Last Hurdle Cleared, UC Merced on Track for Debut

On a former golf course in this farming town between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park, construction crews are busily laying foundations and raising walls for a library, dormitories and classrooms that will form the next campus in the University of California system.

Meanwhile, 27 professors are already at work planning the curriculum and recruiting more faculty for the day the first classes begin next year. They are also trying to attract future students by spreading the word at the region’s high schools.

UC Merced is moving full steam ahead after nearly two decades of riding the highs and lows of California’s finances. Thanks to strong lobbying from its Central Valley backers, the next UC campus has cleared the latest budget battle with the $20 million it sought to meet its goal of opening in the fall of 2005 with a first freshman class of 1,000.

Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, UC Merced’s chancellor, said that support showed UC “desperately needs a 10th campus” and added that “as the campus grows, we promise a good return on their investment.”

Even before Merced was chosen as the specific site, every governor since George Deukmejian had backed plans for a UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his first State of the State address, singled out UC Merced as the one project he would use to “expand the dream of college.”

Critics, however, questioned whether the money could be better spent elsewhere in the university system at a time of tight budgets. Last year, for instance, state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) called UC Merced the “biggest boondoggle ever.”

UC Merced’s weathering of fiscal crises shows just how “the dream of college” means not only the desire by students to earn a degree close to home. It is also the dream of politicians and communities for the construction projects, heightened land values and prestige that come with a UC campus.

Educators in the San Joaquin Valley say area high school students will be more likely to pursue a university education with a UC campus in their midst. The valley’s students, who have close access to Cal State campuses at Fresno, Bakersfield and Stanislaus, already attend Cal State colleges at roughly the same rate as the rest of the state. But only 3.45% of the valley’s high school graduates went on to UC schools in 2002, compared with 7.47% statewide.

“Proximity is very important,” said Tomlinson-Keasey, who was named chancellor in 1999, earning $253,000 a year to develop the campus.

Local parents “ask, ‘Why should we have to send our kids hundreds of miles away for their education? We’ve been paying taxes all these years, yet we have to travel’ ” for a UC education, she said.

For much of the last year, Tomlinson-Keasey has spent part of each week in Sacramento making such arguments to legislators. In addition, a full-time lobbyist is one of the handful of administrators already on staff.

Republican political consultant Kevin Spillane says a UC campus is a matter of pride in a region that “has always had an inferiority complex” compared to more populous Northern and Southern California. For either a Democratic or Republican governor, backing UC Merced “is an easy way to demonstrate concern” for the area, Spillane said.

But Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, said building UC Merced was, “at the end of the day, purely political. It’s pork-barrel higher education.”

“It’s the most expensive way to build capacity,” he said. Rather than construct an entirely new campus, he added, existing public universities could take more students, even if they had to move to year-round schedules.

“The question is: Can we afford it?” Callan said of the new campus. “Are our resources likely to be better spent protecting the world-class institutions we already have?”

Mere word of the campus’ anticipated opening has already generated student interest. About 600 high school juniors have sent their SAT scores to the school. Encarnacion Ruiz, UC Merced’s admissions dean, said 38% of those students were from Southern California.

More than 1,000 jobs have come to town, including 965 for construction workers -- the fruits of $360 million the state has spent so far.

A city of 68,000, Merced has been growing rapidly even without the campus. Retirees and commuters to the Bay Area are moving in. Several cafes and the town’s first microbrewery have opened recently.

“A lot of people are banking on it,” Jason Friesen, owner of the year-old J Bonz Boards skateboard shop, said of the campus. “It comes up all the time at the Chamber of Commerce events, at the downtown business owners’ breakfasts.”

Six campus buildings -- including a library, dormitories and classrooms -- are being built first, within view of the Sierra Nevada. Cattle still graze on other parts and will continue to under a plan that would have all subsequent buildings on just 910 acres of the more than 7,000-acre site. The university is expected to have 6,000 students by 2011 and reach its 25,000 capacity by 2030.

The surrounding neighborhood is a mix of houses and agriculture, with Hmong farmers selling strawberries from roadside stands next to subdivisions under construction. Apart from the UC campus, some of the most prominent public projects in the area are prisons.

Samuel J. Traina is director of the campus’ Sierra Nevada Research Institute, an environmental science and engineering center. He grew up on an apricot farm 40 miles away. Along with the academic benefits to the region, Traina said, “it will be nice to see some opportunities for economic development beyond federal and state penitentiaries.”

He is among the 27 professors already at work in temporary offices. More are being recruited to bring the faculty up to 60 by July. The mere promise of a prestigious UC position drew 6,500 applications for the first professorships at what is now little more than a virtual university.

Members of the faculty did their first Merced teaching this summer for more than 100 students in 10 courses. Most of the students were home for summer break from other UC schools, said UC Merced spokeswoman Patti Waid Istas.

The faculty is now engaged mainly in research, hiring other faculty members, recruiting students and planning the curriculum for the eventual opening.

Many of those on the faculty so far are passionate about the school’s mission to serve first-generation college students.

Before applying for his UC post, engineering professor Christopher Viney had known Merced only as “the gas station” on the way to Yosemite. He had taught at Oxford University in England and came to UC Merced from Heriot-Watt Technical University, an Edinburgh institution with a heavily working-class enrollment.

In Scotland, he drove 10,000 miles over the last four years recruiting students. He’s now doing much the same in California. On a recent night, Viney pitched UC Merced to 20 guidance counselors in Visalia.

Along with the campus’ social mission, Viney said he was attracted by starting fresh at a school without the internal rivalries common in universities and by the “opportunity to build something without the encumbrance of history.”

Professor Traina, a UC Berkeley graduate, was one of three students in his high school class who went to a UC school.

Now at UC Merced, Traina’s research delves into such topics as the effects of climate change on the Sierra snowpack. He travels to Yosemite frequently for research and speaks eagerly of the research that undergraduates will conduct at the national park.

“I grew up watching people who had been dealt a lesser hand in life,” he said. “I really do feel it’s incumbent upon us to do everything we can ... so kids in the region go on to college.”