A Degree of Isolation at New UC Merced

Renata Santillan looked out across a broad expanse of pasture, dotted with flowering mustard and more than a dozen cows, toward the construction site several hundred yards away.

“Is it going to be ready in time?” Santillan, a 17-year-old high school senior from San Bruno, asked, sounding doubtful. “It’s kind of cool, but what would it really be like to go here?”

Less than five months from its opening day, the newest University of California campus is rising from the gently rolling grasslands near this farming town in the San Joaquin Valley. Construction crews are toiling nearly around the clock to complete its first three academic buildings and put the finishing touches on a cluster of low-slung student residence halls.

At the same time, leaders of the first new UC campus in four decades also are working to attract about 1,000 students to fill those classrooms and dormitories for the inaugural year. Using tours, outreach efforts and personal enthusiasm, they are wooing prospective students with the seemingly boundless promise of a brand-new campus.

Yet they also acknowledge the fears of some students, like Santillan, that the campus may be too new, too isolated and too risky.

“Not everyone wants this sort of experience,” said engineering professor Christopher Viney, who at a recent open house demonstrated his own pioneering spirit by donning face paint and a hat with the fuzzy ears of the school’s bobcat mascot. “But remember, such a chance comes along once in a generation.”

Wearing a navy blue UC Merced sweatshirt, Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the university’s chancellor, quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson on the lure of untrodden paths. “You have the chance to be trailblazers,” she told admitted students at the April 23 event in a park beside the construction site.

Merced’s first students will receive a lot of faculty attention, take classes with relatively few others and help shape the campus’ academic and extracurricular offerings for future generations, she said.

Scheduled to open in September with about 60 faculty and 350 staff members alongside its initial students, UC Merced is the first major American research university to be built this century.

The campus, the 10th in the UC system, will open nearly two decades after the university’s regents first authorized it to help cope with an expected boom in the state’s college-age population. It also will be the first UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley, where college attendance rates have traditionally lagged behind those of the state’s other regions.

Some students at the open house already had made up their minds.

Luke Poole, 17, said he was also offered admission to UC Davis and Cal State Long Beach but chose the new campus, partly because it is near his home in Merced. He likes the idea of staying in the valley, he said, and college costs will be lower if he lives at home.

“But I’m also excited to be part of the first class,” said Poole, who remembers playing the saxophone with his middle school band at UC Merced’s groundbreaking several years ago. “That’s pretty unique.”

Poole, a high school baseball player, is disappointed the university will not offer intercollegiate sports in its first few years but said he looks forward to playing intramural baseball and possibly starting other clubs.

Others appeared less certain.

Aniket Sharma, 17, had traveled to the open house from his home in Diamond Bar. His father, Surya Sharma, spoke positively of the opportunities at UC Merced, theorizing that membership in its inaugural class might look good on a medical school application. Aniket sat silent, looking glum.

Pressed for an opinion, the teenager finally spoke. “It’s too isolated,” he said.

The campus is five miles from downtown Merced, a city of about 70,000 an hour north of Fresno. It is surrounded by houses and farms, with cattle grazing on much of the site, which is within view of the Sierra Nevada. Yosemite National Park is about an hour away.

Tomlinson-Keasey, a former UC Riverside psychology professor and an administrator there and at UC Davis, was named chancellor of UC Merced in 1999. Since then, she and the campus have weathered a string of setbacks, including environmental concerns that required a change of site and state fiscal problems that caused a one-year delay.

It remains controversial in some quarters. Patrick M. Callan, president of the San Jose-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, criticizes the campus as a costly mismatch with the state’s higher-education needs.

“It’s going to happen at this point,” Callan said. “But it still comes down to whether we need a highly expensive research university in a rural community.”

Tomlinson-Keasey said she never feared the campus would be scrapped altogether but did worry that continuing budget woes could push it back by as much as a decade, past the expected peak in California’s college-going population.

“But you look at high school enrollment numbers and you know that we need it now, for these next few years,” she said at the open house. “This will be a real safety valve for all our other campuses.”

Yet as with many new enterprises, much about the campus’ initial days is still uncertain.

“We don’t really know how many students we’ll have, whether the classrooms will be ready or whether the infrastructure will be ready,” said Shawn Kantor, an economics professor who is also the head of its faculty senate. “Once we know all that, we’ll feel better.”

By today prospective students must notify UC Merced and other UC campuses that they are accepting or denying their offers of admission.

The Merced campus extended such offers this year to about 6,000 students, for an initial freshman class of 800 to 1,000. The campus also expects to enroll about 100 transfer students in its first year.

By late last week, admissions officials said about 500 students had committed to the campus, with many others considered likely to turn in their acceptances by mail or e-mail in the final hours before the deadline.

Administrators said they were somewhat disappointed that only about 12% of admitted freshmen came from the San Joaquin Valley; they hope eventually to draw about half the university’s students from the area.

Its initial structures -- including the partly completed library, a classroom building and a science and engineering facility -- as well as all subsequent buildings, will be on less than 1,000 acres of the more-than-7,000-acre site. The campus is expected to grow by about 800 students a year, reaching its planned capacity of about 25,000 students by 2035.

Administrators said the library and its signature glass reading room will be finished in time for the first day of classes Sept. 6. If the classroom building is not ready, courses will be held in the library. The science building is expected to be completed later in the first semester.

Professors and administrators are warning admitted students of the possibility of unfinished or unpainted buildings and other last-minute hitches.

“Look, it’s not going to be for everyone, and that’s true for the faculty too,” Tomlinson-Keasey said at the open house. “If you want everything established and ready to go, this wouldn’t be the place for you.”

In a large tent festooned with blue and gold balloons, assistant history professor Sean Malloy was lobbying a prospective transfer student. “Eventually, this will be just like every other UC campus, in good and bad ways,” Malloy said. “But right now, you’ll get an experience here that’s different from every other place.”

Nicole Dasig, 19, a community college student from the Central Valley town of Escalon, was interested. “It’s nice to know how much they want us here,” said Dasig, who is in her second year at San Joaquin Delta College. “I’m liking this so far.”

Throughout the day, students and parents boarded small yellow school buses for brief tours and the chance to walk through one of the completed residence halls. Several said they were impressed with the freshly painted one-, two- and three-bedroom suites, which will house up to 600 students the first year.

“I like the fact that everything’s new,” said Marc Hendrikse, a senior at Santa Margarita High School in Orange County. “But it’s pretty small.”

At several Southern California high schools, college counselors interviewed last week said most of their students applying to UC Merced did so as a backup in case they were not accepted by more competitive schools.

Yet many of those admitted freshmen ultimately decided it would be too risky to choose the new campus, said Ann Keitel, a college counselor at Venice High School. “I don’t know any of our students who’s going to go.”

Santillan, the senior from San Bruno, expressed similar ambivalence as she toured the campus site with her father. An aspiring biologist, Santillan said she was weighing offers from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and UC Davis in addition to Merced.

“There’s a lot of excitement, but you don’t really know what the campus will be like,” she said. “I’m hoping to get every possible benefit out of college, and you can’t tell the vibe of the school yet. I’m not sure it’s my place.”