UC DAVIS: OFFICE OF THE PROVOST
October 23, 2006
Provost's Update, Fall 2006
Welcome Back!
With the quarter well underway, I recognize that everyone is busy with the 2006-2007 academic year, so I wanted to share some of the current and up-coming issues for our campus. Also, I would encourage you to enjoy the Fall Convocation remarks (http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/special_reports/convocation_2006/), because the presentations clearly emphasize the point that our faculty, staff and students make a difference each and every day through their actions - and those actions keep on giving! There is much of which we can be proud - and yet much we have yet to do. Thank you for all that you do!
Record Number of New Students
Thanks to stellar efforts by a great many members of our campus community, UC Davis has successfully accommodated its largest freshman class ever. We have honored our commitment to offer University housing to all eligible freshmen. About 87 percent of freshmen have opted to live in campus housing. At the end of PASS 1, the Registrar reported that first-year students were able to take full course loads and that a greater percentage of them had 13 or more units than at the comparable time last year. We accomplished this by offering over one-hundred additional courses and sections.
I want to thank everyone who has been working hard on this since late spring, when we realized that our fall registration numbers were going to exceed expectations:
- The Registrar's Office for quickly implementing measures that reserved space for lower division students in introductory classes and for working with departments on scheduling additional courses and sections.
- Student Housing for quickly making both the physical and programmatic changes at the residence halls necessary to accommodate these numbers.
- Deans, chairs/directors, faculty and staff in academic departments for adjusting quickly and using the $1 million from the campus to add the courses and sections needed to meet the enrollment demand.
- Colleagues at Sacramento City College who worked with us to increase the number of sections in preparatory chemistry, writing, and mathematics.
- The Office of Administration and ORMP for quickly proceeding with projects that created three additional classrooms in Haring and Surge III--and faculty and staff in Veterinary Medicine for making these rooms available by accelerating their move to new quarters.
Capital Planning and Development
I am gratified to say that we are moving forward on a number of capital projects that will bring a variety of benefits to the campus community. The School of Veterinary Medicine will be moving its entire instructional program and a number of research programs to new facilities in the Health Sciences District of the campus. The campus and state investment in new Veterinary Medicine facilities amounts to over $100 million, and we have more to do before all of Vet Med programs are consolidated at the new site. We also will be opening the new Education Building on the UC Davis campus in Sacramento later this fall. The building will allow our first and second year medical students to be based in Sacramento where the majority of our medical programs are located.
Through the generosity of an emeritus faculty member and commitment of campus funds, we will open a new classroom and lecture hall next summer. To honor the donors, the facility will be named Warren and Leta Giedt Hall. A classroom within the facility will also be named Ted and Rand Schaal Auditorium for another faculty donor and his father.
The multi-use stadium will be completed early in 2007. This will be a great multi-use facility for the campus, replacing the outmoded Toomey Field and serving as an exceptional venue for our sports programs, as well as other activities, such as concerts.
The Davis campus boundaries go well beyond the core campus. We recently dedicated a new research facility at Incline Village, Nevada, on the grounds of Sierra Nevada College, providing much needed facilities for our Tahoe Research group (http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=7912).
We also expect to break ground this year on a number of facilities. A new Physical Sciences building has been funded by the state that will provide space relief for Physics, Geology and Chemistry. On deck is our plan to expand King Hall to provide much needed facilities for the Law School. That project will require approval by the electorate of the Education Bond Act on the November ballot.
While we appreciate the state's support in addressing our pressing capital needs, the amount of funds provided by the state falls far short of our needs. For example, we have had to invest a substantial amount of campus funds to expand the infrastructure of the campus that the state could not fund. We need to develop adequate electrical, steam and chilled water systems to serve our expanding campus. This is a high cost for us, but a good investment in ensuring the future success of our campus. We also continue to partner with the private sector to bring about developments, such as West Village and the Conference Center/Hotel. We have been innovative in developing these partnership projects which will include new facilities to support the Graduate School of Management and other core programs.
Budget Update
Early planning for 2007-08 is underway. The Regents will consider an overall budget proposal for 2007-08 at their November meeting. The next critical point comes in early January when the Governor proposes a 2007-08 State budget.
Later this fall, the campus will begin budget planning with an eye to building on the core. The combined pressures of growth and state budget reductions over the last several years have challenged our existing academic programs and administrative services to maintain excellence. To meet this challenge, we simply must make a concerted effort, using our limited resources, to fortify existing programs. Therefore, over the next few months I will work with staff, faculty and administrators to identify opportunities to achieve this goal. I will share additional information in directed budget communications and the UC Davis Budget News webpage (http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/special_reports/budget/) and will seek input from the campus community.
Workload
I know from listening to many campus members that faculty and staff face a challenge in ensuring that their efforts are truly directed towards achieving the highest priorities. There have been a number of suggestions for improvement from managing our administrative and compliance-related workload more efficiently to hiring more staff to get the work done to focusing our efforts on high priority issues and reducing time spent on low priority items. To ensure that we make specific progress on these issues, I have asked Asst. Executive Vice Chancellor Bob Loessberg-Zahl to convene a small work group of Senior Advisers. The group (which I call the Nimbleness Workgroup) is charged with gathering ideas from faculty and staff about how to accomplish our priorities more efficiently for administrative matters, reviewing the pace at which we are introducing major new information systems, finding better ways to communicate departmental best practices to the campus at large, and determining where a modest investment of resources might make a big difference in workload management.
Energy Conservation Update
The campus continues to grapple with a deficit in funding for utilities-for the purchase of the natural gas and electricity required to heat and cool our buildings and keep our power on. This deficit has grown over time largely because of dramatic increases in energy costs. In response, our Facilities: Operations & Maintenance group has made major commitments to advancing energy conservation at UC Davis, reallocating nearly $1 million from its operating funds last fiscal year to initiate several new energy management projects. An energy conservation engineer will soon spearhead our energy management program, coordinating and integrating energy improvements involving individual buildings with the ongoing conservation efforts of our Utilities division.
We hope to retrofit approximately 20 buildings with new controls and systems over the next 3-5 years, augmenting campus funds with grants from state agencies. An energy savings of between 25%-35% could be realized from some of these retrofits. Efficient fume hoods are another avenue for energy conservation; an engineering study of the feasibility of retrofitting fume hoods in Chemistry and Chemistry Annex is underway.
We participate in the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (CEC-PIER) Innovative Technologies Demonstration Program, testing new approaches to energy conservation in lighting. In partnership with UC Davis' California Technology Lighting Center (http://cltc.ucdavis.edu), O&M installed and monitored bi-level bathroom fixtures in Student Housing, winning the Best Practices Award in Sustainable Operations from the Office of the President. We are testing the feasibility of deploying bi-level lighting in outdoor areas.
This fall, we will complete construction of two additional energy efficient electrical chillers at the Thermal Energy Storage unit, which produces chilled water to air condition the core campus. Work also continues on our Boiler Modernization Project to insulate high temperature piping and fixtures and optimize boiler operation.
We can all do our part as well by reducing energy consumption; to assist in that endeavor, the Office of Administration is working on a campaign to advise us on how we individually can help in this important effort.
Pandemic Planning Update
For much of this year, a lot of campus energy has gone into creating a plan for responding to a Pandemic Influenza event. The planning has extended into all schools, colleges and units on our campus and will help us be better prepared for an entire range of emergencies and disasters. The campus pandemic planning documents, as well as many of the individual plans, can be viewed at http://pandemic.ucdavis.edu.
Recognition of the Excellence of our Faculty, Staff and Students
Our UC Davis campus community continues to receive recognition for the stellar efforts of our members. In fact, they are getting so numerous that just keeping up with them is a challenge - but a very welcome challenge!
Keeping informed about with these exciting aspects of our campus can be accomplished in many ways - by tapping into our News Service website (for example, see recent honors at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=7906), using the RSS system (http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/rss/) to select information of particular interest, subscribing to The Buzz (please see the instructions below) and, as always, reading Dateline and The Aggie.
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Virginia S. Hinshaw
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616-8558
530/752-4964; Fax 530/752-2400
vshinshaw@ucdavis.edu