SDFA President Ivan Evans has written the following letter to President Yudof with specific suggestions on improving community involvement in the selection of UCSD’s next Chancellor.  As of November 2nd, the UC Office of the President has provided no response.

19 October 2011 

Dear President Yudof:

Re: Selection of UCSD’s Next Chancellor

In keeping with the Regents’ policy on the appointment of chancellors, you recently announced the appointment of a 17-member search advisory committee to assist you in identifying the eighth Chancellor of UC San Diego. The San Diego Faculty Association (SDFA) is mindful that the search process will take place in a time of financial turbulence and severe budgetary reductions. In this unsettling context, many challenges that lie ahead are likely to place a premium on sound relations and effective communication between the faculty and administration.

Against this background, the SDFA urges you to augment the search process to ensure that more members of the UCSD community are able to participate in the selection of the new Chancellor. Broadening the search process would draw from and strengthen the deeply engrained spirit and practice of joint government between faculty and administrators that prevails at UCSD and across the UC system.

With the goal of enhancing the search process in accordance with the UC tradition of joint governance, the SDFA respectfully requests that candidates on the short list should be invited to draw up and circulate to the UCSD community a “vision statement” that spells out their goals for the university. Furthermore, the 2-3 candidates who make it to your final list should be invited to UCSD to meet with faculty, staff and students to discuss salient campus issues in an open and unscripted public forum.

The SDFA strongly believes that these measures would validate the UC’s proud tradition of joint governance and greatly strengthen the selection of our next Chancellor. We hope that you share these views and are therefore willing to implement the recommendations above.

On behalf of the Board of the SDFA,

Ivan Evans

President, SDFA

Professor of Sociology

UCSD