UC San Diego profs come up with budget fixer: Close UC Merced

[Tiggeroshii]

Source: Merced Sun Star

C Merced is the target of a group of 23 San Diego professors who have proposed the University of California shutter the campus to save money.

The proposal was written as a letter to leaders at the UC San Diego campus and University Office of the President. The letter was sent anonymously to the Sun-Star on Wednesday afternoon.

As part of a three-point plan, the professors suggested that either one or two campuses should be closed to create an eight- or nine-campus system. They also put Riverside and Santa Cruz on the chopping block.

Read more: http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/942002.html?pageNum=2&mi_pluck_action=page_nav

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Fucking genius. :banghead:

[provis99]

1. I vote Cali close UC San Diego

what selfish assholes these San Diego profs must be. Bet they wouldn't support campus closures if it were their asses on the line.

[slackmaster]

2. San Diego State University is starving its Imperial County campus

Expect more to come.

[DAMANgoldberg]

17. I'm not from CA

but we have similar situations down here in the South. What is the point of UC San Diego and San Diego State University? Don't they have the same enough function to consolidate there? It smacks of the "white school/black school" vibe we have in 2 places in NC, Greensboro (UNC Greensboro and NC A & T) and the Triangle (NC Central U and UNC or NCSU).

[Igel]

18. The UC and Cal State systems supposedly have different

reasons for being. There's some overlap, but UC schools were originally to focus on research and training professionals and those who would go on to grad school, it was intended for the best students to funnel them to either better careers or future education, while Cal State was supposed to focus on teaching, on job training and terminal degrees.

As I said, there's overlap, with more overlap in the last few decades, and with some additional UC campuses coming more in line with CS's mission. Overall the CS schools' faculty still don't focus on research and they tend to have smaller grad programs.

[mnhtnbb]

33. Here's a good summary of the difference in mission between UC

and CSU schools

http://elmo.elmolino.org/~ddemeduc/ucvscsu.html

[sdbell]

55. ucsd, san diego state

UC san diego and San Diego state are completely different schools. They have vastly different admissions standards and academic standards

[litlady]

57. Indeed, and CA is large enough to need both.

CA is over-enrolled at most schools!

[LeftyMom]

3. UC Merced just opened!

And the UC and CSU systems are both turning away qualified students because of lack of slots even at the best of times, so reducing student capacity isn't going to help anyone.

Additionally, part of the reason for building the UC Merced campus was that central California was underserved by the UC and CSU systems (previously if you lived down there you either had to go to CSU Fresno or go away for school, the closest UC campuses would be UCLA, UCD and UCSC, all 3+ hours away by car in good conditions and no traffic) and having a campus in the area that students could live at home and commute to was vital for increasing prospects for higher education in that part of the state, since many students couldn't afford to live at school or didn't want to for various logistical or cultural reasons.

[XemaSab]

9. The Valley needs more UC's, not fewer

(When is Redding going to get a school? :shrug:)

[LeftyMom]

14. I was just wondering about that.

The only school up there is Chico, right? And that's just a CSU, and not exactly the highlight of that system, either. The closest UC, again, is Davis.

[XemaSab]

22. Chico and Humboldt

are the only schools in the northern third of the state

[NBachers]

29. Yay Humboldt

My son's up there. What a great school!

[CreekDog]

34. Look how long it took open Merced

very clever for some San Diego profs to come up with the idea to shut OTHER campuses down.

Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced? :wtf:

[madaboutharry]

4. They are selfish assholes.

I also vote for closure of UC San Diego. Do these people even know that the come off as a bunch of schmucks?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. If the good of the many is considered, UCSD would be a better candidate for closing

Its an expensive campus in an expensive area. Its hard for students to afford to live there, particularly compared to places like Merced. Selling the San Diego facilities would raise all sorts of money for the UC system.

The idea of closing a campus or two has been circulating for some time. Its always a different campus than that of the proponents. Seen it here for years. I teach in the UC system

[varelse]

7. Santa Cruz has the highest cost of living, I think

but they're probably pretty close.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

8. Santa Cruz is a much nicer place than San Diego, so I would support it over UCSD

[varelse]

23. I agree :)

I've lived in both places (and currently reside in Santa Cruz).

[slackmaster]

10. UCSC isn't even close to being in the same league as UCSD academically or in research

SC is really a minor campus by comparison.

[liberation]

46. Depends on which academic program.

UCSD, has some very good programs, but the average is OK. UCSC has some very good programs, with a similar average... it is also a smaller campus. Therefore, academically... UCSC and UCSD are not that different, the main differentiator being that UCSD is a much larger campus. Therefore the condescension from the few UCSD faculty who signed this letter is completely unwarranted, if not down right insulting.

The instigator of the letter is a Sociology professor, so he is most likely unaware of the fact that the state really provides the bare minimum of funding... with most of the money coming via grants, contracts and endowments for each individual department on each campus. Science and engineering depts tend to be net donors, they get most of the grants and contracts. For example, for each dollar my group brings to campus, half of it is used to finance other completely unrelated net debtor programs, usually in the arts and letters. This is deemed fair, because certain fields have less access to grants. So it is mighty ironic for a faculty of a debtor program to display such lack of both empathy and professional courtesy towards other colleagues, some of whom are most likely bringing more money to the UC system than he has brought or is likely to bring during his career.

As a faculty in the UC system I am appalled that some colleagues at UCSD thought that their insulting proposal was good enough to deem distribution. Furthermore, one has to question the competence of a Sociology professor who thinks it is a good idea to leave over 60,000 students out in the cold (never mind the faculty, auxiliary staff, and associated businesses) in the middle of an economic downturn. As I said, the state only provides partial funding for each campus. Furthermore, the savings derived from the closing of those 3 campuses would be orders of magnitude smaller than the catastrophic impact on the economy of california derived from the loss of campus jobs, closing of supporting businesses, lost grants, among other variables. Therefore, Prof. Scull seems to be the personification of "pennywise pound foolish." Maybe a review of his tenure may be in order after all.

[XemaSab]

11. Santa Cruz has a high cost of living because they are a small area with a big school

Would there be any jobs there if not for the UC? :shrug:

[varelse]

24. Well I'm not working for the school

nor are any of the other 600 or so employees working at the same place. ;)

[XemaSab]

43. Yeah, but if the school closed and 500 75K jobs were lost, plus

all the money that the students used to spend in the community was gone, Santa Cruz would look a lot more like Watsonville. :(

[alcibiades_mystery]

25. Tour guide at the Mystery Spot

:hide:

[madaboutharry]

15. I would like to take a moment to tell you

that I have great respect for the UC system. I attended and graduated from UCLA where I received a first class education. Although there were several professors who I would classify as jackasses, my college years were the happiest years of my life. The UC system offers students from all kinds of economic backgrounds the opportunity to obtain a fine education. I hope they figure out a way so that is not taken away.

[Igel]

20. But UCSD is a top-notch school, academically.

The faculty is good, and they're fairly highly ranked. To disband it would disperse the faculty, and it's difficult to put a decent faculty together. Moreover, the campus is in place, and it has a decent library. Cooperation with Scripps is good. It's in a populated area, and while La Jolla is spendy, so's Westwood (for UCLA). UCSD's been trying for years to bill itself as a "third flagship" campus, after UC (for the northern half of Calif.) and UCLA (for the southern half)--USCD implicitly seems to want to break the state into north, middle, and south, with UCLA in the "middle".

Merced is new, and still expanding. It's faculty is either recruited at top dollar to provide instant prestige or they're new and untested. The school's existence is based on a promise to spend more money on buildings and on faculty, on improving the library. At the same time, it's experimental in many ways, and there's not a lot of "synergy" with other institutions in Merced.

A school is needed in the valley for people who don't want to move far away from home, either for psychological or financial reasons, and the presence of a UC campus provides some with a sort of psychological validation, "Yeah, we're important, too"--as though such validation were really needed. Mostly Merced's existence, when first proposed, was political: There were a number of legislators who weren't in UC's hip pocket and so they talked about siting another campus, and while they looked at populations served they also looked, and pondered long and hard, the relative importance of the legislators from the areas "underserved" by UC. Of course, the Calif. legislature has forever been underfunding and critiquing UC for its lack of funding; it's semi-autonomous, and so isn't at the legislature's beck and call.

I don't know if closing Merced would solve the problem.

[aquart]

28. But the teragrid...and Scrips....

[JDPriestly]

30. How about the population?

San Diego County 3,001,072

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&idim=county:06073&q=population+san+diego+county

Merced County 246,117

Fresno State University can serve the are in this crisis.

Add Fresno's population of 909,153 and you still don't have half the population of San Diego County.

Merced University is important, but this may not be a good time for it.

[CreekDog]

35. That's the stupidest reasoning I have ever seen

Counties are not equal units.

The 3 counties surrounding UC Merced have 1.5 million people. UC Merced is much smaller than UCSD.

Secondly, San Diego has both UCSD and SDSU.

Thirdly, Fresno is damn far from that part of the valley.

I hate this kind of crap.

[LeftyMom]

38. Merced pulls from a region from roughly Stockton to Bakersfield.

There's NO other UC in driving distance in that population, and CSUF wasn't adequate to serve that area or nobody'd have built UC Merced in the first place.

That area's comparatively disadvantaged and this is a major long term investment in changing that. The money has already been spent, closing an existing school now WHEN THE OTHER UC CAMPUSES CAN NOT ABSORB THE ADDED ENROLLMENT would create more problems than it would solve, and yes, many of those problems would be expensive.

[XemaSab]

44. I would guess the UC pulls from throughout the state

Can't get into Berkeley? UCLA didn't want you?

Maybe the bar is a little lower in Merced, and you'll still graduate with a UC education. :shrug:

[varelse]

6. My parents live in San Diego

I've just emailed them and asked them to drop by and deliver a piece of my mind, since they are 500 miles closer to the problem than I am at the moment.

[Platypus]

12. What are they smoking?

I don't know as much about Merced or Riverside, but I've had occasion to check out Santa Cruz because of some interesting work there in my own field (computer science) and I'd have to say San Diego is picking the wrong fight there. UCSC is the rising star of the system, second only to Berkeley by many standard measures. Meanwhile, UCSD is sitting in the same town as a Cal State campus. Which one is providing greater incremental value, again? Which one's the more obvious target for closure or consolidation to reduce duplication within the state's overall tertiary-education system? The UCSD letter was written because faculty there felt that proposed system-wide cuts would mean "the end of the campus as we know it" (primary author Andrew Scull's exact words). Note that it's the same percentage cut everywhere, but only UCSD considers itself weak enough to be endangered. When the UCSD folks demand that the system consider "culling the herd" so that resources can be reallocated to the remaining campuses, they're painting the bulls-eye on their own back.

I feel bad for the students there, but the people who wrote and signed that letter can go jump.

[JDPriestly]

31. Santa Cruz population: 253,137

Santa Cruz, I've heard, has a beautiful campus. But it does not serve a vital urban population.

It does not have the community that San Diego has. It does not have the economic importance of San Diego.

[liberation]

47. You would be surprised to know that UC campuses tend to have students that are not local.

See, there are these "new" inventions called car and bus which allow people to travel from one city to another in a matter of minutes to hours.

Using the same faulty logic, actually one of campuses that should be at the top of the closure considerations should be UCSB which serves an even smaller population, and which is further away from major urban centers than UCSC or UCR.

[bluestateguy]

13. Tax and legalize pot, release all non-violent drug inmates

and stop enforcing other non-violent drug "crimes".

[truthisfreedom]

19. Exactly. This is the very first, very human step to cutting costs all over the US.

We have no choice.

[Alcibiades]

16. They should raise tuition

Specifically in-state tuition. When you compare what you get in Cali versus most state schools anywhere in the country, it would still be quite a bargain.

But there are also a lot of gold-plated programs and facilities in the UC system. Problem is, it's easier to get a Mondavi Center built than it is to get the same donors to do something to alleviate the budget pressure.

[Igel]

21. Tuition?

Last I heard, UC couldn't charge tuition. It charged fees. By its charter the cost of in-state tuition was $0 to students. They started off by having various fees for reasonable things like health insurance, athletics, student government.

Then, during a budget crunch, they instituted "fees" for non-academics. This included landscaping, administration, maintenance, security, and a long list of sundry other "non-academic" activities that needed funding. It kept getting harder and harder to keep tuition free for in-state residents, and they kept squeezing every dollar possible into "non-academic", while keeping faculty salaries clearly in the "academic" category.

I think by '99 they had lost a clear connection and fees had increased more than they could justify, but nobody raised a ruckus. Still, I know UCLA (and UC in general) kept academic and non-academic funds strictly segregated in their budgeting until at least June '99 when I stopped being active in administrative circles there and no longer had access to a fair amount of the school's budget information.

[Alcibiades]

36. They just call them fees

Which you know. They have pretty much given up the pretense that the fees they charge are not tuition. At Davis, the largest fee is the "educational fee," which is $6,262.00 a year. It's tuition.

Still, even with the increases, when you compare what you get in the UC system to other state systems, it's a bargain for in-state folks, and even out-of-state folks.

[LeftyMom]

39. Long term, the Mondavi Center makes money for Davis. It's an investment.

UCD hosts events there and rents it out to other organizations for their events. A nice venue like that also helps to draw good speakers and performers and reduces the perception that Davis is a relatively ag college, which is kind of a neat trick considering that it's maybe 100 yards from farmed land. That perception of being a cultured, world-class institution in turn brings more students, more money, more funding for other projects.

Raising tuition isn't really a practical option. Tuition is already high enough to keep a lot of qualified students out. If anything, long-term we really need to be bringing costs back down in the UC and CSU systems, especially for means-tested students (to compare, CA's junior college system waives fees for low-moderate income students.)

It's not all that long ago that public higher education in California was free or very close to it, and may Ronald Reagan be buggered with an extremely large pineapple for changing that.

[KamaAina]

50. I'll even send him the pineapple

by FedEx. (Or is that DeadEx?) :evilgrin:

[caseymoz]

26. I have an idea, why not close down the entire city of San Diego

Put the whole population on indefinite furlough. That will balance the budget. I don't Californians would miss it too much . . ..

[jclincali]

27. UC Merced is kind of a dud. Something needs to be done about it regardless of budget issues.

[Tiggeroshii]

37. How so?

UC Merced
-The first American research university to be built in the 21st century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Merced)
-The UC with the most affordable cost of living.
-The only such UC in the region of central CA.
-One of the "greenest" campuses in the nation. (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/ITU.pdf)

As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty necessary, and they've worked hard to get it to reach some demanding standards. It just opened. How can you declare it a dud?

[jclincali]

41. Extremely low enrollment, unpopular to students attending and merced's local community.

Campus looks like a prison, and feels like one too. Not built on time and enrollment is nowhere near expected.
Basically, a disaster.

[Tiggeroshii]

45. I think it looks pretty nice

Despite it being small, I know a lot of people who've attended who are pleased by it's design. Can you provide a link regarding it's enrollment being lower then expected? I can provide two that support much to the contrary.

http://www.dailycal.org/data/pdf/2058.pdf

http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/10012008_uc_merced_exceeds_enrollment.asp

[liberation]

48. I think UC Merced has had 1 graduating class, if at all (they opened in 05 I believe)

Calling it a dud is kind of premature...

[litlady]

58. Many students have not heard about it yet, and many programs have not been funded yet.

Merced is headed in the right direction with accreditation, research university status, strong faculty, green campus, and some interdisciplinary programs that will be impressive.

No university can really be judged until at least 8-10 years into its life.

[XemaSab]

53. "Green?"

It's built on some of the best vernal pool habitat in the state. x(

[lolly]

51. WoW! After all of, what, 2 years?

Good thing you aren't rushing to judgment! Wonder what you would've thought of the ragtag bunch of students who fled Oxford to found that crappy little fly-by-night place known as Cambridge.

[merwin]

32. And that is why the professors do not run the school. They are apparently too dumb to send it to

the right people. They'd most likely get some kind of support in their quest from at least a few board members, but the President will laugh it off.

[dd20045]

40. hold up here guys/gals

lets get made at the professors and not the university. many students work very hard at ucsd and have done great research in the science and medical fields. moreover, many of the students that go there are not from san diego and come from all over the country and world. furthermore many students are of very low income households and yet our great and thoughtful governor wants to get rid of cal grants. how bout we close down the govenor's office or use some of his campaign money to fund california???

[No Elephants]

42. If only California had a Republican Governor, that state would be in great fiscal shape.

Maybe Arnold will just privatize California.

[KamaAina]

49. NOOOOOOO!!!!! Save the Banana Slugs!!

Seriesly, UCSC is an innovator; for instance, it's the only public university to adopt the residential college system (similar to my alma mater Yale).

[lolly]

52. UCSC has done some major scientific work

First to map the human genome:

http://www.cbse.ucsc.edu/research/hgp_race


Also, believe they have a major astrophysics project going on there.

But I guess that doesn't compare with a couple sociologists at UCSD . . .

[rschop]

54. Reducing the high costs of a college education

How about making an online University of California and doing away with most of the expensive costs of these schools?

The costs would next to zero, and the number of students could be unlimited, and the pace of learning the material would be up to the student. Why on earth are people still sitting on their big fat buts in a stuffy class room in 2009 any way? Isn’t about time the universities joined the 21 century?

[litlady]

56. This story is a few weeks old, and certainly angered many professors...

he wanted to close three schools (Merced, Riverside, and Santa Cruz).

I can't begin to note how much I disagreed with this arrogant professor.