UCD must refocus its mission
“Hey, students: It’s all about tuition.” Professor Walter Leal defends Chancellor Linda Katehi in part by saying she is worth her $400,000 and it is all about the state budget problems leading to tuition going up, and the students should stick to the issue.
What about leadership? Chancellor Katehi has chosen to pitch for faculty support by mass production of 5,000 more undergraduates to bolster the faculty budget in the short run, with questionable consequences about the immediate educational impacts. What about budget year 3, when the jolt of new money has become part of the base and UCD needs another jolt?
Most of Professor Leal’s endorsement of Chancellor Katehi was built on the idea that she has already raised $750 million as a sign of alumni support toward her billion-dollar goal, but he fails to realize that more than $600 million was previously raised by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. It takes most of the wind out of the sails of his argument that she has resounding support.
I wonder how many of UCD’s most generous alumni are going to renew their support as long as Katehi is focused on salvaging her reputation rather than leading the institution we love.
Some of my best friends are engineers, but UCD should be led by a biological scientist, someone who can understand things that Katehi never even heard when they were the focus of the discussion, because it had to do with biology, rather than money. UCD can’t save the state budget; it can refocus on its mission, which is sustainability.
Jon Li
Davis
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=119758
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You’re right, Jon. Most of that money was indeed raised before Katehi got here. With a bit of smoke and mirrors, she announced that they had been previously raising money “quietly”, but were now making the fundraising campaign official.
The kick-off banquet was all very carefully scripted. One of the campus’ biggest benefectors was supposed to read her toast word for word from the script (that a PR person had written for her), but she improvised her toast instead. Later, a photo of her making that toast appeared in a mailer, but words from the (unused) scripted toast were placed under her photo in quotes. I complained about it and was informed that she had given her OK to use those words in a press release. Still, the photo showing her making the toast with the wrong words underneath was downright deceptive and dishonest.
It doesn’t make any sense to distinguish between biology and money as a mission for UC Davis. For instance the NIH, which is the main federal funding agency for medical research, has a $30 billion budget, which is much larger than the budget of the NSF, the main science funding agency. There are other sources of research funding, but that gives you the general picture. The bottom line is that the UC Davis administration has always been eager — as long as UC Davis has existed — to see research in biology, agriculture, and medicine, largely because it brings in so much money. I agree that biology should be and will always be a fundamental research mission for UC Davis, but it would narrow and arguably even greedy to only ever care about biology. Chancellor Katehi comes from engineering while Provost Hexter comes from the humanities, and both of these areas are also essential for UC Davis.
John Li almost always writes interesting, thought provoking letters and this one is no exception. He is a smart guy, so I am confident he won’t mind my assisting with commentary on a false dichotomy. He identifies engineering as something other than involved in biological sciences. At UC Davis, that is NOT the case. The College of Engineering has a division of Biomedical Engineering with quite a few faculty working at the intersection (overlap) of engineering and biology/medicine. In fact, the division’s web site shows the following recent announcement (Dec 11, 2011): “Angelique Louie, Jinyi Qi and David Fyhrie, professors in the Biomedical Engineering Department at UC Davis, have been elected as Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in the 2012 listing just released.” How do I know about this? I happened to have interviewed engineering Dean Lavernia about “engineering and public health” for my online “Introduction to Public Health” class. So, Jon, you might want to edit out that part about engineering leadership….. at UCD it is no doubt a plus!