Following are exerpts from Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef’s State of the Campus speech delivered to the Academic Senate’s Representative Assembly on Oct. 24.

…I have listened, myself, to many State of the Campus addresses. They tend to concentrate on all of the great achievements of the previous year, always with an unstated attempt to make people believe that everything is on course, working perfectly, with a continuous upward trend. I have always been left with the feeling at the end of those speeches that something big was missing. The fact is that on a day-to-day basis everything is not totally rosy, and many of the accomplishments that seem to be important to presidents and chancellors are not terribly important to the day-to-day work of the faculty, students and staff. I could go on in some detail today with examples of the fine things that are happening on campus, and will, in fact, do so for the first few minutes. But that will not be the main theme of this brief talk.

We cannot, though, help but take huge collective pride in the accomplishments of our faculty. As the most recent example…we were thrilled that of the three Presidential Early Career Awards awarded within the entire University of California, two came to our faculty members, Dr. Ma in Engineering and Dr. Saito in Math. That speaks in a mighty way to our recruitment efforts over the last few years. We seem to be aiming our sights higher, and we seem as well to be more likely to be successful in those recruitments.

I could as well talk lots about all of the construction on the campus. Every one of those many facilities will make life better and easier for our students, faculty and staff. We have something like 50 projects underway or in the pipeline, including new constructions and renovations. We are in the midst of attacking a very serious problem within Veterinary Medicine with near $120 million to be spent on those projects during the next few years, and another $200 million planned for the second half of this coming decade. A new classroom and student laboratory building will go up near Briggs Hall soon, the Plant and Environmental Sciences building is about midway through its construction, a $53 million Center for the Arts is coming out of the ground, a $90-plus million genomics building is about to, and so on.

… So I could spend 10 minutes on the good news. But that is not what is primarily on my mind as I think about the last year. Those good things are not what wake me up at four in the morning. For example, I am very worried about the way our culture has evolved with regard to rewards and promotions for the faculty. … As you know, the system of appointments and promotions is largely faculty run, and that is the way it should stay. Suffice it to say that I think it is a system that plays a major role in the supremacy of the University of California system in the world. However, it is a system that will become deadly with regard to morale if it loses its flexibility. We have to think together about ways in which we can improve the system, and I look forward to reading this body’s recommendations.

Dealing with staff issues

I have an equal but different concern about the many staff that this university employs. More than ever before we are dealing with labor negotiators in establishing the wages and benefits for our staff. The unions hire their negotiators, the university hires its negotiators, the negotiations take place in the (Office of the President) and nobody else seems to have much to say in the process, primarily because there are contracts that state that wages, benefits and contract changes must be determined at the bargaining table. In my mind we are not doing well in these processes. On the union side, we have unions that are brand new and still trying to find their feet in how the whole process works, or we have unions that are new to the business of higher education, for example the United Auto Workers. But on the university side we have much to learn, as well.

We sometimes seem not to realize that negotiations are not intended to pull the other side entirely to our point of view. Negotiations are intended to find a middle ground on which everyone can agree–perhaps reluctantly agree, but at least agree. We at the university are not showing our best side when we look at our record in union negotiations.

And who suffers? The staff. Now the staff are already in a poor circumstance because what was once a premier working situation is no longer so because we have been very slow on the uptake with regard to the changing economy and the changing work force, especially in those areas that are in high demand by the private sector. So to begin with, our salaries have dropped, relatively speaking, and to further complicate matters we seem not to be able to come to closure on union negotiations. Add to this the fact that of all the problems we had to solve following the recession in the first half of the past decade, it is the employment of staff that has come back most slowly. Taken together we have a real problem, a problem that directly impacts faculty and students. This is a problem that must go away in the year to come. I am determined that it will.

Two critical areas

Regarding the future, there are two critical problems that we must solve as we move into the next decade. As I have said before, this will be a major decade of growth for this campus. Over the next 10 years, the 10-campus University of California system, by Master Plan Mandate, must accommodate over 60,000 new students.

On average, the University of California will grow by 3 percent per year. At UC Davis we will grow from 25,000 to something between 30,000 and 31,000, a growth rate of about 2.2 percent per year. …

We are doing many things to make sure that we grow in a proper fashion. Most importantly, we have gone through three years of academic planning that lay out the ways in which we will grow. … Now everybody recognizes that an academic plan cannot be carved in stone, and that it will change as time passes. However, we have to have a base from which to work, albeit a base that will be shifting beneath our feet as time goes on. The provost will issue a draft capstone document in mid-December for campus comment. That document will describe the principles and directions of the academic plan, and, again, it will solicit your comment.

The second problem is this: We are in the first stages of the new long-range development plan that must accommodate our growth. What does "accommodate" mean?

Well, it means, for example, making sure that we are able to handle the high-cost recruitment packages for the faculty, that we set a course for making certain that new staff are hired as they are needed, and that the staff that we have are in positions with competitive salaries.

It means that we make progress on improving the packages we offer graduate students.

It means that we must be concerned about housing and making sure that as many of our students and employees as possible can live within easy commuting distance, bicycling commuting distance when at all possible. That means, in turn, that we must be thinking through the possibility of a new university community, one like Aggie Village, but significantly larger with a commercial center that would minimize car travel into downtown Davis, as well as a structure and function that will serve all of our people–students, staff and faculty.

Taking on tough problems

… So we have lots to be thinking about for our future growth, and I have not for one minute felt that we can perform optimally in those endeavors without solving some of the major problems that are before us now, like those that I mentioned earlier.

On the other hand, I also have never doubted that we can accomplish all that I have described. … I have always believed that this campus has, many times over, proven its mettle in taking on the tough issues, not the least of which was the way that we worked ourselves through the recession of the early 1990s. That is not to say that any of it will be easy, but that too is not something that I worry about.

I know that our faculty and our staff are willing to work hard if they can see that indeed their hard work is benefiting the university and that they are not being mistreated in the process. This is what we must do together, and I know that this is what we will do.

Thank you very much.