As UC Davis prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2008-09, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef earlier this week outlined "important questions" for the university to consider as it begins its second century.

Vanderhoef posed the questions during his annual State of the Campus address, delivered Monday to an audience of about 50 at an Academic Senate meeting in the Memorial Union.

Among the questions:

• How do we build on the excellence established during our first century?
• Are there particular areas that should grow or be enhanced or does the current array of academic programs meet our objectives?
• Are there particular transformative areas that are essential to our future?
• Should it be enrollment growth or should it be reallocation that undergirds our planning strategy to provide additional resources and improve quality?

Vanderhoef said UC Davis' proven track record of collaboration and partnership, between administration and faculty, and among the university and other government entities and the private sector, will serve the campus well as it maps a second century of service.

"We are a university with an unusual dedication to building strong communities and solving real-world problems," he said. "Our first century, in fact, was built on that premise and our next will surely continue to fulfill that promise."

He noted UC Davis' inclusion last year in Washington Monthly magazine's list of the top 10 U.S. universities, public and private, for their contributions to society.

Examples of UC Davis' contributions abound, the chancellor said, from transportation policy and stem cell research to the Foods for Health initiative and efforts to improve the state's preschool-through-high school education system.

Vanderhoef said Academic Senate members have their own examples "of how this campus has committed itself to charting new paths, sharing what we've learned and bettering someone's circumstance."

Much of this work is accomplished with grant money: a record $544 million in 2005-06, representing an 8 percent increase over the previous year and an 82 percent increase over the last five years, and topping UC Berkeley's total for the second year in a row.

"This extraordinary funding success is a strong testament to the competitive quality of your scholarship at a time when research dollars are harder and harder to come by," Vanderhoef told senate members. "The last few years have not been easy."

Still, he expressed optimism that UC Davis researchers will be successful in receiving grants "because of the strength of your proposals and because of your strong inclination to pursue interdisciplinary research," which he labeled a favorite of granting agencies.

Also, he said, the Office of Research is taking a more integrated approach in support of technology transfer, research collaboration and entrepreneurship, "and our reputation as a good research partner is growing" — with nearly 20 start-up companies emerging from the campus in just the past two years, a dramatic increase over prior years.

Along with research achievements, he said, UC Davis continues to add on its reputation "for providing an attentive and research-enriched education" to undergraduates.

This makes the campus an attractive option, he said, referring to last fall's freshman class of 5,511, the largest in history at any UC campus. He thanked senate members for working with the administration to handle the challenges that came with the high enrollment.

"And, together, we'll see these students through to graduation — and in a timely way, thanks to the leadership of the Academic Senate and its work on 'time to degree.' "

The chancellor also noted a joint senate-administrative task force that initiated an examination of the undergraduate program review process.

The task force addressed concerns later raised by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which placed particular emphasis on reporting student-learning outcomes.

"We're really a step and a half ahead of the game," Vanderhoef said. "Our task force's work is aimed at creating a review process that is based on evidence, and ensures that we've met our obligations to our undergraduates."

Vanderhoef noted increased diversity in freshman and transfer student ranks, though "we're still not where we need to be," and progress in the faculty ranks as well. He said UC Davis made 121 new Academic Senate hires this academic year, among them 46 percent women and 29 percent people of color.

The chancellor talked of the problem of new faculty members sometimes receiving salaries nearly as high as or exceeding those of their senior departmental colleagues, a situation called "salary compression," the result of the university paying market-rate salaries to attract new faculty, while existing faculty members lag behind.

To help address this issue, Vanderhoef said, the campus last July implemented the Davis Professorial Salary Scale, allocating $2.2 million this year to help close the pay gap. "It's not perfect, nor is it immutable," Vanderhoef said. "But it's a step forward as we try to deal with market-driven inequities."

He said Davis and two other campuses, Berkeley and Irvine, took initial action on salary compression "because the problem was just too urgent for us to wait for the UC system to take the lead."

But Davis and the other campuses must look to the UC Office of the President and the Board of Regents to help find a longer-term solution. He said the regents have made it clear that faculty salaries must get back to competitive levels, and that they will aggressively seek greater support from Sacramento.

Vanderhoef said he is convinced that Gov. Schwarzenegger understands the wisdom of investing in UC, even in financially tight times, boosting UC spending by 6.2 percent in his 2007-08 budget, compared with only a 1 percent increase on average for other state programs.

Still, UC faces slower growth and tighter federal and state resources overall, he said, making this "an appropriate time for us to have a more deliberate conversation about our future."

To help with finances, UC Davis has embarked on its first comprehensive campaign, a multiyear effort now in its quiet leadership phase, the chancellor said. UC Davis' endowment stands at a "respectable" $552 million, he added, "but it must grow." The endowment is the fourth highest in the UC system, behind Berkeley with $2.4 billion, UCLA with $1.9 billion and UC San Francisco with $1.1 billion. The University of Michigan, Vanderhoef pointed out, boasts the largest endowment for a single public university: $5.6 billion.

"We are a peer of these universities in so many measures," he said. "A greater endowment will help secure UC Davis' standing among the world's stellar universities."

Faculty are in many ways the university's best fundraisers, the chancellor said: "It's your scholarship, your programs, your teaching and your patient care, all of those and more, that attract gifts."

The forthcoming centennial observance, Vanderhoef said, will be a time when "UC Davis' visibility will be greater, our ties to alumni and donors will be stronger, and more and more people will see how they are touched by UC Davis — touched by you and your work."