April 2004

 

Senate Plays Integral Role in New UCSF Campus Planning

 

Mission Bay, UCSF’s new 43-acre life sciences campus, is well into its first phase of development with approximately 1000 faculty, staff and students now working and studying in the first two completed buildings. The campus will continue to evolve over the next 10 to 15 years and will eventually house 9100 in a complex of 20 buildings. Remarkable not only for its scope and its key role in UCSF’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), the Mission Bay project also serves to set a new standard for collaborative campus planning among faculty, staff and administration.

 

Although the UCSF Academic Senate is now integrally involved in planning for Mission Bay and other components of the campus LRDP, much of the early planning for the new campus was done without substantial faculty input. Dr. Lawrence Pitts, Academic Council Chair and UCSF Professor of Neurological Surgery, recalls, “There were a lot of people who felt it was too much of a top-down process and faculty were not as involved as they could have been in discussions. Too often the Senate became involved only in the later stages of policy planning and development, which led many faculty members to feel disengaged from the decision-making process.”

 

Through concerted efforts on the part of Senate leaders and willingness on the part of administration, the UCSF Senate has become successfully integrated in the campus planning process. Former Division Chair Dan Bikle and former UCSF Academic Planning and Budget Chair Stanton Glantz were instrumental in establishing a protocol for interactions between the Academic Planning and Budget Committee and campus administration. The proposed system was accepted and now provides a platform for Senate participation and standards for communication between the Senate and administration.

 

In 2002, the Senate began sending faculty representatives to all campus-wide committees charged with evaluating academic, budget, and space planning for Parnassus Heights and Mission Bay, various hospital replacement scenarios, and the future of Mount Zion. (The LRDP includes replacement scenarios for Moffitt/Long Hospitals at Parnassus and Mount Zion.) Now, every committee or subcommittee of the LRDP has Academic Senate involvement. Senate representatives sit on UCSF’s Executive Budget Committee and an Academic Planning Subcommittee charged with looking at the academic implications of the reorganization. In turn, UCSF’s Vice Chancellors of Administration and Finance, University Advancement, and Academic Affairs sit as ex-officio members of the Senate’s Planning and Budget committee.

 

UCSF Academic Senate Chair Leonard Zegans and UCSF Academic Planning and Budget Committee Chair David Gardner also sit on the Clinical and Research Planning Subcommittee, which is in charge of determining how programs will be configured at the Parnassus, Mission Bay and Mount Zion sites. The UCSF Senate also recently established a Hospital Replacement Task Force, which conducted a series of successful focus groups that solicited faculty input and provided a formal mechanism for faculty comment.

 

The Senate has taken an assertive approach to shared governance, says Zegans, and its input is being taken seriously by the administration. “We’re not just responding anymore. We’re also taking proactive stances. We have good, interpersonal, collegial relationships with the administration. We feel that we have access and a seat at all the important tables.”

 

The Administration has become more proactive as well. The Medical School Dean and Medical Center CEO have been hosting a series of town hall style meetings to give faculty and the larger campus community an opportunity to comment publicly on the long range planning process. And a consulting firm has been interviewing individual faculty members and faculty groups about their needs. Recently, the consultants reviewed reports submitted by each school’s Faculty Council on the potential effects for faculty of locating a hospital at Mission Bay.

 

UCSF Academic Senate Executive Director Tamara Maimon agrees that the faculty’s views are being integrated into planning. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress,” said Maimon. “We’ve gone from a situation where the Senate was not really on the radar screen of the administration with the initial planning of Mission Bay to much greater reception by the administration for faculty input. I think we (the Senate) have to continue to be vigilant and to remain involved at all appropriate levels of Mission Bay and campus planning. With a few exceptions, we certainly do have an increased level of openness and support from the administration.”

 

Maimon also pointed out an important element of Senate involvement: the ongoing consultation with rank-and-file faculty members through the Senate’s four Faculty Councils. Through online questionnaires and focus groups, information is collected from faculty members about what they think are the positive and negative implications of planning proposals and what they would need to thrive and be effective as instructors, researchers and health care providers. These findings are communicated back to the administration.

 

Pitts, Bikle and Zegans all agree this shift in Senate involvement is partially a result of the failed 2000 merger of the UCSF and Stanford medical centers, a union that was not widely embraced by UCSF faculty. “They [the campus administration] realized that if they want major changes to this campus they need to get buy-in from the faculty, who are the people who are going to make it work,” Bikle commented. Additionally, Pitts, Bikle and Zegans credit a reorganized and well functioning Senate Office — offering faculty a high level of professional, analytical and administrative support — with fostering increased faculty involvement.

 

Making a Divided Campus Work

Mission Bay offers the opportunity to cluster research programs in larger, more modern facilities. Genentech Hall will house programs in Structural and Chemical Biology and Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, as well as the Molecular Design Institute and the Center for Advanced Technology. New space will also be created at Parnassus for programs covering a range of basic science and clinical research—including human genetics, HIV/AIDS, stem cells and developmental biology.

 

What may be lost in the expansion? For faculty and researchers at crowded Parnassus, the cramped conditions also fostered a unique collaborative culture that integrated clinical and basic science and contributed to a spirit of creativity and discovery. Some fear that some of this unique culture will be weakened or lost once people make the move to Mission Bay.

 

Bikle maintains that many of the basic science faculty whose focus is lab-oriented are interested in moving to Mission Bay, and that most of the faculty who have been chosen to move to Mission Bay are delighted. But at least for the next few years, the campus will be more divided than ever. “The question is how to make it work without losing the sense of community that we have in terms of our collaborations in teaching, research and patient care,” said Bikle. “Some of us do all three.”

 

UCSF will likely be divided between two main sites for years to come, due to limited space at Mission Bay and the recent focus on revitalizing the Parnassus Heights campus (although there are no precise plans yet). To operate as a single campus, UCSF would need to buy about another 50% of the adjoining areas of Mission Bay, which would be complicated because Mission Bay is in a Redevelopment Area, and costly. A possible solution involves building one smaller hospital at Mission Bay and a new hospital tower at Parnassus.

 

Although medical students won’t be a major presence right away at Mission Bay, faculty have been concerned about how to most effectively teach students who are going to be moving between the campuses. Some students will eventually be housed at Mission Bay, but at least at first, the bulk of the teaching will take place on Parnassus.

 

Since Mission Bay is a half hour shuttle ride from Parnassus, there may be some reluctance among faculty to come to meetings at Parnassus, and that would create an obstacle to carrying out the academic mission of UCSF. “We have a lot of very intelligent people who are working very hard to come up with a combination of services and facilities to allow the faculty to do what they do best, whether it is teaching, caring for patients or research,” Maimon said. Zegans said the Senate has been critical to the access, availability and analysis of data related to many of the specifics of Mission Bay development and the LRDP, including how to successfully integrate telecommunications, transportation, and information technology across the campuses.

 

“[The Senate] is like the central processing system of a computer, taking in every aspect of what is going on in all the schools, formulating policy and giving meaningful feedback to the administration,” said Zegans. “I don’t think there is any other single part of the University that serves that function.”

 

For Pitts, a single UCSF campus is ideal, but he believes that in any case UCSF will continue its achievements in teaching, patient care and innovative research. “We have always been a multi-site campus and that has always been tremendously successful, healthy and productive.”

 

Mission Bay — A Massive Project

Research laboratories, lecture halls, classrooms and libraries will eventually encompass 20 buildings and 2.65 million square feet of space on land that was once an abandoned railroad yard, doubling UCSF’s research capacity. The campus is the centerpiece of the 303-acre Mission Bay revitalization project, which, when finished, will be San Francisco’s newest neighborhood, complete with its own school, fire and police stations, hotel, restaurants, retail space and 6,000 units of housing.

 

The first phase of building includes—in addition to the already completed Genentech Hall and the Developmental Biology, Genetics and Neuroscience building—a four-story campus community center opening in 2004, and a student-housing complex slated for completion in 2005. The headquarters of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3)— a multi-campus partnership between UCSF, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz—will be ready for occupancy in early 2005.

 

Despite a downturn in the economy, everything continues on schedule. Funding for the project comes from a variety of state and private sources. Catellus Development Corporation and the City of San Francisco, who donated the Mission Bay land to UCSF, hope the University presence will attract private industry to the area and create a center for commercial biotechnology adjacent to the campus. The project is supported by the Campaign for UCSF, a $1.4 billion fundraising effort, which is enjoying strong support from business communities in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. QB3 is one of the four California Institutes for Science and Innovation established by state leaders who view such multi-campus technology partnerships as a key part of the state’s economic recovery plans. Genentech, the South San Francisco biotech company, paid $50 million towards the $235 million total cost of Genentech Hall for naming rights. (The gift also helped settle a patent infringement lawsuit brought by the University of California relating to Genentech's human growth hormone).

 

Conclusion

Continued discussions between UCSF administration and the Senate will be vital to the success of these projects. As Academic Council Chair Pitts puts it, “The faculty are the people who do the research and take care of the patients, so they need to be very fundamentally involved in planning to optimize their efficiency and the quality of research and patient care. The plans offer a huge potential for keeping UCSF in the forefront of medical science and clinical care,” he added, “but there are obviously a lot of unknowns and potential dangers to these plans. The faculty will be important in helping resolve these issues.”

 

The Senate is pleased with its role in campus development, but Zegans is looking for ways to integrate into the senate ranks the growing number of non-Senate faculty who also play an important role in all aspects of university life. “There’s got to be a broader representation than there currently is,” he said.

 

Finally, the UCSF Senate hopes to increase funding and resources so it can function more optimally. “You can’t stand still on the successes of the past,” cautions Divisional Chair Zegans. “All these things cost money. Right now we function on the good will of the faculty and you need more than that.”

 

- Michael LaBriola