Excellence and the Leiden Report -- Part VII

It is worth spending a moment on the worldwide Leiden Ranking, inasmuch as it represents perhaps the most comprehensive rating of independent universities on scientific performance available.  This is a multi-faceted set of fairly objective metrics, trying to skirt historic prejudice.

The list for 2013, fairly consistent for the past decade, shows some stunning results, with five UC campuses in the top fifteen worldwide research schools.  Every UC campus except Merced is in the top 100.  The list shows some of America’s and England’s best known science schools, ranked relatively low by comparison (e.g. Carnegie, Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell, Georgia Tech):

1              1. MIT                                      

2. UC Santa Barbara

3. Stanford

4. Princeton

5. Harvard

6. Rice

7. UC Berkeley

8. Caltech

9. UC San Francisco

10. Yale

11. UC Santa Cruz

15. UC San Diego

21. Carnegie Mellon                                                              

24. Cambridge

25. UC Los Angeles (UCLA) 

30. Oxford 

32. Cornell

34.Georgia Tech

35 UC Riverside

44. UC Irvine                                                       

67. University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana

87. UC Davis

105. SUNY Stonybrook

Table 1 – Leiden Science rankings

Each school on this list has achieved distinction; that all of the UC universities are so well represented is remarkable.  Taken together, the UC system is an amazingly diverse and accomplished set of universities, each of them broad in undergraduate offerings, and yet each of them uniquely able in specific graduate sectors – enough that each has attained overall world ranking – no mean feat.  This is under-recognized, but it is undoubtedly a fundamental reason for the strong economy and creative accomplishments of Californians over the past century.  No other university system in America, or even the world, is like this.

But it is fragile.  Consider: About $1.4 billion has been cut from the UC system since 2009. It’s a trend of declining support that escalated once the Great Recession hit.  In the past 10 years, state funding for UCLA has decreased by about half.  The impact is palpable, especially for the traditional academic departments.  For example, Patrick Geary, a distinguished scholar in medieval history, left UCLA in December after 18 years as a history professor and has yet to be replaced.

In Geary’s view, the quality of a UCLA education has declined considerably since 2009: “It’s been very hard, and you just get to the point where you feel that UCLA is going to turn into Cal State Westwood or Westwood Community College or something like that in the future,”

According to Geary, he is the third of three senior professors in his field to leave without being replaced in the last six years. The losses were a significant blow to an already small specialty. The university is operating under a partial faculty-hiring freeze. Since 2009, academic departments have left at least 47 full-time faculty positions unfilled ‘like Geary’s’ saving $6.8 million, according to a budget plan released by UCLA officials in February 2011.

The slow hiring trends will continue for several years, according to the budget plan.  Last year, the economics department hired four assistant professors. The new faculty members did not make up for the six vacancies left over from the previous year of no hires. “The number of students is going to increase faster than we are going to be able to hire new faculty to teach them,” Roger Farmer, a distinguished professor and chair of the department. said. “If that persists, I would hope the university would provide resources so we could give students the education they deserve.”