Presentation to UC Regents Educational Policy Committee

Feb. 4, 2009

Good morning.

I am pleased to be here before the Educational Policy Committee to bring to the UC Regents a clear view of the road our campus is traveling, how we got here, and where we’re headed. I will share a few illustrative examples of processes and projects, and spend some time addressing opportunities and challenges.

At the outset, I want to acknowledge that the similarities on all of our campuses far outweigh the differences. Much of what I could say would mirror closely what any of my colleagues here in the room – or for that matter at any of hundreds of other institutions of higher education – might say in describing what are ultimately similar approaches to a common mission. That being said, I will focus my comments on things that are mostly unique to the University of California, Irvine.

I will describe:

• Our planning processes and our aspirations,
• Who we are today and where we intend to go,
• How we intend to get there, and
• How we will know that we have arrived.

For context, it is important to remember that our campus is young. We opened our doors to students in September 1965. Prior to that, the campus had been rolling ranch land, a part of the substantial holdings of the Irvine Company, and before that the Irvine Ranch. With the support of many, and the particular urging of Joan Irvine Smith, the regents were gifted 1,000 acres of land in south central Orange County, and then purchased an additional adjacent 500 acres to found the campus.

Irvine Ranch, 1959: Future site of the University of California, Irvine

As described in the book Instant University, the initial campus plan was to offer a breadth of programs, and to grow them largely in parallel. The campus grew rapidly, and essentially according to its plan, over the next three decades. We grew up alongside the city of Irvine, which was incorporated in 1971, and have a wonderful and mutually supportive relationship with the community. Because of the vision of the regents and other founders of the campus, we had space to grow. We used this space to grow traditional classrooms and labs, and also nontraditional programs such as University Hills housing for faculty and staff.

UC Irvine, the early years

I have often repeated the line that in antiquity cities grew around rivers, in the Middle Ages cities grew around religious centers, in the industrial age cities grew around factories, and in the 21st century cities will grow around universities. Irvine is an archetypical example.

Over its first four decades, the campus garnered a host of notable achievements:

• Dozens of faculty members were elected to the national academies;
• Our outstanding writing programs produced a number of best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors;
• We became ranked among the nation’s leaders in programs as diverse as chemistry, evolutionary biology and dance;
• We produced numerous national-collegiate-champion and Olympic athletes;
• In 1995 we were the first public university to have two faculty members awarded the Nobel Prize in separate disciplines (chemistry and physics) in the same year; and
• After only 30 years in existence, our campus was admitted to the AAU.

The late 90s were a period of sustained and rapid growth, particularly in our undergraduate population. The momentum continued into the new century as our School of Social Ecology launched the first fully online graduate program in the University of California system. In 2002, the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences became the first school of its kind in the UC system.

Today, we have about 29,000 students, more than 1,400 faculty, and more than 9,000 staff members at our campus and medical center.

I arrived in mid-2005, as the campus was finishing a multiyear strategic planning process. The remainder of my comments will derive from that process, and its ramifications for our present and future.

The planning process produced a document entitled “A Focus on Excellence: A Strategy for Academic Development at the University of California Irvine, 2005-2015,” which is available on the Web at http://www.strategicplan.uci.edu. This collaborative process described campus priorities and aspirations, and a strategic vision. It was left to us to refine and animate the plan, and develop a strategy on how to get there.

The general priorities were straightforward and appropriate: By the middle of the next decade we would endeavor to:

• Grow the percentage of graduate and professional students to 25 percent of the overall student population (similar to other large public research universities);
• House 50 percent of our students on campus;
• Continually improve the attractiveness of the campus to undergraduate students;
• Add three new programs in the health sciences;
• Establish a law school; and
• Continue campus growth until our student population stabilized at 30,000-32,000.

There were two specific caveats: First, we would differentially grow towards excellence, with a campuswide program that devoted about half of our new faculty FTE to programs demonstrating competitive national prominence.

Second, we would strive in word and deed to become known for our values-based decision making, to have our values define and describe us, and to continually work to create a culture and atmosphere of rewarding those who live the values.

We moved to implement our campus priorities in several ways. We continued to fund the Programs of Excellence initiative; last year we distributed 36 FTE to nine programs selected by a faculty-led committee. In prior years, we supported initiatives such as our stem cell research program, which received $57 million in gift and grant funding over the past three years. And a stem cell therapy developed at UCI that made paralyzed rats walk again recently become the world’s first embryonic stem cell treatment approved by the FDA for testing in humans.

In laboratory tests, Hans Keirstead, left, and his colleague, Dr. Gabriel Nistor, right, developed a technique for prompting human embryonic stem cells to develop into oligodendrocyte cells.

We have added 3,000 new dormitory beds, and have 1,500 more under construction. Thus by 2010 we will have campus housing for 12,400 students, or 45 percent of our student population. UC Irvine’s student housing has received a host of awards, including several for energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, and our dorms were featured most prominently in Time magazine’s coverage of campus housing over the past half century – ours were shown as examples of the best of modern dorm living. We are proud that many dorms feature “green” furniture, made from recycled or biodegradable materials.

We launched programs in pharmaceutical sciences, a new department; public health, a new degree program; and nursing, with 42 students due to graduate this spring. And we established a new School of Law. Our founding law faculty are now rated 10th nationally for scholarly contributions by a prominent reviewer last summer; in fact, all were tenured faculty at top 10- or 20-rated law schools before joining us. Our initial applicants have academic profiles that match those of the top national law schools as well. We begin classes in August 2009.

To underscore our values-based approach, we established a template of values: Respect, Intellectual Curiosity, Commitment, Integrity, Empathy, Appreciation and Fun. These are of course subject to individual interpretation and modification, but they form a basis for decision making in the chancellor’s office, and allow us to check our bearings as we move forward. If we stick to our values, we will end up where we want to be.

As we look more specifically at the soul of the campus, where we are now and where we will be by the middle of the next decade, I will focus on our strategic plan, and most specifically our strategy map, both of which derived from the strategic vision of our focus on excellence. The vision is what we will look like, the plan includes the mission and themes that will guide us, and the map lays out the specific steps.

The map was developed over two years by several teams that included deans, faculty and staff, community volunteers, and consultants supported generously by members of our foundation.

We asked the questions I posed earlier:

• Who are we?
• Where do we want to go?
• How do we get there?
• How will we know when we have arrived?

The map (see PDF) reflects this effort visually. It is continually in evolution, but at this point represents the work of hundreds of people over thousands of hours, and as programs become better defined, the terms or descriptions used to identify them can and do change. I will describe some essential features, and then give a few examples of what a few of the programs look like and how they advance us towards our goals.

At the top, we have the answers to the a priori questions that guided our planning process. Who are we? We are young, entrepreneurial people, who are enabled, empowered and inspired to make a difference. We seek to make that difference by addressing a series of issues, many of which are among those that matter most to all of us – to you and me – on a daily basis. We recently announced a 10-year fundraising campaign. The strategy map was developed to guide us through the campaign. It doesn’t identify all, or even most, of our critical programs, rather it guides through themes and zones of common interest towards those areas where we believe we can have significant impact.

If we are successful – and we fully intend to be – we will help shape the future and make tomorrow better than today. Ultimately we will enhance our position among the world’s leading research universities.

This entire effort will drive our capital campaign; the strategy map is in reality the campaign strategy map. Our remaining activities are driven by the broader vision of the focus on excellence.

As we focus on our campaign, we have four high-priority initiatives:

• Health,
• Energy and the environment,
• Global cultures and economies, and
• Educating tomorrow’s leaders.

Health

In early February 2009, we dedicated our new University Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility destined to change and improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare for the citizens of our region of the state, and – through its impact on our education and research programs – train healthcare providers and bring new treatments, cures and preventive measures to people all over the world.

On an important but auxiliary note, we used a design/build arrangement with the contractor, so that the university, the state (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) and the builder were partners in every phase of construction. Working as a team, we delivered a facility four months ahead of schedule, which passed more than 6,000 separate inspections and came online under budget. Several factors contributed to this, not the least of which was the quality of our leadership team led by Rebekah Gladson and Wendell Brase, and the assistance of colleagues from across the UC system, whose experience and advice proved invaluable. We also benefited greatly from 3-D computer modeling, which saved us an estimated 18 months and at least $110 million by allowing us to resolve many engineering and construction conflicts at the desktop rather than in the field.

Chancellor Michael Drake greets students in UCI’s nursing science program at the Jan. 29 celebration of the University Hospital’s opening at UC Irvine Medical Center.

Another example of our strategic plan at work is our Program in Nursing Science. We began active consideration of this phase of the plan in the fall of 2005, admitted students in the winter of 2007, and will have our first graduates in four months. Many of our initial crop (who had an average entry GPA of 3.92) are planning to work for a few years and return for advanced training. Nicely, several of them say they want to work in our new hospital and then return to school get an advanced degree here at UC Irvine.

A third example of shaping the future in healthcare and health sciences is PRIME-LC (Program in Medical Education – Latino Community). PRIME is a patient-centered initiative, designed specifically to train experts and community leaders who would specialize in the health needs of underserved populations, broadly defined. The curriculum was designed based on the needs of the patients in the target population, and students are chosen based on their commitment and ability to serve those patients. PRIME-LC was the first; there are now five PRIMEs, one at each University of California medical school. “LC” means that our initiative is focused on the needs of the Latino community. Similar modifiers define the focus of the other programs. We are excited that the first students enrolled in this program will receive their M.D. degrees in four months and be treating patients by July 2009.

Energy and the Environment

UC Irvine research has spawned practical and effective zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered fuel cell hybrid vehicles, and in our own daily world the campus has converted to a 100 percent biofuel bus system carrying more than 1 million riders per year and saving 100,000 tons of carbon emissions. We have photovoltaic cells producing energy on the rooftops of our buildings, and we have the first LEED-certified buildings in Orange County. We do our best in all of our construction projects to think green from the design through use, and we are pleased that we are able to do this on time and on budget.

Scott Samuelsen, Advanced Power & Energy Program director, led the development of UCI’s hydrogen fueling station, the most technologically advanced, publicly accessible station in the world.

Global Cultures and Economies

In the third thrust of our campaign, we devote our attention to the broad areas of interaction between people and cultures of the world. The Olive Tree Initiative is an example. This initiative grew from discussions at our School of Social Sciences’ Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, and featured students from Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other backgrounds traveling together to Israel and the West Bank to experience for themselves the texture of the Middle East conflict. They have returned to lead dozens of discussion groups in and around campus and throughout our community.

A panel of participants in the Olive Tree Initiative trip to Israel and Palestine talk about the unique knowledge they gained firsthand from people who live the conflict day-to-day.

Another project illustrating our commitment in this area is our work with the Free Wheelchair Mission, an amazing program started by Orange County resident Don Schoendorfer, which raises money, builds and distributes free wheelchairs to people in the developing world – more than 300,000 to date. In an example of a town-gown partnership, our engineering students volunteered to value-engineer the wheelchairs, improving them if possible. In a 10-week project led by Professor Mike McCarthy, they redesigned the chairs and created a prototype that is the same weight, can be adjusted for size (pediatric, large and small adult), is many times more durable, and costs only two dollars more. Hopefully more improvements will follow.

Chancellor Drake greets first-year UCI students Caroline Lee, left, and Venus Leung, seated in wheelchairs from Free Wheelchair Mission following the organization’s April kickoff of its 2008 Mobility in Motion national tour at UCI. Mike McCarthy, co-director of UCI’s Center for Engineering Science in Design, stands behind Lee. He consulted with the mission’s founder, Don Schoendorfer, on possible ways to augment the wheelchair designs. Schoendorfer, standing behind Leung, designed the wheelchairs for less than $50 using basic materials. At far right is Alyson Roth, development manager for Free Wheelchair Mission.