"UC Merced"
Will there be a tenth UC campus?
By William Trombley
Senior Editor
THE UNIVERSITY OF California's plan to build a tenth campus near Merced seems to have been moved to the back burner.
The university's official position is that a "first phase" of the next campus will be ready by the year 2005, but privately top administrators say that date is unrealistic unless the state comes up with much more money for "UC Merced" than is anticipated.
There is also substantial internal opposition to the tenth campus--from chancellors of other UC campuses who fear that the San Joaquin Valley venture will eat into their budgets.
UC enrollment is expected to grow by about 32,000 students in the next decade, mostly at the undergraduate level.
Present plans call for the university to accommodate this growth by expanding six general campuses--Davis, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and San Diego. (UC Berkeley and UCLA are at capacity and San Francisco is primarily a health science campus).
"We've got plenty of capacity at existing campuses, at least until 2005," Lawrence C. Hershman, UC budget director, said in an interview, although he acknowledged that increasing campus size would create "community problems" in some cases.
Enrollment at UC Riverside is to be increased from 9,000 to about 30,000, although it is not clear how large numbers of new undergraduates are to be lured to what has been one of the university's least popular campuses.
Daniel Simmons, associate provost for educational relations, said a tenth campus would be needed sometime between 2005 and 2010, even if UC Riverside reaches the 30,000 target.
Simmons said little has happened at the 2,000-acre "UC Merced" location (which is in a remote area of pasture land) with regard to roads, sewers or other infrastructure, since the UC Board of Regents selected the site last May. The regents have taken an option on the land, which was donated by an educational trust, but have not made a final commitment to build.
However, a committee of faculty members and administrators is working on a preliminary academic plan for the new campus, hoping to present it to the university's statewide Academic Senate and the California Postsecondary Education Commission in about a year.
Hershman said $350 million in state funds would be needed to open a "first phase" campus for about 5,000 students in 2005 or thereabouts. "I agree that we have an obligation to serve the San Joaquin Valley," he said, "but someone's got to show me where we get the money."
Although budget cuts that marked the early 1990s have stopped and UC's state appropriations have risen last year and this, the university faces "several years of catch-up" on the other campuses before it can think seriously about Merced, the budget director said.
"The other campuses are leery about the tenth campus," said Simmons. "They see it as a real resource drain."
He also noted that Fresno-area legislators, who pressed UC hard to establish a campus in the San Joaquin Valley, have shown less enthusiasm for the idea since the Merced site was picked over two that were closer to Fresno.
While an opening date for the tenth campus remains uncertain, UC plans to expand its "outreach" activities in the Fresno area, according to Simmons. The UC Davis Extension Center program will be enlarged and there are plans for a "learning center," where students could take lower division course before transferring to a UC campus.
Meanwhile, Simmons, who has been the principal advocate among UC statewide administrators for the tenth campus, plans to leave by the end of the year and return to his old job as a law professor at UC Davis.
