Regents Presentation re: UC Budget

July 15, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you regarding the impact of the state’s current budget situation on UC Irvine.

I spoke to this board in February, and described our strategic plan and progress we were making on our mission. At that time, I characterized our campus as filled with young, energetic, motivated people who came to Irvine to make a difference, to shape the future.

Although we remain committed to that mission, I’d like to give you a few concrete examples of things that have changed over these past several months that are making our efforts much more difficult.

We eliminated entirely our small capital projects program, which funds $5-7 million annually in classroom and other physical plant renovations.

We cancelled the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellows Series, which for several years has brought to campus heads of state such as Mary Robertson; Nobel laureates like Wangari Maathai; legal scholars like Charles Ogletree, and humanitarian leaders like David Hamburg, all of whom have spoken to overflow crowds of students, faculty, staff and community members.

But in addition to their scholarly presence, these individuals have helped us make real-world differences.

For example, Vicente Fox visited our campus through the Distinguished Fellows Series in April. As you may recall, I described to you earlier this year a variety of UC Irvine programs that are making a real and tangible difference in peoples’ lives. One of these projects involved the interaction of the Free Wheelchair Mission with our engineering school, and resulted in improved availability of better-performing, low cost wheelchairs for poor people around the globe. We learned that the Free Wheelchair Mission organization was having difficulty getting wheelchairs to Mexico due to import and other issues. We arranged for a brief meeting between former President Fox and the director of the Free Wheelchair Mission, which removed several obstacles and will result in the first shipment of wheelchairs to Mexico within a few weeks. The program that enabled that to happen now no longer exists.

In March 2005, I reported to this board on healthcare workforce needs for California’s future, focusing part of my talk on the active and costly nursing shortage our state currently faces.

The year after I arrived at UC Irvine, we approved a nursing science program, recruited an outstanding director, and admitted our first students, a small class of 40. I’m proud to say that 36 of those students graduated just one month ago, and 22 of them are already employed in our new hospital. But rather than grow each year as planned, the program is now frozen, with just a handful of faculty and only room for 50 students per year.

UC Irvine normally hires approximately 75 faculty each year, and loses perhaps 25 to retirement, recruitment, etc., for a net increase of roughly 50, which matches reasonably well with our normal growth of about 1,000 students per year.

This year, we did not hire enough to even to keep up with attrition; the headcount decreased by 18. And even though we reduced freshman by 700 slots this year, our enrollment still grew by 1,250 students because we increased transfer admissions and our continuing classes were each larger than the preceding year’s cohort. This resulted in a net gap of 80 faculty and a further degradation of our faculty/student ratio. Our professors are willing to teach, but we are now finding it harder to schedule their classes because we don’t have enough large classrooms to accommodate the increasing class sizes.

Vicki Ruiz, our dean of humanities, was featured in a July 13 Inside Higher Ed article on UC’s budget crisis, which opened with her interview. An excerpt follows:

When she was named dean in 2007, she hired 17 new professors. This year she hired four, even though nine searches were planned and next year, no new positions have been authorized.

As of April 30, we are down 309 staff from one year ago, with about one-third from budget-related layoffs. As a result, our faculty – who now have much more work to do – have less support. And staff, faced with significant salary cuts, are working harder and harder, with fewer resources, each year.

UC Irvine’s Freshman and Transfer Seminar programs have been eliminated. These are critical programs, and this is a major loss to the campus. Think for a moment about your own careers, and about those very few and very meaningful times you were touched and inspired by a special teacher. Those interactions probably didn’t occur in a large classroom but in a hallway, during office hours, or small group instruction. Our seminars, which provided hundreds of opportunities for those interactions, no longer exist.

A few other examples of how the cuts are impacting UC Irvine:

• We have stopped admitting students to our Ed.D. program, which provides working professionals with critical leadership and administrative training.
• We are reducing our library budget by as much as 20 percent, cutting hours, librarian assistance and print and electronic collections. And although paper volumes are becoming less critical, expensive electronic resources are becoming even more essential for both students and faculty.
• We suspended our Distinguished Professor Program.
• We suspended ACE, our multidisciplinary master’s concentration program in arts, computing and engineering.
• We have suspended the DESK-TOP initiative, which funded new computers for each faculty member every four years.
• We suspended our Career Partners Program, which was instrumental in the recruitment of top faculty.
• We suspended our Faculty Career Development Awards Program.
• We are not filling a recently vacated vice chancellor, health affairs position.
• We reduced support for faculty travel to academic meetings.
• We stopped heating the water in our public restrooms.
• We eliminated support for our Visual Resources Collection.

There are many more.

I have been at the University of California for 37 years, first as a student and resident, and now 30 years on the faculty, with four as chancellor at UC Irvine. I have never been as concerned as I am at this moment in our history. A favorite mentor of mine once told me: “The difference between A and A+ is huge.”

The University of California has always – or almost always – been an A+ institution. When we were not, we knew we should be and we worked, day and night, to get there. That has been the story for UC and therefore the story for California. These cuts threaten that future.

Chancellor Michael Drake