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CHANCELLOR ROBERT C. DYNES
KEYNOTE ADDRESS, IMPERIAL VALLEY EDUCATORS CONFERENCE
MAY 9, 2002
- Thank you, Rafael. Let me
thank you all for taking the time to join us here today. I'd like to
thank Thomas [Gilkison] for organizing this conference and being a wonderful
UCSD ambassador to Imperial County.
- In presentations during
today's conference, my colleagues have told you how UCSD is working
to serve the citizens of Imperial County. I'd like to get a little more
personal in my presentation and tell you why we are committed to serving
Imperial County.
- I'll explain the "why"
in three ways, and I'll use my three hats that I wear. The first hat
is the Chancellor hat. That's the hat that I was introduced as wearing
- that's the tie and the suit. And I'll give you the sort of company
line as to why.
- The second hat, the other
title that I have at UCSD, is Chief Diversity Officer. So I'll tell
you why from that perspective.
- And third, I'll tell you
why from my guts and my heart. And that's rather personal - I'll tell
you why it's not just an institutional commitment but a personal commitment.
- So let me start with the
easiest part, which is the Chancellor hat.
- For nearly six years, I
have been the UCSD Chancellor, and when I was inaugurated, I made a
commitment to a lot of people that UCSD would be much more engaged in
our community, and our community, our service area, is San Diego and
Imperial Counties.
- Like any major public research
university, we have three missions: education, research, and community
service.
- If you do the job right
- and I use this as a yardstick in measuring what we are doing - almost
everything you do embraces all three of those missions at once.
- Too often, people are confused
about the UC system. They think, "Well, they're just interested
in research, they're not interested in education."
- The programs that you've
been hearing about from my colleagues illustrate how those three are
really intertwined.
- Of our three missions, of
course, our primary mission is education. Our job is to take gifted
youngsters and make adults out of them.
- If we're doing our job correctly,
these young people learn not only their discipline - not only political
science or physics or computer science or theatre & dance - but
they learn how to think critically, be creative, and probably most importantly,
they learn how to interact with a vast array of other students who come
from all over the state of California and in fact from all over the
world.
- We cannot do that alone.
We rely on partners like you to carry out our mission of making adults
who can think critically and who will give back to their communities.
- To put it very simply, we
rely on you to send us your gifted students so we can help educate them
to be the next generation of leaders in our community.
- It is statistically a fact
that students live where they matriculate. If we lose our students to
other parts of the country, they will likely stay there. They will find
jobs, fall in love, do whatever young people do in their 20s, and stay
in that place.
- So we have a mission to
keep our best and brightest, if we can, in our community. That's our
job together - not mine, not yours - to feel more secure that we have
properly prepared the next generation of leaders from every diverse
background.
- San Diego and Imperial Counties
are enormously rich in cultural diversity, and all of those cultural
backgrounds need leaders. They need leaders who have learned how to
interact with each other in ways that are constructive and who can embrace
each other's backgrounds and cultures.
- And that leads me to my
second hat as UCSD's Chief Diversity Officer.
- I became Chancellor in 1996,
within a year that California voters passed Proposition 209, which banned
race and gender as factors in admission to the UC and CSU system and
other areas like hiring and contracting.
- I was very worried at that
time that the campus would narrow in its diversity, that we would lose
bright young people of diverse backgrounds who perhaps didn't have the
same educational opportunities as others.
- So we developed an action
plan that emphasized K-14 outreach in selected areas, communities and
schools that we believed would add to the strength and richness of UC
San Diego.
- I needed to put somebody
in charge of that plan who had the clout to make it happen, somebody
who wouldn't be ignored and wouldn't pass the buck. There's only one
person on our campus that can't pass the buck. That's me.
- So I appointed myself Chief
Diversity Office in 1998. And I made it clear to everyone on campus
that I was determined to increase the ethnic diversity of our student
population, our faculty and our staff.
- At the same time that I
enlisted campus leaders in this effort, I spent a lot of time off the
campus approaching civic leaders, business leaders, private donors and
especially K-14 educators for help.
- As I've said from the beginning,
I cannot do this by myself. I need help to make UCSD stronger by bringing
the breadth that is California to UCSD.
- God created bright people
of every background. We have to find them, and we have to prepare them.
- Student diversity at UCSD
is critical to the success of our campus. It is also critical to the
success of all of Southern California, especially San Diego and Imperial
Counties.
- We need to keep every one
of our talented students in this area so they can be our next leaders.
We cannot afford a brain drain to other parts of the country. Our region
needs a gifted, diverse workforce, especially in the complicated time
that these young people are facing since last September.
- Since we launched this diversity
plan in 1998, UCSD has, with some risk - I've almost lost my neck a
few times - has emerged as a state leader in new and innovative outreach
programs.
- We were the first University
of California campus to offer admission UC-eligible students in the
top 4 percent in every high school in San Diego and Imperial Counties.
The rest of the UC system has followed us since then.
- We launched the groundbreaking
UniversityLink program, which just this morning added its 10th pipeline
here in Imperial County. The rest of the UC system has copied this program.
Some might disagree with that, but it's the truth.
- Our Early Academic Outreach
Program has been phenomenally successful. Our Admissions and Relations
With Schools Office maintains close ties with high schools and community
colleges.
- And we have something that
I'm personally particularly proud of, which is a campus charter school,
the Preuss School, that is preparing young students from low-income
families and underperforming schools to be first-generation college
students and, hopefully, graduates.
- When we started these initiatives,
we encountered a lot of skepticism. I remember standing up in front
of lots of skeptics who said, "This isn't going to work. K-14 educational
reform is not a University of California issue. You're supposed to do
frontier research to make the world a better place."
- That last sentence gave
us the key. My answer was simple: K-14 educational reform is an appropriate
focus of frontier research.
- If UCSD can create and apply
new knowledge in neuroscience and bioengineering and theatre & dance,
if we can create new knowledge in the traditional things that we're
good at, surely we can come up with new ideas and new ways for educating
the best and brightest students in our community.
- I'm a research scientist;
I'm a physicist, which means I like to do experiments, and I like to
accumulate data.
- Our K-14 research initiatives
have been experimental. I haven't told you about the ones that didn't
work. For the ones that are working, we have data on them now. And the
data are pretty exciting.
- Our transfer numbers are
way up; the numbers of transfer students from community colleges is
up almost 50 percent in the past few years.
- And those transfer students
are performing as well as those who came in through the freshman path.
By the time they graduate, their GPAs are indistinguishable. You can't
tell whether they were transfer students or students who came as freshmen.
- Our charter school kids
are competing on a par with kids from the best schools in San Diego.
Their ninth-grade entrance exam scores are comparable with those of
Torrey Pines and La Jolla High. These kids are from
- And students in low-performing
schools where we focus our outreach efforts are taking AP courses more
than ever and SAT tests in greater numbers than they ever did before.
So it's working. And the numbers are beginning to show it as we look
at our admissions. We're building the breadth that we want to build
with no compromise in intelligence.
- So now let me give you my
personal hat.
- I'm a first-generation college
graduate. I grew up in a place called London, Ontario, Canada. It's
cold there - colder than it is here, I can tell you that.
- I wasn't a particularly
good student. I spent a lot of time playing sports and socializing,
walking the streets, doing what a lot of kids wind up doing. I wanted
to be a professional hockey player. I had a contract with the Toronto
Maple Leafs. And I was on that track.
- But again and again, I was
hammered by teachers and by my mother - not by my father, he wanted
me to be a professional hockey player - to go to college. When I was
that age, I believed that I could do anything I wanted, I just had to
work at it. I'm not sure that our young people have that same belief
today.
- When I finally convinced
myself to go to college, I knew I was going to succeed in college. It
required a lot of sacrifice. It required financial sacrifice from my
parents, who were great parents. And I worked part-time, actually, almost
as much time as I spent in the classroom.
- But that education was an
amazing ticket to enormous options. I believe there are many young people
in Imperial County who need to hear that message, and their families
need to hear that message.
- You can help us get that
message out. It is only through strong partnerships with you and the
educators in Imperial County that we can deliver that message and persuade
young people from your community to come to UC San Diego. If they come
to UC San Diego, there is a better chance that they will stay in this
community and give back what the community has given to them.
- Let me conclude by thanking
you for your cooperation, your advice, and your support.
- I'm going to have to leave
in a few minutes because I'm scheduled to go over and make a recruiting
trip to Brawley High School.
- I don't want to leave Imperial
County without making this message absolutely clear: UCSD is a public
research university, and it is your public research university. It's
yours in the sense that all of UC is yours, but we're your nearest neighbor.
- If you can help us persuade
as many youngsters to aim as high as they can and come to UCSD, you've
helped us, and you've helped yourself. There's no telling how high some
of your sons and daughters can fly if we help them.
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