The three finalists to become UC Davis' next provost and executive vice chancellor have completed their campus visits, meeting with administrators and the campus community at individual forums.

Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef, who will make the selection, has asked for comments from faculty, staff and students by the end of the day on Feb. 22. He has asked that people write to him directly at the Office of the Chancellor or via e-mail to lnvanderhoef@ucdavis.edu.

The new provost will replace Virginia Hinshaw, who is now the chancellor of the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

During the search for Hinshaw's replacement, Professor Barbara Horwitz, vice provost for academic personnel, is serving as provost and executive vice chancellor in an interim capacity.

The three candidates for provost visited UC Davis in February. A fourth finalist, Meredith Hay, vice president for research at the University of Iowa, withdrew her candidacy prior to her scheduled visit to campus.

The UC Davis News Service attended each of the public forums to gather information for stories on each of the candidates. They are:

Pramod P. Khargonekar

AGE: 51

CURRENT POST: Dean, College of Engineering, and Eckis Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida

EDUCATION: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, B. Tech (electrical engineering), 1977; and University of Florida, M.S. (mathematics), 1980, and Ph.D. (electrical engineering), 1981

Mriganka Sur

AGE: 54

CURRENT POST: Department head, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

EDUCATION: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, B. Tech. (electrical engineering), 1974; and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., M.S. (electrical engineering and psychology), 1975; and Ph.D. (electrical engineering and neurobiology), 1978

Andrew B. Wachtel

AGE: 49

CURRENT POST: Dean, Graduate School, and Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University

EDUCATION: Harvard University, A.B. (history and literature), 1981; and UC Berkeley, M.A. and Ph.D. (Slavic languages and literature), 1983 and 1987

Pramod P. Khargonekar

Pramod P. Khargonekar says he entered public university at the age of 16 and never left. Today, at age 51, he declares: "I believe in the value of public research universities."

The provost candidate, an electrical engineer, has been dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville since 2001. The college faculty numbers 275, and enrollment is 7,100.

Khargonekar cited what he believes are a public research institution's three major roles:

* Public benefit — "We are taxpayer-supported for the public good. It is for the public that we exist."

* Learning — For undergraduate and graduate students, of course; for the community, through special courses and continuing education; and for academics, to keep their knowledge and skills up to date.

"We learn as a community of students and scholars and staff. A lot of it is driven by innate curiosity and a lot by societal needs, and, increasingly by private industry."

* Engagement — Through outreach and service. For example, the University of Florida posts employees in every one of Florida's 67 counties. "There is tremendous buy-in, because people can see the difference we are making in everyday lives."

"Our engagement mission allows the assets of the university to be deployed to the public good," he said, noting how the university assists agriculture and other industries, medicine, fine arts and kindergarten-through-12th-grade education.

Beyond admitting students, Khargonekar said, the university is obligated to help them succeed: "We are educating the leaders of tomorrow, providing value to the taxpayer."

And, he added, while the university is accountable to the public, he labeled as "a bad idea" a proposal in Florida to establish a kind of bachelor's degree exit exam.

Exit exam proponents "think we are doing a bad job," he said. "Our obligation is to make the case" that the opposite is true.

Khargonekar described globalization as "the single most powerful force that is changing our world." If students are to survive and thrive, he said, they must be "much more globally aware."

Nutrition professor Judith Stern asked the candidate how he achieved his goal of higher rankings for Florida's College of Engineering. U.S. News & World Report today ranks the college 16th among public universities (up from 20th since Khargonekar became dean) and 26th among public and private universities (up from 35th).

The dean responded that he put greater emphasis on graduate education, with improved financial aid and fellowship opportunities, and doubled the ratio of graduate students to faculty. He added that rankings do not drive the college; instead, decisions are based on academic merit.

Today, he said, Florida's College of Engineering boasts "better students, better productivity and better papers," and 187 Ph.D.s in 2007, compared with 95 when he became dean six years earlier.

"I take great pride in finding that maximum point of leverage" — in this case, balancing resources among undergraduate, masters and Ph.D. instruction, he said.

Tilahun Yilma, distinguished professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, said quality faculty are the best contributor to rankings, and he asked how UC Davis can attract better candidates. Khargonekar said he urges his administrators "to recruit people better than yourselves."

About fundraising, Khargonekar said: "The university is a great cause to appeal to potential donors."

"The opportunity is there," he said. "It's a matter of us doing the work to make it happen."

The candidate did not shy away from responding, "I would need more information," when asked whether UC Davis needs more resources to train K-12 math and science teachers, and whether UC Davis needs to offer more foreign language instruction.

"I don't think there is a university left that can do everything," Khargonekar said. "But whatever you choose, excellence should be your goal."

— Dave Jones

Mriganka Sur

Calling UC Davis "one of the great secrets of this nation," provost candidate Mriganka Sur argued that the university can maintain its land-grant values of access to all and commitment to public service, play a leadership role in reshaping government policy regarding research funding and reach its full potential only through "an unremitting focus on excellence."

In a presentation at the University Club on Feb. 20, Sur talked about the role and mission of a land-grant university, the importance of the arts, humanities and social sciences to education and society, the challenges facing public research universities and the "single idea" – excellence – that he said is fundamental to UC Davis' continued growth and success.

Land-grant mission: The Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land grant university system, remains "visionary" today in its commitment to public service and to high-quality public education for all, the provost candidate said. But Sur noted that graduation rates in this country remain highly correlated to family income. "We have to make (higher education) accessible to young people of all socioeconomic classes," he said. "Access to high-quality public education is a special mission of an enlightened society."

Arts, humanities and social sciences: MIT increased its emphasis on communications skills after realizing that its graduates, despite their brilliance, too often end up working for "CEOs who went to Harvard, Yale and Stanford," Sur said. "If you have an idea and you can't express it, it's like a tree falling in the forest." The neuroscientist emphasized that the arts, humanities and social sciences are critical to "understanding ourselves, our world and our place in it." He also argued that science and technology alone will not solve the most important problems of our time, tuberculosis among them.

"TB is not only caused by the tuberculosis bacillus, but by poverty," Sur said, noting that half the world's population lives on just a few dollars a day and that in his birthplace, India, 500 million people exist on less than a dollar day. "In addition to new drugs, we will also have to discover solutions to poverty," he said, through new collaborations and alliances that span the globe and bring together government, nonprofit and private sector resources.

Challenges: Public research universities face "multitudes of pressures" with "no easy answers," Sur said. In response to audience questions about budget cuts, he referred to the reductions UC Davis experienced in the 1990s. "Your new provost will have to learn from the past" to determine "what was done well and what wasn't," he said, adding that uniform across-the-board cuts are the "easy way out" and not the way to "build excellence."

Increased private support is essential, he said: "There is no question the size of the pie has to increase." He noted that MIT raised $435 million in private support for neuroscience research in the last eight years.

Excellence: Responding to a question from the audience, Sur said excellence is achieved by learning from units that are already excellent, looking for and cultivating seeds of excellence that exist in other units, and ensuring that the people who make decisions "know what excellence looks like." "Unless you know what excellence is, you can't build excellence," he said.

Sur closed by emphasizing the "enormous potential" of UC Davis. "I know Davis," he said. "It has ambition, it has the will. Perhaps we can do something together."

— Claudia Morain

Andrew B. Wachtel

Answering what he called "undue skepticism," provost candidate Andrew Wachtel asserted that a humanist, and not just a scientist, could play that role well at a major research university like UC Davis.

"I don't think it's a reasonable skepticism," said Andrew Wachtel, dean of the Graduate School and the Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University in Illinois.

"My job is to ask good questions and illicit good answers and then make good decisions," said Wachtel, who specializes in Slavic languages and literature. As provost, he said, "You're not the only administrative officer of the university. I don't think it's impossible to have a provost who's not a scientist."

Describing his role as dean of the Graduate School at Northwestern, Wachtel said he regularly interacts with member schools, including engineering and medicine. "You cover the waterfront," he said. "It's kind of a junior provost position."

Wachtel said he was interested in the position of provost at UC Davis because of the diversity of the university: "The incredible breadth of programs here is amazing."

Describing himself as someone who speaks his mind, Wachtel emphasized the need for universities to better make their case to the state and students' parents, operate with transparency and efficiency, and communicate more effectively.

Universities face increasing skepticism at home and growing competition from foreign universities and for-profit institutions, he said. "We will have to more actively confront the challenge and articulate much better why we do what we do and spend the resources we do."

"Davis, with its focus on agriculture and veterinary medicine and a number of other areas … strikes me as being in a good position to articulate its value to California," he said.

He said he would help push UC Davis' self identity beyond second status to UC Berkeley. "That's something I'm very comfortable leading."

Wachtel introduced comprehensive assessments of programs in the Graduate School, and he said public universities need to assess their programs to make strategic decisions and demonstrate their effectiveness. They also have a responsibility, he said, to be a model community in the use of financial and environmental resources and in respecting differences among people. "Making that much more a part of the public perception of what we do is an important thing to do."

Wachtel responded to a handful of questions on a variety of topics:

On undergraduate education: "I want an undergraduate student to be more curious when they leave than when they came." He added that through their studies, students should become more effective in written and oral communication. And while accreditation can measure competency in a field like engineering, he said, what is most important is how the value of a liberal education is measured.

On fundraising: "This is something all state institutions are going to have to ramp up," said Wachtel. Fundraising is primarily the responsibility of the chancellor, he said, and the provost plays the role of "cheerleader." He cautioned that fundraising, aimed at increasing an endowment, would not solve the immediate problem of budget cuts.

On the international environment: Wachtel, who is fluent in five languages and reads another five, said he has experience operating at the international level. He is director of the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Students at Northwestern, and his research has involved him in Russian, Eastern European and Turkey caucuses.

American universities have historically been "colonialist" and only trusted foreign universities to teach their students foreign languages. He suggested partnering with universities abroad to take advantage of research funding in their countries. He also said that today's students see themselves working overseas: "We need to prepare them for that."

— Julia Ann Easley