Anyone who strolls across its lush, grassy campus, past its commanding libraries, laboratories and lecture halls and spends time talking with its bright and eager students and gifted faculty will readily fathom that UCLA is a top-tier institution. Indeed, UCLA is by any measure one of the world’s premier centers for research and scholarship, a virtual cathedral of knowledge where more than 100 major disciplines are offered to some 37,000 graduate and undergraduate students every year.
Consider just a few of UCLA’s achievements: In the past six years its faculty has won two Nobel Prizes; the UCLA Medical Center has been judged as “Best Hospital in the West” by U.S. News & World Report for 13 consecutive years; no less than 31 of UCLA’s Ph.D. programs rank among the top 20 in their fields, making them collectively the third-best in the country; the university is among the top five in the United States for total research funding from all sources, and in the fields of science and engineering jumped from 12th in the nation for federal funding in 1997 to No. 3 nationally in 2000.
Success invariably brings new challenges, and so it is that UCLA faces one of its biggest tests in decades: How to maintain excellence during a nationwide economic slump that has broadened an already wide resource gap between itself and the wealthiest private universities. Over the past several decades, state support for the University of California has declined steadily and looks set to drop further, given the state’s continuing budget woes.
It was against this grim backdrop that Chancellor Albert Carnesale, determined to push this critically important issue forward, met with faculty leaders at a retreat in Ventura, Calif., last September to discuss ways of overcoming UCLA’s resource crunch. The following month, he appointed Executive Vice Chancellor Daniel Neuman as head of a 12-member Competitiveness Task Force aimed at maintaining UCLA’s prominence as a global research institution. The task force comprises six action groups, each responsible for formulating and implementing strategies in diverse areas ranging from faculty and graduate-student support to optimum utilization of campus space. The groups are scheduled to present their recommendations to the chancellor in the spring.
In a recent letter to campus leaders, Chancellor Carnesale outlined the task force’s mission. “Virtually since its inception, UCLA’s strategy for excellence has been based on growth of faculty and new programs,” he wrote. “Now we must achieve our goals and maintain our leadership position through different means.” The message was clear: In decades past, with sufficient levels of state funding to rely on, UCLA expanded enormously, mirroring the institutional trend of the times as well as California’s galloping growth rate. In the 21st century, that’s no longer the model.
THE IMPORTANCE OF COMPETITIVENESS can hardly be overstated in today’s globalized world, where the discipline of the market is everywhere, including in higher education. But what does it mean for a campus to be competitive? “One form of competitiveness is how well we do in recruiting the best people,” says Tony Chan, dean of physical sciences, who heads a task force group on support for graduate students. “We are a top research university, and to do good research, we need the best people, the best graduate students and faculty. That’s where we have to be competitive — to attract the next generation of Nobel Prize winners and the top faculty to train them.”
The problem for UCLA, however, is that while its endowment is generous compared with other public universities, it is small compared to those of elite privates like Harvard and Princeton against which it competes. (UCLA’s endowment at the end of Fiscal Year 2002, for example, had a market value of $1.2 billion; that was dwarfed by Harvard’s endowment, valued at $17.5 billion.) This disparity of funds has a direct effect on UCLA’s ability to recruit and retain leading talent. Resources and competitiveness, therefore, go hand in hand. As Executive Vice Chancellor Neuman puts it: Competitiveness is simply “the ability of an institution to have the resources to attract the very best individuals — be they faculty, students or staff — when other universities are doing the same thing.” Thus, a critical goal of the task force is “to see what can be done to enhance UCLA’s competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining the best faculty and students.”
Which raises a fundamental question: What attracts distinguished faculty and students to UCLA in the first place? Probably the most compelling attraction is UCLA’s solid reputation for cutting-edge research, the kind that “arches and bends with society’s goals,” in the words of the late Rep. George E. Brown Jr. ’46, one of California’s most respected politicians and an ardent supporter of university-based scientific research. Indeed, only a handful of campuses in the country can match UCLA’s track record in research. “We offer a very special research education, which requires a very special kind of professoriate,” says Barbara Nelson, dean of the School of Public Policy and Social Research, who is heading a task-force action group on ways to improve faculty housing, child care, schooling and spousal employment — all important factors when it comes time to recruit and retain top faculty. Only about one out of 10 American universities is dedicated to research, says Nelson. “It’s what we do best. It’s our special advantage.”
Research that pushes the frontiers of knowledge cannot be sustained without high-caliber faculty, which is why the teaching staff is one of the key measures of a campus’ value. “It is by no means an original idea that an outstanding faculty will attract outstanding students, some of whom will go on to become outstanding teachers,” says Neuman. Nor is it novel for an exceptional faculty to serve as a magnet for their peers at competing universities, while at the same time — and this is key — “attracting resources in order to enhance research capability.”
Expecting faculty and administrators to be more entrepreneurial is not just realistic but imperative, considering that academic costs are going up much faster than state funding to support them. Start-up packages for scientists are a good example. “The cost of getting a young scientist up and going is in the six-digits, often seven-digits,” says Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost for International Studies and Overseas Programs, who heads the task-force action group on generating new resources and making the best use of existing ones. “Funding for this can come from the state, but it is a flat figure in terms of the number of students taught. Academic costs have skyrocketed over the past decade or 15 years, and the major reason for that is that technology has dramatically improved what we can do in the classroom,” says Garrett. “High-level education no longer resides in the ‘chalk and talk’ model of research and instruction, which has fallen by the wayside even in the social sciences and humanities.”
A possible solution, says Garrett, might lie in exploring two broad areas. “The first is that while always being mindful of UCLA’s mission as a state university, we should be thinking of more opportunities for charging the market price for the world-class education we provide.” There’s little doubt that the University of California’s current fees are a bargain, but raising them is a difficult political issue for many legislators who believe that higher fees mean diminished access for underprivileged students. That need not happen, says Garrett, because a campus like UCLA can redistribute much of its resources any way it likes. For example, he points out, Harvard University takes a good portion of its relatively high tuition fees and redistributes it as aid among students who are financially disadvantaged.
Garrett’s second point is that even though UCLA does exceptionally well raising research funds, having tripled the amount of research money it has received over the past two decades, it might refocus its efforts “more on core academic activities, the most important of which is support of faculty and graduate students.” Investment in human capital, says Garrett, is where the campus has the largest comparative disadvantage. Indeed, it’s a tall order for UCLA to match the kind of money that elite, private universities spend on their faculty and students. “The financial packages we provide for Ph.D. students in particular are just not competitive,” says Garrett, “and the issue of compensation for faculty goes a lot further than just salaries.” Reason: West Los Angeles, where UCLA is located, is a much sought-after place to live but “making it attractive for faculty to live here while at the same time providing appropriate child care and education for their children is very expensive.”
Nelson agrees that the regional costs of housing and children’s education “create our biggest problems.” This is something the UC recognizes, she says, and it tries to create ways to give faculty targeted resources, particularly for housing. “Part of what we are good at is being thrifty, inventive and enterprising,” adds Nelson. “But in the end, competitiveness is about making sure we raise more money to have an outstanding faculty, and that we allocate the funds to make our faculty better researchers and better teachers.”
THE CENTRAL ISSUE AT UCLA, even in good times, has always been how best to use the institution’s limited resources to promote excellence in research, teaching and public service, the UC system’s three-part mission. Yet data on resource use is typically scarce, which is why it’s heartening to note that it is one of the task force’s assignments to provide it. Heading the group examining allocation and reallocation of resources is Scott Waugh ’70, dean of social sciences.
Besides examining UCLA’s budget mechanism, Waugh’s group is keeping an eye on such things as how much research a department has produced, how others regard it, whether the department is cost-effective and if it receives adequate support for realizing its mission. “There is always the question of how to allocate resources or whether it’s a good idea to reallocate from one area to another,” Waugh says. The whole idea behind the task force is to “keep the chancellor well-informed and help him understand what his options are.”
Or what those options should be. “There are a variety of things to do, but certainly being continuously attentive and vigilant about managing resources ought to be a top priority,” says Aimee Dorr, dean of the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, who heads the task-force group looking into the deployment of existing academic resources. An essential first step in that direction, says Dorr, is “a spirit of recognizing that the campus as a whole has to succeed.” This attitude, she emphasizes, is not unlike the rallying cry of the American Revolution: United we stand, divided we fall. “The campus is big enough and our work challenging enough that we can remain disconnected from each other,” Dorr points out. “We need to know more about our college, our schools and our colleagues. We need to understand each other well on a professional level.”
In fact, it was UCLA’s diversity of disciplines and its “tremendous intellectual resources” that brought Dorr to UCLA from USC in 1981 — she took a substantial salary cut and lost a full-time secretary to make the switch. A specialist in child welfare, Dorr says she joined UCLA because “there are faculties all over campus that are related to my interest.” Dorr’s school works with a remarkably wide range of faculty encompassing just about every field, from the social, physical and life sciences to the schools of engineering, law and management. These faculties carry out research and public-outreach programs on common projects, besides sending students to each other’s classes. According to Dorr, this interdisciplinary approach, or the grouping of diverse subjects within one program for students, is UCLA’s greatest strength, and one that it has already exploited.
When it comes to collaborative research and teaching, says Executive Vice Chancellor Neuman, “UCLA is better in this regard than other campuses.”
A stellar example of such collaboration is the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), which broke ground in February for its new facility on campus. The CNSI is focused on developing the nanotechnological advances in information, biomedical and medical technologies that will dominate science and the economy in the 21st century, drawing on the expertise of physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, engineers, medical scientists and other scholars. Another collaboration is the new Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, which brings together researchers from engineering, physical and life sciences and medicine to develop machines for space that will mirror both the adaptability and intelligence of human beings.
Such academic integration is testimony to the “entrepreneurial risks we undertake in intellectual endeavors,” says Neuman, “which comes out of UCLA’s youth. Older campuses would find it much more difficult to do this because they have embedded in them traditions dating back scores of decades, if not centuries.”
Another good example of UCLA’s research-oriented, cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial initiative, says Neuman, is the Department of World Arts and Cultures in the School of the Arts and Architecture, which is considered unique not just in the country but around the world. It evolved out of the dance department in the mid-1990s, and offers a curriculum in culture and performance studies leading up to the Ph.D. “It’s a new, emerging field that may well serve as a model for other universities in this century,” says Neuman. As with any research-based program, it’s impossible to predict the department’s eventual direction, but as Neuman perceptively stresses: “What is interdisciplinary today becomes disciplinary tomorrow.” He adds, with a smile: “How’s that for a bumper sticker?”
OF ALL THE TOP CAMPUSES in the nation, UCLA, with 419 acres, is among the smallest in land mass. This has profound implications for long-term planning, making space one of the keys to competitiveness. “Without space, your program can’t grow, so in certain ways it is more important than money,” says Judith L. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education and, as of July 1, interim executive dean of the College of Letters and Science. Smith is the head of the task-force group entrusted with space planning, including how UCLA has developed in the past and what kind of programs it should develop in the future. Besides long-term planning, Smith’s group is also monitoring ways in which faculties can continue to do quality work without the prospect of building much more on the main campus.
“Space is power,” says Smith. “I don’t know if you can have a dialogue about that, but space is certainly something that the faculty understands very well. It kind of transcends everything.” Many campus buildings, adds Smith, were built in the 1950s and ’60s, and renovating them is monumentally expensive, especially since state funds for renovation as well as new buildings are scarce. “We are looking at models in other universities to see how they have dealt with these important issues,” she says.
Indeed, one way of tackling UCLA’s budget woes may be to instill a dose of administrative reorganization. That, at any rate, is the view of William Ouchi, holder of the Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Chair in Corporate Renewal at The Anderson School, who has offered a course for UC managers titled, “What Will Our University World Look Like?” The course includes responses to the challenge of dwindling state support for UC campuses. As Ouchi sees it, “having a difficult economy is no more or no less a disadvantage to UCLA than any private university.” That, he explains, is because private campuses are having trouble raising tuition fees and are faced with diminished endowments, plus ever more requests for scholarship money by students whose families have been hit hard by the economy.
Given these circumstances, UCLA might consider an approach that offers more local autonomy, not just for the upper echelons of the campus but for each school and department. “We are relatively decentralized,” says Ouchi, “but the best of the private universities are much more decentralized than we are, and they are responding very quickly to the financial pressures we are all facing.”
Among the remedies that Ouchi offers is streamlining of staff not at the front line — that is, employees other than professors, physicians, student-aid officers and people in charge of student admissions and placement. “We’re coming off 20 years of largely prosperous times, when staff was added,” he says. “Now we need to trim back some.” The push for that has to come from the top, adds Ouchi — “the decisiveness to say we have to achieve some economies here.” The only catch is that “you have to let people at the lower levels help you figure out how to do that.”
It also is essential when endeavoring to generate greater support to better educate the public about critical issues at the heart of UCLA’s budgetary crisis. Millions of Californians, including many decision-makers, prospective students and their parents, have no clue what life is actually like inside the campus, let alone what it takes to keep the place running. The results of a focused education campaign will not, of course, be evident overnight. But when the financial fortunes of the state of California bounce back in the years to come, any strong public backing for UCLA is bound to result in better state funding for the campus.
“These are the citizens who provide direct support through taxes, and indirect support in that they will or will not be intellectually supportive of UCLA,” says Executive Vice Chancellor Neuman. “Only if they value what a world-class university can provide will we have the political support needed for increased resources.”
