The Chancellor's Brownbag Update crowd is, well, hardly a crowd anymore. And you'll count more administrators among brownbag attendees than faculty, staff or students.

Those who've been around since the brownbags were initiated in the early 1990s, as the campus coped with onerous budget cuts, know that these informal lunch hour chats with the chancellor and other senior administrators would draw audiences large enough to nearly fill the Main Theatre. Not so today; in fact, attendance has been steadily declining the last couple of years.

This changing circumstance has prompted senior administrators to ask if there isn't a better way to promote meaningful dialogue with the campus community and to provide an appropriate degree of accessibility to key campus leaders.

The Senior Advisors Group - a group of senior staff representatives from across the campus brought together to advise the chancellor and provost on issues of staff workload and compensation - has also weighed in, advising small-group dialogues between staff and their deans and vice chancellors each quarter.

That proposal was endorsed by the chancellor and provost, who asked the deans and vice chancellors to begin these breakfast or luncheon chats with small groups of their staff this spring. The chancellor and provost will also host such get-togethers, meeting first this quarter with representatives of the Staff Assembly and with leaders of ADMAN, the UC Davis Administrative Management Group.

The Council of Vice Chancellors - a group chaired by the chancellor and provost and including vice chancellors, vice provosts and the dean of graduate studies - endorsed these additional methods for promoting dialogue:

• Rotating forums (hosted by each dean and vice chancellor) for the chancellor and provost with each college, school, division and administrative unit;
• Quarterly Council of Deans and Vice Chancellors meetings with key campus constituency group leaders and meetings with individual constituent groups as issues warrant;
• Occasional issue-specific forums for presenting information and gathering campus-community feedback on issues of topical and timely interest; and
• Periodic coffees or informal get-togethers for the chancellor and provost with small groups of faculty and staff members and students.

The next step is for Assistant Chancellor Sally Springer, Vice Provost Barry Klein, Assistant Executive Vice Chancellor Jerry Hallee, Associate Vice Chancellor Dennis Shimek and Assistant Vice Chancellor Maril Stratton to outline an implementation strategy for these alternative communication avenues.

In addition, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef acknowledges that he's a responsive e-mailer for those with burning questions or issues. "There are many means by which I can stay in touch with issues that are of concern to campus community members and respond appropriately," he said.

"For example, not surprising to anyone, I expect, I receive many, many e-mail messages every day," Vanderhoef said. "But it is still the case that a true sense of the emotion and depth of the issues comes best from face-to-face conversation.

"Our hope is that the additional paths of communication that we are exploring not only will make deans and vice chancellors more readily available, but will promote a richer, more sustained dialogue within our community."