The announcement of the purchase of the Rancho Palos Verdes campus has raised concerns, as blog readers will know. We have noted the effective geographic isolation of the new satellite campus. By public transportation, as we pointed out, currently there is realistically no possibility of commuting to and from Westwood. By car - or perhaps by some shuttle bus service UCLA might provide - we are talking about an hour each way, assuming no traffic fiascos on the San Diego Freeway.
The Academic Senate, in an email recently circulated, talks about the necessity of keeping UCLA united. It's hard to see how that can be done. If the new campus is part of the undergraduate program, having a stand-alone campus will not be keeping UCLA united. It will not be like the separately-located med schools that some UC campuses have.
From the Senate's email:
Recently, the Chancellor announced the campus expansion of UCLA to two sites in Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro. The Executive Board of the UCLA Academic Senate held a closed session meeting in mid-August to provide the Chancellor with a letter titled Campus Expansion Principles and Process that advised on parameters, principles, and shared governance processes.* We emphasized, among other things, that campus expansion must serve the academic mission and our public mission, must involve faculty hiring, must be undertaken through shared governance, must not drain the Westwood campus of resources, must keep UCLA united, and must advance values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We provided this letter to the Chancellor, at his request, for his recent presentation to the UC Regents, who approved the land acquisition.
We share this letter now with all Academic Senate members to encourage a transparent and deliberative shared governance process during this historic moment, a process we particularly welcome given that the Academic Senate did not have an opportunity to provide substantive advice in the critical early stages of the decision-making process.
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*https://dms.senate.ucla.edu/issues/issue/?6489.Campus.Expansion.Principles.and.Process.2022.Aug.
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https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/united%20campus.mp3
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