Everyone by now has heard or read discussion about the decline in state support for public higher education and the critical funding gap that is confronting UCLA, and their implications for the university’s continuing ability to compete successfully with better-funded private institutions for top faculty, top students and critical research dollars. There are numerous initiatives under way to try to close that gap and to maintain UCLA’s place as a center for fresh ideas, dynamism, innovation and creativity, including Chancellor Albert Carnesale’s Ensuring Academic Excellence Initiative to raise $250 million over the next five years to help recruit and retain the very best faculty and graduate students in the nation.
Providing quality education to the state’s citizens is important, but why should the people of California care about the funding problems confronting UCLA when we are faced with so many other pressing issues? To answer that question, and to talk about the contributions of the university to California and the state’s citizens, UCLA Magazine brought together a group of business, community and academic leaders for a roundtable discussion.
The panel included Paul Boyer, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for chemistry; Warren Furutani, member and former president of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, former president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education and senior consultant to California Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Núñez (D-Los Angeles); Betsy Wood Knapp, entrepreneur and chair/CEO of BigPicture Investors, a company that invests in West Coast start-ups; Ian Krouse, professor of composition and chair of the Department of Music in UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture; Henry Samueli ’75, M.S. ’76, Ph.D. ’80, co-founder, chairman and CTO of Broadcom Corp. and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA; and Richard S. Ziman, chairman and CEO of Arden Realty, Inc. Professor of Political Science. Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the UCLA International Institute, moderated the discussion and set the stage in his opening remarks. Among key indicators of UCLA’s excellence, he noted:
- UCLA is ranked No. 2 in the U.S. in total research expenditures from competitively awarded contracts and grants, No. 8 in Ph.D.s awarded, No. 2 in postdoctoral fellowships awarded, No. 9 in prestigious faculty awards received and No. 19 in National Merit Scholars among entering freshmen, according to a University of Florida study of the nation’s research universities;
- 25 departments and schools at UCLA are ranked in the top 20 nationwide, according to U.S. News & World Report;
- According to an independent survey by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, UCLA generates, both directly and indirectly, more than 65,000 jobs for the region, as well as $6 billion in economic activity created by the innovation that flows from its classrooms and laboratories.
Garrett also noted that among the 62 members of the Association of American Universities — the leading research universities in the United States — nine are in California. Among those, six are University of California campuses, and just three are private. Compare that, he suggested, with Massachusetts, where there are seven private research universities in and around Boston alone. In Massachusetts, he said, public research universities like UCLA might be considered a luxury; in California, they are a necessity.
That ability to play a vanguard role as an engine of innovation for the state, however, is threatened by the growing resource gap, Garrett said. With that he initiated the conversation:
Garrett: What have you gained by your association with UCLA?
Samueli: My company, Broadcom, would not exist if it were not for UCLA. There’s no question in my mind that the success of Broadcom, and the wealth that we’ve created for the state, has been because of the academic excellence and the research that was done at UCLA. Besides earning all my degrees here, I came back for 10 years to be a professor, and it was during that time that the core research that I performed with my graduate students helped to build the foundational knowledge behind what we created at Broadcom. It’s a level of excellence that really was unmatched at any other university … a result of being in an environment in which you are surrounded by brilliant students and brilliant colleagues.
All of that together translated into our ability to start a company and lead the broadband revolution. It would not have happened if it were not for UCLA. So I literally owe everything that I have today to the university. This place is the lifeblood of innovation.
Ziman: For there to be a successful entrepreneurial environment, there must be very strong educational institutions. We certainly know the value of this at my company. Arden Realty is the largest office landlord in Southern California. We have 20 million square feet. Our average tenant today is 6,000 square feet; they are small entrepreneurs, start-ups with tremendous amounts of innovation. We’re very fortunate to be in this geographical area where there are fine universities in or very close to Los Angeles, and where all of that education, expertise, creativity and innovation creates an environment where business can flourish.
A close friend of mine who is the CEO of a firm that is one of the largest owners of apartments in the world told me that when he picks his core markets where he will invest most heavily, he looks for where there are great universities and educational facilities that can feed the local economy and produce employees for the local economy who will fill his apartments. Purely from an entrepreneurial point of view, and especially from a real estate entrepreneurial point of view, it is a key requirement — a necessity — to have great universities within the locale of where your portfolio is going to exist. It feeds everything.
Samueli: Nearly 20 percent of Broadcom’s employees in California are UC graduates. It is disconcerting that other states such as Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts and Mississippi are increasing investment in technology research, using tax credits, special university budget increases and other incentives, in their quest for long-term economic health at the same time that California has been making reductions. They are attempting to lure high-tech businesses and world-class engineering and other scientific researchers away from California. As a businessman who has headquartered my company here because of its proximity to great research universities, I want to see the state making more investment in research, not less.
Garrett: I’d like to broaden the conversation beyond this important nexus between science and entrepreneurship by asking Ian Krouse to talk about the importance of UCLA’s enormous footprint in the public arts, not only to our students and faculty, but also to the community at large.
Krouse: The arts can play a major role in the way in which UCLA relates directly to the community. We have two different faces to the arts within our university. We have the wonderful UCLA Live performing-arts apparatus, which is a world-class enterprise and something we can be proud of. And there is the academic face, the work we do in the classroom with our faculty and our students. I think this is an area where we can put more emphasis on creating a public face in terms of presenting the wonderful things that we are doing in the arts in the academic realm. I think that we can build bridges to other viable and substantial institutions in our area — the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Opera, for example. We have done a good job already in building bridges to community arts organizations. There’s a long history of that at UCLA, and we can look to build even more substantive relationships in the future.
I’d like to share a personal example of a project that could not have existed without UCLA, the premiere of a new opera about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It began some 20 years ago when I was a graduate student doing work with a small theater in East Los Angeles. Who knew then what this project would ultimately evolve into? I wasn’t thinking at that time about building bridges to the community; I was simply a graduate student trying to launch my career. But the thing grew and has waited 20 years for the opportunity to finally gel, and the catalyst for that is UCLA. Our unique positioning in our community, the quality of the students from many different departments, the support for the arts that has been funneled into this project — it’s a wonderful opportunity to showcase the potential for UCLA to build these kinds of bridges that I spoke of.
Garrett: One thing that sometimes goes underappreciated is the incredibly strong connection between UCLA and the community college system. Today, roughly one-third of the students in each graduating class at UCLA began their college careers in community colleges. Indeed, UCLA is No. 1 among major research universities in Pell Grant recipients from low-income families. Warren, how do you view this linkage between elite institutions in the California higher education system such as UCLA and the community colleges?
Furutani: For me, the community college is a bridge to get students into the university. There are many different steps along the way to arriving at a flagship school like UCLA. For some people there will be off-ramps as they pursue different educational goals. They may go straight into business, they may go into different kinds of educational or job-training programs. But the issue is making sure that those bridges exist from one sector of the public education system to the next. And if the bridge turns out to be a drawbridge — if we take the best and bring them in and then lift the bridge so that no one else can enter — then we have a problem. We have to bring in not only the best and brightest, we also need to have diversity within the class. UCLA can be elite, as long as it is not elitist.
Garrett: It is not a question, then, of either excellence or access — both are necessary for us to be competitive and successful. These twin goals that were front and center in the creation of the University of California, the leading public university system in the world, are still the right goals.
Furutani: Absolutely. Let me use my own son as an example. He goes to school at UCLA, which we are very pleased and proud of. But candidly, he was lucky to get in. He was an average student. And you know what an average student at UCLA is: He had a 4.2 GPA and a 1300-plus SAT. And that made him average. To me, that speaks to the necessity to make sure that we have a public higher education system that operates along a continuum. The issues that face education at the lower end of the spectrum are equally important as those at the top end.
Garrett: Let’s talk about the role of graduate education and what is necessary to attract and retain the best graduate students. It is probably hard for the general public to understand Ph.D. education. But those of us on the inside know full well that graduate students are the connective tissue in the research university, working with faculty on research, mentoring and teaching undergraduates.
Boyer: It is essential to a research university to have excellent graduate students and postdoctoral fellows attacking problems of major importance.
A great research university provides an environment that offers the best system society has developed for the creative discovery of new knowledge. High-quality faculty and graduate students are crucial to outstanding discovery. This is an area of concern in the life sciences because we’ve been losing our competitive edge in attracting the best, both in faculty and graduate students.
The need to improve the present state of affairs may not be adequately recognized. An indicative measure of this is the number of UCLA faculty who are members of the national academies. Among universities with 20 or more members in the National Academy of Sciences, for example, UCLA ranks 15th, well behind UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. Over the past several years, the number of Academy members at UCLA has remained relatively stable, around 28, while the numbers for the other campuses have increased.
Faculty quality is thus a very pertinent issue. Funding for named professorships and provision of ways to ameliorate housing costs for both faculty and graduate students are two important ways that private resources can increase faculty and graduate student quality at UCLA.
Samueli: Similarly, raising fees for graduate students without providing adequate financial support dampens their interest in UC campuses. If UC campuses can’t offer scholarships and other financial incentives to attract the best graduate students, who are critical contributors to academic research and, ultimately, the work force, they will go to universities in other states, and those states will accrue the benefits of their research. The net effect is a reduction in research that is so critical to California’s economic health.
Garrett: I think that if you asked the academic leadership on campus what they think the thin end of the wedge is with respect to the competitiveness gap, they would say it is worrying about losing some of the best faculty and not being competitive for the best graduate students. On the graduate student side, I know, having come to UCLA from a private university, that all the leading private institutions in the country now guarantee full funding for Ph.D. students for four or five years. That’s the national best practice. It has been estimated that only 20 percent of UCLA’s graduate students have guaranteed funding packages beyond one year.
Boyer: It is important to recognize, at least in the life sciences, that what is needed is not more graduate students — there are already more Ph.D.s than there are opportunities for them — but higher-quality graduate students. We’re not getting the best graduate students coming now. If we have additional funds, they should be directed at getting high-quality graduate students to come to UCLA.
Garrett: We haven’t yet talked about how undergraduates fit into this research enterprise. Betsy, you have many interests on campus, but also you’re involved in other higher education institutions in the U.S., including your alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One of the things that stands out about Wellesley is its success in creating an undergraduate experience that really equips the students to go on to graduate careers. Based on your involvement with a liberal arts college as well as with UCLA, how do you assess the value of a large research university to undergraduates?
Knapp: The research university offers enormous exposure and opportunities to an undergraduate student. As fine an institution as Wellesley is, I don’t think the students there have quite the same richness of experience and exposure to what they could do next as they would at a research university. In that way, UCLA has a great advantage.
I’ve been a member of the board of The Anderson School for many years. My husband and I endowed a competition there for M.B.A. students to spearhead the development of a business plan. And one of the ways we’ve tried to expand this program, to have an impact on the undergraduate experience as well as the graduate, is to have the M.B.A. students identify business-creation opportunities by visiting other parts of the campus — in engineering, the sciences, the arts, for example. It provides an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students to work together.
Garrett: You certainly have a broad perspective.
Knapp: Yes. But also as an entrepreneur and businesswoman, I recognize the need for business creation, and the research university is a key engine in that arena. I am also a very practical person, and I recognize the importance of skills development. Students have to come out of school with the ability to do something, as well as with a sense of the direction they might want to go in the future. They receive greater exposure to those possibilities as undergraduates at a research university.
If I could change the subject for just a second here, one of the hats that I wear is that of a member of the Campaign Cabinet for Campaign UCLA. I am very concerned about the resource gap, but one positive thing that we ought to recognize is that UCLA has raised $2.7 billion-plus. There is a remarkable capacity that exists for private funding of higher education. I think it speaks to an extraordinary interest on the part of UCLA’s constituents, be they alumni or be they the public at large, to support the campus. Limited state support is going to continue to be a problem; private support is key to helping to address that problem.
Garrett: Something that’s often raised in the public is the question of whether we should accept that, while it’s wonderful to have very good public universities, perhaps we don’t need to have great public universities. Maybe being good is good enough. Is good “good enough” for the University of California?
Samueli: No, absolutely not acceptable. If we want to maintain and enhance the quality of life we have here in the state of California, we must have the best universities. We need excellence, and we have to strive to be the best, not second best, in terms of having the best public university system, the best overall university system. [Being] the best attracts the best talent, which in turn creates the innovation that translates into creating jobs, creating industries, creating wealth. It is a circle that feeds on itself — wealth creation translates into philanthropy that comes back to the university. It’s a cycle that builds. But if you break the link in that chain and things start to crumble, you end up being mediocre or average. And this state can’t afford to be average.
Furutani: If we at UCLA or within the University of California start relegating our dreams and visions to being mediocre … then I think we have serious problems.
Garrett: Other states have in the past 20 years confronted similar crises in public higher education. The University of Michigan in the 1980s, with the agreement of the governor and the Legislature, made the tacit determination that the Michigan economy was not strong enough to support a world-class university. Rather than let the university suffer, they opened the university to students from other states and other countries. Today, more than one-third of the undergraduates of the University of Michigan come from outside the state and pay essentially the market price for tuition, not subsidized by the state. I don’t think Californians would accept that approach.
Ziman: There are 38 million people in this state. We have to educate them. We have to do what we can do so that they become part of our economy, part of our environment, and if we don’t, it’s going to adversely affect California to the point where, as Henry says, we will have mediocrity, or even worse. So it’s imperative that we maintain quality and access. The Michigan model of using students from outside the state to pay the freight is, in my opinion, unacceptable for California. There’s no vision there. It is not furthering the goal of what this university should be for the state.
It’s imperative that we figure out how to meet these challenges and advance our objectives. We have a duty to bring our residents, our people of California, up to the highest educational caliber possible so that they, in turn, can give back to create an economy and a research environment, whether it’s basic, clinical, whatever it may be, that will give back to the community and will encourage the community to grow more.
Krouse: Striving for greatness and achieving greatness is a direct function of dynamism, not stasis. The idea that good may be good enough is anathema to anyone who is involved in this enterprise. “Good is good enough” translates into a kind of complacency that is a death knell for greatness. If the pressure we’re feeling because of the funding gap pushes us to a call to arms to create dynamism, it will enhance our ability to be competitive.
Garrett: We have no other choice.
