The First Public Research Institution To Be Built in Decades Rises in Merced
By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 15, 2005
MERCED, Calif. -- The high school seniors visiting the University of California campus here this spring got a typical sales pitch -- about the small classes taught by top professors, the spacious living quarters, the exquisitely fresh food served by a dining hall that pipes in the hottest new music.
But they did not get a chance to be briefed by worldly sophomores, or sit in on one of those great classes, or even loll on a grassy quad to ponder a future here -- because none of those things exists quite yet. Opening in September to make room for a surging student population, the University of California at Merced is the first new public research university to be built from the ground up anywhere in the nation in at least a generation.
"You'll have the chance to be trailblazers," Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the university chancellor, told several hundred prospective freshmen visiting the campus -- now just a construction site framed by grazing cows and a stark Sierra mountain vista -- on a recent Saturday.
For, indeed, the project is taking California into something like uncharted territory: No one even thinks about starting new research universities these days.
UC leaders say building a school from scratch is allowing them to reinvent the university concept with new efficiencies and innovations -- from the way the buildings are cooled to the way academic disciplines are organized -- that would be hard to attempt at long-established institutions. But some critics fret that investing in a brand-new full-service campus is an overly expensive solution at a time of tight budgets.
"What if the tradeoff is that some kids won't get into college at all because the resources are tied up where they don't need it?" asked Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
The last big wave of new campus development came in the 1960s, as states scrambled to educate the baby-boom generation. That was when the foundations were poured for schools such as George Mason University in Fairfax, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the most recent UC campuses, in Irvine and Santa Cruz.
But ever since the latest boomlet began graduating from the nation's high schools in the late 1990s, most states have simply squeezed more students into their existing campuses, or nudged more applicants off to private or second-tier institutions. The Golden State is one of the few to have built even modest-size undergraduate colleges in recent years -- the new Cal State campuses at Monterey Bay and the Channel Islands -- and none has attempted to launch a major research institution.
California, though, has historically promised not just a seat at a state school for every student who wants one, but a place at the best institutions -- the UC campuses -- for the best students. For years, the top 12.5 percent of the state's high school graduating students have been guaranteed admission to at least one of the UC campuses.
As officials began preparing for the next wave of growth, UC leaders resisted the idea of simply expanding their nine campuses, which now average about 25,000 students each. "They would become so large you'd lose something," Tomlinson-Keasey said.
They began planning a new campus in 1988 -- around the time members of its first freshman class were born -- and in 1995 picked its site just outside this farming town of 70,000 in the center of the vast San Joaquin Valley. University leaders said the location would help them reach out to a poor and academically underserved population, which over the years has sent relatively few of its students to UC institutions.
But the site choice drew criticism from some who saw it as a sop to the region's politically prominent boosters. Critics argued that a new campus would make more sense in one of the state's population centers. No less than the state's then-Senate President Pro Tem John Burton publicly denounced UC-Merced as "the biggest boondoggle ever."
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."