Charting UCSC's Future

As campus provost, John B. Simpson has spearheaded a planning process that will guide UCSC through the first part of the century.
Photo: r. r. jones

For more than a year, John Simpson has led UCSC through an unprecedented campuswide planning effort. The goal: to produce a roadmap guiding UCSC to the year 2010 and beyond. Many of the questions posed by Simpson during the planning project have focused on UCSC's academic offerings. What programs, for example, make sense to add? And how will the campus build on its research strengths in the next decade? The give-and-take effort has also considered a number of nonacademic issues, such as how the campus should use emerging technologies to interact with students. And what will it take to secure the financial resources necessary to pay for the activities described in the 2010 plan.

These and other topics raised during the 18-month project have fostered extensive dialogue throughout the campus community. In fact, Simpson believes the project's final report, expected to be completed later this summer, may be less important than the process required to produce it.

In the interview that follows, Simpson shares his impressions of the project and describes why he thinks this an opportune—if not absolutely critical—time to plan for the UCSC of tomorrow. —Jim Burns


Why undertake this major planning effort at this time in UCSC's history?

Several years ago, a number of us in the faculty and administration determined that the campus would have a fairly predictable rate of growth in the first decade of this century--and that this growth provided us with an unusual opportunity for long-term planning. We knew that, according to a 1999 study, 63,000 additional students would be eligible to attend a UC campus by the year 2010. And that UCSC, as its share of that growth, would expand by about 6,000 students in that time period.

So instead of doing our thinking, planning, and budget projections on a year-to-year basis, we decided to imagine what the campus could be like in the year 2010 and think about how we're going to get there. It breaks out of the usual mold of thinking short term, thinking piece by piece, position by position, initiative by initiative, and considers in a much broader sense what the UCSC of the future will look like.

Indeed, in its own way, I think this process is as interesting an opportunity as Dean McHenry and Clark Kerr had when they conceived of and started UC Santa Cruz, because the development of the campus in the next ten years will have a defining influence on its character over the next half century or longer.


How successful has this effort been at producing a detailed campus plan?

I think that the goals and aspirations that have been articulated as part of this process have given all of us at UCSC a very good idea about what we want to do in this decade and why we want to do it. We took a long view, and we sought input from all faculty and staff. So, the planning to date reflects the visions of more people in greater detail than ever before.

Personally, this project has also confirmed for me that the faculty and staff of UCSC have an enormous dedication to this institution. People could have seen this project as just another planning exercise. Instead, they have been genuinely engaged in considering how the UCSC campus should expand and how it should be operating by the time we begin the next decade.


Would you share a few of the academic initiatives that have been proposed?

In the Arts, for example, the division is interested in establishing graduate programs in the field of audiovisual media. One interesting idea is the creation of a Digital Arts/New Media Master of Fine Arts program, which would be the first M.F.A. degree at UCSC. Graduate program growth like this is an acknowledgment of the division's development and reflects the blending of art and engineering processes that goes into the creation of some of today's art.

The Humanities Division has a number of very creative proposals, including a master's program in Public Humanities designed to prepare students for careers related to the management, promotion, and interpretation of cultural events. And the division's recently established Institute for Humanities Research is very interested in expanding its scholarship in the areas of Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, Modernist and Avant-Garde Studies, and South Asian Studies.

In the Social Sciences, the division has defined an agenda including multidisciplinary programs that enrich research and teaching. One of these includes a new master's in Social Policy and Public Advocacy. Addressing society's challenges will be a common research theme for many social sciences and humanities faculty, including those affiliated with College Ten and with the newly established Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community.

The Natural Sciences see growth in a variety of thematic areas in which faculty collaborations from several departments illustrate the value that UCSC places on multidisciplinary scholarship. Research will address human needs in environmental science and technology, biomolecular medicine, and health sciences. The Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering [CBSE], which spans natural sciences and engineering, will help apply new understandings of biology to medicine, agriculture, and ecology.

The Baskin School of Engineering sees its future in three very timely areas of inquiry: biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology. A focus is interdivisional work through the CBSE, one of 20 centers in the world that make up the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. Graduate program growth will include a new master's and doctoral bioinformatics program, the first in the UC system.


Are there campus values that this process has helped rearticulate?

Yes. I think UC Santa Cruz is, in a very real sense, unique among first-tier public research universities. It is not, and probably defiantly so, going to copy the mold that is set by most large, public, state-supported universities, including other campuses of the University of California.

For example, we balance in a meaningful way the academic worlds of teaching, research, and public service. While many campuses describe themselves as balancing these three activities, paying attention to all three is deeply embedded in UCSC's culture. Indeed, in my experience, this is a rare ethos for a state-supported university.

I believe that as we go forward and think about where we will be programmatically in the second decade of this century, the campus's long tradition of fostering, indeed pushing, an interdisciplinary agenda--where the assumption is that the interesting lines of inquiry are often at the boundaries between traditional disciplines--is a tradition that will be emphasized.

To my mind, that is very progressive for a research university. In fact, one of the troubles other, older, more established universities have is getting out of what is sometimes referred to as the "tyranny of the disciplines." Our history of valuing interdisciplinary scholarship makes it much easier to steer clear of that outdated model.


Are you considering UCSC's traditional strengths as you assess the proposals?

Absolutely. I think one responsibility that Chancellor Greenwood, I, and other members of the central administration have is to make sure that our plan for UCSC's future incorporates the values and ideals that have so successfully guided the campus's development in its first 40 years of existence. Developing a plan for UCSC's future does not mean that we should abandon our past.

In fact, UCSC's long-standing commitment to quality instruction, the high degree to which we have been able to view teaching and research as complementary-- not competing--activities, the exemplary manner in which we have encouraged our students to apply what they have learned in the classroom to society's most pressing challenges, these are among our truly great strengths. And they will be preserved, even enhanced, in this plan.


Given the state's budget uncertainties, how will UCSC pay for these proposals?

Obviously, the state government is still a critical source of financial support for UCSC. But your readers may not realize that state funds represented only 44 percent of the campus's budget last year. It's the gifts and grants from individuals, foundations, business and industry, and others that support the agenda of academic excellence in this and in all state universities.

Plus, we don't have much control over what we get from the state. I'd rather be in a position in which our ability to develop new and exciting programs is not compromised during the state's lean budget years. If we are to achieve the aspirations detailed in our 2010 plan, we have to diversify our support base, meaning that gifts and grants will be more important than ever.

 

Want more information about UCSC's 2010 planning project? See the following web site, which includes proposals from UCSC's academic and nonacademic divisions: planning.ucsc.edu/plans2001

 


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