Dear UC Merced Colleagues:
It is a pleasure to welcome you back for the 2012-2013 academic year. I hope the summer months afforded you a chance to travel, explore, stretch your minds, spend time with family and friends or otherwise renew and reinvigorate the spirit that drives and sustains you.
We begin the new year with some important milestones — our largest class and more competitive class of incoming freshmen (nearly 1,500 students), our largest contingent of graduate students (321 students, up 23 percent over last year) and 26 new ladder-rank faculty members to teach and conduct world-class research in the great UC tradition. Faculty and staff combined now total 1,200, while total student enrollment is now approximately 5,600.
These are important metrics for our young campus as we begin our eighth academic year and seek to increase our contributions to the UC system, the San Joaquin Valley, the state and the world.
It is especially noteworthy that we continue to attract bright students, extraordinary faculty and talented staff during a time of seemingly relentless budget cutting and fiscal constraints at both the state and UC system level. I commend each of you for the hard work, dedication and commitment you've shown in our quest to become the world’s next great public research university.
The budgetary challenges facing the UC system as a whole could ease considerably if California voters pass Gov. Brown’s revenue measure (Proposition 30) in November. If passed, Prop 30 would restore $125 million in state funding to the University of California, allowing the system to avoid additional tuition and fee increases this year.
If Proposition 30 does not pass, an additional $250 million in state funding would be cut automatically from the UC budget, almost certainly necessitating mid-year tuition increases.
While it's impossible to predict how voters will respond to this measure, we’ll stay in close touch with the UC Office of the President to ensure our need for sustained funding remains a top system priority regardless of how the legislation fares.
On a related note, I encourage you to visit the UC Merced advocacy page to learn how you can help in our advocacy efforts with lawmakers.
Despite the uncertain fiscal situation, UC Merced will continue to focus on its evolution from a start-up to a more mature University of California campus.
This will require giving even greater attention to recruiting and supporting outstanding graduate students and strategic investments in areas of emerging research distinction and prominence.
With the advice and guidance of the UC Merced Division Council Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation, I will launch an initiative this year designed to identify initial areas for strategic investment. We will also imagine the distinctive features of UC Merced as a highly competitive research university campus with about 10,000 students, and use this as a basis for planning.
This year will also see a continuing focus on improving internal communications, various process-improvement efforts, and the construction or completion of several important new buildings on our campus.
Tomorrow, the Student Activities and Athletics Center will come online, followed by Student Services Building and Housing 4 (both about a year from now), and finally Science and Engineering 2 (fall 2014). These projects will expand our physical facilities by approximately 25 percent and provide much-needed research, academic, housing and recreational space.
However, adding capacity beyond our Phase 1 "golf course" footprint is likely to require considerable creativity and flexibility, given the ongoing financial uncertainties facing the state and the UC system. To that end, we announced late last month that we’ve retained the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a nonprofit land-use and planning organization, to help identify cost-effective alternatives for acquiring and financing additional space.
From Sept. 9 through 14, a team of consultants from ULI will work with campus leadership to develop a range of options — both on and off campus — that will accommodate projected enrollment of 10,000 students within the next eight to 10 years.
Any off-campus possibilities that might emerge from this process are likely to be in areas where UC Merced already has a presence, such as Atwater, Fresno and Merced. We will provide periodic updates as this study moves ahead.
I would like to close this brief letter with a personal reflection on my first year as your chancellor. What I've come to recognize is the depth of the challenges you were aware of long before I arrived, and the dedication and perseverance that have been required to respond to these challenges. I now fully recognize that working together to solve problems, big and small, as this young university campus continues to invent itself, will be critical to our future success.
We will benefit enormously by tapping into the collective brainpower that is here, by inventing new ways to collaborate across silos and by supporting each other in the work we do.
I look forward to working even more closely with you this year to continue the noble endeavor that has brought us all together at this magical place.
Thank you for all you’ve done to bring us this far and for the contributions you will continue to make during the academic year.
Sincerely,
Dorothy Leland
Chancellor
