UC Mercd Magazine-Volume XVI, Issue 2

J eopardy! contestant: “I’d like to make this a true Daily Double, Mayim.” BREAKING new ground MayimBialik: “For the category ‘Key Dates in History,’ the Jeopardy! answer is, ‘The year UCMerced was founded.’”

campus lore has it that a golf ball is embedded in the head of the mace carried by the chair of the Academic Senate at Commencement and other ceremonies.) Jump ahead to fall 2006: UC Merced has been fully operational for over a year with a student body numbering about 1,300. Founding Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey has stepped down. Rod Park is acting chancellor. A botanist with a remarkable career as a teacher, researcher, viticulturalist, and academic administrator, Park’s accomplishments at UC Merced include a central role in bringing the iconic Beginnings sculpture to campus. According to legend, Park was in his office in the west wing of the Kolligian Library Building when he got a call from a general in the Army Corps of Engineers. The general informed Park there was a bit of a problem — the people who built Merced Hills Golf Course never bothered to file an environmental impact statement or get clearance to build the course. Because of this, the general said, the university would need to remove all its buildings and restore any disturbed campus lands to their natural state. As the story goes, Park engineered a compromise over martinis with the general. Is this true? I can’t say. But should you encounter a Merced old-timer complaining about the conversion of Merced Hills Golf Course into the site of the university, you can always look them in the eye and say, “Yeah, but that golf course should have never been built in the first place.” Back to 2002. As the date of the founding ceremony approached, there was still a chance UC Merced was not going to happen. Besides environmental groups suing to prevent the university from being built, civic boosters and commercial interests from other Central Valley towns and cities still harbored hopes of pulling off a last-minute miracle play that would wrest the new UC campus from Merced. Some within the ranks of the University of California itself were strongly opposed to establishing a 10th campus, and politicians fromoutside the Valley shared this sentiment. On top of all that, gaining approval from the Corps of Engineers for construction beyond the former golf course was a slow and complicated process that offered no guarantees of a successful outcome. Despite all the uncertainties, in the days leading up to the ceremony workers erected a temporary structure just off Lake Road, approximately where Scholars Lot and Bobcat Field are located today.While described at the time as a tent, the massive structure was large enough to accommodate some 1,600 attendees, among whomwere Gov. Gray Davis, assorted local dignitaries, representatives of dozens of other colleges and universities, hundreds of community supporters, and UC Merced’s full contingent of approximately 75 employees.

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Jeopardy! contestant: “What is 2005?”

MayimBialik: “Oh, I’m sorry. The correct answer is 2002.”

By Donald Barclay

Yes, Mayim is right as usual. Though the year 2005 is shown on the UC Merced seal, that is actually when the first full class of undergraduates was admitted. The “real” founding of UCMerced took place on October 25, 2002.

How do I know? I was there. I saw it all with my own eyes.

By the final week of October 2002, I had spent almost two months as an employee of a university with no faculty, no students and no campus. During that time, I had not once ventured onto what would become the site of UC Merced. All along Lake Road the campus lands were protected by tautly strung, five-strand barbed-wire fences festooned with ominous “No Trespassing” signs. I was looking forward to the founding ceremony as my opportunity to finally set foot on what would become both the first new University of California campus since 1965 and the first (and, to date, only) newU.S. research university of the 21st century. Merced was selected as the site of the 10th UC campus in large part because the lands of the Virginia Smith Trust – 7,000-plus acres –were available for the creation of both the campus and its adjoining natural reserve. Abutting the trust lands was a 110-acre divot called the Merced Hills Golf Course. In 2001, the University of California was able to purchase the golf course acreage thanks to a generous donation of $11 million from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. (Campus lore has it that the course, though popular with local golfers, was driving to bankruptcy.) The acquisition of the golf course was critical to opening on schedule. With the option of erecting its initial buildings on the golf-course site, the university was able to sidestep delays from a series of lawsuits brought by environmental groups as well as the lengthy permitting processes required before building on the more environmentally sensitive portions of the trust lands. The golf course is why UC Merced has a Little Lake – it is a former water hazard. (More

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