Campus News
UC Launches New Outreach Initiative
UCSC Chancellor Emeritus Karl S. Pister To Play Leading Role Saying that the University of California and all of higher education in the state have "entered a new era in terms of how we allocate educational opportunity," UC President Richard C. Atkinson unveiled a major new initiative to help prepare greater numbers of California young […]
UCSC Chancellor Emeritus Karl S. Pister To Play Leading Role
Saying that the University of California and all of higher education in the state have "entered a new era in terms of how we allocate educational opportunity," UC President Richard C. Atkinson unveiled a major new initiative to help prepare greater numbers of California young people for a university education.
Addressing the UC Board of Regents at their January 15 meeting in San Francisco, Atkinson described the initiative–called the Outreach Action Plan–as the "next step" in the Regents’ mandate to develop new directions and increased funding for outreach, now that UC policy and state law have eliminated the use of race, gender, and ethnicity as factors in the admission of students.
"I believe that we owe much of our success in achieving diversity over the past 30 years to our highly effective affirmative action efforts," he added. "Yet I also believe the university now has the opportunity to shape an approach to diversity that puts greater emphasis on individual promise and potential, less on characteristics like one’s gender or the color of one’s skin."
Atkinson’s Outreach Action Plan has three main elements:
- An enhanced administrative structure, with Karl S. Pister, chancellor emeritus of UC Santa Cruz, taking on an expanded role in his capacity as senior associate to the president.
- An ambitious funding strategy fueled by investment from the university–including an additional $2 million commitment announced today by the president–the state and federal governments, the California public school system, and private sources.
- Intensified personal involvement in a range of outreach efforts on the part of the president and the Regents, the chancellors of UC’s nine campuses, and UC’s faculty, students, staff, and alumni. Atkinson cited as an example a letter from him to 13,000 California high school students encouraging them to apply to UC.
"We are proposing to improve the educational experience and preparation of K-12 students on a scale and scope never attempted before," Atkinson said in presenting his plan. "This is an extraordinarily ambitious goal, but if there is any state in the Union that can succeed, it is California."
He added that to accomplish this goal, "We must rely not only on our own efforts but also on the active participation and support of our partners in the schools, business and community organizations, and the state and federal governments."
Atkinson’s plan seeks to implement in a comprehensive and coordinated way the recommendations of the UC Outreach Task Force, a 32-member panel of Regents, UC faculty, staff, and students, business and industry leaders, representatives of the state’s major education sectors, and officials from the state Department of Education and the Postsecondary Education Commission. The Board of Regents called for the formation of the task force to help establish new paths to ensuring educational opportunity in California and continued access to UC for qualified students.
The task force recommended that UC, in order to improve the preparation of students, should undertake a major expansion of its academic outreach to the state’s K-12 schools, creating long-term partnerships with selected schools to improve their ability to educate and motivate students.
Other recommendations called for increased efforts to work directly with students to strengthen their academic preparation; better and more timely information about UC programs to be provided to students, families, teachers, and counselors; and expanded UC research in understanding the root causes of disparities in educational motivation and achievement, and how these disparities can be addressed.
In recent months, the Office of the President, under the leadership of Provost C. Judson King, has joined with UC campuses in beginning to implement the task force recommendations. Two campuses, UCLA and Davis, made presentations to the Regents at today’s meeting describing their efforts in response to the task force recommendations.
The Outreach Action Plan presented to the Regents by Atkinson is intended to provide added impetus and support through the deployment of these strategies:
- Administrative structure: Former chancellor Pister, who has been working on the school partnership program recommended by the task force, will have the additional responsibility of seeing that UC outreach activities are coordinated across the university; overseeing efforts to acquire the funds needed to implement the task force recommendations; and assisting in accelerating work on all aspects of UC’s outreach efforts, including implementation of the task force recommendations. Pister will report directly to Provost C. Judson King and Atkinson.
- Funding acquisition: The task force estimated that reaching its goals would require an investment of new money over the next five years totaling $60 million, roughly doubling the amount UC currently spends on existing outreach programs.
Emphasizing that securing the additional funding should be a "shared responsibility," Atkinson said that UC will work with other education segments and the legislature to enable the use of Prop. 98 funding for joint outreach and school development programs. Prop. 98 is the state constitutional guarantee to provide the K-12 system with a minimum level of funding each year.
In addition, he said that his office will initiate discussions with the Clinton administration and appropriate federal agencies to seek the designation of additional federal funds for outreach programs in California. He also noted that UC campuses, with the Office of the President as a coordinating point, already are working to increase private fund-raising for outreach from foundations, businesses and corporations, and individual donors.
On the university’s behalf, Atkinson committed an additional $2 million from internally allocated university funds for outreach. This, together with the $5 million increase to UC’s budget proposed by Gov. Wilson, would bring the total of additional UC and state funding committed to outreach–at both the undergraduate and graduate level–to $12 million annually.
- Personal engagement: Citing his November letter to 13,000 promising California high school students–it received strong favorable response from students and parents–and similar efforts by campus chancellors, Atkinson said this kind of individual attention and encouragement can make a difference.
"I want to multiply the good results we got with the November letter by enlisting members of the UC community to help with the outreach activities coming out of the task force recommendations," Atkinson told the Regents.
He said he would issue a letter to the UC community asking the Regents, faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends of the university to contribute their ideas, time, talent, and energy to the outreach initiative.
Atkinson also said he would report to the Regents regularly on the implementation of the Outreach Action Plan, starting with the board’s February policy meeting.
"We want to see that this issue receives the wide visibility and attention it deserves," Atkinson said. "The Outreach Action Plan is one of my highest priorities. We are mobilized and organized and believe we know how to succeed. I intend to give it my personal attention and involvement."