| - should not be possessed with having to grow enrollment and administrative overhang all the time;<
- should understand and value the role of academia for basic research (not just applied) and its value for providing top-notch education to students;
- should understand that the administrative system needs to be geared towards supporting faculty and not vice-versa; |
| 1. It is essential that the search does not lead to one of Vanderhoef's crew who have reached their position through his appointment - this will only lead to another dictatorial reign.
2. In light of 1., it is essential that the new chancellor come from outside UCD. |
| A chancellor must have overview of what is at UC Davis and to actively promote collaborative efforts that will lead to the successful funding of center grants. These center proposals must be given highest priority and strongly supported from the campus administration with time, effort, and money committed to their success. |
| Administrators hired at UCD need to be first and foremost excellent administrators who respect shared governance, not necessarily active academic scholars. |
| appoint a Chancellor like President Yudof |
| Campus planning and infrastruscture have been seriously eroded by an exaggerated emphasis on capital and minor-capital improvements while at the same time paying little attention to the critical needs of existing education and research activities.
Allocations to the Colleges and the Library remained flat for at least 4 years while inflation has continually reduced the real value funds available. This has led to reduction in program quality and in turn to the demoralization of the faculties.
The financial situation for the Colleges and the Library is now extremely serious. If left unattended the Library will not a sustainable unit within a year or two and it seems likely that the several Colleges will follow suit shortly thereafter. This is unaccepatable.
The current adiministration has shown reckless disregard for the instuitutions of shared governance, openess and transparency. The very existence of the University of California at Davis as a quality insitution of higher learning and research requires a dramatic reversal if we are to have here at Davis a major teaching and research institution.
The present administartion has eaten much of the seed corn. It is unlikely that there will be additional State funds for several years. Substantail salary savings could be realized by placing a hiring freeze on all faculty positions. Unpopular? Sure.
However, why recruit new faculty when the Colleges lack the funding necessay to our new colleagues to get started? For the most part, positions lost would not due irreparable harm to either teaching or research programs.
The task facing the new chancellor is daunting to say the least. A detailed internal and extranal audit of selected administration units seems most appropriate and would allow an objective view of operations to be had for the development of a new strategic plan for the campus.
I wish the new Chancellor well.
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| Chancellor should build infrastructure to catch up with (support) the massive growth in people, funding, standing, etc. that took place at UC Davis over the past 15 years. This may need to come at the cost of faculty hiring , etc. But will be necessary to leverage and even sustain all that has been gained. An example is in the tech transfer office where we lag badly behind many institutions that have incubator companies and much better connections (e.g. to VCs and angel investors) and resources than UC Davis' office. |
| Chancellor should understand the importance and uniqueness of the agricultural "roots" of the UCDavis campus and emphasize the importance of the agricultural sciences and the veterinary and other health sciences in the future of UCDavis. |
| Find Super-Chancellor, if you can! |
| Having a "vision" of excellence is not important; being able to recognize and support it is. Coming from outside UCD is not important; being able to address UCD's problems and opportunities is. Reorganizing units is not important; making sure they're getting the job done is. The relative size of graduate programs is not important; their quality is. The people who know what makes a superb university are the people who do the work of the university; a university run by managers may be a well managed business but it will not be a superb university. The core business of the university is teaching and research; if the chancellor is not committed to that, what's she there for? The way to make sure those core businesses are handled effectively is to make sure the people who know those businesses are making the decisions; that's why shared governance is critical to the mission of the university. Ultimately a culture of excellence can only thrive in an institution committed to excellence in all its programs. And an institution without a world-class library cannot be a world-class institution--not in any respect. |
| I believe an "outside" candidate is vital. |
| I think it is about time we had a chancellor from the humanities. Have we ever had one? |
| I'd be particularly pleased to see a chancellor with no connection to the ag school or even to biological sciences, perhaps a philosopher or musician, to demonstrate that Davis is really a general university, not an ag/biology campus with a few other odds and ends tacked on. |
| In a time of budget crisis, I look for a chancellor who will have the courage to invest strategically in programs at UC Davis that are already internationally recognized, and that are the hallmarks of our campus image. The decline of such programs will come rapidly under the current system of benign neglect, coupled with an emphasis on broadening the campus's academic profile. While I and many others would welcome UCD developing over time into a well-balanced campus with across-the-board excellence in arts and humanities, as well as in sciences and engineering. However, broadening academic focus at a time of declining budgets is likely to result in mediocrity across the board. |
| In my opinion, the most important criterion in the selection of the new chacellor is that the person should be a scholar of unquestioned credentials, who is a broad thinker (given the diversity of UC Davis), an excellent communicator, and a public intellectual. This person should be highly visible on the national scene. Such a person can elevate the visibility of UC Davis and propel it to the national ranks. Berkeley chancellor Bob Birgeneau is an example of the type of person I have in mind. I have nominated Nobel Laureate and former NIH director Harold Varmus to the selection committee. I believe that Harold would be a superb chancellor for many, many reasons. He fits my criteria perfectly. Since he is an avid bicyclist and spent much of his career in Northern California, we might have a chance in recruiting him.
I believe that the most important specific issue for the chancellor to tackle on day 1 is strengthening the UC Davis library system. |
| It is critical that the new chancellor move away from the tradition of appointing mediocre faculty to administrative positions so that they can be easily controlled. We need excellence and creativity at all levels. |
| It is extremely important that we bring in someone with a 21st century vision, who is not wedded to reducing UCD further to a corporate model, who is not part of the Old Boys network here, and who is going to keep administrative appointments to the minimum. We need to restore shared governance. |
| Management style and commitment to shared governance is crucial. In the last decade, a culture of autocratic rule has developed, making for an oppressive environment that has chipped away at the effectiveness of the faculty. The view that the administration is, in fact, here to support and foster the efforts of the faculty and to provide a certain degree of cheer-leading along with vision and coordination of effort needs to be restored. Unfortunately, during the last 5-10 years, it appears that excessive effort by the administration has gone into protecting and maintaining power. The President should think of optimizing the term of a Chancellor with respect to the twin goals of benefiting from experience and preventing entrenched attitudes and wagon-circling behavior. |
| Morale among faculty at UC Davis continues to decline after continued battering about budget cuts and profound salary inversion. The next Chancellor needs to take care of the faculty, creating an environment where we are able to flourish, and the faculty will take care of the teaching and research. Be aware of the Gen-Y phenomenon in our potential replacements, and don't take senior faculty for granted. No one here aspires to be anything less than the best, but the erosion of faculty to other universities or the private sector combined with poor recruitment pools of applicants will further our descent into a second-rate university. |
| Most of all, it will be crucial to recruit a Chancellor who first achieved overwhelming success in their own career as a scholar, teacher, and researcher, and only later chose to become an administrator. They should be deeply committed to elevating UC Davis to the top tiers of research universities; this will require a commitment to hire top notch colleagues (not "subordinates") who are also excellent scholars and who are willing to engage in productive discussion and debate with the Chancellor (not "yes-men or yes-women"). Similarly, it will require a Chancellor brave enough (and with a track record strong enough) to challenge systemwide, to argue against bad policies and to press for more resources. A Chancellor (or any administrator) should represent (and aggressively lobby for) the needs of the programs under them, not passively pass down decisions reached from on high (email can do the latter at much less cost). Part of this requirement is the ability to recognize the faculty and staff as valuable colleagues (shared governance), not as disposable employees. The Chancellor should especially value the opinions and needs of our most successful faculty and staff, not consider them as bothersome annoyances.
Beyond these absolute requirements, there are many specific repairs in the infrastructure at UC Davis that must be made. Office of Research, Architects and Engineers, and Division of Graduate Studies, in particular, need dramatic reform and reorganization.
I believe that to achieve these goals, we should recruit from off campus, or if that is not possible, we should find a superb scholar on campus who might already have served as a departmental chair or as a program director, but who can bring an "outsiders" viewpoint.
I fear that unless we turn this university around, we are in danger of losing our position as a research/teaching institution. |
| Other comparable UC campuses (such as, San Diego and Santa Barbara) have sped past UCD in developing thriving and well funded research programs. UCD's faculty have not been sufficiently supported to compete in this way. UCD has greatly under-utilized local high-tech industry and is far behind in development activities. This track record of failed innovation is the result of a moribund upper administration. The new chancellor needs to be strongly forward looking with an inspiring research and intellectual vision. At this point the remedy is to replace most of the upper administration with those from outside UCD. At a minimum the chancellor must not come from UCD. The strategy of appointing internal people has simply failed to remove the log-jams to innovation. |
| Please work hard to ensure the transparency and openness of the process of searching for the next Chancellor. |
| Provide more financial support for recruiting international graduate students in the College of Biological Sciences |
| Renew the longstanding commitment of the whole state of California to UC as part of California's vision of a just, progressive, diverse, sustainable, innovative and all-around fantastic place!! |
| Resentment about shared government does not carry much weight for me. In general, faculty involvement has been slow, unimaginative, and not very useful. I think we are fortunate that the administration has made many good decisions on its own. I personally would like to see the time faculty members spend on merit and promotion decisions, at all levels of the hierarchy, and on other committee activities reduced in favor of more time for research, mentoring, and teaching. A huge amount of time and energy is now wasted on administrative activities that provide almost no added value to the process. I'm pretty sure that the difference between the very best public universities and the okay-but-not-great ones is not "shared governance." The difference is in resources, creativity, and good judgment. |
| Some of these questions are not well-phrased. Understanding shared government and having a commitment to its success are different. If you say the candidate understands it, you probably limit yourself to UC people. That is not what we want to do.
Everyone who applies is committed to appointing excellent subordinates. Who is evaluating them? By assuming we need to be raised to be a first tier research university, we do deny that by many measures we are in an enviable position. I am not wearing rosy glasses here, but rather the issue is to move to a higher level recognizing that in many regards we are doing pretty well. It is just that in recent years we have squandered some of what we have gained. |
| The chancellor needs to be more involved with the campus and less involved with the outside world than the incumbent has been. :arry has been more focused on building edifices than building programs. Personally, I want that the new chancellor have a background of excellent scholarship needed to grow quality programs but I am less concerned than many of my colleagues that he continue his scholarship. We need administrative leadership from the chancellor to help grow the excellence in scholarship to which we all aspire. |
| The new chancellor needs to be committed to recruiting excellent
students, both graduate and undergraduate, as well as excellent
faculty. This survey does not emphasize undergraduate education
sufficiently. |
| The UCD faculty salaries lag significantly behind the national average and even those at other UC campuses. CAP pointed out that "The initiative to raise UCD’s salaries to a level that exists at other UC campuses must come from the administration." The incoming Chancellor must address this issue to attract and maintain top talents. |
| The unequaled breath of disciplines of UC Davis is a unique strength that the new chancellor must be able to articulate and willing to promote publicly. The new chancellor must restore the trust of faculty, staff and students by promoting an atmosphere in which open and rigorous debate can take place, and opinions contrasting that of the administration can be raised in a professional manner without having to deal with retaliation. Only in such an environment, shared governance will be able to function properly. |
| There has been far too much inbreeding in the administration of this campus. Appointees appear to be selected on the basis of whether or not they are likely to "rock the boat," rather than their intrinsic merits or abilities. Faculty morale is at an all-time low, as the administration becomes increasingly brazen in its nepotism and self-serving agendas. We need a fresh vision from an outsider who will put the advancement and reputation of campus above his or her own ambitions or predilections. The merit/promotion process is completely broken, and has no vestige of credibility as a fair and consistent scheme. In short, the campus is riddled with serious problems. We need a courageous and visionary leader to fix the grievous maladies of this campus, just as we need such a person at the national level. The last thing we need is "more of the same". |
| There is a real need to change the culture of "kicking upstairs" failed faculty from internal academic units to high level administrative positions where they are "penalized" for their failure with fat, over-inflated salaries. The quality of the current UCD administration is an utter disgrace. This administration provides no significant support for the true mission of the university, i.e. scholarly research, science and teaching. The appointment of a *competent* chancellor would represent a tremendous, massive advance for UCD. |
You will find attached the message I sent to the UCD Chancellor committee:
I would like to offer my views regarding the search for a new UC Davis Chancellor.
To provide you with some background, I am a faculty member in the Dept.
of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UC Davis and served as Chair
of this Department from 1996-2000. I have been for 21 years on the UC Davis
Campus.
Chancellor Vanderhoef is stepping down after serving approximately 15 years
as UCD Chancellor, and it is fair to say that as time has gone on, his
administration has become progressively more sloppy and secretive.
I will not reiterate the episode of the under the table settlement with Celeste Rose
which infuriated a large segment of the UCD faculty, giving rise to a
no-confidence motion from the UC faculty. More recently, Chancellor
Vanderhoef pulled the plug on a national search for the UCD Provost position
which had attracted very strong candidates (including one outstanding
candidate from MIT) only to install one of his cronies as Provost under
a flimsy pretext, bringing great dishonor to our Campus. More generally,
over the last 10 years Dr. Vanderhoef has managed UCD primarily
through a very small inner circle, which has progressively shrunk as the
most marketable of its members found high administrative positions
elsewhere, or fell our of favor. This has left us with a small group of
permanent administrators, where key positions keep getting reallocated
like the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic. The latest change was
Dean of Engineering (Lavernia) -> Provost (Hurwitz) -> Vice Provost
for Academic Personnel (White) -> Dean of Engineering, which was
conducted *without any full external search* for any of these positions!
From my perspective, our Campus urgently needs a breath of fresh air
and to rid itself of the massive cronyism it has experienced under
departing Chancellor Vanderhoef. So an outside Chancellor needs
to be selected, and no internal candidate should be considered. In
particular, Dr. Vanderhoef's inappropriate termination of the
recent Provost search should not be rewarded by considering his
newly appointed Provost (Dr. Lavernia) as candidate.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that UC Davis has a rather sordid
history in terms of letting one Chancellor poison the well for his/her
successor. When Jim Meyer stepped down as UC Chancellor around 1987,
he appointed Larry Vanderhoef as Executive Vice-Chancellor
(the equivalent of the Provost position). After a new Chancellor was appointed
(Ted Hullar), there is very little doubt among UCD campus observers that
Larry Vanderhoef undermined Ted Hullar's tenure, paving the
way for his own accession to the Chancellor position. This must not happen
again! Our Campus needs a new start, with new management at
all top positions.
I would also like to point out that over the last 10 years our Campus
has a record second to none of dissimulating and hiding embarassing
information. For example complaints of ethical research violations
at UCD are routinely dismissed, no matter how egregious the
underlying issue (such as plagiarism) might be. In my opinion,
if the extent of dissimulation of unsavory activities at UCD
comes to light, our Campus could suffer severely. It is time for
our Campus to handle its blemishes in a honorable and open manner,
in accordance within all applicable UC guidelines.
I thank you for the opportunity to offer my views and wish
you success in your search for a new UCD Chancellor.
|
| Your survey is more a marketing tool than an in depth inquiry nrvealing the agenda of its drafters.
Whatever happened to ranking free speech and inquiry issues, students serving on faculty/administrator committees, campus safety and other similar issues?
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to write it. |
| To move into the highest ranks we need to be perceived as a strong Letters and Science university, not an applied science university. We have great academic strength in L&S but L&S has little power on campus. It is very unusual that there is only one L&S person (an English professor) on the recruiting committee. I know of no other university that would do this.
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| UCD has stagnated over the last 15 years. We need a Chancellor who knows what real research is and who is willing to appoint high quality administrators, not his cronies, who will speak their minds. This is a crucial appointment for Davis. We cannot afford to promote anymore of the insiders who currently hold positions here. |
| We must get a person who leads, inspires and has vision. We cannot tolerate another individual who "leads" by bullying and intimidation, who relies on the cost of faculty having to defend themselves against bogus allegations with legal representation as a means of trompling on their rights. Having experienced this first-hand with the current Chancellor, I can attest that it demoralizes and disenfranchises faculty, and it costs the University both in terms of faculty no longer being willing to devote their entire beings to the University as well as rewriting their wills to leave their entire estates to other academic institutions where they were educated rather than to this one where they spent their entire careers. The emphasis here on doing the "politically correct" and self-serving (for the Administration) thing rather than the just and honorable action is pathetic. The dishonor of having only 28% of the faculty vote to support the Chancellor in the no-confidence vote was spun to "Faculty Supports Chancellor" in Dateline; a page from George W. Bush's playbook. |
| We need a leader with a vision for UC Davis, but not a generic vision of a large, successful, research university. I hope we find a leader whose vision for Davis is strongly guided by the exceptional qualities that have long distinguished us from other large research Universities, including:
1) our history and enduring identity as an agricultural school,
2) our huge land holdings, which include extensive agricultural lands and other important habitats,
3) our very strong academic programs in agriculture, environmental and life sciences and engineering.
These aspects of our campus identity have both academic and cultural implications that distinguish us from Berkeley, UCLA, U Michigan, etc. (e.g. bicycling, sustainability, ag biotech, environmental science, etc). In taking UC Davis to the highest level as a research university, it would be a mistake not to build, in part, on the foundation of these exceptional qualities. UC Davis can lead the way in the new sciences and new technologies needed to meet the sustainability and environmental challenges of the 21st century. But let's not strive to emulate UCLA or Duke. We can and should retain our distinctive differences. In every important way, including academic programs, campus planning, architecture, marketing, etc., UC Davis could become the exemplar of a scientific approach to sustainability.
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| We need an outstanding academician. We do not need a business person, a CEO or a lawyer. |
| We need someone who recognizes the importance of all fields. |
