Campus Life

Two simple words, “Leland Legacy,” captured the significance of Wednesday’s opening event for the second phase of the Merced 2020 Project, an event that doubled as a goodbye and thank you to outgoing Chancellor Dorothy Leland.

The message graced a wall of the new Sustainability Research and Engineering Building in large white block letters, a nod to Leland’s tireless effort and motivation to lead the award-winning expansion project.

The growing UC Merced campus is nearly ready to debut the second phase of the innovative Merced 2020 Project, a multiyear plan to add 1.2 million gross square feet of classroom, office, research laboratory, dining, recreation, housing and other needed facilities.

Phase two will include the Arts and Computational Sciences Building, the Sustainability Research and Engineering Building, a Research Server Container Facility, a regional loading dock, a recreation field and outdoor basketball courts, and additional residential housing.

Dr. Art Kamangar and Calvin E. Bright have been invaluable in the development of UC Merced since before the campus opened its doors. To commemorate their philanthropy and outstanding service, this week they were awarded the prestigious Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor for extraordinary accomplishment bestowed upon an individual by the university.

It started with a simple off-hand comment, one that would likely be met with a chuckle at any other institution. At UC Merced, it became a ripple that has changed the academic and social strata of an entire school.

At the northern tip of the UC Merced campus, an unremarkable aluminum gate leads into a field that extends, seemingly, into infinity. Perpendicular to the gate, the LeGrand Canal, drawn from Lake Yosemite, snakes around campus into the emerald pastures, through farm rows and almond orchards across the highway. It’s the rainy season and bulbous cumuli foreground the rippled line of the Sierra Nevada that slices across the open sky.

Wastewater methane reclamation for the City of Merced. Odor abatement in BART Plazas. Solar collection for oxygen generation on Mars. UC Merced campus drone tour. Skin test analyzer for Valley Fever patients.

This might sound like a list of cutting-edge, high-tech inventions, which they are, but they are also a sampling of the projects featured at UC Merced’s Innovate to Grow event — I2G — held earlier this month by the School of Engineering.

Clouds loomed over the Carol Tomlinson-Keasey Quad last weekend, but nothing was going to rain on the parade of the more than 1,300 Bobcats who walked the stage at UC Merced’s commencement.

It was not my intention to be your commencement speaker this morning, and you were no doubt looking forward to having California’s First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom share her wisdom with you today. I am sorry that she could not be here, but I understand and respect her decision not to attend this ceremony, as the University of California system continues important contract negotiations with one of its labor unions.

In Ms. Siebel Newsom’s stead, as your chancellor, it is my great honor to formally address the UC Merced graduating class of 2019.

The undergraduate engineering curriculum at UC Merced offers students professional experience by participating in the senior capstone project, the Innovation Design Clinic (IDC). The IDC culminates in the Innovate to Grow event on Friday, May 17, from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in an annual showcase of student talent and ingenuity, highlighting the culture of entrepreneurship in UC Merced’s School of Engineering .

It is one of the largest and, arguably, most complex social infrastructure projects in the nation. Now, every building in the award-winning Merced 2020 Project is completely topped off.

Chancellor Leland, UC Merced senior leadership and members of Webcor and Plenary — the project’s construction and development partners — signed the final beam that will be placed on the Student Wellness and Counseling Center building on Tuesday. The building is part of the third delivery phase of the project, set to open in fall 2020.