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Published online 22 July 2009 | Nature 460, 441 (2009) | doi:10.1038/460441a
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Cuts bite in California
University faces hard times as budget gets squeezed.
The ten-campus University of California (UC) system — a national star of US public universities — has begun haemorrhaging top researchers as its financial crisis escalates.
On 16 July, the UC board of regents voted to give its president Mark Yudof the power to force university staff to take unpaid leave through a furlough plan.
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I wish to comment on UCSD chair of sociology, Andrew Scull's (alleged) suggestion to downgrade several UC campuses, including UC Davis, into teaching colleges. I read this in your article but I have not seen the letter. If your report is accurate, I feel compelled to say that I find Scull's recommendation offensive. As a typical professor at UC Davis, I have run a research lab doing cutting edge cell and molecular biology research for the past 20 years (some of it published in Nature). I would argue that we perform research of a quality that is quite competitive with much of the (high quality) research being undertaken by my esteemed colleagues at the institutions that Scull argues should be elevated to "elite research institutions". Accordingly I, like many other UCD faculty scientists, have maintained extramural research funding at a level that is significantly higher than my salary since the first nanosecond that I walked through the door at UCD. To deal with UC budget cuts, I could make a suggestion that I suspect Professor Scull would find as offensive as I find his - let us designate sociology (and comparable subjects) as "pseudo-science" and discontinue supporting it in favor of "elite" disciplines such as physics and molecular biology throughout the UC system! In fact I would not suggest doing this because it is as counter-productive, divisive, inappropriate and elitist as his own suggestion, and because I know as little about what is going on in sociology as I suspect Scull knows about cell and molecular biology research.
I think the notion of designating some of the UCs as elite, and others as teaching schools reflects a certain level of discipline myopia. In my field, Evolutionary Biology, I'd definitely include UC-Davis, UC-Santa Barbara, and UC-Irvine in the elite group. As an example, UCI's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dept. has 5 National Academy members, making it, at least by some measures, about as elite as you can get. I'd imagine mathematicians, historians, chemists, etc. could each come up with there own elite list for the 10 UCs.
... perhaps it was not such a good idea to add a 10th campus to the UC system considering the volatile state of the economy.