Chancellor's Address

Chancellor Greenwood's Address to the UCSC Community

M.R.C. Greenwood, Chancellor
University of California, Santa Cruz
October 2, 2001

A web broadcast of Chancellor Greenwood's address to the campus community

Introduction

Good afternoon everyone.

All of us who witnessed the events of September 11th saw history in the making -- and we will continue to witness it, be part of it, and live through it for the rest of our lives. We are in the midst of profound changes in America -- changes in our attitudes and in our priorities.

Long before the events of September 11th, I decided that after five years on campus, it was time to talk with you about a few issues that are important to our university community. And I will still do that. But I am sure I share with many of you the feeling that the more mundane aspects of day-to-day life, the normal challenges of our campus, seem to pale in the face of the nation's stark new reality. And then I realized there is no better place to be in the days to come than in one of the nation's best research universities.

Let me take time today to talk about how far we, as a community, have come in the past five years. Then I will talk about where I think we need to go in the next period of time, both as a consequence of our comprehensive planning efforts already under way, and in light of recent events.

I don't know what the long-term outcomes of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will be, and frankly, I don't believe anyone knows. But, I do know that our nation's great research universities -- including ours -- will play a pivotal role in the collective response to the tragic events of September 11th. These times call for the ingenuity of people like us to help meet the enormous national challenge that lies ahead.

Some of you may recall Vannevar Bush, the architect of American science policy and in many ways the architect of the modern research university. In a commencement speech at Harvard in June 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, he presciently stressed that "the power of an attack rests very largely on surprise, and surprise in turn rests on ignorance." How right he was, and now we know the horrendous price of ignorance.

As we are once again learning, our universities need to play an ever-larger role in combating ignorance.

But first, let me put the "research university," as a unique social institution, into perspective. Most of the great ideas of the past 50 years -- in the post-World War II era, when the American research university as we know it began -- have originated in these institutions. Think about it: From advances in fundamental physics and astronomy, to the unraveling of the human genome, to the birth of the women's movement, to the creation of an information-based economy, to new and exciting art forms, research universities have been the hubs where those ideas were born and nurtured.

In the past three weeks, there has been confusion and lack of understanding about who perpetrated the terrorist acts, or why. But it was the universities -- including our own -- that provided experts with the most insight and understanding about cultures, possible motivations, and the intents of the terrorists. In fact, many of our faculty in our four interdisciplinary centers in the humanities and social sciences came forward quickly to share their deep expertise with both the campus community and the news media. Just on Sunday afternoon, for example, as I was listening to our local public radio station, KUSP, I heard many callers comment on how much they learned from the UCSC faculty who participated in talk shows during the past few weeks.

So you see, UC Santa Cruz, with an environment of careful analysis and understanding, is already well positioned to play an important role in guiding the next generation of students and future scholars.

UC Santa Cruz as a model

When I arrived on campus over five years ago, I asked for your help in facing our challenges and in building our institution. You responded magnificently. Let's take a few moments to review what together we have accomplished since then.

As you know, this year we were ranked second in the world in the physical sciences in citations; and, in one of the few quantitative analyses of its kind, we were ranked overall in the top 15 public research universities.

In our alumni, we have many successes as well. For example, in the arts, our 1974 alumnus, Kent Nagano, one of the outstanding conductors in the world and now the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, just 10 days ago led a brilliant, and powerfully moving performance of Lohengrin. That performance, just four days after the tragic events, was a testament of the triumph of creativity and spirit over agonizing circumstances.

I have said this before and I say it here once again: We are one of the very few research universities launched in the past 35 years to reach such a high level of distinction. There is much for our students, faculty, staff, and community to be proud of. The hard evidence shows indisputably that we are an extraordinary success story, and it is time for all of us to celebrate that success in our conversations with those who might say otherwise -- while at the same time look forward to where we can and must go.

In 1998, the Millennium Report, guided ably by faculty co-chairs Professor Gail Hershatter and Professor Marc Mangel, provided us with central principles for what has become our mission statement, to be "an outstanding public research university with an uncommon commitment to high-quality undergraduate education." We've come a long way in building this "outstanding public research institution with an uncommon commitment to education at all levels."

Let me first talk about undergraduate education. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, has said that perhaps the most important product of an undergraduate education in a changing, fragmented society may be "a critical mind, free of dogma, but nourished by human values." Now, more than ever, we must work hard toward this critically important product.

Our commitment to high-quality undergraduate education is strong, and continues to evolve and mature as new opportunities emerge. We have a great deal to be proud of:

Nearly 50% of our students engage in research as undergraduates and many publish their work.
Our students, along with our faculty and staff, contribute about 1 million hours annually of volunteer time to our communities.
Sixty former UCSC students are currently serving in the Peace Corps, and more than 400 have served since the campus's founding. We share a Top-10 ranking with institutions with vastly higher enrollments, such as UC Berkeley (ranked third) and the University of Michigan (sixth).
We have the largest percentage of students going on to complete doctoral work, in fields other than science and engineering, than any other UC campus.
Our students report that they face higher academic demands than their peers at other campuses, and find that their work at our campus emphasizes critical thinking.
We now have the most stringent and comprehensive system of evaluating students of any major research university.
One significant way of focusing on students is our residential colleges. Led by a committed group of College Provosts, they are the places where students live, where they learn to think beyond themselves, to see through the eyes of others, to become a part of a community, and to share in the responsibilities toward those communities.
We are in a new era of articulating the unique residential and academic setting of the colleges with our divisions and departments. But, as former University of California President Clark Kerr said recently in a letter to our campus, "Santa Cruz can be and should be the national model for universities that choose collegiate structures. . . and there will be more and more of them."

Let me say just a few words about some of the people who make this campus such an extraordinary place for students. For example, the dedicated professionals in Student Affairs. During the past few weeks, they have worked tirelessly with students and their parents as they arrived on campus just days after the September 11th events; they organized a continual series of events for students to focus their energies. I want to acknowledge publicly today their unfailing commitment to the whole campus community during these trying times.

And there are many other amazing people, such as:

Manny Grijalva, our campus mail manager, who also volunteers his time to organize our campus's Second Harvest Food Bank Drive.
Jim Kent, a new kind of contemporary graduate student who helps to make our academic programs so exciting. You've probably already read about him in the papers, but Jim, who returned to graduate school after a successful career in the computer industry, was one of the late-hour UCSC heroes in sequencing the human genome.
Katy Flint, who mobilized her fellow graduate students to campaign for a new Graduate Commons -- and it just opened a few weeks ago. Please visit it!
Nickie Bazell, an undergraduate who happens to have been a student in my yearlong class, who exemplifies students who find a way to help others. She was not a particularly good writer when she arrived, but was inspired by Don Rothman to become a very good writer. Nickie began tutoring students in local schools to help them write, and because of her efforts recently won the prestigious Strauss Fellowship. It will allow her to continue her tutoring while completing her undergraduate degree.
And last but not least, Alison Galloway, our professor of forensic anthropology, who in addition to her faculty responsibilities, is also a member of one of the National Recovery Teams, a group of professionals who are called in to help in situations like those in New York City.

We have an amazing group of people here on campus.

Most of you will have noticed that we have added a few more students among the redwoods on campus. In the past five years, we have grown our enrollment by nearly 2,700 to over 12,500 students.

We have done this to play our important role in educating the wave of new California citizens who qualify at the very highest levels for higher education. There can be no doubt that educating these fine young minds is in the best interests of the nation, the state and our local community.

Along with these students, we have added over 100 professorial faculty and new staff.

And our academic program has also grown to respond to the increase in these students. Since 1996, we have added:

A new engineering school, which now has over 1,100 undergraduates and 150 graduate students
16 new undergraduate programs
5 new graduate programs
And the first master's program in the UC system in software engineering, operating jointly in Silicon Valley and on the main campus in a unique partnership with University Extension.

More graduate programs have been proposed, and are likely to be submitted for approval within the next few years.

And, building on the Millennium Committee's recommendations in 1998, we now have five new or expanded interdisciplinary institutes: the Center for Cultural Studies; the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies; the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community; the Institute for Humanities Research; and the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Through such collaborative centers and through additional support to the Senate Committee on Research, Provost John Simpson and I have provided more funding for faculty scholarship than at any time in the recent past.

And, our extramurally supported research program has also grown dramatically in the past five years. The total research income rose from $50 million to almost $72 million, a 43% increase in five years.

I wish I had the time to tell you about all of the successes in the research programs, but instead I will use examples that typify the wave of the future, and what is happening in the best research universities today -- advancing scholarship through collaborations across disciplines, departments, divisions and institutions. Let me just list a few:

$20 million from the National Science Foundation for the National Center for Adaptive Optics
$1 million from the Keck Foundation for a new spectrometer to be used for environmental toxicology
$2 million from the Department of Energy for the Center for Supernova Research
Three-quarters of a million dollars from private sources for the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community
$350,000 from Talat and Kamil Hasan for an endowed chair in Classical Indian Music
$5.7 million from the National Institutes of Health for the UCSC Center for Genomic Research
And finally, a recently announced $14 million from the National Science Foundation, of which our campus will receive $3.5 Million, for the Center for Informal Learning and Schools. It is particularly notable that this grant is the only one awarded in the nation for informal learning of science. The center involves interdivisional collaboration across the natural sciences and social sciences divisions, and is also an international collaboration among three institutions -- UCSC, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and King's College in London.

Our outreach to our various communities has also increased significantly. For example:

Many campus and community friends and their families enjoy the new and privately financed Seymour Marine Discovery Center. It opened in March 2000 and has had over 32,000 visitors this year alone, including 5,400 students organized through school programs.
And nearly 60,000 additional students of all ages have benefited annually from our successful UCSC Extension programs serving Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, and Monterey Counties.

We all know that education improves people's lives, but one of the most intractable social problems today is the quality of K-12 education. We should, however, be proud of what we here at UCSC have accomplished with our innovative K-12 educational outreach programs. They have been models for all University of California campuses, and have helped to launch countless others throughout our state. Through our programs, we are reaching students who otherwise would not have a chance to prepare for college, and become future students on our campus.

Most of you may not know that we are changing the face of high school education in underserved areas. Here is just one example:

Our UC College Prep program, which is systemwide program run by our innovative and unique Educational Partnership Center, is offering Advanced Placement courses to over 2,000 students in 150 schools in 50 counties in the state. This is the size of a large high school!

And we are doing other amazing things, too:

We now have an innovative minor in education, and are the first UC campus to create a 15-month education master's and credentialing program.
Our New Teacher Center is known statewide and nationally as a leader in teacher retention and high-quality mentoring. It has touched tens of thousands of beginning teachers in California, and has demonstrable results: Teacher retention rates have reached 95 percent in some districts, nearly double the national average. There is virtually no school in any district in the tri-county area and Santa Clara County that has not been positively impacted by one of our programs.

All of this growth in people and programs requires expansion of our physical space. This is always a difficult task, but fortunately, we have been able to plan our growth remarkably well.

Since 1996:

Three quarters of a million new assignable square feet, including residences and academic buildings, either have been constructed or are under construction.
More than $300 million for construction from both state and private funds has been spent or committed. When all current projects are done, we will have spent more than $420 million.
2,800 new student beds will have been added by 2004.
With nearly 50% of our students in university housing, we continue our long-standing leadership as the UC campus that houses the largest percentage of its students.
The Wellness Center, the new Bay Tree Bookstore, the Graduate Commons, and "Quarry Plaza" have been completed, and all are proving lively hubs of activity and instruction.
We hope to break ground on approximately 95 faculty-staff housing units within the next 18 months.
$7.8 million has been spent on deferred maintenance.
The first parking structure on campus has been completed, and we have initiated bi-directional bus service. I've even had faculty and staff stop me and say they appreciated the new parking garage!!!
We have spent $32 million on renovations and additions to the arts facilities, which now house a rich array of arts and lecture programs.
Our first facility down in Monterey County, the Monterey Bay Education, Science, and Technology Center (or MBEST) was dedicated on September 17.
We are pursuing a Silicon Valley Center, with UCSC as the systemwide lead campus.

With new bond issues in the next couple of years, we will add even more facilities to advance our campus's mission and goals.

Let me put all of this growth in perspective. During the past five years, this campus has -- or in the very near future will have -- engaged in the most intensive physical plant planning and build-out process in our entire 35-year history. And we have done it amazingly well. While some have been worrying about how we would manage the planned growth in student population to 15,000 on-campus students, increase in the number of faculty, and build new facilities and housing, in a little over five years we have already accommodated approximately 60% of the growth that we expected in this 10-year period.

We have grown gracefully, albeit with some stress. But with the cooperation of the entire campus community, we have accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time with a minimum of unpleasantness. These successes should give us every confidence that we can continue to grow in a thoughtful fashion to accommodate more students on the main campus and in both off-site centers in Monterey and Silicon Valley to reach an enrollment of 16,900 by 2010.

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has been involved -- the faculty who have developed new courses and programs to accommodate new students and interests; the staff who have taken on new responsibilities in order to move forward; the administrators who have shepherded this complex process through with minimal disruptions. You are all party to the successes of the past five years.

The future -- the next phase of growth

Now on to the future.

I would propose that our main challenge over the next five years will be to give greater attention to three emphases:

We are certainly one of the finest, and must not falter in our efforts to be the finest, public research university in the nation for undergraduate education. But, in order to have that distinction, we must now focus more attention on the first part of our mission statement, to become "an outstanding public research institution," a goal that, among other things, will require considerable emphasis on fostering graduate program growth.
We must enhance an intellectual environment that attracts and inspires the best faculty, and attracts the first-rate graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who will constitute the next generation of academic leaders; and
We must strengthen our culture of diversity, creativity, and discovery as the bedrock of an exciting undergraduate experience.

Thus we do have some formidable challenges ahead, but I believe these can be met with focus and commitment.

In this academic year, we will complete the next phase of the planning process, led by Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor John Simpson. You can find the documents describing the status of the planning effort to date on our web site.

Let me focus in particular on graduate and postdoctoral education. We must fulfill our commitment to California's citizens to provide critical research, scholarship, and new forms of creative expression by expanding graduate enrollment and providing more opportunities for postgraduate work. This new emphasis should not be misinterpreted as a de-emphasis on undergraduate education. Rather, a quality graduate program is essential to the quality of undergraduate education by bringing a cohort of young scholars into the undergraduate classroom and laboratory.

California has been underinvesting in graduate education. Did you know that California is dead last among the 15 largest states in the growth of graduate education in the last decade? In the past 30 years, undergraduate education has grown by 100%, but graduate education has grown by only 7% statewide.

UCSC is now on the lower side of comparably sized research universities in overall numbers of graduate students, and we produce fewer Ph.D. students than do our nearest size sister campuses such as UCSD and UCSB. We must work hard to improve these numbers.

There are many reasons why more graduate students are needed. We live in a knowledge-based economy that thrives on new ideas that emerge through exploration and discovery in universities. The nation's future strength, and California's in particular, depends on investing in graduate education. Here is why:

All segments of our economy need well-prepared professionals, managers, and leaders.
Industry, government, and nonprofit organizations need workers with the skills of critical thinking and analysis that are honed in rigorous graduate programs across the array of academic disciplines.
And, the state will need approximately 40,000 new faculty in the coming decade at all levels of higher education.

But perhaps most important for the long-term success of our state and our nation is that advanced degrees are the key route to upward mobility. As leaders produced by UC graduate programs increasingly come -- and must come - from more diverse communities than in the past, they in turn will create jobs and opportunities for many other people. Those educational opportunities for diverse groups are part of the great legacy of the UC system, and UCSC can and must play a greater role.

And so for the next decade we must strive to do the following:

Increase our graduate enrollment
Double our annual production of Ph.D.s
Build the scholarly research enterprise
Nurture continuously the intellectual environments for undergraduates, and
Succeed in enhancing diversity in both our graduate students and faculty as we work toward those goals.

As I noted earlier, we have made much progress with our undergraduate educational issues. We have made a start in building graduate education. We have increased graduate student support by 32% since 1996, to over $11.5 million in the last academic year from a combination of sources. In this academic year, graduate support will rise even more dramatically -- to almost $14 million, an increase of 20% over last year. This increase is important, as it reflects the leadership of Provost Simpson in placing a higher priority on graduate education as a mechanism for future growth.

Even with these changes, we must do more. Beginning now:

We will be calling on divisions, deans, and faculty members to help secure research and training grants from federal agencies and private foundations, in order to help us support unique programs.
We will also call on our students themselves to take advantage of opportunities to secure fellowships and research assistantships.

In order to develop the intellectual environment that will lead to new discoveries, we must also strive to at least double our extramural research funding over the next five- to seven-year period. Our new Vice Chancellor for Research Robert Miller will work with faculty to make this goal a reality. He and Vice Chancellor for University Relations Ronald Suduiko will work together to garner private foundation and individual philanthropic support. I also have asked Vice Chancellor Suduiko to move us forward in our first major fundraising campaign with the very able help of our UCSC Foundation volunteers and alumni, and our excellent Development staff. This campaign will be aligned with our emerging priorities.

Fiscal realities

So how will we accomplish these ambitious goals and meet these challenges? As all of you know, even before the events of September 11th, the state's economy had suffered several blows, and part of the state's pain was passed on to the university. We are disappointed with the outcome in the current state budget, but relative to other state agencies we fared pretty well. UCSC will be funded for our enrollments, and we will get funding for technology. We also will be funded for the two California Institutes for Science and Innovation in which the campus is involved. We are likely, however, to have a rough year or two. The reality is that although the state economy is suffering with the energy crisis and a plunge in capital gains tax revenues, economists tell me it is fundamentally strong.

One reason is that the economy of the state is more diverse than it was in the dreadful budget years of the early 1990s, and the state is not experiencing the significant outflow of population that we did back then. UC's budget increase this year may not be everything we want, but overall, we can find some comfort in the fact that education continues to be a high priority for the state.

As we look out into the future, unfortunately, the situation is not easily predictable, but I can assure you that we are doing everything possible to ensure our stability and strength. Many of the decisions that must be made in the near-term and in the future are systemwide decisions and are not made on this campus. We must all realize that we are entering into difficult times.

But this university is here to stay.

We have been through tough times before, but we are the type of institution that will survive this time, too. We will survive and be stronger than ever, for UCSC is a special place.

A vision for the future

My vision is for this campus to be a shining example of what this nation -- and the world -- will need in a great research university in this century. We will not try to catch up with a last-generation or last-century model of a megauniversity, or multiversity. Instead, we will be the example of a new model -- relatively small, diverse, excellent in disciplines, but also multidisciplinary in our approach to larger social challenges. We will continue our commitment to undergraduate education, and will strengthen graduate and research programs to support the whole. All of this will be welded into a sense of community both within this core campus, and within our larger region. We will grow in influence as the regional, state, and national educational partner of choice, through our facilities in Monterey and Silicon Valley, as well as through our many other community-oriented activities.

My vision, therefore, is pretty basic:

We must build this institution to be an extraordinary intellectual environment.
We need to achieve excellence, diversity, and balance in our students, our faculty, our administrators, and our staff.
We want our best scholars to stay, and we want new ones to join us because of our vital intellectual environment.
We want faculty from different fields to know each other, to explore new ideas together. We must do better in learning to appreciate each other's talents, for without that kind of curiosity, where will the next generation of great ideas come from?
And we must strive to honor our "Principles of Community." Although we cannot expect to always agree with each other on every matter, we must unfailingly demonstrate respect, tolerance, and patience in our communications.

UC Santa Cruz is not some abstract concept in the future. It is already an extraordinary place that is the outcome of the diverse visions of many individuals. Academic institutions may look to some like business organizations with our organizational charts and complex budgets and facilities, but in fact they are much, much more. They are an amazing amalgam of creative individuals whose collective responsibility is to advance our understanding of our world and ourselves.

These last few weeks have brought home to me how much our research university is a human community. It is not simply a collection of individuals in various roles. It is a highly networked, ecologically dependent community where we all teach and learn: Classrooms, libraries, and laboratories are certainly critical but they are not sufficient. Students, it has been estimated, receive nearly 50% of their higher education outside of the classroom -- from other students, in the residential environment, in internships, through off-site and foreign-country experiences.

Faculty and staff are constantly learning, relearning, and evolving their approaches to scholarship, teaching, and work. Most of this education is what we create together, day by day, week by week, informally as much as formally.

Even as we speak, the role of the American research university is evolving. Universities, in spite of their reputations in some circles for foment and revolutionary ideas and insights, are among the most conservative of society's institutions. At their root they evolve, they reach new asymptotes. They accommodate change, but they are rarely totally revolutionized or restructured. Some believe that universities -- that we -- are in imminent danger of becoming totally irrelevant and overtaken by the information society. I believe this view completely misses the point: Universities produce the knowledge that drives the information society, and therefore the economy. Without them, the primary source of new unfettered ideas and new knowledge would dry up. We must enable free exploration of new ideas that advance the frontiers of knowledge and help us to understand complex phenomena, including human interactions.

Our deans and faculty are asking themselves what will be the critical knowledge for the future, and what are the critical skills that both we and our students need.

Our faculty, in particular, must be especially curious in this next period of time, for society has a great need for their talents. They must bring deep understanding and original ideas to bear on new challenges. They must apply their problem-solving skills to new and difficult problems. They must use their scholarship to offer insights into human and cultural behavior. They must explore new forms of human expression. Recent events call out for their special attention and ideas if we are to live in a more peaceful world.

Once again, I stand before you as I did five years ago, to ask for your support and continuous participation in this ambitious endeavor.

As I stated in my inaugural address, "We understand that education is our mission, but the foundation of an education is knowledge. To be a great university is to both create knowledge and to transmit and preserve this knowledge.

For our students and our partners, knowledge is power. Not knowledge to be used to control or intimidate, but knowledge that liberates the spirit and the mind. . . knowledge that leads us out of the darkness and into the full light of wisdom and understanding. . . knowledge that leads to personal fulfillment and an enlightened society."

Over 130 years ago, the University of California was founded with the motto FIAT LUX -- let there be light. Perhaps never has that idea been more relevant than it is today.