UC Abandons San Joaquin Campus Plans

In yet another depressing indication of the state’s budget problems, the University of California on Friday abandoned for the foreseeable future its plans to build a campus in the San Joaquin Valley.

“This is not a good thing,” UC President Jack W. Peltason said. “It’s not what we wanted to do. It’s what we had to do, given the economic realities of our time.”

The UC Board of Regents’ unanimous decision to halt planning for a 10th campus was devastating for Central California activists and educators who have long complained that the area’s students are shortchanged academically because no UC campus is within commuting range. “It creates a rather chilling effect on all of us,” Robert Carpenter, head of a committee that lobbied to bring the campus to Merced, said of the regents’ vote.

Statewide, the move reinforces worries about how UC will accommodate enrollment pressures from the offspring of baby boomers in the next 12 years. The UC system now serves 165,700 students and demographers forecast an additional 63,000 by the year 2005. Existing campuses can squeeze in only about 40,000 of those anticipated students, officials predict.

Amid much competition and study, UC was on the verge of spending an estimated $1.5 million on environmental impact reports on three finalist sites in the region, two near Fresno and one in Merced. The university had already spent an estimated $3.8 million on consultants, surveys and staff travel to the area, as armies of buttoned-down academics hiked through dusty pastures and lush farm fields that they hoped would one day be home to dormitories and libraries.

But Peltason and the regents said they could not proceed with the studies while all nine existing UC campuses face tough cutbacks in programs and staffing under recessionary budgets. “Not only are we unable to build a 10th campus . . . we are having great difficulty in sustaining the present enrollments on the existing campuses,” Peltason said.

Shortly before the vote on the proposed campus, the UC president announced that studies will soon begin on possibly merging duplicate undergraduate academic programs offered among the nine campuses and possibly eliminating some graduate and professional school programs. That is a sharp retreat from UC’s traditional expansionism and squashes the ambitions by all campuses to offer as wide and as distinguished curricula as possible. No specific programs were mentioned Friday.

The regents insisted that they remain committed to one day building a San Joaquin Valley campus if state revenues for UC ever increase enough.

A new campus of 5,000 students would cost about $600 million to construct, with the bills split between state and private sources, said William B. Baker, UC’s vice president for budget and university relations.

The search for a possible San Joaquin Valley campus began in 1988 when UC officials, flush with the optimism of the time, announced that they might build as many as three schools around the state in the near future. By 1990, it was settled that the first one would be in the valley, where the UC attendance rate is sharply below that of other regions. The agricultural area had felt snubbed since the early 1960s when UC last built undergraduate campuses, in Irvine and Santa Cruz.

Politicians, businessmen and educators from the San Joaquin Valley came to San Francisco on Friday to plead with regents to at least choose a site and hold onto it for up to 15 years, until economic conditions improve. By abandoning the process, Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson said, “you hold all of us to some extent hostage to that uncertainty.” He estimated that governments in Fresno County have spent $900,000 on land surveys and lobbying for the campus.

Gail McIntyre, the chairwoman of the Madera County Board of Supervisors, said she was disappointed but not surprised by the regents’ action. But she added that she believes that there will one day be a UC campus in the area.

The three finalist sites were the so-called Academy tract of 3,300 acres in Fresno County, 10 miles east of Clovis; the 7,000-acre Lake Yosemite area, six miles northeast of downtown Merced, and the 5,200-acre Table Mountain tract, 12 miles north of downtown Fresno in Madera County.

In other business Friday, the regents discussed the highly controversial retirement package awarded to Ronald W. Brady, the system’s senior vice president for administration for the past 10 years. Setting off protests from faculty, students and legislators, Peltason announced last week that Brady would receive his full $181,640 salary for the next year even though Brady would be officially on leave and working part-time before full retirement.

Peltason said his predecessor as president, David P. Gardner, had arranged the agreement for Brady and that university attorneys say the contract is binding. The regents agreed not to block the deal after Peltason promised such contracts in the future would require their approval.