By Owen Thomas | Examiner columnist
July 30, 2023 (SFExaminer.com)
It’s a historical oddity: Of the University of California’s 10 campuses, San Francisco is the only one that doesn’t offer undergraduate degrees.
Mayor London Breed has a bold proposal to change that by inviting the state university system to build a new campus downtown, where there’s, unfortunately, plenty of space. She and City Attorney David Chiu unveiled the plan this month, announcing they’d sent a letter to UC officials to kick off discussions.
The timing seems fitting because it happens that the University of California is in the process of planning for a new campus. Sort of.
Under pressure to expand its degree-granting, UC has come up with a 2030 Capacity Plan that would add as many as 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students to the system by spreading them around existing schools rather than building a new one.
San Francisco is not getting much of that growth: another 129 graduate students, a rounding error in the overall scheme. The Berkeley, San Diego and Merced campuses would account for more than half of the increase in enrollment.
That concentration of growth seems unwise. A UC report acknowledged that Berkeley and other campuses have experienced “neighborhood opposition” to development plans. UCSD is already behind on building needed student housing.
UCSF has had its own challenges to expansion: Neighbors tried to halt a $4.3 billion expansion approved by the UC Board of Regents last year, though it’s moving forward now. But Breed and Chiu’s letter suggested downtown as a site for growth rather than UCSF’s tight quarters in Parnassus Heights.
“There are a number of properties that would uniquely be able to house a mixed-use UC campus, complete with student housing, classrooms, lab space, and student services,” Breed and Chiu wrote in their letter.
One such site might be the struggling Westfield Mall. It seems like a natural site for classrooms already, with its curving escalators poised to whisk students rather than shoppers. The now-closed Century cinema could turn its theaters into lecture halls. And one might picture a library’s reading room under the building’s historic dome. SFUSD owns the land underneath the mall, which might smooth the way for a transfer to UC.
From there, one stop down the Central Subway lies Central SoMa, a logical locus for development, with new office buildings opening up and few takers for leases. A recent Cushman & Wakefield study found that the downtown vacancy problem was concentrated there. UCSF’s existing Mission Bay campus is just a few stops further.
It’s easy to see a campus come together, strung along the spine of San Francisco’s newest and most painfully underused transit line. And it’s easy to envision adjunct professors from The City’s biotech, software and AI industries bolstering a downtown college’s faculty and adding to its draw: Stanford already does this quite successfully in the South Bay.
Consider, too, the venture capitalists who might lurk in coffee shops near campus, checkbooks in hand.
That’s where the San Francisco idea has an edge over UC’s existing expansion plan. Sure, UC Merced is proud of its sustainable buildings. But it’s far greener to adapt existing office space, especially if most would be taking public transit to get there. And there would be jobs waiting for new graduates: San Francisco’s unemployment rate remains historically low.
Housing is a challenge, but given the needs of students, a campus might encourage the building of accessory dwelling units, tucking in extra apartments in homes around The City rather than relying on the big dorm construction projects, which seem to be running into trouble elsewhere in UC-land.
The biggest obstacle may be lining up the various institutions involved and getting them to talk to each other. When I asked the University of California what it thought of Breed and Chiu’s letter, Ryan King, a spokesperson for UC’s Office of the President, told me it had “not yet received the letter from Mayor Breed.”
How long does it take a letter to travel from San Francisco to UC headquarters in downtown Oakland?
More than a week, apparently. Breed and Chiu said last week, in unveiling the proposal, that they had already sent the letter. But in fact, it was UCSF that offered to deliver the San Francisco officials’ letter to the UC board, according to Breed spokesperson Jeff Cretan.
UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood confirmed to the mayor’s office that he had sent it. Hawgood’s office did not respond to an inquiry about the letter’s status, and King offered no explanation in response to a follow-up question.
You’d expect a little more alacrity for a university system that hopes to be educating 33,000 additional students by the end of the decade. But this might explain why so many things seem to move slowly in California’s academic sector. San Francisco, for a change, seems to be in a hurry to solve problems.
