Riding Tidal Wave II

UC Davis prepares to accept its share of the coming enrollment surge with an ambitious building program.

Tidal Wave II will soon be crashing on the shores of higher education, and UC Davis is getting ready. Tidal Wave II is what former UC President Clark Kerr dubbed the coming surge in enrollment of the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomers, who created the first big wave of students in the '60s.

The University of California is preparing to accommodate an additional 63,000 students by 2010--an increase of 43 percent, equaling the university's growth over the last 30 years and roughly equivalent to the current combined enrollments of UC Berkeley and UCLA.

Under the state Master Plan for Higher Education, UC accepts students from the top 12.5 percent of California's high school graduating class each year. UC's Office of the President has stressed that the university fully intends to continue fulfilling that social compact and to find space for the students who have earned a place at the university.

That growth will be handled in a variety of ways, including building the new UC Merced campus, increasing the number of summer classes and offering more off-campus opportunities through programs like Education Abroad. In addition, campuses must expand their regular school-year enrollments. Each is being asked to accept its fair share of the increase. At UC Davis that translates into an average annual growth rate of 2.2 percent, which will result in a total enrollment of 30,000-31,000 students in 10 years.

"Our growth rate will be slower than most UC campuses because we're closer to our target enrollment," said UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. "That absolute growth number is not unfair to us at all. It is our fair share . . . to accommodate all of these new UC-eligible students. We will do our best to ensure an open door for the next generation of young people, honoring our Master Plan obligation to educate the state's top high school seniors."

To teach and provide services for these additional students, the University of California will also need to hire some 7,000 new faculty (about 500 at UC Davis) and some 8,000-9,000 additional staff.

"With this growth comes opportunity," Vanderhoef says. "It give us the opportunityto reshape our academic landscape, our intellectual blueprint." The campus will be able to carefully target those additional faculty positions to augment existing strengths and to launch new initiatives.

To house the additional students, faculty and staff, the physical landscape of the UC campuses will be changing as well. Some $10 billion worth of new and renovated facilities will be needed across the system, with about $1 billion of that needed by UC Davis (not counting an additional estimated $500 million for the UC Davis Medical Center).

Over the next five years, UC Davis will construct almost 50 projects worth more than $725 million, tripling its recent annual expenditure on construction. In aggregate, those projects will transform the 92-year-old campus through sorely needed modernized research and teaching facilities, a new stadium/swimming center, the addition of a regional theater/conference center complex and a new Entry Quad for the campus.

But this growth, in addition to being an opportunity, will also bring a challenge, Vanderhoef acknowledges. "The challenge is to determine the most academically responsible way to accommodate the anticipated enrollment demand and to make best use of limited funding, particularly for facility construction and renovation."

University administrators also recognize that growth can be a hot topic on UC campuses and in their neighboring communities.

"Here at UC Davis, both the campus and the community agree that our character as one of the last remaining traditional college towns must be preserved and even enhanced," said Marj Dickinson, director of government and community relations. "After all, it is a characteristic that is treasured by current and former students, faculty, staff and the community."

The campus must be mindful of the city of Davis' historic desire to limit growth, as well as implications of the city's pending General Plan and a recently passed ballot measure requiring a vote of the citizens to ratify new city developments not already included in the city limits. "The campus, the city and neighboring communities must think together in innovative ways to preserve our shared campus-community values, characteristics and amenities while keeping our promise to a new generation of students, faculty and staff," says Dickinson.

Rick Keller, campus facilities planning director, says that the campus is carefully planning to avoid sprawl on what is still the largest campus in the UC system, with the majority of its 5,200 acres remaining for agricultural research and teaching. "We're going to be densifying the core of the campus with more buildings to maintain the 10-minute walking circle," he explains.

To guide the facility growth plan, the campus's 1994 Long Range Development Plan, which extends to 2005, will be revised to take a broader look at what will be needed in the long term. Before the campus can grow beyond the vision of the 1994 plan, campus planners must seek a campus consensus on how best to accommodate growth over the next 10 to 15 years.

This fall, a public advisory committee composed of representatives from on- and off-campus constituencies will begin town-hall meetings to discuss different ideas of how the campus should grow. These will be just the first in a series of public meetings that will inform development of a new Long Range Development Plan and an environmental impact report that will eventually go before the UC Board of Regents for approval.

The result will ultimately be a new face for the Davis campus. Meg Stallard '68, for one, is pleased that the campus is stepping up to the challenge. An active volunteer whose community service includes a seat on the Woodland school board, Stallard says the University of California needs to make room for students in a growing state.

"I can say that with my school board hat on. We're building a second high school," says Stallard, who is also vice chair of the Cal Aggie Alumni Association. "We're turning out more high school graduates in my community, and we want as many as possible to stay in California.

"As UC Davis grows, it becomes a stronger campus academically," she adds. "The growth strengthens the campus as a resource and enhances the quality of the degrees received by the people going to school here."

One of about 17,000 students during her years at UC Davis, Marily McAdams Mora '74, now deputy executive director of the Reno/Tahoe International Airport, hopes to see efforts to preserve a sense of community and belonging as the campus grows. "Some of the growth is positive--like the new arts center--but I hope the campus can strike a balance between those positive things and the impersonal nature that can come with having so many students."

Following is a look at some of the new facilities that will help the campus accommodate enrollment growth and that will update existing laboratories, many of which were built at least a half century ago and are obsolete.

* New campus initiatives that promise to put UC Davis at the forefront of research will find a home in a six-story, $95 million Genome and Biomedical Sciences Building in the Health Sciences Complex. The building will house 70 research teams from various colleges and divisions.

It is an example of the creative ways that UC Davis is funding its new projects. Unlike the '60s when most construction was financed by state funds, only about 30 percent now comes from voter-approved state building bonds. Consequently, the university has looked increasingly to private donations, other public sources (such as the federal government) and other innovative partnerships, like developer-financed projects.

The genomics building is being funded chiefly through a new mechanism created by legislation written in 1990 by former State Sen. John Garamendi. The law allows the university to pay off a construction loan by directing overhead charges on newly acquired research grants to costs associated with constructing and operating the research building. Additional financing comes from a Whitaker Foundation grant, chancellor's discretionary funds and a UC Davis Health System contribution.

* Over the past year, the campus has worked diligently on a plan to upgrade the facilities for the School of Veterinary Medicine, whose accreditation was placed on conditional status because of inadequate facilities. The Legislature included $4 million in capital funds in the 2000-2001 budgetfor preliminary plans required before construction funds can be appropriated to address the school's needs. The campus has committed the first $47 million of the $124 million it expects to spend over the next four years for the vet school to build facilities, with about 60 percent of that coming from state bond money and the remainder from donations and university sources. The school's projects include a $10.8 million teaching lab building, a $13.6 million Vet Med Instructional Buildingand a $77.1 million Vet Med 3A. The instructional building will replace classrooms in Haring Hall and the Surge complex, while Vet Med 3A will house classrooms, teaching and research labs, and space for various veterinary services. Also on the drawing board are a $12.2 million Center for Companion Animal Health, which will focus on feline and canine medicine as well as research on cancer, genetics, infectious diseases and nutrition, and a $3 million Equine Research Facility.

* The 1996 and 1998 state bond acts, approved by California voters, are providing partial funding for the $20.8 million Engineering III. The three-story 36,000-square-foot building is being built on the former site of a parking lot south of Bainer Hall, with two-thirds from bond funds and the remainder from capital funds. It will house departments now in Walker Hall; that 70-year-old building, with its charming Spanish colonial revival exterior and oft-remodeled interior, will be evaluated to see what can be saved. One possibility is that the building, like Hart Hall across the street, will retain its façade while the interior is gutted and replaced.

* A $39.6 million, 124,000-square-foot Plant and Environmental Sciences Building will replace the outmoded facilities in Hoagland and Hunt halls, which cannot be used for experiments that depend on heat and humidity controls because of a lack of central air conditioning. The building is being funded half by bonds and half by campus funds.

* A much-anticipated facility is the Sciences Laboratory Building. This $47.3 million building, to be paid for mostly through the 1998 state bond act, will be located west of Haring Hall along the Storer Mall. It will consolidate 10 chemistry labs and 24 biological science labs and include a 500-seat lecture hall, study spaces and a computer lab.

* On the west side of the campus core, new student facilities will be built over the next four years. These structures are being paid for mostly by UC Davis students, who voted in February 1999 to pay the debt on $65 million worth of projects by increasingtheir quarterly fees. The new structures include a $46.5 million student recreation and activity center just north of and attached to Recreation Hall, a $5.4 million aquatics center and a $26.1 million multi-use stadium on the southwest corner of Hutchison Drive and La Rue Road. Additional funding for the aquatics center is coming from the city of Davis and from a $1 million gift from UC Davis alumnus/faculty member Rand Schaal '73, Ph.D. '91, and his father, Ted, with the understanding that the Olympic-regulation-size pool will be shared by Davis community swimmers. The stadium also will be funded with private gifts.

Another new student facility on the west side of campus is a just-completed student apartment complex called The Colleges at LaRue. The complex, which consists of units with full kitchens and living rooms, provides housing for more than 500 students. The project was built by and is being managed by a private developer.

* On the south edge of campus near the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center, a $53.5 million Center for the Arts Performance Hall is under construction and an adjacent three-story parking facility was just completed. That section of campus is being designed as the "new front door" for UC Davis, highlighted by the four-story glass-facade theater planned as a state-of-the-art venue for performing artists from the campus and from around the world. The campus is seeking private donations to fund $22.6 million in construction costs (plus another $7.4 million for an initial operating endowment and startup costs); the remaining $30.9 million will come from non-state campus funds.

* Campus officials have chosen a development team that includes Texas-based Benchmark Hospitality to build an academic conference center with 150 guest rooms and 15,000 square feet of meeting space east of the new Entry Quad and the new Center for the Arts. This center will be privately financed, developed and operated on five acres of campus land. Expected to be under construction next summer, the project will include a restaurant, pub and large ballroom.

The developer will also build a 60,000-square-foot university services building to house University Relations staff and other campus units. It will be the first leased building for administrative staff on campus.