UC President Richard Atkinson spoke to a group of UC editors last week, addressing questions on enrollment growth, budgetary concerns and UC implications of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Neil Michel/AxiomPresident Richard Atkinson, who has been with the UC Office of the President since 1995 and was for 15 years chancellor on the San Diego campus, last Friday took time with a UC editors group to address current university issues. During a question-and-answer session, he examined a variety of topics from budget concerns, to the Sept. 11 attacks, to growth amid a declining economy.

Below is the first of a two-part story focusing on Atkinson's views on topics raised during his talk.

Q: How do you view the budget situation for UC?

The people who were here before 1995 remember how tough the early '90s were. Economists would say that those five years were the most difficult years in the history of the University of California, more so even than during the Great Depression.

So we look like we're going into another tough period; whether it's a long period or short period is a little hard to discern. But those who've been here a while know we've managed to survive downturns before. I don't mean to indicate it's not a serious problem, but as I said, we're in for a bad couple of years. Hopefully, the economy will turn around in the latter part of 2002. That's what most people believe. And if that's the case, two bad years can be dealt with. If it goes on for four or five years, then it's a great problem for us because we're in a peculiar moment in time, given the huge increases in undergraduate and graduate students that will be flowing towards the university.

Everyone knows the numbers. The 50 percent increase in the size of the student body in this 10-year period is a big task to confront. And if we're trying to confront it with an ever-shrinking budget, it could really undermine the quality of the institution. What's important to the state of California in my judgment is that we have to maintain quality - that we provide value to the state of California and that both our teaching and research programs are truly outstanding.

This month we will present the next year's budget to the regents. That budget is going to be the Partnership budget, fully funded, plus a return of all the funds we lost in last year's Partnership budget. And we are magnanimously saying we are not asking for anything above that in the Partnership budget. That will require an 11.8 percent increase in the university's budget. So it will be interesting. I assume the regents will say that's a good budget. They may say you ought to have x, y, and z and then we begin the kabuki dance with the Legislature and the governor's office.

Q: With Tidal Wave II on the way, has there been any talk about an enrollment cap or a way of controlling or slowing down growth until the economy picks up?

A: Tidal Wave II is a real worry. But if you look at it and project it out, you hit a peak about 2010, and then it really drops or is flat for the rest of the next decade. So we've got this incredible increase through this decade, but then things really do level out.

Obviously, in budget discussions going on now, there is the notion of capping our enrollments. But you know historically we've always taken the view that we would admit any student to UC - to one of our campuses - if they fell in the top 12.5 percent of the statewide high school graduating class. If we were to walk away from that, I think it would be a pretty harsh event for young people in this state.

One possibility that's been discussed is - and this is not dual admissions so don't confuse it with dual admissions - admitting students to UC as freshmen who are qualified or in the top 12.5 percent statewide with the requirement that they spend their first year or two at a community college.

Whether we could divert some of those students to community colleges for a year or so to deal with this is a possibility. Another possibility is to increase fees. We've had seven years with no fee increase. And when we have fee increases, we don't lock out poor students because half of the fee increase goes into financial aid. The governor, on the other hand, has said no fee increases while I'm governor.

Some people have said we should slow development of the Merced campus. That doesn't really buy us anything. Money for the buildings is already in place. To slow down the initial development would really just save a small amount of money, hardly worth noticing.

We had three campuses start summer sessions, with intentions of (others following suit). We probably won't be able to do that which is really unfortunate, because summer sessions were really key to our ability to deal with the flow of students to the university.

Q: What are some of the mid-term consequences of Sept. 11 for the university?

A: I went out to the Livermore Laboratories last Monday and, simply put, just about everything that's going on in the national scene in terms of chemical threats, biological threats, nuclear threats were located right there at the Livermore Laboratories. The governor asked for potential members for an emergency task force...the governor's task forces are just loaded with UC people.

• just signed a letter within the last half hour to Gov. (Tom) Ridge, (the Pennsylvania governor who was recently selected to head up the new office of Homeland Security) inviting him to come out to the university to visit the Livermore Laboratory to see what's going on. The area of cyber-security is a major issue for the country, and tracking down the use of the Internet is also a major issue. Our huge supercomputer facilities, which can't be matched anywhere in the world, are the core to the National Security Agency's efforts, and people at the NSA said, "Thank god there is the UC that can look to the future rather than the immediate issues of the day."

Q: What about the bond measures for next November?

A: The governor is thinking about a bond issue that would be used to speed up construction of facilities in the state. So UC has six or seven major buildings we could go into construction on much earlier. There's nothing better than building buildings in down periods. What typically happens is when the economy is doing good, we get money to build. And then we get these incredibly high construction costs. When the economy goes down into the tank, and we could get good construction costs, we don't have any money to build. The other is the bond for facilities (including Vet Med 3) for higher education and K-12 - we are linked with K-12. We're optimistic but I would probably say every president's office has been optimistic, and not all of them have worked out.

Q: You said you felt that more than a couple of years of hard economic times could lead to a dilution of quality. Were you thinking in terms of teaching or research?

A: I think on all fronts. We fund our research in large part from the ability to attract faculty who can compete at the national level in a peer-reviewed process to receive support. And we are an incredible institution. I don't have the dollar numbers in hand, but no one can match us in terms of the flow of federal dollars. Of the top seven campuses in the United States that receive federal funds, three of those campuses are UC campuses. And the other three or four are private universities. So no one matches the UC in the quality of faculty we have. And that, in turn, I believe defines the quality of education that students receive, the quality of the research programs, the quality of graduate education - the incredible contribution the university makes to the economy of this state.

Recently some economists examined productivity measures and concluded, yes, there's been wonderful productivity growth in the United States in the last seven or eight years. But when they factored it out, it was virtually all California growth and it was all based on (smaller) high-tech companies. It's the great research universities of the state that have been really key to driving that. Is that good for teaching? Absolutely it's good for teaching. It means the students that come through UC are at the cutting edge of their field.