38 minute read
Dr. Michael V. Drake Meet the University of
He takes the helm at a time of pandemic, social distancing and serious budget choices.
MONICA LOZANO: For purposes of full disclosure, I want to mention that I served on the Board of Regents of the University of California for 15 years, and President Drake and I overlapped for almost the entire time. Today I’m pleased to welcome back to California, to The Commonwealth Club, this prominent academic leader the day after the election for a timely discussion of the challenges facing public higher education and the challenges facing our nation more broadly. So, welcome, President Drake. It’s good to see you again. MICHAEL V. DRAKE: Wonderful to see you, Monica. LOZANO: You had great success when you were at The Ohio State University. You increased enrollment, increased diversity, brought in more research dollars. But there was something about this particular opportunity that compelled you to come back not just to California but to the University of California, under what everybody would say are probably the most challenging times in its history. I want to ask you about that decision to come back, but I also want to think about leading during times of crisis. That must have been something that called to you also, because, as we said, the challenges facing the UC are just tremendous right now. What made you come back? DRAKE: My wife and I were Californians. We grew up here. We met in college—I was in college near here. Then she went to law school at Berkeley when I was in medical school. So we raised our family here, and our family’s here. We felt like Californians. We always were planning in some way to at least spend some part of the next phase of our lives reconnecting with California. That was always in the offing. We weren’t planning on doing something quite this intense, I think. We thought about another phase of life.
But honestly, during that time of the initial lockdown when we were dealing with COVID, I had been working quite intensively with The Ohio State University for all of those years. During the time of the lockdown, it just seemed like this wasn’t the time to be on the sidelines, that we really needed all hands on deck. Discussing with the committee the opportunity to come back if there was something that we could contribute to this effort, this seemed like a time for all of us to be doing our best to help us get through this extraordinarily challenging time in our country’s history. That was compelling. That was one thing.
Let me say the other thing that was really compelling is, with the [experience] of being at UCSF and being at the office of the president in a different role, a couple of decades ago
THE 21ST PRESIDENT
of the University of California oversees UC’s world-renowned system of 10 campuses, five medical centers, three nationally affiliated labs, more than 280,000 students and 230,000 faculty and staff. From the November 4, 2020, online program “Meet New University of California President Dr. Michael V. Drake.” Part of The Commonwealth Club’s series on Ethics and Accountability, underwritten by the Travers Family Foundation. Dr. MICHAEL V. DRAKE, M.D., President, University of California In conversation with MONICA LOZANO, President and CEO, College Futures Foundation
Dr. Michael V. Drake was appointed UC president this past summer.
being a chancellor for many years, we had the opportunity to meet many wonderful people. The chance to come and to work again with those people on this great enterprise was really something that was extraordinary compelling. LOZANO: How has it been? When you mentioned meeting wonderful people, you’re not able to physically meet with anybody right now. So how has it been in terms of acclimating to the institution, getting to know the enterprise? It’s obviously changed six years later. How are you spending your time actually familiarizing yourself with both the people and the issues of the university? DRAKE: Yes, this is a strange time for all of us. It’s a time unlike any time any of us have lived with. I can say that without fear of contradiction. I mean, we’ve not ever had a time like this in our lives. That has been unsettling I think for everyone. I’ve actually been saying to colleagues that work can be challenging and stressful and hard. We deal with real problems, and those things can require energy from us. We often would get energy back from the people that we’re working with. The joy of being with people and working on things together really is enabling and empowering. Now, we have the problems to deal with; we don’t get the payback and the positive feedback of being with people. That really is stressful I think for all of us. It’s stressful for our faculty. It’s stressful for our students. It’s stressful for our staff.
Like I’m sure you do and many others, we’re on Zoom all day, so the people are there, but we really do miss the human connection. What we do is try to put extra intention into doing our best work in that realm, but I will say I miss the fact that we’re not able to be together. I’m in my normal office where I was many times as vice president and a few feet away from where I met hundreds of times in the conference room. There’s no one else on the floor. It’s a strange thing. I will say though that the real resolve of the people in the community, the resolve of our colleagues, brings great energy to our meetings, and actually we’re making great progress even under these difficult circumstances. LOZANO: I want to spend a few minutes talking about the impact of the pandemic on the operations of the university. Obviously campuses were restricted in terms of having students onsite. Talk to us about the way in which you’re making decisions regarding the impact of COVID on operations, and then what you foresee in terms of spring enrollments. DRAKE: Well, I’d say first there really is
Moderator Monica Lozano of the College Futures Foundation interviews new UC President Dr. Michael V. Drake for The Commonwealth Club.
the impact.
If I may back up a little bit to the spring: I teach a freshmen seminar. I’ve been teaching a freshmen seminar for years. I taught it when I was at UC Irvine. I taught the freshmen seminar when I was at The Ohio State University. I really noticed the students I’d gotten to know in the first part of the semester, and then we were online and separate. We had our first Zoom, and I remember how happy I was to see them all. They seemed happy to be there. We missed each other. I could actually feel great to have a connection, great to see people and be able to talk with them in this format. But we missed each other and the energy of being together.
I know that broadly we would love very much to be able to bring people back together as soon as we can appropriately, but we want to make sure we do that in a safe fashion. We’ve been very thoughtful about repopulating the campuses in a slow and even fashion. We had a meeting today with the chancellors to look at the COVID positivity rates on campus, and we’ve done tens of thousands of tests, hundreds of thousands by now, across the system. So bringing people back, repopulating the campus, but doing it in a safe and effective way is something that’s always been paramount in our planning.
I will say that on the campuses, we’ve been pleased with the positivity rates with our students living in the dorms. Almost all of our classes are virtual. Almost all the classes now are online. And that’s certainly going to be for this time, and I’m going to say that the overwhelming majority of classes will be online starting in January as well. But we have from several hundred to a few thousand students living on campus, socially distancing, using non-pharmaceutical methods of protecting themselves, masks, hand-washing, social distancing—the non-pharmaceutical interventions. That experience has worked well. The positivity rates on the campuses are dramatically lower than the positivity rates in the surrounding communities. We’re watching that very carefully.
As we’re able to maintain that, it will allow us we believe to have more of those students who wish to come back to campus, to live. Even though the classes are largely remote, we’ll be able to increase the number of students on campuses, we hope, in the winter and spring. We’ll know more about that really in a few weeks. The country is experiencing a surge. We have to see how we do with this surge. But the hope will be that we’ll be able to maintain this great differential between the students who are living on campus safely and communities, even those relatively safe communities, where the students have lower positivity rates.
Your question about the impact broadly on operations—we’ve had significant impacts in many ways. We’ve had obviously a state budget reduction. We’ve had losses in our health system, because we were not able to do elective procedures in the springtime. Much of that has been recovered now, so that’s going better. We have significant losses in our auxiliaries. Tens of thousands of students lived with us on campus, and now those students are not there. Some are, but not nearly as many as we normally would have. There’s a great delta. Our costs haven’t gone down nearly as much, but with no one living there, there’s no revenue. The campuses have had to absorb that. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that had to be refunded in the springtime and then not received here in the fall.
We’ve gone through a real effort of belttightening and avoidance of costs and a whole series of other things to try to help our budgets to balance, but there’s quite a bit of stress on the system. LOZANO: I was thinking about your comments about the positivity rates, and it seems to me that, at least for our audience, it might be interesting for them to hear about the role that our medical enterprise is playing in terms of testing, tracing, pursuing a vaccine. It just feels that this is where UC really matters, and it is about these grand challenges that face humanity, where we can actually bring the best of our research and medical facilities to bear. DRAKE: Yes. LOZANO: So maybe you could describe a little bit about what’s happening in that realm. DRAKE: Well, it’s a big topic. I would say that our health system, UC Health, began to be focused on the pandemic really in January,
—MICHAEL V. DRAKE
before there were cases here in the United States, to look at the public health challenge that might come to us. We’ve seen things in the past, nothing quite like this, but we had SARS years ago, we had Zika, we’ve had other infectious diseases that were arising overseas that we expected or feared might come to our shores. That kind of planning and discussions began really in January.
By early March when there began to be cases here, our health system really sprung to life, and I would say that, starting then, it’s really been seven days a week for the leaders of our hospitals, for our clinicians, for our nurses, for our other critical personnel, the essential personnel that we have driving and doing food service. All the things that require hospitals to work have been going really full tilt since the beginning of March.
We’ve learned a lot. We’re better able to treat patients now, because we’ve seen what works with this novel disease. Remember, it’s a disease that no one had ever seen before this six, eight months ago. But we’ve learned to do a good job there, to try to treat people effectively when they come to our hospitals and to our ICUs. In addition to that, we’ve been working with public health, with county health, with state health officials, so that testing and contact tracing where appropriate has been done. Our universities are doing testing for the communities of patients that they serve and also in many cases are doing testing for local entities, other educational institutions, et cetera. We’ve been doing our best to ramp up testing and be a good source of that.
Then we have, at this moment, while we’re speaking, there are people taking care of patients in our intensive care units, in our wards. At the moment, there are people in our laboratories working on development of vaccines and also working on development of antivirals and other treatments to be able to do a better job of taking care of our patients. That’s a 24/7, 365 effort really for us, and it will continue throughout the winter and into the spring. This is going to be with us for a while. LOZANO: I wanted to stress this is when the UC makes us proud. It plays such an important role in terms of dealing with these large-scale, global issues, like this particular pandemic. There is a question from the audience that asks whether or not there’s other particular issues, global climate change, et cetera, that you intend to prioritize during your presidency. DRAKE: Let me say that COVID-19 is an extraordinarily pressing issue for us on a daily basis now, so we are working on that actively. Every time I have a chance, I want to make sure that I thank and acknowledge our health-care workers who have done such an incredible job putting themselves at risk, particularly at the beginning when we didn’t know what this was, but putting themselves at risk in order to save the lives of strangers. It’s the work that they do every day, but it’s come into a bright focus over these last several months. We really do thank them with all our hearts and want to acknowledge that.
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t arrive in a perfect and completely mannered world. We have other issues that were with us in December and January of last year that remain with us now. The threat of climate change I see as an existential threat to humankind and one where, as a system, we feel like our responsibility is to really be at the forefront of helping society to deal with this great threat to humanity. So we have a multitude of things that we are working on to try to do our best to both be good citizens in addressing climate change within our own facilities and across our own university, but also collaborate with others to stimulate research and to try to address this. For me, it’s one of my top priorities.
You mentioned the size and scope of the university. There are few institutions that can do as much as we can, who can participate the way that we can in trying to find the solutions to these challenging problems. We want to make sure that we’re fully doing the best that we can. LOZANO: Well, we appreciate that. Especially in California with the wildfires and everything, climate change is real, and we’re experiencing it every day in this state.
Let’s go back to the operational impacts of the pandemic, if you don’t mind. You mentioned virtual instruction, distance learning, distance teaching, how difficult that was to actually convert all your courses to online. One of the questions I have for you, President Drake: Is there anything out of this moment that is durable? In terms of how you think about the educational and academic activity of the university, what do you see as the role of online and/or hybrid education? Then if you can also address the concerns people have with regards to equity and issues of access, especially for low-income, first generation students of color that are frankly suffering through a lot of hardship right now. DRAKE: Yes. First, as you mentioned, the rapid shift in which we went from our normal method of instruction to fully online last spring—I really want to give kudos to
the faculty, the amazing resilience of the faculty in being able to shift the thousands and thousands of courses immediately to an online format in a way that was able to deliver educational content to students to allow them to continue to make progress toward their degrees. I also want to thank the students for their resiliency and being able to adapt to a whole new way of learning for many of them and under, as you mentioned, many unequal circumstances. Our students have done an incredible job. So our faculty on the one hand, but our students on the other, have really worked together to continue to create and project an educational pathway forward. That’s very important.
Things that we learned. We’ve been for really 10, 15 years moving to more and more courses online or more and more parts of courses that are taught online. My own course was a seminar. We would meet together once a week, but all of the materials were delivered to the students in electronic format for years. There were no books, no papers, nothing to buy. They used an iPad and got the information that way, and I communicated with them that way. So we were quite used to using technology to enhance our instruction.
At my last university, we had a higher percentage of students—even though they were living on campus and taking most of their courses in a traditional way—a high percentage of students, about 40 percent in a given semester, were taking at least one class online to help smooth their pathway or passageway through the educational curriculum. I think that here at the University of California, we’re going to have more online and technology-enhanced opportunities for our students as they move forward. We probably got there a little more rapidly than we would have, because necessity is the mother of invention, but I think that’s going to stay. I think that we had capacity to have more online instruction available, and this allowed us to ramp that up a little more quickly than had we not been in a position where that was as necessary.
I’ll say we mentioned the health system and all of the things that we’re doing. We went to only emergency and serious issue care in the springtime. Elective surgery and other things were put on a back burner for a while. But when we did that, we stopped seeing patients in the clinic and went to telemedicine, and the overwhelming majority of the visits that we did, orders of magnitude more visits in telemedicine in April than would have been the case in February. Those numbers stayed high through April and May and then began to decrease as we started seeing more patients back in the clinic. But we didn’t take the telemedicine visits down to anywhere near where they’d been before.
Now we’re still seeing tens of thousands of telemedicine visits a month, and I think that that will be a permanent change in the way that we offer visits. So, actually more clinic visits in October than would have been the case in October the year before. A big slice of that would have been telemedicine visits. That would have been tens of thousands in October 2020 and only a handful really in October 2019. Some of those changes, I think, are going to be a permanent acceleration to the future. LOZANO: There’s a question from the audience that asks whether or not you anticipate campus life getting back to some sense of normalcy. When would that be, and do you think it’s going to be later than 2021? DRAKE: Well, I’m hopeful. I can’t predict the future. I love campus life. I’ve been at universities for my life, and I’ve realized what a privilege is. I really remember talking to my students last spring and seeing them and asking them how they were doing, and they just really wanted to get back to school. They wanted to get back to campus. They love everything that happens. They really love being with each other and the experience of the social and political growth that happens in the campus environment. It’s something that’s a special time; you and I remember those times from our lives a few years ago, and our students love that today.
We would really look toward getting back to something of a normal residential campus experience as [much s] we can, to be honest, and in the same way that we look forward to all the other things that we loved so much about being people in society, meeting friends and family and spending time together, going to restaurants and movies and whatever we were doing, going to ballgames and concerts, all of those things. Those were the things we looked forward to and the things that were fun, and we put them all on hold. My wife and I have grandchildren, just my favorite thing in the world always, and my life was really planned around when we could spend time with the grandchildren. Now we don’t see them. That’s really heartbreaking in that way for many, many people.
We’re all really doing everything we can to get back to being able to see each other safely. When that will be will depend on a couple of things. One, when a safe and effective vaccine can arrive and be distributed. That will take time, no matter what. If it were available today, we would still be months and months before it could be distributed broadly enough to make things safe. That really takes us well into next year before that would be our pathway back. But the sooner the better, and my fingers are crossed that we are able to get something that comes out shortly.
Our own behavior now though, the things I mentioned, the so-called NPIs, wearing masks, hand-washing, and social distancing, those things are incredibly important now. In fact, many public health experts say that they are as preventative and as protective as a vaccine. The more of us that do that today, the lower the incidence of the virus will be, the safer our communities will be. We get into a positive feedback loop of fewer and fewer people who can be infectious and protecting ourselves. So I think the more that all of us can do everything we can now to protect ourselves and protect our communities by wearing masks and washing hands and maintaining social distance, the healthier our communities will be over this winter and into the spring.
Another thing that we can all do now is get flu vaccines. As you know, the flu symptoms and COVID-19 symptoms are very similar, [but the] COVID-19 is much worse, many more people hospitalized with COVID-19. But every year, we have hundreds of people in California hospitalized with the flu. With the impact that we fear may come from surges over the winter, we want to make sure that we don’t have diseases masquerading as COVID-19 that divert the energy and care of the health-care system, or have our hospital
President Drake says that the switch to digital life went well, but he shares the general desire to get back to “normal,” in-person life.
beds taken up by disease that we can help to prevent with a vaccine, like the flu. I’ve had my flu vaccine. I hope you’ve had yours. LOZANO: I have. DRAKE: Okay. Good. I just would say that’s a very important thing that we can all do now to make November and December and January and February as safe as possible. The more we do that, the sooner we’ll get back to being able to spend time together. LOZANO: I read that you had instructed, if I’m correct, for anybody who either resides or is educated or works at a UC facility to get a flu shot. There’s a question also from the audience that just came in, President Drake, that asks what advice you have for students to stay motivated during this prolonged period of time. DRAKE: I’ve been reading books of the blitzkrieg in the Second World War to get a feeling of how people, when they find themselves under kind of a broad societal siege, move forward through those times. I think there are a couple things that have worked for us throughout history. One is to take a wide-angle view. The things that are in front of us right today are challenging and a drag, and I wish that they would stop, and I can’t make them stop, and that’s frustrating.
We take a step back and know that we as a country, we as people, we as families have made it through tough times in the past, and that if we stick with it, day by day, step by step, we will make it through. It’s all we can do, but it’s what we must do really to move forward. Just take a step back and remember that many people in the world have dealt with many very serious things, that people today are living through famine and warfare and other things that are threatening their very existence on a daily basis. What human beings seem to be able to do is to take a step back, to take the long view, and keep walking, put one foot in front of the other and move forward. I’d encourage that.
I believe, although it’s a facsimile of connection, that doing Zoom calls and phone calls and FaceTime and other things with friends and family, all of whom are going through this in different ways, that’s an extremely important thing to do, more important than ever. If I may just say for us, our family is distributed across this country and in other places, and we’ve been able to do things like have birthday parties where there are people from multiple countries together, which wouldn’t have been the case normally. At Passover, we had many different members of our family who were on multiple continents being able to spend time together. Those kinds of things are available using technology. They’re a substitute for what we would really like to be able to do, but they are something.
I would encourage that, and to do what you can to take that step back and that wideangle view to not allow yourself to get yourself down, to understand that this is a drag and it feels like a drag because it is, and that step by step we’ll move our way through it and get to the other side. LOZANO: That was wonderful advice. The institution does have a responsibility to supporting students during this period. DRAKE: Yes. LOZANO: Now, before, and in the future. One of the things that we’ve heard is that students are concerned about their mental wellbeing, issues around affordability. They’re not on campus. They’re not working. They may have lost income. And I actually want to go to the first question from one of our Travers Fellows, Tara Madhav, who’s a senior at UC Berkeley, who has a question for you about affordable housing. DRAKE: Great. TARA MADHAV: President Drake, my name is Tara Madhav, and I’m a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in political science and history. Many UC students struggle to find affordable housing in order to attend their respective universities. What steps can you and the UC take in order to ameliorate the affordable housing struggle for students? Thank you for taking the time today to answer my question. DRAKE: A very important question. Very nice to have a chance to say hello. Affordable safe housing is really a basic human need, and it’s an issue for people around the world [and in] this country. It’s certainly an issue for California broadly. It’s one of the real challenges in the state of California. We do a few things to try to help this.
For one, on all of our campuses, the campus housing that we provide is below market rate. We have housing that is less expensive than living in the community broadly, and we in fact build it for that to be the case. In the last five or six years, we’ve added about 17,000 more beds on our campuses, and I know that we have plans to add 15,000 more beds between now and 2025. Our goal there is to have [it be as] affordable as we can make it, safe, effective housing for students to live on campus when that’s their preference. And, again, 17,000 new beds and 15,000 more in the planning phase to be able to address that.
We also want to do all we can. We have food pantries on our campuses and other things to help students who are experiencing homelessness or find themselves food insecure. We of course provide broadband and other types of support to make sure students can stay connected. We understand that, with a wide range of student backgrounds that come to our campus, we’re very proud in fact of the number of Pell students we have, the number of first generation students that we have. We have the most diverse class in our history this year; that part of our axis is something that’s very important.
So we do our best to make our campuses supportive, safe places for our students to be. It’s one of the reasons that we’re working so hard to make the campuses safe enough to invite more students back, because we can do a better job of helping to support them when they’re with us than we can as they’re distributed broadly around the state and, I’m sure, many of our students live even in other states and other countries. Our ability to be able to help is enhanced by being able to have students on campus, and we’re working hard to try to increase those numbers. LOZANO: It leads me to think about the decisions that are made and that are reflected in your operating budgets—$2 billion was a number I heard in lost revenue. Some of it has been made up. But you’re now working with your chancellors. We don’t know where the state will be in terms of its budget for the
UC. So what are the priorities that you have established? What are the principles that you’re asking the chancellors to consider as they make budget decisions? What stays? What goes? What’s important and fundamental to the public service mission of the UC? DRAKE: We really focus on our core mission, and our core mission is the creation and transmission of knowledge, teaching for our students to help them continue to make progress toward their degrees, support for our faculty who are doing research, as we mentioned earlier, the research of the type that will be able to help us deal more effectively with pandemics as they come in the future and climate change and all the other things that are critical to our future. So we want to maintain support for our faculty in their teaching and support mission, maintain support for our students in their learning and progressing toward their degrees. Those are our core missions.
We also have a real core commitment to our very dedicated, really wonderful staff. You mentioned we have 220,000 faculty and staff. The majority of those are staff positions. People have their whole careers with us and really are the backbone of the University of California. We’ve been very committed to doing all we could to protect those people who are working with us. Many are able to do their work remotely during this time and work at home. Some have jobs that don’t lend themselves well for that, and we really worked hard to try to protect those people and those jobs. We’ve done reassignments or trainings or other kinds of things and worked it to do the best we can to keep that workforce whole. [What] I speak to the chancellors about really is protecting our core mission and our people.
If I may say, in my medical background, when you are losing blood pressure, the higher functions don’t get supported as much. You may not think clearly. You may black out and faint. But the breathing center and the heart, the things that keep you alive, your body kind of focuses attention on making sure that those things that you need to stay with us, that those things are the places that get the focus. We really want to focus on making sure that we protect our core mission so that, as we emerge from these difficult times, we can continue to accelerate forward. LOZANO: I’ve also heard you talk about that there is opportunity that comes out of moments like this, a moment of crisis. I want to turn to the second big issue that emerged across American society this year, which had to do with the issues of racial reckoning and systemic racism in institutions, in higher education. I’ve heard you use the term “It’s time for us to be anti-racist.” Can you talk to the audience about what are the kinds of changes that you would like to see occur within higher ed—perhaps broadly, but at the University of California—that tackle these issues of systemic racism that may make it difficult? As proud as you are about Pell and diverse students, campus climate becomes an issue. Talk to us about your thoughts regarding this moment of racial reckoning. DRAKE: It is an important moment of racial reckoning, but we’ve grown up in the United States, and the United States has had a real issue with race since before its origins. The modern version of this country really was built on the back of racism in a profound and these days almost unimaginably unacceptable fashion. But the legacy has never really left us. That original sin has been a part of our daily lives for all of my life, all of your life, Monica. We deal with this in lots of ways, at work, at home, broadly. It’s always been there.
I’ve watched over my life continual efforts toward trying to come to a reckoning with this and to try to make progress. Most of the time, the progress is slow, small, a few steps forward, a few steps back, a few steps forward, a few steps back. Every once in a while, we seem to have an opportunity to take a larger step. I’m hoping that this is one of those opportunities to take a larger step.
The stark recognition, I guess, of the social injustices that are faced by so many people—I’m thinking specifically now of the social injustices faced by African American men in this country all along—were really played up in horrible fashion on videos now. These things that have been happening, or that we might read about, or we might not hear about, we now can see. I think that for millions of people the stark reality that this is actually happening here in our own country still today, and happening time and time and time and time again, was enough to make people say, “My goodness, we really have to do something to try to address this.”
We’ve been talking about things we can do that really are anti-racist. It’s been baked into our culture for so long that it’s like a fish and water. You don’t see it for what it is. There’s a joke about a fish saying, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What’s water?” Y
You don’t see it so much, because you get used to “Well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way they’re supposed to be.” Taking a step back and saying, “Well, gosh, do they have to be way?” I think is part of anti-racism. What can we actually do to make things better?
We as a university community are continuing with these discussions. We are going to have a symposium after the first of the year to talk about security and safety on campus and what we can do to be exemplars of best practices. These are things we want to do on our campuses where, again, we want to be exemplars of best practices. We need to do them and live them in our communities. We need to be examples for the rest of the country and honestly the rest of the world in how we can treat each other with respect and compassion, no matter who our parents were and who we are today. That’s just something for us to work on every day. LOZANO: I remember when I was on the Board of UC Regents, and we talked a lot about campus climate. Then under my tenure, when I was chair, they adopted a statement of principles against intolerance. There was a foundation there, but it still shows up, and students still, and I’m sure faculty and staff also, are dealing with these issues that you described.
I’d like to now go to our second question from a Travers fellow, Katrina Bullock, who has question for you. KATRINA BULLOCK: My name is Katrina Bullock, and I’m a junior at UC Berkeley studying political science with minors in education and African American studies. Many first-generation, low-income students
—MICHAEL V. DRAKE
of color struggle with succeeding in university settings due to resource inaccessibility and the reality of imposter syndrome. How can the UC system address elitism at the university level and make a more accommodating experience for nontraditional students seeking higher education? DRAKE: Katrina, thank you; an extraordinarily important question, and one we work on really every day. It’s an interesting thing. We believe very much in access, affordability and excellence. By access, I mean that we want to make the university broadly accessible to people from all walks of life, from all corners of California, and from other places in the country and around the world as appropriate. But we really, particularly for California students, we want students who work hard and who’ve achieved well to be able to aspire to the University of California.
We do a better job than most in tuition relief; we have programs that neutralize tuition for families [with incomes] up to $80,000 a year. So tuition becomes not a barrier for those families and less of a barrier for families just above that level. That’s very important. But if you’re the first in your family to go to college, if you come from a community that is underrepresented on our campuses, yes, you will find yourself being a bit unusual as, forgive me, I was in all of the phases of my career. That was just something I was used to. It was something that you sort of got used to. Like I said, the fish and water, you get used to there not being people like you around as you move forward.
What my colleagues, I hope, and friends and many of us have done is try to broaden things so there are more people who look like us there in our wake than there were in front of us as we arrived, and we hope that, as you mentioned, Monica, that sense of community, that we develop communities that are welcoming and nurturing to our students. I did work on this honestly 30, 35 years ago.
One of my favorite books is called The Enigma of Arrival by the writer V.S. Naipaul, a British writer but of South-Asian Indian origin. It was written about his life, when he arrived from Trinidad—where he was born—in England for his education and then where he led his life until he passed away [after] many decades. But all of us when we arrive someplace that’s new to us feel strange. We’ve had an idea of what it’s going to be like in our minds before we get there, but having not been there, that idea is never quite like what the reality of being there is. We have to go through that growing into and becoming a part of that community, and that is disquieting for everyone in some way. If you’re the first in your family to do that, it’s more challenging and more threatening, and you don’t know necessarily that everybody else is feeling that way, although that’s commonly the case.
We work very much on the campus in orientation and in creating affinity groups and places where people can go for support to let you know, every student, that we admit you on purpose, that you’re a part of our community, you become a part of our university family, and we’re there to be able to support you. And, actually, our community is better because you’re there, and the contributions you make to the community are critically important.
One last thing I’ll say, Monica, is that part of that then means that we have diverse communities and that our students are meeting people who are unlike people that they’ve grown up with, no matter who they are. Each one of us is as different from the other as the other is different from us. One of the big opportunities and one of the big joys that we have is getting to know and find commonality with people from different backgrounds, but that’s always a challenge and can be threatening. We as a community continue to work on making that a safer and more rewarding place to be. LOZANO: This issue of access in particular, it seemed like in 2020, the UC made some giant, symbolic and substantive statements about its commitment to access, both in terms of its reflection on the use of standardized testing and admissions, also a very important statement around the rollback of Proposition 209 and what is now, as of yesterday, Prop 16 that was on the ballot. That issue around the lack of ability to use race, gender, ethnicity in admissions decisions stayed. I think some of us are concerned about the original impact of Prop 209 on the UC. So the question is not just around those wonderful supports that you have in place once students are on campus, but what can you do to ensure that your admissions policies are actually such that you are able to pull from diverse student populations. DRAKE: It’s something we’ve been working on really for decades. I was the admissions director at UCSF in the 1990s, and we worked really hard on being able to make those statements. We wanted to walk the walk, and we’d let others talk the talk. We wanted to actually be doing it. A couple of times, we were pleased that we had the most diverse medical school class in the country and also the most selective. Part of our proof point is that it wasn’t excellence or diversity, it was excellence and diversity, and in fact diversity made us better. We couldn’t be our best unless we had broad access and broad inclusiveness.
Then we worked hard in making sure that we could promote people through the ranks. We were starting with very little, but step by step things got better. Year over year, we’re still committed to that.
I can just say from my own experience, in the last six years, I was a part of a system for a long time working on [this issue]. It was one campus there, but we were able to increase diversity dramatically, a 50 percent increase in Latinx students over six years, a 50 percent increase in Asian students over six years, roughly 100 percent increase in AfricanAmerican students over those six years, and at the same time, interestingly, symmetrically, an 18 percent [increase] of four-year graduation rates, the same 18 percent that happened at Irvine.
Who knows where that comes from? But we had a terrific increase in four-year graduation rates, an increase in six-year graduation rates, an increase in research funding. All of the things that we would use to measure success and excellence were up at all-time records at the same time that we dramatically increased our diversity and also increased our number of Pell and first generation students.
So my lived experience is that a university can continue to raise its profile in all of the academic success and research things that we care about as we at the same time improve our access and our affordability.
