A Vision Of Lucre

Last week Pica attended the Chancellor’s Fall Conference, a day-and-a-half shindig where UC Davis faculty and staff discussed the just released campus strategic plan, a document entitled The UC Davis Vision. This document is filled with platitudes about how the campus will “ensure that [it] maintains and develops high-caliber courses, curricula and academic programs” and will “invest in targeted areas of established and emerging excellence and distinction.” This is the sort of document that university administrators feel the need to produce every few years, and one wishes they would merely dust off the previous edition from the archives in the basement rather than go to great effort to rewrite the thing anew.

Absent from the plan is much discussion of how the university plans to achieve this grand vision in the face of a massive budget crunch, let alone avoid the internecine fighting that accompanies such. There lies however, off in the bucolic northwest corner of Yolo County, a possible solution to the university’s woes. This valley is home to the Cache Creek casino, a fantastically successful enterprise a few years old run by and for the benefit of the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians. (In California gambling casinos are only allowed under tribal auspices.) Many Cache Creek Valley residents are not very fond of the casino for bringing lots of traffic to their formerly quiet valley, but given tribal sovereignty there is little they can do.

But here an opportunity beckons. What if the Rumsey Band were to partner with the university to move the casino to campus? All parties would benefit. The casino would be in a much more accessible location, being right off the interstate running from the Bay Area to Sacramento. Both the Rumsey Band and the university would share in the profits, and the university would be ensured of a stable and growing funding source. Cache Creek would get their quiet valley back, and there would be many new part-time jobs for the students. (Who wouldn’t rather be a croupier instead of delivering for Woodstock’s Pizza?) Indeed, whole new university programs could spring into existence—what about a hotel administration department? (Cornell has one, why not UC Davis?) And seeing as how the Mondavi Center is built on a Native American gravesite, placing the casino nearby is not that geographically inappropriate.

Looking a few miles and years down the road, there are other prime opportunities for public-private partnerships. There’s a proposal afoot to build a $250 million racetrack and entertainment complex entitled Dixon Downs, to be located about 7 miles down the highway from UCD. Think of the funding that could come the university’s way with a little bit of creative outreach! Plenty of opportunity for the veterinary school at the very least.

Serving the entertainment industry—the new function of the university in the 21st century! Sounds like it would make a good proposal for Governor Arnold.