November 15, 2004

Academic Senate begins 'year of critical decisions'

UCSC's Academic Senate will hold its fall meeting at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, November 19 at the College Nine/College Ten Multipurpose Room. Alison Galloway, Academic Senate Chair, has addressed the following letter to members of the Senate outlining issues on the agenda.

Dear Colleagues,

At the beginning of each year the Senate Chair has the pleasure to welcome everyone and extend best wishes for the coming year. I also have the obligation to say that this will be a year of critical decisions about the future of the campus. We begin our year at the fall meeting of the Academic Senate which will take place on Friday, November 19th in the Multipurpose Room, Colleges 9 and 10. It will be followed by a reception in the Dining Room of the University Center hosted by Acting Chancellor Chemers. (Click here for full agenda.)

The fall meeting traditionally is the time to review the prior year’s achievements through the annual reports and to assess where we stand at the moment. It is also an opportunity to welcome new faculty to the campus and provide a glimpse of the system of shared governance by which the Senate and the administration manage this campus.

One of the largest tasks already undertaken this fall was the review of the final set of Western Association of Schools and Colleges essays. This work overlapped with the second task, the review of a preliminary draft of the Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) to the year 2020. This draft calls for planning of the physical structures to allow the potential for growth to 21,000 students. It is not designed to provide an academic plan nor deal with the many questions in terms of the impact of campus growth on the surrounding community. Academic planning falls outside an LRDP and the mitigation of our impact is handled in the Environmental Impact Report, drafting of which is scheduled to begin shortly.

Two items are of interest with regard to the LRDP. The first is the Committee on Planning and Budget (2003-04) report on the LRDP and campus growth. The second is a resolution put forward by Professor Meister regarding the choice of the 21,000 student enrollment for the LRDP. Additional information on the LRDP and the work of the affiliated Strategic Futures Committee can be found at planning.ucsc.edu/lrdp/. I urge everyone to become familiar with these issues so that we can have a productive discussion.

Sincerely,

Alison Galloway, Chair

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