As part of his visit to the campus, UC President and former UCSD Chancellor Robert C. Dynes sat down with the Guardian editorial board for a question-and-answer session about the top issues facing the university. The following is a compilation of Dynes’ remarks:
Guardian: How do you feel about increasing reliance on private funds and what is the effect of that on the university’s mission?
Dynes: There is some rumbling about privatizing the university — you’ve probably heard some of that rumbling. That’s code for saying, “How do we afford, as a public institution, to do what we do?” The state of California has reduced the number of money that supports the UC from 12 percent of its budget to 7 or 8 percent of its budget over the past 20 years. That’s why you’re paying more fees. The state has walked away from its responsibilities and it’s reaching a limit, because you can’t pay much more in the way of fees.
We’ve got to find other ways to find money. Now, one of the obvious ways is private philanthropy — people donating to the university. Right now, the university receives just a little over $1 billion a year from private sources. You would say, “Holy cow, that’s a lot of money!” And you’re right; I can’t even imagine what a billion dollars would look like if sitting on a table. That having been said, the university receives from the state almost $3 billion, so that one billion is still pretty small.
And we’ve never had a tradition of alumni giving. I’m going to try and change that so that when you guys graduate, you’re going to hear from the president — if he is still the president — that it’s time for you guys to take on additional responsibilities. We need that, and it’s how Harvard survives.
G: Do you see a specific threshold at which a public university becomes a private university – a point beyond which you’re not willing to go?
D: I’m not willing to become a private university, in part because of my own belief in public education. …
Let’s start off philosophically, because I grew up in a public system. I was educated in a public system. I worked my way through college with jobs. I managed to do it — my parents couldn’t help me. If it weren’t for the public system, I would not be here today, and I know that. I believe that the United States has the best public systems in the world and that the University of California is the best public system we have, so I believe in the public system.
Despite the fact that the fees have gone up, you can still somehow take some debt that isn’t going to kill you, and graduate and pay it back. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.
So now, let me give you some cold, hard facts. The state of California gives us $3 billion a year. It’s $9,000 to $10,000 per student, that’s what the state of California gives us. Three billion dollars a year pays for some of the faculty salaries, staff salaries and rooms. But not all of it, by any means. We raise a lot of money to pay for the stuff to teach you guys. …
If we kissed the state goodbye tomorrow — “I can’t deal going up to Sacramento to deal with the Legislature, because they drive me crazy” — we would need an endowment of $60 billion dollars to do that. That’s an endowment that’s bigger than Harvard’s.
So how are we going to get from here to there? Who is going to give us $60 billion dollars to kiss the state goodbye?
So philosophically, I don’t want to go there, and practically, I don’t see where that $60 billion is going to come from — that’s on the order of an entire year’s budget for the state of California.
G: Do you know why UCSD is lagging behind other campuses in alumni donations?
D: I think the real truth is that in a period in the ’70s and ’80s, students were sort of abused at UCSD, so they don’t have great memories of their time. … I mean, they weren’t taken seriously. I think that we kind of [brushed them aside], that we didn’t have much in the way of residences. … And when people don’t care, it shows. There is about a decade-and-a-half where students felt like, “Alright, you’re here. Now get out of here.”
Now, I think all of that has changed. I can tell you one person That cares about students: That’s me. So there is this one-and-a-half decades out of our short life where we’re trying to find these alumni and say, “Please, please, please give us a second chance.”
G: A study released last year compared the performance of Preuss School with other applicants who were not accepted, and found no statistical difference. Why do you feel that this specific outreach program deserves more protection in budget cuts than other outreach programs?
D: You have to first understand that I was instrumental in the Preuss School, so I have a certain fatherly feeling. I almost lost my neck on the Preuss School. You’re too young to understand this, but I almost lost my job for the Preuss School, so I have a certain ownership in the Preuss School, an emotional attachment to it.
I’m willing to put academic preparation money — outreach money — into anything that proves successful. Not goofy ideas, but anything that actually achieves success.
And what is success? In my view, success is preparing young people so they can actually compete by the 11th grade and will be eligible for the UC. It’s a simple measure. Just give me those measures and I’ll find some money to put into it.
G: You have said that you would allocate $12 million to outreach programs, no matter how the Legislature comes down in the budget. Are you willing to sacrifice enrollment for outreach?
D: No, we’ll find that money elsewhere. We must meet the Master Plan. I’m a devotee of the Master Plan, so we have to continue that growth of 5,000 students. We have to find that outreach money, we have to find that $12 million elsewhere. But no, I won’t trade it off.
G: If the sufficient amount of money to rebuild University House cannot be raised through private funds, is the UC Office of the President prepared to fund it?
D: I’ve said “no” so far. That’s local and they’ve got to raise that money locally.
My wife and I lived in that house for seven years. You would look at it and go, “Holy cow, would I love to live in that house!” And it was nice. On the other hand, it was dangerous. I have a photograph of mushrooms growing in the bedroom carpet. …
Something has to be done, because nobody should be living in that house. It is seismically unsafe.
G: Do you believe we will we get enough money?
D: It will be private money. It won’t be money that will be drained from student resources.
G: The governor has come under fire for failing to restore money to education groups last year and for indicating his intent to overturn Proposition 98. Does this hold any bearing on your compact agreement with him?
D: He has told me over and over again over the past year that he would honor the compact. …
And I believe he will, I trust him. I’ve had enough conversations that I believe him. But I think he appreciates that it’s in his best interest. He understands that the University of California is actually the salvation of California. He didn’t know that — I taught him this. But he understands it, and I think he sees that as the right place to invest.
G: Last week, in a report on the status of buildings, UC Senior Vice President for Budget and Finance Joseph P. Mullinix reported that more than 60 percent of the university’s buildings are either reaching the end of their useful life or are already there, and it doesn’t look like there is any state money to address this problem. How serious is this issue and what approach is the university taking?
D: This is serious. It’s called “deferred maintenance” and it’s a polite way of saying that we’re not maintaining our buildings. It’s a little misleading because we’re building lots of new buildings — they’re all over the place. …
If you go to Revelle Plaza, and you look at my old building, Mayer Hall, it’s a dump. I know that — my lab used to be there. And so we have to find a way to use some of the compact money to maintain those buildings so that they don’t deteriorate any more than they are.
So some of the compact of money is there for some critical deferred maintenance, but not enough. It’s by no means enough, but it’s the first time in four years that we’ll have any money for deferred maintenance.
You see from other institutions that when they don’t plow money back into deferred maintenance, eventually, they get into big trouble. There are some campuses — I won’t name them — that have not put as much money into deferred maintenance as San Diego has.
G: So are we starting to catch up now?
D: No, we’re not. We’re sort of slowing the decay down, but no, we’re not catching up. It’s one of those issues where you sit and you think, “What am I going to do with this money? Am I going to give staff raises? Am I going to try to ease the pain on health care? Or am I going to put it into deferred maintenance?” And the choice — because they haven’t had a raise in four years — is staff and faculty raises.
G: UCOP recently hired Gretchen Kalonji, the partner of new UCSC Chancellor Denice Denton, as director of international strategy development — a $192,000-a-year job. The job was given to her as part of the recruitment package offered to Denton. How do you justify creating new management positions in a budget crisis?
D: Everybody knows about the University of California. Why don’t we have an international strategy as to whom we make collaborations with, how we do this and [how to manage the] money flow? Do we have a strategy for international students? You would all benefit if we had some international students. So why don’t we have a strategy? It turns out that Gretchen has been working on international strategies for the University of Washington for several years. She is probably the best in the country.
She is right now in China — right now, this very moment — preparing what the University of California’s position will be on collaboration with China for the governor’s visit. She is terrific and she is going to change the nature of our international strategy.
G: Would she have been hired if Denton was not confirmed as chancellor?
D: We couldn’t have gotten either one, because they are partners. If we wanted to attract Gretchen, we’d have to go look and see if there was a job somewhere for Denice. It’s a partner issue.
This is not new at all. I’ve done this many times on the San Diego campus when I’ve recruited a faculty member at the San Diego campus. A faculty member would say, “I’m not coming anywhere without my husband.” Surprise! …
You will discover this someday. You will have a partner some day and you will discover that, gee, this ain’t the ’50s anymore. Both spouses work and they both have careers. Anybody that doesn’t recognize that is half a century behind, so we have to work to see if we can find opportunities for the spouse.
In the case of Denice and Gretchen, it was a tremendous twofer. We got two people at the top of their game. It was either zero or two, and we pulled it off. I’m really proud of that.
G: How would you respond to critics who would say it was inconsistent for you to enter into the compact with the governor — with a state budget at the time that would have kept eligible students out for the first time in more than three decades — and at the same time support eligibility changes to limit the number of qualified students to 12.5 percent, in the name of the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education?
D: No, it was not inconsistent. We knew that we were over the 12.5 percent. At the talk that I gave when I was appointed president, I said unequivocally that quality was the most important aspect of the university — the Master Plan and quality. And I would not compromise quality over quantity.
As we realized that we had snuck up to almost 14 percent, and the result of that was that you were seeing larger classes, the student-to-faculty was larger, you were seeing less time with your professors because there were just more students, I was motivated to bring it back to the Master Plan, which is 12.5 percent and then grow from there.
I wanted to bring it back and then get the commitment from the governor to support the growth, staying at that 12.5 percent, so we could bring back the student services that were slowly depleted because of the quantity.
G: You spoke today about “tweaking” the Master Plan. Today, California has far more students attaining higher education degrees and we have far more technology jobs that require these degrees than when the plan was first written. Is it time for the state to go back and make revisions to the Master Plan?
D: No. Let me start off with the context of the Master Plan. The Master Plan is much broader than saying that we’re the top 12.5 percent of top graduating classes at high schools. It talks about research and it talks about graduate education and graduate degrees. …
The signal is that the bachelor’s degree is no longer the terminal degree. Every student is thinking about what’s next: “Am I going to go to law school, to medical school, get a Ph.D.?” So we have to grow, and all of the students that have gone through the tidal wave — you guys, your tidal wave — you are going to be expecting to go to graduate school. So we have to start building the graduate schools and professional schools. …
So inside the Master Plan, we have actually been sacrificing the graduate programs to continue to meet the tidal wave of undergraduates. Now that that’s going to level off, we have to build the graduate schools, so that they will be better for you.
G: Where does that leave the more traditional social science majors, who may not be thinking about law school but about entering the workforce?
D: If we don’t create the jobs for you, the economy of California is going to get into trouble. So we have to create the new companies. …
If you look at all of the large companies up and down California, almost all of them come from California universities. … They all come from faculty or students who have good ideas and create the companies. And they create the jobs for social scientists, the engineers — they create these jobs. We have to continue to keep that flowing, and that happens in the research labs.
I’ll give you a great example: Mike Judge. He graduated in physics from UCSD and then created “Beavis and Butthead,” then “King of the Hill” and … so on.
This is a society of very creative, restless people. We have to continue to nurture that so that the venture capitalists are ready to plow money into you, because you have a good idea. The way to do that is to continue to have this UCSD where engineers are working with people in music, creating new forms of digital music, which is what’s going on right now.
I don’t know what the next industries are, but I hope they come out of the UC, because then there will be jobs for the arts and humanities folks, for the social scientists, for the engineers and for the scientists.
G: With the recent rankings — I’m sure you’ve heard that we’re 13th in the world based on a study done in China — how do you think UCSD compares to other schools in the system and how does the University of California, in general, compare to other private and public institutions?
D: I ain’t going to answer that first one, because I’d have nine campuses killing me. But the second part is something that I alluded to in the town hall meeting. The University of California, without any argument, is the finest university in the world.
Now, people say to me, when I say that, “What are you talking about, Bob? Harvard? Stanford? Princeton?”
And the answer to that is, we’re 10 campuses now. We are huge compared to Harvard. So if you look at the impact, we produce more Ph.D.s than anywhere else in the world. If you look at the impact that the University of California has on the world, it is far beyond any of those others. So what we lack in funding we make up because we’re huge, so we can do things that other universities can’t.
G: Now that you’ve come back after the first round of your tour, how is it going to affect your policies and your vision for the university?
D: It changes things. It’s affecting it already.
I saw, for example, the agricultural programs in the University of California. I saw those transferred directly to the fields and to the farmers. It was the most efficient tech transfer I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m a techie — I come from the electronics industry, the telecommunications industry — and I thought we knew how to transfer technology. Man, these people in the ag programs know how to do it.
It’s driven me back to think about how we an do a better job of tech transfer in biotech and the other high- tech [fields] so we can better serve the state of California. So I’ve learned something from the ag business. …
So I’ve learned all sorts of neat stuff like this. It’s been fun. I mean, the learning has been just incredible — how much I’ve learned about the state of California. And I’m expecting on the next round that I’m going to learn just as much. It molds the way I think about what we should be doing, which I hope will influence your lives 10 or 20 years from now.