Ask for a five-year academic plan based on 500 new and replacement faculty positions and what do you get? A faculty that is gunning its engines, ready to take off when the light turns green. By June 15, deans will have submitted to Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey action plans integrated from more than 100 departments and programs. The plans aim at developing and strengthening the individual programs while integrating 10 cross-disciplinary initiatives into the very fabric of the campus. The campus is expecting to fuel this change through an estimated 500 faculty positions, the majority coming from retirements, that are expected become available over the next six to eight years. The strategic brainstorms heading in Grey's direction result from departmental and college debates and disciplinary introspection. Faculty members and their deans have been scoping the national disciplinary scenes for emerging research trends. From those intellectual forays and assessments of existing faculty strengths, departments are looking for opportunities to hire faculty members who will help create, in the words of Leo Chalupa, chair of neurobiology, physiology and biology, "clusters and bridges." "Clusters refer to areas where we already have significant strengths that make us notable. We need somebody to fit in without duplication who can leverage a limited number of appointments to lift us to the next level," Chalupa says. "Bridges will help the campuswide initiatives it's an additional faculty member that fits our needs and can relate to the new initiatives by working with other departments." The big challenge was to be realistic when planning for new faculty positions, Chalupa says. "Basically there are things you'd like to do and things you might be able to do, but you need to look at the initiatives and at what's happening across the Davis campus to decide what can be done most effectively to achieve excellence," he says. Campus deans say the process has been just as exhilarating for them as for the faculty. "What's exciting about this moment is that we have been targeted for tremendous growth. We can do something bold and new. Not all UC or even non-UC campuses are looking at this kind of growth," says Joann Cannon, dean of humanities, arts and cultural studies. She reports seeing the planning exercise work to the campus's favor this year as her departments recruited new members. "The opportunity for growth has been a selling point as these recruits see themselves participating in that building process. We're competing with schools not looking at the same type of growth." And, yet, deans have had to balance new programs with existing needs as well as prepare for the accompanying challenges that more campus faculty will bring. Deans say they are concerned about raising their faculty's expectations beyond what is attainable in a five-year period. On a more concrete basis, they worry also about where all of these new faculty members will be housed. "The issue that comes up again and again in all of our plans is space," says Mark McNamee, dean of the Division of Biological Sciences. "The problem is there is a lag time between turnover of faculty with retirements and when our new faculty arrives." In response, his division has formed a space committee to look at how to best use the existing space and how to get new space. Balancing existing needs with new ideas Guiding the process has been a big part of the deans' job. At the beginning of the planning period, "many faculty members were left with the unfortunate impression that the initiatives would eat up all of the new faculty positions," says Steve Sheffrin, dean of social sciences. He has had to assure his departments that the important areas left vacant by retirements -- areas that may have little to do with the cross-campus initiatives or building new programs -- will be covered. "We have to make sure we're giving students the appropriate attention from faculty members and graduate students. If the demand is there for courses, we have obligations to serve the students," Sheffrin says. Another dean who is predicting a heavy teaching load from the projected 3,000-student increase is Peter Rock of the Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Since Davis draws the largest share of science and engineering majors -- about 70 percent -- of the UC campuses, Rock is expecting a significant impact on the math and physical sciences from the future biological science and engineering majors, not to mention those majors in his own division. "It's nice to be needed," he says. While the planning process was focused on how to strategically use the projected 500 faculty positions available through growth and turnover, sometimes other opportunities have emerged in the process, says Barbara Schneeman, dean of the College of Agricul-tural and Environmental Sciences. New facilities and partnerships needed, also "In some areas of the campus there are other types of investments that are necessary to achieve excellence in our programs, such as in facilities, how we are organized or in partnerships that should be developed, such as with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forestry Service," she says. The process for each college, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Division of Biological Sciences has been as different as the disciplines within them. For some, this year's academic planning exercise induced heated discussions until a consensus was hammered out, such as happened in anthropology, according to the chair of anthropology, Bob Bettinger. This is a discipline in which the subdisciplines have been not just drifting, but tearing apart, due to changes in the sciences, the social sciences and, equally important, changes in the subject matter -- humans, who have become increasingly integrated into a global, capitalistic culture. "Before the academic plan, we were operating under an existing structure that was becoming increasingly inappropriate for graduate education," Bettinger says. "We had to rethink what anthropology is all about because we are still operating with the contradictions." But the airing of these deeply held convictions created a catharsis for its faculty, Bettinger said. Rather than split apart, as the anthropology faculty at Stanford University did, the Davis group decided the discipline needs both its social scientists and its scientists, operating in two wings. For other departmental faculties, the process was easier. The mathematics faculty, for instance, sat down and looked at the forecasted student growth and the accompanying teaching-load increases to forecast how many positions it would need just to stay even with its current faculty-to-student ratio, says chair Motohico Mulase. The faculty then looked at its own expertise and decided it could continue to strengthen five existing areas but wanted to add a new subdiscipline in discrete mathematics. "Our department is small in comparison to those at other UC campuses," Mulase says. "We can turn this smallness into a positive thing. By carefully planning our hires, we can be a top department because we have the room to hire where other math departments don't. Everybody saw the future opportunities." A balancing act In the College of Engineering, the process of planning was one of balancing teaching needs with research opportunities, says Ian Kennedy, associate dean for academic personnel and planning. "The job of the departments was to identify those research areas that are most valuable to the college and the campus," Kennedy says. "The job of the college is to evaluate those and have some priorities. We've had to rely on the departments to make good judgments because they are closer to the action." The School of Veterinary Medicine took a very organized approach to the planning, according to Dean Bennie Osburn. It started with a daylong retreat last fall attended by 120 faculty and senior management staff members. "We brought in individuals from the outside to tell us where they saw the practice of veterinary medicine going and the opportunities for the profession," Osburn says. A series of committees -- composed of college faculty and outside veterinary practitioners, state government officials and agricultural producers -- then set out to look at the future of animal health, environmental health and human health. From that, four initiatives were created in genetics/genomics, environmental health, food safety/public health and animals in society that the departments refined into their overall academic plans. "Initially it was hard to think about where the faculty should be directing its efforts, but I was pleased with the way the group came up with ideas and directions," Osburn says. The college most prepared to plan Of all of the planning units, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences may have been the most prepared to launch into the academic planning process. That's because the college worked last academic year on restructuring. The college had already held townhall meetings and retreats, created a Web site for communicating planning ideas, and revved up its faculty and staff to think about future planning, says Dean Schneeman. The same committee chaired by Jim MacDonald that structured the reorganization plan was ready to segue into academic planning. "We were well-positioned to move forward," Schneeman says. The result has been a plan that uses core competencies in each academic program as the basis for collegewide themes and areas of opportunity for growth and development. It's been an illuminating and cohesive experience for the faculty, say those involved in the planning process. "People are remarkably oriented to the general idea that we are special," Chalupa says about his own neurobiology, physiology and behavior faculty -- but he could be speaking for a number of units. "We want to be better than we are -- world-class status is what we want. It won't happen in five years, but we're going to take a giant step in those next five years."