Chancellor assesses UCLA's future

This interview originally appeared in the October 22, 2002 issue of UCLA Today.

Now beginning his sixth year at the helm of UCLA, Chancellor Albert Carnesale talked with Karen Mack of UCLA Today about the state of the campus, his vision for UCLA’s future and the special challenges posed by a lean budget environment.

Q. How would you assess UCLA’s progress during your tenure as chancellor?
A. We have many reasons to take pride in our university. Every day, we see excellence throughout the institution. UCLA’s students and faculty are more impressive than ever, outstanding new facilities have opened and others are under construction, and our teaching and research programs are benefiting from curricular and technological innovation.

Q. What is your vision for UCLA?
A. Simply put, by any measure, UCLA should be among the great universities of the world. Not just the great public universities, but the great universities, period. That’s a small and very distinguished peer group.

Q. What is your strategy for realizing that vision?
A. It’s a three-part strategy. The first element is strengthening the foundation of the university by investing in the units at the heart of the academic enterprise, such as the College of Letters and Science, the Library and the information-technology infrastructure.

The second focus is crossing academic boundaries. Very few problems in today’s world can be solved by individuals in a single profession or discipline; collaborative, multidisciplinary scholarship has become essential to furthering discovery. UCLA has a distinct comparative advantage in this regard, partly because we have a full range of academic disciplines on a single campus where scholars in all departments are within walking distance of one another.

The third component of the strategy is concentrating on excellence — focusing resources on the things a great university must do well, and on the particular areas in which UCLA holds, or can hold, a comparative advantage.

Q. How would you rate the success of that strategy to date?
A. It has been an effective strategy for UCLA, with many tangible outcomes. For example, the California NanoSystems Institute; the Center for Society, the Individual, and Genetics; the Pervasive Computing and Society Colloquium; the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing; and the UCLA in LA initiative all reflect the emphasis placed on crossing academic boundaries. We’ve also seen many enhancements to core academic activities and infrastructure in the College and in the libraries.

Q. What is the major challenge that UCLA faces now?
A. Our ability to continue to recruit the very best faculty and students is the key to maintaining institutional competitiveness. When it comes to attracting the best people, no one finds fault with UCLA’s location, reputation, programs or facilities. When we do fall short in our recruitment efforts, the reason is usually financial. We can’t always match the level of resources available at our peer institutions, especially elite private universities, for faculty salaries, laboratory facilities and graduate student support.

Q. Why is this happening?
A. There is a significant and growing resource gap between UCLA and the elite private universities, which have substantially more money available to spend on their students. The gap between us isn’t new, but it has been widening because the resources available to private universities have been growing faster than those available to public universities. For example, UCLA’s endowment is about one-tenth that of Harvard’s, but we have twice as many students while receiving considerably less tuition income. Meanwhile, state support, after being static for a decade or so, is now shrinking.

Q. How big a factor is California’s budget crisis?
A. Obviously, it has a short-term impact on UCLA’s resource context. For the current academic year, we already have absorbed $13.3 million in cuts to academic and support programs, with additional cuts likely at mid-year and in 2003-04. But even if the state’s coffers were overflowing, we still would be addressing the resource gap vis-`a-vis the elite private universities and striving to enhance UCLA’s competitiveness.

Q. Has your vision for UCLA changed in light of the current resource challenge?
A. No. The vision of being among the very best universities will not change.

Q. If that’s the case, do we need a new strategy to realize that vision?
A. Again, the answer is no. Public universities always have done more with less, and up to now UCLA has been very successful in applying incremental resources to bring about progress and growth. But incremental resources are not sufficient to narrow the resource gap with the elite private institutions.

In my view, we have an effective strategy for ensuring excellence, but we need to implement that strategy more rapidly and more forcefully. To remain competitive, we must make better use of the resources we have, and we must attract more funds from non-state sources such as the federal government and private philanthropy.

Q. How difficult is that to do in the current economic climate?
A. Fortunately, based on recent achievements, there is ample cause for optimism. Take a look at research funding. In fiscal year 2001-02, UCLA received $767.8 million in extramural contracts and grants. That was a campus record and a 15% increase over the previous year, and it kept us among the top five universities in the nation for total research funding from all sources. If you look just at federal funding for science and engineering research between 1997 and 2000, UCLA rose from 12th in the nation to third, passing Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Penn, among others.

And there is more good news in the arena of private fund-raising. 2001-02 was a banner year for philanthropic contributions to UCLA, highlighted by David Geffen’s remarkable gift of $200 million to the School of Medicine. The record year-end total of $509.4 million propelled Campaign UCLA past the $2-billion milestone, with the overall Campaign goal of $2.4 billion now well within sight. This success reflects the strong support that UCLA enjoys throughout California and beyond.

Q. What do you consider to be the most important priorities for UCLA’s future?
A. In the near term, we must respond to the state budget cuts while protecting core activities and strengths, especially in light of the challenges posed by enrollment growth, rising health-care costs and the expense of upgrading or replacing our older facilities.

In the longer term, we must narrow the resource gap that separates UCLA from some of its peer institutions, by maximizing and focusing resources in ways that will enable us to continue to recruit and retain the very best faculty and students.

To that end, I’ve asked Executive Vice Chancellor Dan Neuman to chair a committee of academic leaders who will recommend an action agenda to enhance UCLA’s competitiveness. In conjunction with other teams of faculty and administrators, the committee will address such critical issues as graduate student support, faculty recruitment and retention, resource-allocation processes and interdisciplinary activities.

I’ve always believed that challenges bring with them opportunities. Our current challenges bring opportunities for all of us to work together in order to make UCLA the best that it can be.