferences of interest to the public, such as the recent Summit on Innovation
in San Diego and the SAT Conference at Santa Barbara. Using funds provided by various sources, including NSF and other
agencies, faculty are using UCTV to present their research, which helps them
meet the public information requirements of their grants. Students also provide programming, such as
production of a weekly “magazine” of local news and events by students in
UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and programming from the Berkeley
School of Journalism.
Director Burnstan described plans for expanding the public access to UCTV’s programs. Securing increased cable carriage is a major goal of 2002. This will be accomplished through partnerships with existing education and government channels. In the future, as television becomes increasingly digital, there will be more opportunities for UC to show its own channel on the local cable system. Increased local exposure will provide an incentive for campuses to expand the programs they offer. In addition, there will be more use of the web. Currently programs can be watched as a live video stream on http://www.uctv.tv; in addition, over 200 archived programs can be downloaded. There are plans for programs targeted to specific audiences, such as teachers or rural health practitioners, that can be combined with supporting website materials.
EchoStar does not make available information
about the number of viewers. However,
e-mail and other communication to UCTV indicates that viewers enjoy the
programs they watch, and frequently seek more information about subjects or
presenters, specifically in health related areas.
APC members offered suggestions for
programs and for encouraging more campus participation. For example, a program on the application
process, in English and Spanish, could be useful, particularly if archived and
available for future downloading. There
was discussion of UCTV’s use for universitywide meetings. Funding has to be acquired for producing
programs of a universitywide nature, since there is no individual campus
sponsorship or production. Members
encouraged efforts to advise faculty of the potential grant funding for making
their research more widely known to the public through UCTV.
3. Professional School Planning
The APC reviewed a draft set of
criteria for the planning of professional schools, following up on discussion
at the previous APC meeting http://www.ucop.edu/planning/apcfiles/apc53.html. Discussion centered around whether UC needs
planning criteria that are specific to professional schools or that would apply
to academic planning in general. It was
argued that in any academic planning there are competing values and priorities,
with the desire to develop individual campuses fully in order to provide access
and contribute to research on the one hand, and to be “one university”—efficient
and non-duplicative—on the other.
There was discussion about ways
that professional schools are different from other new programs: they require significant numbers of new
faculty, they are usually established as stand-alone units, i.e., as schools,
the finances are different, they have a public constituency, and it is not
expected that each campus would have every school. It was noted that the criteria presented for planning of new
professional schools would probably apply to any new academic enterprise of
significant size.
A revised draft will be made
available for discussion by administrative and Senate committees concerned with
academic planning.