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Larry N. Vanderhoef, Chancellor, UC Davis
Davis Rotary Lunch - Davis Community Church
3/5/01 - 12-1:30 p.m.
Planning for Growth at UC Davis
Let me begin by mentioning that I am most grateful for your invitation. I have been to this Rotary Club before, and you have among you several strong supporters and employees of UC Davis, and/or alumni. I would surely miss someone if I tried to name every one of you. I hope all of you fully realize that we will be forever in your debt.
I am going to spend the second half of this talk telling you how we are preparing for the five thousand additional students that will be added to our annual attendance between now and 2010. Before I do that I want to give you some context regarding land grant universities to help explain why our expanding campus is such an important part of fulfilling UC Davis' mission today.
In the 1860s, it was realized that this country needed more universities than just the private universities on the East Coast. We realized that, for the United States to develop into a self-sustaining nation of note, a college education must be made available to the population at large, and that these universities were needed to address society's real and practical needs.
To get the colleges started, in 1862 the federal government, not having great cash resources because there was so little taxation at the time, gave grants of land -- hence "Land Grant" -- to the several existing states to use as a university site or, if sold, as a source of money to build the college. In 1868, California's land grant university-the University of California-was established.
Regarding the intention that these colleges make higher education more generally available, they were immediate successes. Many in this country, outside of the East Coast landed gentry, wanted and needed education beyond high school. And they got it.
Regarding the second charge, addressing society's needs, two immediate problems demanded attention. The first was the production of food -- agriculture -- to prevent the famine that touched everyone in those days as people starved in other countries, and even in this country in the late 1600s and then again in the early 1800s in the Northeast.
The second need was to develop wealth in the country, and trading clout equal to that of England, France, Spain, and Italy. We had to develop our natural resources, invent and build the machinery, utilities and the entire infrastructure needed to generate that wealth. So mining and engineering were also very prominent in those early land grant colleges.
These state land grant colleges have, with no argument, been unusually successful at making higher education more generally available - sometimes, as in California, adding campuses as needed to keep pace with the state's population.
What about the second obligation of land grant universities, to pay special attention to society's needs? Today agriculture is still a concern, but we now worry not about how much but rather about the way we produce food-water allocations, pesticide use, genetically modified organisms, and the way we market and process food in other countries.
And added to those agricultural needs are, today, concerns about health care, the environment, the economy and crime. And number one among the concerns and perceived needs in our California society for about 15 years now, is the quality of our K-12 education systems.
So the second mandate for land-grant colleges, serving society's needs-community needs-is an ever-evolving ballgame different in 2001 than it was in 1868. At UC Davis we are meeting those needs-in medicine, the environment, agriculture, and K-12 education-in many ways. But there are good and sufficient reasons to believe that we must improve. In fact, the case can be made that UC Davis has, over the years, lagged in its responsibility to be paying attention to society's needs.
We started out as an agricultural arm of the university, and we were, even after being made a general UC campus in 1959, still mostly agricultural long after the time when universities that at one time had also been strong dominantly in agriculture, like Purdue, the universities of Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin, North Carolina State University, etc., had grown in ways that spread more completely across the academic spectrum and, more importantly, across the spectrum that is required if we are indeed going to be responsive to society's needs.
It was, and still is, surprising how little we were reaching out to our surrounding communities and how little the people of Sacramento knew about UC Davis. In Sacramento, their knowledge was almost entirely about our medical center. And in 1984, when I arrived, they were still calling it the county hospital.
It was our conclusion that the best of our units in agriculture and biology and engineering could not continue to be competitive with the best in the country until they were surrounded by people in the other academic areas of a university that have equally high or even higher quality than they. Simply put, the quality of an individual part of a university is limited by the quality of the other parts. The very best faculty and staff go to those universities that have the highest general quality, not just quality in their areas. We knew that the arts, humanities and social sciences had to improve.
At the same time we also knew that we could not, under any circumstance, sacrifice the strengths we already had.
That is not easy to do. The stars have to come together - just right. Lots of stars. And lots of "just right."
One star was growth. The University of California had to grow. We had no choice. The babies of the baby-boomers were on our doorstep. The California master plan for higher education requires that we admit the top one-eighth of our high school graduates. That meant that the UC had to grow by 60,000 by 2010 - 3 percent per year. UC Davis' fair share of that growth was 2 percent per year - 5,000 more students.
Growth is never easy, and change is never easy, but if a campus needs to change and improve, it is easier to do during a time of growth.
As one part of that improvement, we had to make facility needs a highest priority. Competing for the modest dollars we receive from the state for facilities were very pressing needs in veterinary medicine (we have $120m in the pipeline), engineering (we just opened Engineering Unit III), at the medical center and elsewhere on campus. We realized that, to construct facilities like the $95 million genomics building and the Center for the Arts, we had to depend entirely on donations, other discretionary funds, and creative financing. The bottom line is that we will, over the next 10 years, be building $1.1 billion in new facilities, with only about 20 percent being paid for by the state. That takes taxpayers, to be sure - to help build, for example, a major classroom/laboratory building, a plant and environmental sciences building, and veterinary medicine facilities that must be constructed between now and 2010.
But it also takes partnerships with the private sector - to help build a needed conference center and hotel, non-frosh campus apartments, and JAX West.
And it takes donors - to help construct the Center for the Arts, and to complete needed veterinary medicine facilities.
It also takes creative financing to build, for example, the state-of-the-art Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility, a new football stadium, aquatic center, and Activities and Recreation Center.
It takes federal and state agencies deciding that UC Davis is the right place to build their facilities, facilities that we want on our campus - like the Western Human Nutrition Research Center and a research containment facility. It takes more hard work than most people can possibly imagine. And it takes patience, patience with the great number of those who comment who say "It cannot be done." The whole of it, the pursuit and placement of these physical facilities, is a story in its own right, one that we will tell several times at public gatherings as part of our Long Range Development Plan process.
For today, I would like to finish by briefly describing the multipliers that transform 5,000 students into faculty, staff, and student housing needs, something we worry lots about. Here is the way it goes.
What follows assumes the status quo regarding where people are choosing to live, but we are also assuming that if they could afford it, a higher percentage of our new employees would prefer to live in Davis or otherwise adjacent to the campus, and that for environmental reasons, this would be good for our community because of minimum commuting.
Through our LRDP process, we will examine how to best provide housing for those new to our campus. However, for illustrative purposes, I offer the following:
To maintain our student housing supply at the current rate of 90 percent of students who now live within the Davis area would require 5,000 student beds above the current plans. Assuming one-fourth live on campus, 3,750 would live in conventional apartments within the city. At three students per apartment, 1,250 new units would be required. The campus will likely have to host a greater percentage of student housing to meet this need.
To maintain faculty housing at the current 75 percent who live within the Davis area would require approximately 400 housing units. Again, this is a conservative estimate because we know that affordability would make the percentage higher.
To maintain staff housing at its current level of 40 percent who live within the Davis area would require an additional 700 housing units. Once more, we have little doubt that affordability would increase this number.
Admittedly, these are quick calculations and much study is left to be done. They do not, for example, include the hundreds of retirement replacements that will occur during the next 10 years. However, they should provide some sense of the scale of the task we face ahead.
Some of this need will be met by Davis in-fill, and some will choose to live in nearby communities. But many, I am guessing, would choose to live closer to campus, preferably within biking distance of the campus, and with access to our great Davis schools. Because affordable housing is an increasingly important part of being able to recruit the very best faculty and staff, we must feel obligated to meet that need. It is and will be very much on our mind as we develop our long-range development plan over the next two years.
We are well aware that discussion of such ambitious plans can cause some anxiety among some members of the Davis community. The reason for such concern is heartfelt. We have an outstanding community and we do not want our quality of life to erode. In fact, the quality of this city is itself very important in our recruitments of faculty and staff.
We must keep in mind that the campus is embarking on a discussion of alternatives. By definition, some alternatives will be discarded and some will be preferred, and some new ones could emerge. But let us approach this discussion in a way that lets alternatives be weighed against the type of community and region we want to become. And let us set our sights high to create something deserving of our joint history.
Much discussion is reported on the need for partnerships and cooperation between the city and university. I could not agree more. The city has earned its credentials for sensitivity to environmental issues. UC Davis is an academic leader in environmental studies. In fact, we have just proposed creation of a Graduate School for the Environment.
Together, we have an opportunity to show the world a new model for development - one that has housing next to the workplace - one that reduces reliance on the automobile - one that believes a 5-minute ride on a bike to work is better than a 45-minute commute in a car. It is within our power to create an example and educate others that new models of development are necessary (and possible) to protect our environment. The community should reclaim its place as an international leader in sustainable development. The campus's need for housing, its available land, and our shared community values may make this possible.
Let's examine these alternatives rather than resolving the challenge through the conventional model of commuting and contributing to the region's poor air quality. Let's dare to be Davis again.
We invite your participation in our planning process. You may be aware that an advisory committee of campus and regional leaders has been formed. This group will hold several public meetings over the next year and a half. (Its next meeting is Thursday, March 29, from 4 to 6 p.m. in MU II of the Memorial Union.)
We welcome your ideas and participation as we plan the best of futures for the campus and the larger community that it serves.
Thank you very much.
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