The University of California got a second-in-command in March as Judson King was named UC's provost and senior vice-president for academic affairs. He replaces Walter Massey, who left UC last August to become president of Morehouse College.
King has held the provost's position on an interim basis since Massey's departure. He joined the Office of the President in 1994 as vice provost for research after having served for 31 years at UC Berkeley -- as a professor, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, dean of the College of Chemistry and, finally, as provost of professional schools and colleges. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, King received a doctorate of science from MIT in 1960.
In another major transition, Patricia Small was named Treasurer of the Regents, effective with the retirement of current treasurer Herbert Gordon on August 6, 1996. Small has served as the associate treasurer of the Regents since 1981 and has been in the treasurer's office since 1972. As associate treasurer, she has been responsible for the daily management of all of UC's investments, which today are valued at more than $32 billion.
The systemwide changes leave the University still seeking leaders on three campuses, as chancellorial searches are currently underway at San Diego and Santa Cruz, while at Los Angeles, Chancellor Charles Young has announced that he will retire on June 30, 1997.
Actors and playwrights have joined the ranks of UC students who will be paying special professional school fees this coming fall. In March, the UC Regents approved a UCLA request to add a $2,000 fee for MFA students entering UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. The rationale for charging the special fee solely at UCLA was that it offers the only film and television degree program in the system and that its theater program "is unique in the UC system because of its professional orientation and its integration with film and television." In another sign of the Regents' uneasiness about some of UC's new fees, the UCLA proposal made it out of the Regents' Finance Committee on a 6-5 vote.
The Office of the President announced in March that it is moving, but that it will remain in Oakland. UCOP will leave its current offices near Lake Merritt in Oakland when its lease on the site expires in May 1998. Most UCOP employees will be moving into a 200,000 square-foot building the University expects to construct in downtown Oakland, on Franklin Street, between 11th and 12th Streets. Some UCOP employees will be housed in leased space nearby. The Franklin Street site was chosen from among a list of six finalist sites, five of them in Oakland and one in Berkeley. The action is being taken as a cost-cutting move.
The University of California is making a collection of scholarly humanities materials available on the Internet. SCAN -- Scholarship from California on the Net -- is a pilot project that has begun with an electronic prototype edition of an existing print journal, Nineteenth-Century Literature. Later this year, SCAN will expand to include the full texts of several books in nineteenth-century studies, as well as primary source materials from special collections in UC libraries. Additional journals, books, and primary materials in nineteenth-century studies, history and classics will be mounted in 1997.
SCAN's goal is to develop an economically viable electronic publishing model for humanities scholarship. It is a collaborative project of, the UC Press, UCOP's Division of Library Automation, and the UC Libraries at Berkeley, Irvine and Los Angeles. The project's Internet address is http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:8080/scan/.