California to Open University Despite Budget Woes

Campus planning was snarled for several years by environmental concerns -- eventually solved by an $11 million gift to purchase a new site -- and the opening was delayed for a year by the state's fiscal crisis.

Callan questions why California felt compelled to build another research institution -- which would award a wide array of master's and doctoral degrees and invest heavily in cutting-edge science -- when it already has nine others.

"When your real capacity problem is undergraduate education, you don't build institutions that are the most expensive we've got," he said. "We have plenty of capacity for graduate education" at campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, he said.

Travis Reindl, a policy analyst for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, speculates that California might have drastically scaled back its expansion plans had officials tried to get it rolling just two or three years later. "The state's credit card is pretty much maxed out," he said. "You'd be having a radically different conversation today."

But the criticism has largely died down as the state's investment adds up -- $400 million thus far -- and as UC-Merced's opening draws closer to reality. Tomlinson-Keasey now thinks a lot of people will be impressed by how cost-efficient a new university can be.

Energy-saving features that would be hard to retrofit onto an old campus -- such as solar-shaded windows and a 2 million-gallon storage tank that will cool water at off-peak rates -- will save millions of dollars a year by cutting the electricity bill to half that of a comparable-size school. Laboratories have been designed so that professors can easily share them, rather than lay claim to their own costly piece of real estate. The library has been designed so that students can check out books simply by walking out the door with them -- the transaction recorded by radio tags in each volume.

Most radical, perhaps, is UC-Merced's decision to abolish the normal structure of academic departments. "If I had a department of psychology, I would have one that ranked tenth out of 10, and it would be that way for some time," Tomlinson-Keasey said. "That's not good for an institution that's trying to make its mark."

By keeping faculty grouped more loosely in larger categories such as engineering, humanities and natural sciences, the chancellor hopes to encourage cross-discipline collaboration and reduce the usual pattern of academic turf wars.

Faculty members drawn to the rural campus -- there are 60 so far -- welcome the newness. At most institutions, "if you want to make a change, it will be a marginal change," said Art Woodward, a psychology professor recruited from UCLA. "You come here, you make a difference."

Belinda Reyes, an economist who moved to Merced from the Bay Area, recalled a faculty meeting in which she spontaneously suggested starting a public-policy program. The immediate response: "Okay!"

But the students eyeing the campus for the first time on "Bobcat Day" -- named for its future mascot -- were somewhat more hesitant. For its inaugural freshman class, UC-Merced accepted 6,000 applicants and is hoping to get at least 800 to enroll. Along with graduate and transfer students, officials hope to start with about 1,000 altogether. By 2020, the campus could have as many as 25,000 students.

"It's a new campus, and it's got the appeal of it being small," said Michael Campos, 18, of Fremont. "But there are only nine majors so far -- that's to be expected."

Chris Yun, 18, of Cupertino lingered at a bookstore booth. "I like trying new things," he said, explaining why he might pick UC-Merced. "But I'm not sure if it's going to be as good as they say."