Like raising a child, nurturing a newborn campus is rewarding in ways that faculty members have difficulty describing -- and can fray nerves in ways easy to enumerate.
The faculty members who have already arrived on the new Merced campus of the University of California have not only had to balance research with teaching, but also had to concentrate on curriculum development, community outreach, job searches, and heavy administrative duties. “Everyone is doing multiple tasks and working very long hours,” says Maria Pallavicini, dean of the School of Natural Sciences.
Merced faculty members have also faced setbacks, like buildings that aren’t ready on time and a yearlong delay in the opening of the campus itself.
To a person, 10 Merced faculty members interviewed by The Chronicle say their additional duties -- and the dearth of colleagues and graduate students -- have cut into their ability to do research.
But that has not dimmed their enthusiasm.
“No one comes to a new campus like this without a lot of pioneering spirit,” says Michael E. Colvin, a professor of natural sciences.
“The faculty have come because of that challenge, not in spite of it,” says Jeff R. Wright, dean of the School of Engineering.
Someday Merced will boast a faculty of more than 1,200. For now, the university employs fewer than 50 professors; 60 should be in place by the time the campus officially opens, in September.
Recruiting for those positions has proceeded smoothly, by and large, despite the many challenges the new faculty members face, the remoteness of the campus in central California, and Merced’s lack of name recognition.
Some people who were offered jobs turned them down for reasons related to Merced’s location. Two reached by The Chronicle said family ties kept them at colleges in the East.
But Merced has seen an outpouring of interest in faculty jobs. Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the chancellor, says the university received 7,000 applications for the first 30 faculty openings. “Many were drawn to the UC name,” she says. “Thank God for that.”
Indeed, many faculty members mention the university system as a prime reason for their interest in their new jobs. “Being within the UC system guarantees a certain level of support from the state and a certain level of quality,” says Kevin A. Mitchell, a physicist who is an assistant professor in the natural-sciences school.
It also means a certain salary level. Merced pays faculty members salaries in the same range as that of professors on the system’s other campuses. The lowest-paid assistant professor makes nearly $49,000, and the highest-paid full professor brings home more than $151,000. According to the Greater Merced Chamber of Commerce, the median price of a house in the city in 2004 was $279,000, a far cry from the sky-high prices elsewhere in the state. (The median price in San Francisco was $647,000.)
‘A Bit Like Noah’s Ark’
But professors on the new campus cite as the chief attraction the opportunity to shape a curriculum and a university’s research priorities, to build something new rather than try to alter established guidelines or goals elsewhere. The current faculty, says Kenji Hakuta, dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, “is a bit like Noah’s ark. You have a small population, and they’re making decisions on behalf of everybody.”
Gregg Herken, a professor in the social-sciences school, says Merced’s style contrasts with that of the last organization he worked for, the Smithsonian Institution, where he was curator of military space at the National Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian, he says, was “pretty hidebound and bureaucratic. We have the advantage of being a start-up.”
For him and the other two historians at Merced, both of them assistant professors, that means shaping the entire curriculum. “That’s heady stuff for junior faculty -- or for any faculty,” Mr. Herken says.
That freedom has allowed faculty members to be creative. For instance, Mr. Mitchell and a mathematician will team teach a double-credit course in calculus and physics. “These are two very closely related subjects,” says the physicist, “so it makes sense to teach them together.”
The introductory-biology course will also make more use of mathematics and computer science than traditional biology courses do, says Mr. Colvin, who will teach it. That shift in priorities will lead to less emphasis on memorization, he says. It will also have a practical side benefit: Since teaching-laboratory facilities will not be completed by the time the fall term starts, computer-lab sessions will help make up for lost time.
Faculty members from all three schools constituting the university are working on shaping a yearlong core course that will be required of all freshmen. The class will pay particular attention to noteworthy concerns of California’s Central Valley, such as the use of natural resources, particularly water, from the perspective of scientists, engineers, politicians, historians, and anthropologists. But it will also “look at the big issues that involve students and citizens of the 21st century,” says Mr. Herken. “It’s ambitious.”
Avoiding ‘Silos and Barriers’
The interdisciplinary core course reflects an intentional emphasis of the university as a whole. With its small faculty, it has not yet created academic departments. And when it does, they may not form along traditional disciplinary lines. “We hope that the faculty will align and collaborate based on their research interests rather than on departmental affiliations,” says Mr. Wright, the engineering dean.
For instance, Mr. Hakuta suggests, cognitive science -- a mix of neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology -- may become an emphasis at Merced. A major in earth-systems science, in the School of Natural Sciences, already reaches far beyond a traditional geology program, moving into ecology and environmental science.
“Departments often create silos and barriers for faculty with different expertise,” says Ms. Pallavicini, the natural-sciences dean. “It’s often difficult to get a computer scientist and a biologist together if there’s different space and different rules in their departments.”
Such problems do not exist at Merced, where the faculty members know each other well because of their constant administrative work in the race toward opening day. But other issues have cropped up because of that very lack of departments.
One has been evaluating candidates for jobs, tenure, and promotions. Merced has had to look for help from faculty members at other universities within the candidates’ disciplines, and has had to have Merced faculty members in other disciplines evaluate the candidates.
A second problem has been working out an equitable distribution of courses. Though senior faculty members have agreed to take on heavier teaching loads, to allow their younger colleagues to get their research programs going, those senior professors are used to the teaching requirements of the departments at their former universities.
Now economists work in the same school as literature scholars and so might have the same teaching loads, even though they are not accustomed to teaching as much. Those issues are still being sorted out, says Mr. Hakuta.
‘Dating Game’
Another major concern comes simply from starting from zero: The administration must recruit excellent researchers while at the same time making sure they can offer enough courses to give students a rounded education. Recruiting faculty members, says Mr. Hakuta, is “kind of like a dating game. You’ve got to go with the best dates you’ve got available at the time. It may not be the perfect person. I think we’ve been very lucky at finding the right people.”
Since most of the incoming students this fall will be freshmen, the task has largely involved finding faculty members to teach introductory courses. As the students progress, more faculty members will be recruited and will cover a larger number of specialized areas. So far, Merced has no plant biologists, for instance, or European historians. The university also needs to recruit graduate students to help teach the courses and to assist in professors’ research. The goal is to open this fall with 100 graduate students, but some professors think landing that many is unlikely.
For prospective faculty members, having fewer graduate students and faculty peers amounts to some professional risk. In fact, one scientist cites concern about his ability to do productive research as the reason he turned down an offer of a full professorship. As Alex B. Guenther, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., explains, “The things I wanted to get done with my research in the next few years weren’t likely to get done” at Merced.
Jennifer O. Manilay, who has a Ph.D. in immunology from Harvard University, is finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley before moving to Merced this summer to be an assistant professor of natural sciences. Some people advised her against taking the job, she says. “But when I thought about it, I really wanted this job at Merced. How many opportunities will I have in my lifetime to be part of a faculty at a brand-new university? I think that’s also advantageous career-wise because already, from the beginning, I’m learning all the things that are involved in administration.”
Sean L. Malloy will begin as an assistant professor this summer, too, in social sciences, humanities, and arts. A historian, he will come from a teaching job at the University of San Francisco. He didn’t get the same advice as Ms. Manilay. Instead, he says, “I’ve heard nothing but ‘You lucky son of a bitch.’”
The faculty members who have gone to work at Merced do consider themselves lucky, and they want to provide their students with a good experience. They hope for success stories like Mr. Herken’s: He graduated with the pioneer class of students at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in 1969, and now is back to participate in the system’s newest campus.
“When I was a student at Santa Cruz,” he recalls, “I had assumed that the faculty and administrators had planned this out to the nth degree, and it would be a well-oiled machine. Obviously it wasn’t, because the buildings weren’t ready. There weren’t any classrooms.
“It turns out it’s just the same thing now. ... We’re kind of making it up as we go along. It’s exciting and daunting.”
