Defining our Future: A Path to Academic Excellence and Economic Opportunity

9.21.11

Thank you Isabel [Montañez, the MC] for the nice introduction.

And thank you Mark [Otero, first speaker] and Paul [Henderson, second speaker] for your inspiring remarks. You are both such wonderful examples of the kind of energy and entrepreneurial leadership UC Davis provides for our state and region.

As everyone here is all too aware, the recession and ongoing budget cuts have placed tremendous stresses on higher education. In the past four years our state budget has been reduced by more than 40 percent.

This past year alone the gap we had in our funding between state cuts and the fixed cost increases such as health care obligations and employee pension contributions, was more than $130 million. Since I joined the campus as the Chancellor, at UC Davis and throughout the UC system, we have had to make some very difficult choices.

We had to reduce support to many programs and totally eliminate others. We had to furlough many employees, lay-off others and displace many more. We took a comprehensive review of every dollar we spend and have been taking a number of steps to substantially reduce our administrative costs. Yet, despite all these measures, the budget cut was so big that we had no choice but to substantially raise tuition for our students and their hard-working families.

Since 2008, all our energy has gone into dealing with the state budget cuts and the emotions stemming from tough decisions. For the past two years the University of California has suffered from cuts, loss of morale, and an atmosphere of instability. In my two years as the Chancellor at UC Davis I have seen our state budget contribution plummet to below 10 percent of our total revenues.

But I am here in front of you today to say that enough is enough.

We will not allow continuous and permanent reductions in state support to define a new status quo for UC Davis where our ability to excel is constrained by limited resources. Dealing with state cuts cannot become a long-term strategy for our campus. I have now become convinced that we need to change our course. This is what I’m feeling as the Chancellor.

While we deal with the challenges of the day, we need to focus on our future and the opportunities it brings. Our future strategies will not be shaken by the vagaries of the state budget. Neither will we become a victim-to or an instrument-of political agendas and related rhetoric.

Moving forward, we are determined to focus on the opportunities provided by the sources that make up the remaining 90 percent of our budget.

We will understand the conditions that allow us to achieve excellence and we will develop a plan to further advance our mission as a land grant university. Our mission of providing access to an excellent education.

So here we are today to talk about defining our future; to talk about our path to academic excellence and economic opportunity.

Academic excellence and economic opportunity have always been cornerstones of our vision at UC Davis. This is why we were ranked among the top 10 public research universities in the nation for the second year in a row.

This is why we are among the top 10 universities in research funding, with 700 million dollars in research grants in the past academic year.

And this is why we consistently have graduates like Mark Otero and faculty like Paul Henderson contributing so much toward making our region, state and world a better place. It is this level of achievement that everyone in this hall is working hard to enhance.

We want to take this foundation and build on it so we can offer the benefits of a UC education to an even greater number of deserving students. We will take control of our destiny by developing new strategies and adopting new budget models that will move our campus forward in the coming years.

We will search for new opportunities — and work hard to bring them to fruition while staying true to our mission. And this is what I would like to talk about in some detail here today.

This university stands out among the 10 campuses in the UC system because we have the largest physical footprint, more in line with bigger undergraduate and graduate schools. With more than 6,000 acres and 17 million square feet of maintainable space, we have already made major investments in our physical infrastructure. We should utilize and exploit this investment to the maximum.

If we increase the population of highly qualified resident and non-resident students, in a thoughtful and deliberative way, and reduce our administrative costs in parallel, we will be able to generate new funds in support of our academic enterprise.

Our preliminary analyses tell us that by adding 5000 more undergraduate students in about five years or so with an appropriate and responsible mix of in-state and out-of-state, we can accomplish a number of important goals.

For example, we can make our campus more diverse and more international, creating a more vibrant educational setting to prepare future our global leaders.

We can become financially stable.

That way, every time state revenues drop and our budget gets cut, we will not have to reduce programs, furlough faculty or lay-off staff and substantially raise tuition.

We will be in control of our own destiny.

This growth will provide sufficient new revenues by 2020 to support an additional 300 tenure track faculty, giving us even more of the intellectual capital we need to fulfill our vision as one of the top universities in the U.S.

We can grow our graduate programs and our graduate student cohort substantially and allow for additional research opportunities. In parallel, we will be able to improve existing infrastructure and make investments needed to sustain and grow excellence across our campus. And most importantly for our state and region, with this influx of intellectual capital, we can spark economic opportunity and create jobs in our own communities.

We call this idea the “2020 Initiative” signifying the fact that by 2020 our campus will be able to complete this growth effort, accomplish its goals of excellence and achieve its objectives of becoming even more widely recognized as one of  the top public research Universities in the U.S. and around the world.

Now, to do all these exciting things, we will of course need your help.

Our initiative for the future is just being developed in broad strokes.

Nothing is set in stone.

And nothing will be decreed from on high.

We will create the process whereby we can determine exactly where and how this growth should occur. 

We want to hear your thoughts and ideas as we develop the details for this initiative.

We want to see where there is passion, energy, interest and sound reasons to grow on our campus. We are talking about the academic programs, of course.

We want to hear what you — the staff, faculty and students at UC Davis — want to see happen.

We want to know what you — alumni, friends and supporters and members of our neighboring communities of Davis and Sacramento — want to see happen and we want you to get involved in the process. And we must always remember as we move through this process, that our focus is on excellence, innovation and economic development.

We must never grow simply for growth's sake.

The goal is to continue creating a university that can sustain its rising trajectory through its own best efforts, leveraging support from the state of course, but rising above the fiscal limitations we now face. Connecting academic excellence and innovation to economic development requires careful planning and appropriate investments. And to transfer the innovation that takes place on our campus to opportunities in the community and the region that bring prosperity, requires intervention.

Our plan is to provide this intervention by creating what we call the Innovation Hubs. These Innovation Hubs will be intellectual communities that will better enable the transfer of campus research from the lab to the marketplace.

Last spring, we went out to the region and asked for ideas surrounding creation of these hubs to enhance partnership opportunities between campus-researchers and the private sector. Many of the responses noted that our campus has not been as nimble as should have been when it comes to technology transfer.

Under the leadership of Vice Chancellor [Harris] Lewin, the campus is reviewing the tech transfer infrastructure and process with an eye toward improving our ability to partner with the private sector and play a bigger role in the economic development of our region and state. In addition, it was suggested that bringing together related but organizationally separated campus research centers could help entrepreneurs more easily connect to the campus research enterprise. 

In response to that suggestion, we are locating several energy-related research centers enters within our new UC Davis West Village project to create what we call a “University Hub” as a prototype for future Innovation Hubs. We believe this “U-hub” will facilitate enhanced interactions with the private sector in the area of energy research within the first zero-net-energy community in the region.

We appreciate very much the interest that our supporters took in responding to our request. As our 2020 Initiative unfolds, we will continue looking for additional partnership opportunities with our neighbors and friends to enhance our economic development role in the region.

But make no mistake — our campus is already a strong engine of economic activity, as last week's report from the UC Office of the President points out. According to the report, here at UC Davis, in fiscal year 2009-10, we were responsible for about 56,000 jobs and 5.5 billion dollars in economic activity.

But at the same time, I know, I believe – we all believe – we can do better when it comes to creating more jobs and economic activity in the region, which is what the Innovation Hubs are all about.

The goal is to have more success stories like Professor Raju Pandey of the college of engineering. Raju can’t be with here today. He is in India for family reasons, but I wanted to speak about his achievements.

With some of his students, Raju invented wireless sensors in our labs that monitor and control energy use in data centers all over the country. The high-tech company he helped found, SynapSense, which did not exist five years ago, has now 55 employees and growing and has attracted $41 million in venture capital. And they have partnerships with Hewlett-Packard Co., Bosch Group, General Electric and others.

Now, the strength of UC Davis has other regional economic benefits as well.

Just this past June, the Japanese toolmaker Mori Seiki [Mau-ree Say-kee] broke ground on a new manufacturing plant in Davis that will employ up to 150 people. A big reason the company decided to expand here was because of UC Davis researchers and the world-class graduates we produce. The company has supported research done in our engineering labs for the last 16 years and now they can directly hire UC Davis graduates and create new jobs for the region.

We believe we can do more of that and play a leading role in bringing sorely needed economic development and jobs to Northern California, our state and nation.

As a land-grant university, improving the quality of life in our region and state is a core part of our mission, and it is something we all take very seriously. More success in this arena will also help the university maintain and expand its core research activities even in this era of uncertain federal funding.

I am very excited about working with all of you and the rest of the UC Davis community to accomplish these goals and make sure our future is always a bright one.

At UC Davis, I know we have the passion. We have the creativity and we have the ingenuity to respond to the state's budget crisis and make us even greater and stronger than before.

If we work together and keep our eyes focused on the ultimate goal, we will succeed.

And UC Davis will soar even better.