January 2005
Q/A WITH UC PROVOST M.R.C. GREENWOOD
This past April, M.R.C. Greenwood (pronounced “Marci”) left her position of eight years as the UCSC chancellor, and took over as UC’s Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs. We thought that you might like to hear, first hand, her views on a few of the important issues facing the University of California today.
Q: You and President Dynes have embarked on a long-range planning mission to define what the University of California should look like in the next ten to twenty years, and to set the University on course for attaining that vision. You have been meeting with groups of administrators, faculty, students, alumni, regents and others to help you with this mission. Have you been surprised by anything that has emerged from these discussions so far?
A: The long-range planning discussions have not been terribly surprising except for how frequently the different groups within the University community agree with each other. There are twenty or so issues that are fairly consistent across the groups, including the ones you would expect -- student access, the balance of graduate and undergraduate programs, the need for professional schools, increasing globalization, finances, and erosion of state support. The President has been very clear that he wants us to create a vision that will stimulate the support needed to make it a reality. The next step will be for us to have some focused discussions on the issues we’ve identified.
Q: In talking about a future vision for UC, there are those who question whether, going into the 21st century, the University should continue to make policy based on the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. In their view, the Master Plan is a forty-plus year old document that is out of alignment with the changes that are taking place in the state of California today. How do you respond to this view?
A: I think that the Master Plan was one of the most strategically well thought out documents in educational policy history, and it has served the University extremely well. It allowed the University of California to develop as the premier research university in the nation, if not the world. The bedrock component of that success is the differentiation of functions among the three institutions of higher education – the CCC, CSU and UC. Often, these days, when people talk about the Master Plan they talk only about the 12.5% issue. They talk about whether we are educating enough undergraduates or whether we should change the ratio. This question is one that we will be discussing over the coming years, and there will be differences of opinion.
But a larger issue of the Master Plan is finding the right balance of programs that will help fill the current and future workforce needs of the state. This is a question that we have not addressed for quite a long time, although the health sciences are currently looking at this. We should be studying these needs in other areas as well because, from the point-of-view of the Master Plan, we should be just as concerned about whether we are providing the seed corn for intellectual discovery and innovation at the graduate level, as we are about whether we are providing as much access as people would like at the undergraduate level. The quality of the university will be in jeopardy if we let the balance go too far in one direction. If we don’t have great graduate and professional programs, we won’t attract great faculty and if we don’t have great faculty, the undergraduates won’t get a quality education. I am quite focused on ensuring that the new generation of students who come to the University of California will get the same quality education, as did previous generations. These are some of the issues that will need constant evaluation, but I for one do not think that the Master Plan is in any way out-dated.
Q: A recent survey by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) determined that admissions of international students at 125 U.S. universities fell by an average of 18 percent last year because of homeland security policies, and that the biggest drop has taken place in engineering and the sciences -- areas where America is not able to produce enough doctoral candidates to meet its own needs. To what extent have UC’s graduate programs been affected in these areas, and what, if anything, is being done to counter this trend?
A: UC’s international admissions have fallen about 16%, which is slightly less than the 18% reported by the CGS survey. Whereas CGS found a big decline among the engineering admits, we are actually estimating that the decline among UC’s engineering admits was no greater, on average, than the general decline among international students. We think some of the decline is due to problems we have been having in providing support. For instance, some programs are choosing to support fewer students better in order to have a higher quality program.
I do think that current U.S. Visa policies have done two things. One is that the actual process for getting a visa is longer and more difficult, though frankly I think many of the international students have mastered the technical difficulties. The other, more troubling issue, is the huge amount of international chatter that has resulted about how difficult it is to get into the U.S., or how international students are not really welcome here, and particularly not welcome from certain countries and in certain fields. So, some of the problem is what we are communicating. Other countries, in the meantime, are aggressively recruiting those students to come to their universities.
It is probably incorrect, though, to attribute the changes in the distribution of international students only to the homeland security directives. This trend has been apparent for at least a half decade. While the PhD production in the U.S. has been going down, it has been increasing in Europe, and Asia’s PhD production now surpasses that of the U.S. So, bright international students have choices other than the United States, and we have made it much easier for them to make that decision, which is very regrettable.
I would like to touch on the other statement in the question you asked me, which is that the U.S. is not able to produce enough doctoral candidates to meet its own needs. We have spent proportionately much less money trying to identify talented students in science, technology, engineering and math, and we have not been providing the intellectual and financial resources to help students be successful in these areas. I will simply remind people that back in the late fifties and sixties when the Sputnik era was kicking off, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided strong science and math education in the schools, and encouraged people to stay in those fields and aspire to university and other careers. Many of the scientists in the University of California and at the Labs are here because of the loan forgiveness program that was part of the National Defense Education Act, and I am one of them. We no longer have such programs.
You know, a great many of the United States scientists, including a lot of us in the University of California were first generation kids. We came from families who had just moved to this country or, at most, were second-generation kids. We didn’t come from backgrounds where there was much financial support, but we found help because the country was investing in its own students in those days. When you compare what the United States is investing in this area right now to what Singapore is investing, or China, or what we are seeing in Australia, or the U.K. -- it is my view that it’s not that we can’t produce the students, it’s rather, as a society, we have chosen not to.
Q: The National Research Council (NRC) plans to conduct a survey of research doctorates early next year. What is the purpose of this survey and what are its implications for UC?
A: Because of funding issues, NRC has had to postpone the survey for a year, but this question focuses us on a bigger issue and that is, are we satisfied with the quality of our graduate programs and are we able to stay competitive? The quality of UC’s graduate programs is very much on my mind, and I know it is of great concern to the Academic Senate. The survey, of course, puts us in the position of having to collect some of these data but, in addition to that, and as I have discussed with the Academic Senate Chair and Vice Chair, refreshing the 2001 Report of the Commission on the Growth and Support of Graduate Education, and making graduate education a major topic for intensive study, analysis and recommendations is certainly on my list of things that we need to get done in the next period of time.
Q: Last November, California voters approved Proposition 71 to establish a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to award grants and loans for stem cell research and research facilities. What does this proposition mean for UC?
A: First, I want to be sure that faculty understand that just because their campus does not have an official representative on the Independent Citizens Oversight Commission (ICOC), this does not signal that they are ineligible to apply for the funding. Faculty members from any UC campus will have an opportunity to apply, if they can meet the requirements of the RFPs that are issued by the Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The money is restricted to California investigators but we won’t know until sometime in January, after the ICOC meets, what the proposals will be. Faculty should realize that the stem cell initiative was not a University of California initiative. This is an important point of information because it helps to explain how the initiative will be implemented.
The details of the initiative were contained in the actual legislation the people approved. The University of California has six official positions on the ICOC, the 29-member governing board. There will be representatives from the five UC medical school campuses who will serve eight-year terms, and the UC Berkeley chancellor who was appointed by the Lieutenant Governor. In addition, there will be eight representatives from other California universities and academic research institutions who will serve six-year terms. The constitutionally elected officers who have been assigned to make appointments will determine the rest of the membership. Once established, the ICOC will set the rest of the rules. It will appoint the scientific review committee, the medical ethics board and the facilities people. The ICOC will have up to fifty employees and act as a mini-granting agency. I think that we can expect to start seeing some RFPs in the late winter or early spring 2005, at least that is the hope.
This stem cell initiative is a grand experiment in California, and it is probably the most significant science policy initiative since the human genome project in the life sciences. How well we do and whether we are able to make this investment pay off for the science, the patients, and for the state is a real challenge, but it is an undertaking that the University hopes to make as successful as possible.
Q: Do you have any particular message for the UC faculty?
A: I think most of our faculty are concerned about the funding constraints that we have been operating under for the past few years. Though we will get some relief -- meaning it might not get worse -- it will be a while before we see improvement in state support. I would urge faculty not to be more than reasonably discouraged by this and to continue to do what they have been doing, which is producing the best scholarship, bringing in the federal and private funding, doing the best job they can with their teaching and trying to inspire our students to go on in higher education. I hope that faculty will continue to appreciate what a wonderful institution this is, and to recognize the exciting synergies that can occur across fields, and within fields across the system. The University has probably not maximized these synergies, and I hope that over the next few years we can begin bringing faculty together in various clusters and groups to work on novel ideas and solutions that will benefit both them individually and the institution as a whole.
Q: You have been in your new post for a little over eight months now. What would you say has been your greatest challenge in making the transition from campus chancellor to UC’s Provost?
A: This job has many of the same challenges as those of a campus chancellor except, as Provost, I need to understand the whole university, not just one campus, and be aware that the University of California’s Office of the President is responsible for working with the Regents and the Legislature, and for complying with the laws of the state and the nation. In that respect, it’s a broader stretch of imagination and knowledge that you have to master quickly. It’s also not as hands on and interactive as it was on the campus, and that is a change. There is no question that the challenges facing the University of California are very real and our ability to understand and master them, and be persuasive, is something that takes a lot of time and energy. I do miss the campus environment, but I am also finding this job fascinating and interesting as well. I admire President Dynes and think that he is the right President for this University at this time. We knew each other as chancellorial colleagues, and so I found the opportunity to come and work with him very inviting. President Dynes is a man of tremendous integrity, and he is very focused on envisioning what we have to do to ensure that the University of California continues to be a legacy for this state.