Tuesday, May 19, 1998
Ask campus community about changes
CONSTRUCTION: Faculty, students offer invaluable advice for
administrators
By Travis Longcore
The article, "Construction projects made concrete," (April 29)
deserves comment. While the article began to describe the process
by which capital projects are developed at UCLA, it failed to
illustrate the manner in which faculty, staff and students are
excluded from participating in the planning process. As indicated
in the article, most building projects on campus are initiated by
administrators – deans, vice chancellors, provosts, etc. – and
Capital Programs does what the administrators want. What the campus
lacks is a planning department. Yes, Capital Programs does a fine
job of shoehorning new buildings onto the campus (usually at the
expense of somewhere between 30 and 300 trees at a time), but no
entity on campus engages in any sort of community planning process
by which the people who use the campus have a say in where and how
new construction is undertaken. The new administration advisory
council is a far cry from an open community planning process. One
positive example has been the planning for the new hospital, where
administrators have reached out to involve scores of faculty in
their planning process.
After considerable pressure over a two-year period, Capital
Programs reluctantly began to share its plans with the Academic
Senate Council on Planning and Budget (a committee which has
student representation), but when that committee voted twice last
year to oppose the Morgan Center expansion because it filled in the
last remaining open space on Bruin Plaza and violated the campus’s
own Long Range Development Plan, the committee was trumped by a
higher administrator and approval for the costly project was pushed
through to the regents by then-Chancellor Charles Young. That is to
say, faculty and student involvement is fine as long as everyone
shares the administration’s opinion.
Things might have become better with a new chancellor, but
Albert Carnesale has, unfortunately, left the same old bureaucrats
in charge of Capital Programs. While other UC campuses (Berkeley,
for example) make an effort to undertake coordinated campus
planning that involves the campus and local community at an early
stage, UCLA capital projects are formulated at the upper
administrative level and approved by the same administrators long
before the campus at large knows about the proposals.
Whereas the UC Berkeley planners put siting and building
concepts on their web site, encouraging people to print the map,
draw on it and write comments, then fax it back in, our
administrators prefer to exclude campus input. The campus at large
finds out that there is a new project the day the construction
fence goes up. UCLA deserves better. The administration could let
us know about the projects on the horizon by soliciting public
input much earlier in the process. They have been asked many times
to do this. But they actively oppose this idea, precisely because
they know that many of these proposals will be wildly unpopular and
will therefore not get done.
Money is currently being sought for a huge arts complex,
possibly of Anderson School proportions, that would fundamentally
transform the nature of North Campus, but no one knows about it.
URL is slated to expand over 50 percent onto the North Campus food
facility. The Career Center is slated for destruction to make way
for a new library. Why is the administration keeping these plans
secret? Couldn’t their planning be improved by campus involvement?
Don’t the students and faculty deserve to know what the
administrators want to do to the campus? Might different decisions
be made if the people who use the campus had some say in how it is
designed? The chancellor’s new administration-stacked advisory
council will do no good unless the process is opened up, and
proposed projects are publicized and debated as to their merits,
rather than the status quo of building to suit the administrator
who can raise the most money.Longcore is a doctoral candidate in
geography.