In this year's budget, the state reduced to 2% what was to have been under the Partnership Agreement a 4% increase -- or $120 million -- in the UC's base budget, affecting, among other things, range and merit increases for staff and faculty, as well as the increased cost of health benefits.

UC President Richard Atkinson has asked that UC campuses comply with the directive.

As a result, on Nov. 1 Chancellor Albert Carnesale implemented a partial hiring freeze across the campus for non-academic personnel and strongly advised all supervisors and managers to exercise caution in spending.

Donna Vredevoe, an immunologist, former chair of the Academic Senate and acting dean of nursing who became vice chancellor of academic personnel in July, has the critical responsibility of recruiting top-notch faculty during this time of economic uncertainty. She talked with UCLA Today Senior Writer Marina Dundjerski about the effect of the cuts on faculty, as well as her goals and the challenges of maintaining academic excellence.

Q: How does the state's budget crisis affect UCLA faculty?

A: Currently, the merit increases for faculty are being paid. But the faculty will have a very small cost of living raise, .5%. It may place us behind the comparison-eight institutions.

I don't deal directly with budget matters, such as the allocation of FTE, but I do deal with appointment and promotion of faculty, and I work with searches.

While the hiring freeze is not supposed to directly affect academic personnel, there will be an indirect effect.

We'll continue with faculty hires, but if staff are cut back, the support services for teaching will not be as strong. And that is going to create problems long-term. The staff have an enormous role in the teaching enterprise. Anything that affects them will affect teaching.

Is UCLA still pursuing hiring more faculty for the projected growth in student enrollment?

A: At this time, we must proceed on the assumption that the numbers of students and faculty are going to grow as the needs and the population of California grow.

It may be that that won't happen as time goes on, depending on how severe the budget cut is going to be, how long the downturn lasts and whether or not we can come up with alternative strategies. But we are going to proceed with the plans we have in place for faculty hiring.

So the searches are going forth now. We'll need an estimated 214 additional faculty to teach a projected increase of 4,000 students over a 10-year period. When you include retirements, we will have to appoint even more faculty.

We are going to have to be very competitive. If the other UC campuses also face rising student enrollment, then they will be competing for faculty as well.

Q: In the past, the faculty were offered a Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program. Is there discussion about offering it again?

A: Some faculty assume there could be another VERIP because it seems like a logical thing at a time of budget reduction. But there's no discussion about it at this time.

We lost a lot of very good faculty with previous VERIPs, so I think UC is going to think long and hard before it does that again.

Q: Are you concerned that some of our best and brightest faculty may be lured away by some universities unhampered by budget cuts?

A: Yes. And so we must make UCLA an attractive place for faculty, and we try to do that with a variety of things. Salaries aren't the only incentive.

We have a strong academic environment here. We have excellent students. We have diversity in our faculty and in our student body in particular. Los Angeles is a very stimulating community. There are some things we can offer faculty, such as assistance with housing loans. In a few cases, we can offer some slots for child care.

Q: What is your commitment to faculty diversity?

A: We are working very hard to diversify the faculty in terms of gender and ethnicity with all kinds of new strategies. What we're trying to do is capture some of the young scholars in the postdoctoral programs, get them interested in UCLA and recruit them.

We are trying to be creative in the way we describe searches, for example, by not defining them so narrowly that only a very small pool of applicants might qualify. Let's say there's a faculty position being vacated in immunochemistry. In the past, they've hired an immunochemist. Now, rather than defining it that way, they might broaden it to a wider span of immunology so you would have more candidates available for the position.

Q: Where do you see UCLA faculty over the next decade?

A: Clearly, we're going to have a more diverse faculty; we're driving very hard for that. And we're going to try to develop areas of strength throughout the university. The chancellor is definitely moving in that direction, asking all the units to report in which areas they do the best and which areas are most pertinent to the future. So we will see faculty in those areas of strength.

We may see faculty teaching in different ways. Right now, there's a lot of classroom teaching. But the Internet and advanced technology systems will enable the faculty to teach to and from remote locations. We will see new venues for learning.

Q: What other challenges or goals do you have?

A: One of my great challenges is to make the academic personnel system more understandable so that faculty know what it takes to progress through the ranks, what the requirements and expectations are.

Another is to try to strengthen some of the mentoring systems we have within the departments and improve the academic personnel review process so that it is as state-of-the-art as possible. We still do some of our work with paper folders and carry file boxes around. We definitely need to go online with a lot of information. I'm going to make a hard push in that direction. Finally, I want to do everything possible to make the system as fair to faculty as possible. I want to work closely with the Council of Academic Personnel. We have a very good system of shared governance in faculty review. But I want to enhance that shared governance in academic personnel. I want faculty to feel confident that their opinions count very strongly and that decisions are being made by peers who are qualified to evaluate them.

Q: Do you plan to continue teaching or conducting research?

A: I still work with some doctoral students in the School of Nursing. I'm the chair for one doctoral committee, and I'm on three other doctoral committees.

I am also maintaining a research program, and that is a challenge. I am analyzing immune dysfunction in cardiovascular patients.

The chancellor has a very good perspective on this -- he would like to have academic administrators continue their research programs.

It gives me a good sense of what faculty are going through as I evaluate their dossiers and as they do self-evaluations and talk about problems of extramural funding and laboratory work -- I've lived through that. And I'm still living through it.

So I think I have good empathy.