Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Chapter 7: A Different Footprint

110 A Different Footprint 7 The explosive growth of American higher education since the Second World War notwithstanding, the founding of a new research university has not proved to be a common occurrence. With few exceptions, the more than fifteen hundred new or transformed institutions created after the war were either community colleges, public comprehensive universities newly founded or converted from state normal institutions, or for-profit entities that made no claim to research proficiency. There have been no new private liberal arts colleges to speak of, only a few new private comprehensive universities, and just a handful, literally, of new public research universities : two in New York if one counts the conversions of the University of Buffalo to the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo along with SUNY Stony Brook; and six in California if one counts the University of California (UC) Riverside, which was first a Citrus Experiment Station and only after World War II a full-fledged UC campus. The University of California Merced—A New Public Research University The sixth new UC campus—the University of California Merced—can rightly boast of being “the first new American research university in the 21st century” (UC Merced 2012). Its history also offers something of a morality tale about why so few new research 111 A DIFFERENT FOOTPRINT universities have begun over the last six-and-a-half decades in the United States. The founding of UC Merced is a testament to California’s enduring faith in the power of its universities to transform both people and landscapes. By the 1980s the state’s agricultural midlands , having long chafed at the absence of a major UC campus in their midst, had the political clout to lay claim to a campus of their own. The effort’s political godfather was probably Cruz Bustamante, in the 1990s the powerful speaker of the State Assembly who, as Inside Higher Ed later reported, “cajoled, pushed [and] arm twisted the university president into making . . . [a central valley campus] a [UC] priority.” Bustamante and his colleague Dennis Cardoza, having eventually realized that appealing to UC’s sense of political correctness could overcome most arguments against establishing a new UC campus so far removed from the state’s major population centers, simply would not take no for an answer. Serving the Central Valley and California’s agricultural hinterlands, they regularly pointed out, would mean serving a population of substantially Latino and firstgeneration college-going students. UC Merced remained a tough sell that triumphed only because UC’s leadership felt boxed in by a political calculus that threatened to hold the UC system hostage. As Andrew Scull, chair of the department of sociology at UC San Diego, succinctly observed to Inside Higher Ed, “I think the university caved on the politics of [creating Merced], and thought if they didn’t agree to this their budget would be punished. . . . I think many people, even at the time that Merced was just a figment in some planner’s eye, were very, very concerned” (Stripling 2009). Probably the most consistent as well as vocal critic of establishing the Merced campus was Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, by then best known as the publisher of Measuring Up, the biennial report card measuring the effectiveness of state systems of higher education. As the Merced campus set out to recruit its first class of students in the spring of 2005, Callan told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “If there were no such thing as opportunity costs, if we had money to do everything, how could anyone be against this?” The inconvenient truth of the matter, Callan observed, is that “we have been squeezing people at the bottom and turning people away at community colleges at the same time we’re investing in this. The tragedy of Merced is that we never did have that debate about what we need to do to provide opportunities for Californians” (Hebel 2005). The last real opportunity to substantially delay operating the Merced campus came in 2003 when California faced a $38-billion budget deficit and an unpopular governor who was about to be recalled from office. The legislature put off the official opening of the campus for a year while most of California waited for the dust to settle from the political wrangling that accompanied Governor Gray Davis’s attempts to solve the budget crisis. A...