8 May 2000 |
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| To: | Committee on Planning and Budget Committee on Educational Policy Graduate Council Interested UCSC Faculty |
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| From: | Gary Glatzmaier and Bill Ladusaw Co-Chairs, Santa Clara Valley Regional Center Academic Planning Task Force |
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Today, we are posting an interim draft of the report of the Academic Planning Task Force. Our task force was charged by Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Simpson to provide academic direction for the implementation of the Santa Clara Valley Regional Center. Our group has been constituted in conjunction with a parallel committee that is examining academic support features of the center such as its physical location and needed characteristics, development and outreach activities, financial models, student services, etc. We solicit your input and comments on our draft. Between now and the beginning of June (when we are scheduled to issue our report), we will be working on the other elements of our charge and thinking hard about the question of the general methods and procedures by which new programmatic initiatives will be implemented. We also solicit your input on that topic. Please send your comments to us at aptf@cats.ucsc.edu. Many thanks in advance for your thoughtful and constructive input. |
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Table of Contents
Curricular Models for the Regional Center Curriculum
Lift-off and Evaluation Conditions
Assessment of the Center as a Whole
The June 17, 1999 report from the Santa Clara Valley Initiative Committee recommended that UCSC develop a regional center in Santa Clara Valley which would address the three missions of the University: instruction, research, and service. The Center will provide a visible presence for UC in the Santa Clara Valley and serve as a base for UCSC's extension operation in the valley, support our admissions outreach and community service in the area, and improve research and industrial collaborations. The committee also recommended that UCSC expand its instructional effort in the valley to take advantage of opportunities for serving new populations of students and to assist the campus in accommodating increased student enrollment.
Executive Vice Chancellor John Simpson convened this Academic Planning Taskforce for the Santa Clara Valley Regional Center (SCVRC) in March 2000. Our primary charge was to provide academic direction for the implementation of the SCVRC by providing a plan to guide the origination of curricular offerings for the Center. We were asked for recommendations for: A long-range, general framework for Regional Center academic planning and general methods and procedures by which new programmatic initiatives will be implemented. In addition, we were also asked to (i) develop an enrollment plan and (ii) provide an assessment of the general profile of the instructional activities likely to be situated within the Center.
We report here the result of our initial consideration of the issues surrounding academic planning for the Center. We have focused on how the Center can extend the regular UCSC curriculum to take advantage of the opportunities there without distorting academic planning for this campus or unduly drawing away resources which would be better deployed in strengthening existing programs or supporting new initiatives here. Below we detail a long-range framework for evaluating programs for the Center and assessing their impact on general campus academic planning and monitoring the development of enrollment at the Center. Our task is not to develop a specific curriculum but to recommend the guidelines for the selection of programs for the SCVRC which meet the goals of the Center.
After discussing the issues with the Deans, Department Chairs, and many of the faculty, this Task Force recommends a framework that places highest priority on the establishment and maintenance of programs that enhance the academic programs of UCSC by capitalizing on the Silicon Valley location. Lower priority should be placed on the goal of using the Center to accommodate anticipated increases in general student enrollment.
The choice is forced, we think, if the primary goal in developing SCVRC to develop programs of which UCSC can be proud. If the Center is successful and attractive, the main campus will benefit and the student enrollment will be reached.
Curricular Models for the Regional Center Curriculum
We have considered two models that could be the goal of academic planning for the Center. One attempts to provide a full four-year undergraduate curriculum with additional graduate programs, which would work from the beginning toward supporting the enrollment of more than 1,000 student FTE at the Center. The other focuses on upper-division and graduate education. We recommend the second model.
The first model would in essence aim for establishing a new undergraduate college of UCSC at the SCVRC so that students could enter the college from high school and have some version of a UCSC experience. This model would stand the best chance of reaching the goal of 1,000 to 2,000 additional student FTE's in the near future.
However this model would require UCSC to mount a fully developed lower-division curriculum for undergraduate students at the Center. We believe that this would require substantial numbers of UCSC faculty to commute to provide individual courses at the Center, which would be impractical, or else have a large percentage of the courses provided by teleconferencing from the main campus or by temporary lecturer faculty, which is inconsistent with our dedication to the UCSC format of undergraduate teaching. As a result, we think that the Center curriculum and the students enrolled there would be perceived as second-class citizens of UCSC. We do not think that it makes sense to attempt to replicate a smaller version of UCSC at the Center.
In addition, we believe that this model would not make effective use of intersegmental cooperation with the existing higher education institutions in the valley. In particular, the community colleges in the Valley currently provide effective lower-division education to 87,000 students. Since the average transfer student to UCSC does at least as well as the average UCSC-educated student, we do not see a positive advantage in concentrating our initial efforts to developing a full general undergraduate program there. Successful expansion of the curriculum into broader undergraduate coverage would be better left until the complexities of ensuring engagement by campus faculty in the Center and the effectiveness of delivering curriculum at a distance have been tested and developed with programs of more targeted attractiveness.
Targeted Upper-division and Graduate Programs
We recommend that the SCVRC curriculum focus mainly on upper division and graduate courses for which there is a clear motivation for taking advantage of the opportunities in the valley. There are two sources of positive motivation for programs there: to extend access to UC (and UCSC) to new eligible populations there and to enable UCSC students and faculty to take advantage of resources and opportunities for research in an urban region with a high concentration of high tech enterprise.
The SCVRC should provide new opportunities for research and internship experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. Curricular offerings at the Center could provide special preparatory courses for UCSC majors which target some of the 87,000 community college students, potentially increasing the transfer rate or expanding the population of transfers to UCSC. We also believe that several departments, particularly those with high-demand undergraduate majors, could project coherent disciplinary or interdisciplinary subprograms into the Center.
The SCVRC should be composed of programs that would significantly benefit by being located in the Valley. This constraint should help to maintain the same academic standards held at the main campus. Programs should be selected based on their potential for successful and meaningful collaborations with research and industrial organizations in the Valley and based on the needs of commuter students, research partners, and regional employers. We think that by pursuing this initial strategy, we are more likely to develop an attractive center that would build student enrollment.
The SCVRC should also provide many university services. For example, access to most of the UCSC-based student business services, on-site academic and career advising, evening and weekend "discussion sections", and social events for residential and commuter students.
In our discussion with divisional deans, chairs, and general faculty, we have heard many suggestions for programs that would fall into our target category. Many of the suggestions which have been floated are in emerging areas of science and technology, for which a positive motivation for location at the center would stem from the availability of expertise and resources as well as demand from industry in the valley. Others connect with social issues that could be profitably studied in the region. In addition there is demonstrated demand in the state for the education of new teachers. To illustrate some ways in which programs may have a positive motivation for location in the valley, we describe four programs which, reasoning from our assessment of the types of program which would serve the population of the Santa Clara region well, we think would rank high on this criterion if relevant faculty and departments on the campus are interested in developing concrete proposals.
In mentioning these particular areas, we do not seek to overly privilege them in the planning processes nor do we warrant that there is current support in the relevant departments to forward specific proposals. But we believe that they represent good illustrations of potentially successful programs which would both grow naturally out of the UCSC faculty and have a positive motivation for location at the SCVRC.
The Committee on Planning and Budget published an analysis of the proposal to establish the Regional Center that articulates several concerns about planning and financing the SCVRC. These concerns have informed our discussions and we endorse them. We address in Appendix # the seven specific points raised in their report.
A major concern raised in the CPB report of February 9, 2000, regards the extent to which the SCVRC can be developed and sustained without negative impact on the allocation of resources to campus programs. Many faculty have expressed real concern about the re-direction of resources, both personnel and money, from campus programs in need of further support. Funding for the development and initial implementation of the SCVRC must come from separate core or forward funding. We also believe that the subsidization of the center programs by the main campus should be minimized in the long run. A accounting system should make clear the extent of the balance between cost and benefit for individual programs. The SCVRC should be an investment that has the potential, if done well, to provide wide ranging potential benefits to UCSC.
For the Center to succeed, faculty need to become excited about the opportunities for education and collaboration. Currently most rank and file faculty show little genuine enthusiasm for the development of the center. Their view of the potential benefits to the campus is moderated by concerns about the potential negative consequences for the development of other campus programs and for their own conditions of work should current faculty be required to teach at the center.
This excitement should motivate leadership. Many faculty look toward the Engineering Division for this leadership since it currently has the most experience with distance learning and research collaborations "over the hill". The Dean and Chairs of Engineering are enthusiastic and willing to take the lead but, like all the other Divisions, do not feel the cost of developing the SCVRC should come out of their main campus programs.
The Task Force agrees. If UCSC does build the SCVRC it has to be a clear success and that it will require major funding commitments from the State, UCOP, and the Valley (e.g., NASA Ames, the city of San Jose, private industry).
The remainder of this report is devoted to specifying what types of programs we see as attractive candidates for basing at the center. We then discuss the proposed planning and evaluation model. Appendix # represents our attempt to take some of the initial proposals that have been floated by faculty and departments as illustrative of how we see the planning process unfolding.
Following on from the assumption that highest priority should be given to programs which make "positive sense" for siting at the SCVRC, we have discussed the profiles of several types of viable programs. For a program to be viable in the sense intended it would ideally provide sufficient curricular offerings to allow students to have the center as their primary or only locus for instruction and for which on-site support could be provided to faculty and students involved in the program.
If we step back from the idea of a full campus, a mini-UCSC, then the highest priority would not be to develop a program which would take entering UC frosh students and attempt to deliver lower-division curriculum to them. Lower-division students are well-served by enrollment in UCSC's main campus or in the community colleges in the area. Effort expended in mounting a full lower-division curriculum would be redundant with the effort of the community colleges and would isolate entering students from the experience of the full range of resources of the main campus. However there are several types of program which are focussed and attractive enough to draw sufficient number of students to be supportable. These include:
Lift-off and Evaluation Conditions
To move from an idea for a program that makes positive sense for the center to actually inaugurating the program, a proposal should clarify what it would take to begin. These would involve development or start-up resources required and an estimate of the on-going requirements for the program.
Programs at the center may need to be more opportunistic than programs on the main campus. They should develop a constituency sufficient to sustain them without undue subsidization from the main campus. It may also be that the areas of focus in emerging areas of research may be more subject to change and the programs should respond to those changes. Hence proposals should characterize up-front the basis on which a decision to renew commitment to them should be made after a trial run of, say, 5 years.
Based upon these two criteria, a decision can be made for which programs to initiate at the center within the resource commitments that the university, the campus and the community are able to provide.
Concern has been expressed that the activities of the SCVRC might be a net drain on resources which would be better devoted to strengthening main campus programs. This is a serious concern and each program should be monitored fairly to reveal the balance between resources required and the contributions that it makes to the campus. This will require a means of assessing the extent to which programs at the center, and the center itself, are drawing on campus resources beyond the level returned by enrollment and leveraged contributions from the university, the state, and private contributions.
Accounting for this balance will require that each program be assessed as part of the proposal process for the student FTE supported and committed funds from other sources.
Assessment of the Center as a Whole
It is useful to apply the same criteria that we propose for the evaluation and description of candidate programs to the SCVRC as a whole. What are the pre-conditions that must be met for the center to be successfully launched? What is the basis for evaluating its success? How can its development be monitored to assess the extent to which it represents a draw on campus resources which are not repaid by return in enrollment at the center or other benefits to the campus?
A full response to these questions will require elaboration which we are not ready to give at this stage. However several points have emerged in our discussion which we believe are important to highlight at this stage because they address the concerns that CPB has articulated about the unfolding of the planning.
The project of developing the SCVRC differs only in magnitude but not in kind from the planning for an additional UC campus. In particular, considerable faculty and administrative effort will be required to develop appropriate programming for the center and it is not realistic to believe that the center can from the beginning be self-sustaining. As a result, it is clear to us that core funding for the years of planning and startup will be needed which supports both the administrative effort and releases faculty to devote attention to the development and implementation of these programs. It is also likely that some of the resource requirements of the center will have to be forward funded in anticipation of developing sustainable enrollments.
An on-going concern to the campus will be insuring that the center does not create a debilitating drain on resources for development of the Santa Cruz campus in either the capital or the operational budget.
We believe that the conditions on the startup of the center should include:
From here, planning for the center must get more specific. Program proposals, following from the suggestions in the appendices or new proposals, must be made concrete enough to be reviewed by the normal campus academic planning process. Clearly all such proposals from divisions will need to be vetted by the Committee for Planning and Budget, the Committee on Educational Policy, and the Graduate Council of the academic senate.
We do not believe that a coherent, strong center will necessarily result from distributed decisions made about individual programs. Particularly during the first five years of its existence, attention will be needed to insure that it the overall planning for the center is evaluated independently of the general campus process. We therefore believe that the administration should move as rapidly as possible to designate academic administrative leadership for the center.
The proposed Regional Center will succeed only if it has effective and energetic leadership. Dynamic leadership will be essential during the early stages, and in the longer term, an effective academic leader will be crucial if the Center is to have intellectual and academic cohesion and be something more than an aggregation of programs and courses. That kind of cohesion will emerge, we think, only if the Center can benefit from the vision and single-mindedness of a full-time director.
The challenges facing the director will be very substantial indeed. We take it to be very important, then, that the right kind of person be appointed to the position and that that person be given the incentives and the resources to do the job properly.
If the director is to be effective, we regard it as absolutely crucial that (s)he have the full confidence and support of the Academic Senate. We view this director as someone who must be able to establish academic, intellectual, and structural vision for the Center in order build upon the admittedly equivocal current support of the UCSC faculty.
If faculty confidence is to be assured, the director must be a senior member of the Academic Senate with substantial administrative experience and a strong intellectual record. Furthermore, the process by which the director is selected will have to be as transparent as possible and must involve close consultation with the Academic Senate—represented, presumably, by the senate leadership in one or more of the major committees (CPB and/or the Senate Advisory Committee). Both the choice of director and the process by which (s)he is chosen will prove crucial in establishing a thriving Center.
In addition, the senate leadership should form a committee of representatives from relevant senate committees (at least CPB, CEP, Graduate Council, and Faculty Welfare). The charge should be to monitor the overall planning process to insure that the development of the academic aspects of the center are coherent from the beginning and to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the recommendations of this taskforce.
The establishment of a SCVRC and the proposed projection of UCSC campus curriculum to students there raise a number of attractive possibilities for individual faculty and programs. The attractiveness is strongest to faculty when it is seen as a way to increase research and collaborative opportunities and we have encountered faculty who are conditionally interested in pursuing some specific ideas. However the view of potential positive benefit to the campus is obscured for most faculty by concerns that development of the center will negatively impact campus program growth and their own personal quality of life and conditions of work.
We advocate an initial strategy for academic planning which seeks programs which have clear positive motivation for location at the center and which show promise of meeting student demand in the valley and the state at large while taking advantage of collaborative relationships which enhance institutional research and instruction. Independent funding of development and the careful tracking of the balance of costs and benefits during the start-up of the initial programs together with effective leadership and oversight of the center will be, we believe, the best way to nurture enthusiasm for the center and insure its success.
Task Force Members: Professor Gary Glatzmaier (co-Chair), Professor Bill Ladusaw (co-Chair), Professor George Blumenthal, Professor Jim Clifford, Professor Russ Flegel, Associate Professor Darrell Long, Professor Jim McCloskey, Professor Barry McLaughlin, Assistant Professor Mary Beth Pudup, Professor Frank Talamantes, Director-Senior Lecturer John Wilkes, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Bridges (ex officio), Vice Provost Academic Affairs Crosby (ex officio), Vice Chancellor of Research Gill (ex officio), and Vice Provost and Dean Undergraduate Education Goff (ex officio).
The Santa Clara Valley Regional Center Academic Planning Task Force appointment letter is also available on-line.
Your comments on the task force's interim report are welcome.
http://www.ucsc.edu/planbudg/aptf/scvrc-5-8-00.htm, posted 5/8/2000.