Concluding this set of LIBERAL EDUCATION posts -- Part VIII

The question is how much this excellent system is at risk because of the dysfunctional California legislature, a dyspeptic electorate, and the seemingly endless budget issues that face the state.   It is against that backdrop that increased tuition, alumni donation programs, and revocation or at least major revision of Proposition 13 are crucial issues for our time.

It would be nice to report that the evening ended on an upbeat note, but in fact it was disappointing. ‘Bob’ (Dr. Robert Jacobsen) remained engaging, trading insightful stories and examples in response to many questions, but there was no conclusion, no call to action, no point of view that seemed to hang together enough to generate a direction.

Walking back to our campsite, one attendee lamented the missed opportunity, which provoked a question about just what defines ‘educational excellence’ anyway.  Is it learning facts, skills, and concepts – or is it learning how and why to learn?  It is hard to imagine, for a 21^st century world where the predictions are that each person on average will have five or more careers, that the purpose of an educational system is to teach job skills – it isn’t even possible.  And it is equally hard, almost nonsensical, to imagine that teaching facts, especially factoids, in a connected Internet-based world has much value or utility.

The undergraduate school, we felt, is the nexus of opportunity – this is the place to discover, to experiment, to turn with disinterest from one pursuit to savoring the next, to finding your inner passion.  And mentors, coaches, and colleagues – some still call them teachers, upper classmen, and classmates – are invaluable in this discovery process.  The secret, though, of the UC undergraduate experience is not just the breadth, the relatively modest cost, or the local site – it is that when that passion is discovered, it can be embraced, grabbed deeply and inhaled, from researchers who have dedicated their lives to this domain.  This is not skill-based learning, and certainly not on-the-job training.  It is completely antithetical to the government’s “gainful employment” metric, belatedly and stupidly imposed to reduce student loan default rates.

How do you place value on the twenty-one separate music degrees offered at UC Santa Barbara or the eighteen language degrees at UCLA?  These are not routes to high-paying Silicon Valley jobs presumably, although one could have argued similarly about abstract mathematics and statistics two decades ago, and missed entirely the huge opportunity today at such companies as Google and Facebook for those specific skills.

Can you imagine yourself back at age seventeen?  Was it course content, friends, or the pending job that mattered most?  Some offer the ‘three rules of two’ as a good metaphor for the successful young college student: (1) make a friend in two days; (2) be stimulated by a teacher within two weeks; and (3) have a project-based success within two months.  Experience  these and you’ll become more, rather than less, enthused.   This is not an argument for survey courses – in fact, it is just the opposite.  Immerse, go deeply quickly, get infected with a field.  See if it lights your fire.  If not, move on.  But you’ll catch fire best if you meet someone already on fire.

The really good schools – those with Nobel Laureates, for example -- put them in the freshman classroom, not tucked away in an obscure cloistered lab.  And those schools listen carefully to student ratings – who inspires in the classroom?  These are content-free discoveries often.  It is the ‘why’ that excites researchers, not the ‘how’ – and that, we concluded around the obligatory campfire (even though the day had been unseasonably hot), is the secret of the UC campuses, the true genius of a Clark Kerr.  Put excellent researchers on your campus, and honor them but all the while expect them to mingle and mix with the youngest students, to create that wonder, that spark of enthusiasm, that sense of ‘what it takes’ to pioneer on the cusp of an important question or performance or action.  Great things will come of it.

Seems so simple, now that we’d heard Jacobsen and reflected on it ourselves.  What might it take to inculcate this message with the California legislators and the voting public?

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.”

Liberal education and the entire UC system -- Part VI

The good news is that the other campuses have largely fulfilled Kerr’s dream – they’ve become significant research universities in each case. Pioneering research is a critical component of the highest quality education, and perhaps as a corollary consequence, these UC ‘clones’ have largely emulated Cal’s breadth of undergraduate disciplines that Kerr envisioned for the top 12% of students.

Even though Jacobsen omitted this analysis, it is worth considering each campus in turn.

UC San Francisco, with the mission to be “the world’s pre-eminent health sciences innovator, joined with UC Berkeley in 1873.  In 2009-2010, UCSF became the only institution to claim faculty who earned the Nobel Prize, Albert Lasker Award and Shaw Prize within a single academic year.  Five UCSF faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  UCSF faculty are ranked third for "scholarly productivity" among all universities and research institutes worldwide, according to 2007 data published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

UC Davis began in 1905, admitting ‘ag students’ for what is still the largest physical UC campus at 5,300 acres.  Their oenology program today leads the nation, but in addition they are:

·       1^st among 96 of “America’s Coolest Schools 2012,” Sierra magazine's 6^th annual ranking of the greenest universities (a publication of the Sierra Club)

·       1^st among national universities in number of faculty papers written in the field of ecology and the environment, agriculture, entomology, food science and nutrition, and plant and animal sciences (ScienceWatch)

·       Tied for 1st among research universities (with UC Berkeley and Penn State) as the top producer of U.S. Fulbright Scholars, 2012-13

“The UC Southern Branch” opened in 1919; it was named University of California at Los Angeles in 1927 (quickly known as UCLA), enrolling 5,500 students in 1929 on a new Westwood campus.  Operating as an autonomous unit, by 1938 UCLA was conducting its own research program and granting PhD degrees.  UCLA today is the largest UC student body, with 28,000 undergraduates and 12,000 graduate students.  There are 405,000 living alumni for UCLA, versus 452,000 for Cal.  UCLA faculty and alumni have garnered twelve Nobel Prizes and several hundred other prestigious awards; the Internet was born at UCLA in the early 1960s.

UC Santa Barbara joined the renowned University of California system in 1944, growing to be an integral and important part of public postsecondary education in the state. UCSB’s 1,050-member faculty includes five Nobel Prize winners, scores of elected members of national and international academies and societies, and dozens of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowship winners.  For the past decade, UC Santa Barbara’s researchers have outscored every other UC campus in scientific rankings, scoring an incredible 2nd place worldwide in impact and value of faculty publications, slightly behind MIT but ahead of Stanford, Caltech, and Berkeley. Recognition of UCSB’s academic quality takes many forms. One of the most prestigious is support from the National Science Foundation. The campus is now home to 12 national centers and institutes, eight of which are sponsored by the NSF, including the Materials Research Laboratory, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the Southern California Earthquake Center, and the renowned Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. The California NanoSystems Institute—one of the California Institutes for Science and Innovation—focuses on dramatic breakthroughs in materials, devices, and resulting technologies, made possible by controlling form and function at the nanoscale.  At the interdisciplinary Carsey-Wolf Center, students and scholars study everything from silent films to the latest in digital media and satellite communications, all in the context of a strong liberal arts and sciences curriculum.

In 1948, the University of California Regents approved the establishment of the College of Letters and Science at Riverside. The college opened for classes in February 1954.  In 1959, Riverside was declared a general campus by the Regents and courses of study began to be developed. The University’s Graduate Division was established in 1960.

Since then, UC Riverside growth has mirrored the growth of Southern California. Once a small university in a small town, it is now the premier research and educational institution in the thriving Inland Southern California region.   With its roots as a Citrus Experiment Station, UC Riverside is guided by its land grant tradition of giving back by addressing some of the most vexing problems facing society. Whether it is assuring a safe, nutritious, and affordable food supply; stimulating the human mind and soul through the humanities and arts; or finding solutions to the profound challenges in education, engineering, business, healthcare, and the environment, UC Riverside is living the promise.   Already internationally prominent for its food and environment research programs, 850 faculty run the gamut from established professors in the prime of their research to up-and-coming academics bringing in exciting new ideas.

Seven current and former UCR faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, while more than 50 UCR faculty members have garnered Guggenheim Fellowships.  More than 100 UCR faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a recognition of how these faculty members have made notable contributions to the advancement of science and its role in society.

After a five-year pilot with Scripps Oceanography, UC San Diego (UCSD) opened in 1960 with this mission statement: “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through excellence in education and research at the undergraduate, graduate, professional school and postdoctoral levels. The campus is committed to community engagement, public service and industry partnerships in order to advance the health and well-being of our region, state, nation and the world. Our academic community of world-renowned faculty, bright students and dedicated staff is characterized by a globe-spanning culture of interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.”

UCSD recently ranked 5^th in the nation for annual federal research and development spending, excelling in both traditional scholarly disciplines and fields that cross these disciplines, such as neuroscience, nanoscience, and climate science. Similar to Berkeley and other UC faculty, UCSD researchers consistently earn international acclaim. They include Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, members of the National Academies, and recipients of MacArthur Foundation "genius grants."  UCSD has the leading national program in a half dozen fields, as well as the nation’s premier Supercomputer Center.  The UC San Diego faculty counts among its members and alumni 20 Nobel Laureates, two Fields Medalists, 8 MacArthur Foundation Fellows, two Pulitzer Prize winners, 91 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and 8 recipients of the National Medal of Sciences.  They also hold more than 158 Endowed Chairs.   

Located forty miles southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County, UC Irvine opened in 1965.  An analysis by Times Higher Education, released in June 2013, ranked UCI first in the U.S. and fifth in the world among the 100 best universities less than 50 years old. The “100 Under 50” list aims to show institutions poised to become future world leaders. 

The 2007 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index ranked five UCI research fields in the top five among large research universities. Computer & information science ranked first; information science/studies fourth; and geology/Earth science, mathematics, and urban & regional planning fifth. Produced by Academic Analytics, the index rates journal articles and books published by each program’s faculty, as well as journal citations, awards, honors and grants.

UC Santa Cruz also opened in 1965, and along with UC Irvine, has been acknowledged in the “Top 100 in 50” rankings. “In its 45 years, UC Santa Cruz has earned national and international recognition for quality research and world-class teaching. Faculty include 24 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and 33 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Awards include:                    

·       The computer engineering Ph.D. program was rated 1^st nationally for publication impact by the National Research Council in 2010.

·       In 2012, UCSC was rated second in the world for research influence by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

·       In 2010, the UCSC Economics Department was ranked 7^th in the world--and 6^th among all academic departments--for research in international finance, according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).

·       In 2012, UCSC's graduate programs in computer game design were ranked among the top 10 in the U.S. (Princeton Review)

·       In 2013, Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked UCSC 11^th in the world overall among universities under 50 years old (and 2^nd only to UC Irvine in the US).

·       In 2013, UCSC placed 11^th in the annual Leiden Ranking, which measures the scientific performance of 500 major universities worldwide.

·       In 2010, the British publication Times Higher Education ranked UCSC 18^th in the world for research impact in geosciences.

Opened in 2005, the UC system's tenth campus at Merced — the nation's first public research university to be built in the 21st century — is the first new UC campus in 40 years.  Critics are carping that it is off to a slow start, but alongside the growth record of earlier campuses, it has a solid beginning.  With 6,000 students already, academic research is a critical part of UC Merced's mission just as it is at other UC campuses.  The Merced campus also garners the highest student ratings for faculty (3.88), by a full 0.1 points over second place Berkeley and Riverside.  The rest have a modest average of 3.71.  Berkeley’s key competitors average 3.88, tied with Merced. [1]

Special research institutes established at UC Merced include:

·       Health Sciences Research Institute

·       Sierra Nevada Research Institute

·       UC Merced Energy Research Institute

·       University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute

In addition, startup funding has been received for the:

·       UC Merced Center for Computational Biology

·       Center of Excellence for the Study of Health Disparities in Rural and Ethnic Underserved Populations

·       UC Merced Center for Research in the Humanities and Arts

UC Merced has also entered into collaborative research partnerships with the:

·       Central Valley Higher Education Consortium

·       Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

·       National Park Service

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[1] Rate Your Professor, July 9, 2013  http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/SelectTeacher.jsp?sid=4767