UC Merced failing to live up to promise
A decade has passed since America’s newest research university opened amid farmland in Central California. And surprisingly little on the landscape has changed. Cows still graze alongside UC Merced. There’s no student union, and some researchers are based miles away at a former Air Force base… Construction of the university, which broke ground in 2002, began as dramatically rising construction costs collided with massive reductions in state higher education spending after the 2008 economic downturn. By 2010, California was spending $1.6 billion less on higher education than it did a decade earlier… A decade is far too little time to judge the campus, said Janet Napolitano, president of the UC system and a former U.S. Homeland Security secretary and Arizona governor. She cited 50-year-old UC Irvine as an example. “UC Irvine 50 years ago was a pile of dirt,” she said. “Now it’s a center of bioengineering and other disciplines in Orange County. There’s a whole cluster or companies around there.”
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by Matt Krupnick, The San Jose Mercury News.