At InnovaScapes Institute, we are mindful of the processes that get in the way of Innovation. In fact, we are dedicated to teaching ways to recognize and overcome them.
I recently gave a talk about elements of the process, especially tackling resilience as a needed quality
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2oeSFkV7eE&feature=youtu.be
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
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 21st 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:
·
1st among 96
of “America’s Coolest Schools 2012,” Sierra magazine's 6th
annual ranking of the greenest universities (a publication of the Sierra Club)
· 1st 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 5th
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 1st
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 7th in the
world--and 6th 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 11th in the
world overall among universities
under 50 years old (and 2nd only to UC Irvine in the US).
·
In 2013, UCSC placed 11th 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 18th 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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