Expected UCLA growth requires careful balance

  Steven Yeazell Professor Yeazell is a
David G. Price & Dallas P. Price Professor at the UCLA School
of Law. He also served as the 2000-2001 UCLA Academic Senate
Chair..

UCLA, the largest UC campus and one of the great universities in
the world, is supposed to grow by about 4,000 students over the
next 10 years. That’s a big challenge for a campus dense not
only in student and professorial talent but also in people, traffic
and buildings ““ and lean on dorm space, parking, labs and
faculty offices.

Unlike some of our sister campuses, which will grow by
percentages far higher than our 15 percent, we can’t just
build classrooms, dorms and offices on big tracts of empty land. At
UCLA, planning growth is more like staging a ballet than like
building a subdivision: intricate, coordinated and, we hope,
artful. But, like a ballet, if we get it right, the whole will be
more than the sum of its parts and the campus will emerge not just
as a bigger, but a better place.

Start with students whose education is the point of these
efforts. Sharing UCLA’s undergraduate education with more of
California’s best students is the centerpiece of the growth
plan. But just admitting 4,000 more freshman won’t work, it
turns out.

First, we want to preserve UCLA’s system-leading mix of
transfer and freshman admits, so not all of those new Bruins should
be freshman. Then there’s the question of which academic
units should offer admission to these students: what’s the
right mix of aspiring engineers, artists, film directors,
sociologists, poets and chemists? That’s another bit of
academic ballet, in which UCLA tries to maximize opportunities and
build on strengths.

Thinking further down the line, to teach more undergraduates we
need more professors, and to win the intense competition for the
country’s best professors, we also need graduate students.
After even a little thought, it becomes apparent that one has to
work out the right mix of graduate and undergraduate, freshman and
transfer students.

Finally, there’s the question of when and for how long
these students should study at UCLA. Would it make sense to have
summer study be part of every student’s UCLA experience?
Should UCLA, admitting students in competition with the best
private universities, move closer to the four-years-to-graduation
standard at private institutions?

As we develop answers to these questions about students, we also
have to think about their teachers. Over the next 10 years, UCLA
will have to hire a thousand new faculty. About a quarter of this
group will be additions to the teachers and scholars already here;
the rest will be replacements for those who retire or move from
UCLA.

To put it another way, in a decade, every third professorial
face will be new. That’s a big order: we have to match
faculty “searches” (as the hiring process is called)
with student demand, so that our professors of cinematography and
history and linguistics and computer science keep pace with student
interests and developing fields of knowledge. It typically takes at
least as long to conduct a faculty search as it does to select a
student for admission ““ about a year ““ so we need to
start figuring out quite soon who and what we need.

As we’re thinking about these questions, we have to answer
another one: where will these additional members of this community
live and learn?

UCLA wants to continue to offer every freshman the opportunity
to live on campus, but that requires more dormitory space,
especially if we want to relieve dorm overcrowding at the same
time.

Graduate students badly need close-to-campus housing. We must be
sure we’re using existing classroom space efficiently and
build additional space where it’s necessary. New teachers
will need offices and laboratories. Everyone wants parking. And all
this has to be planned to fit into a beautiful campus in a way that
will comply with legal restrictions on growth and enhance rather
than degrade aesthetic values and scarce recreational space.

By now I hope I’ve convinced the reader that this is not
an easy dance to choreograph. And I haven’t mentioned the
M-word. For each additional student, the State of California, which
now supplies about 20 percent of UCLA’s budget, has promised
about $9,200 (that’s a combination of state funding and
educational fee revenues). That’s less than half of the
$21,000 it presently takes to educate each UCLA student.

If we were starting a new school, this funding gap would be
catastrophic, causing the best students to seek their education
elsewhere and the best faculty to leave. Fortunately there are some
ways to avoid this train wreck.

Educating more students can cost less if some of those new
students take up “unused capacity”: adding a student to
an existing class that’s not full doesn’t require
hiring a new teacher or building a new classroom.

But eventually the class fills up and requires a new classroom
and a new teacher who needs an office, a laboratory and research
funding. Students need counseling, recreational facilities, good
study areas and computer laboratories. So finding the funding for
this growth is going to be a big task ““ in which present
students as well as alumni and legislators must play a role.

With intelligence, good will and imagination, UCLA can open this
new ballet to applause and good reviews ““ but not without a
lot of sweat and hard work beforehand.