Vanderhoef was hoping to head off funding trouble for the campus's proposed contained research facility and to prevent further cuts in the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The $35 million pest control quarantine and containment facilities project would fund construction of two facilities--one at UC Riverside and one at UC Davis--to develop new means to control crop pests. Funded jointly by the federal and state government, the project has received $7 million so far from Washington--just enough for the Riverside facility and for initial planning for Davis. Another $10.5 million in federal funds is needed to complete the project.
"We had heard that the Davis containment facility was going to get bounced from the budget as a result of the relentless search for dollars to balance the federal budget," Vanderhoef said this week.
So both Vanderhoef and UC Riverside Chancellor Ray Orbach flew to D.C. to testify before the appropriations subcommittee about the project's value and urgency and its having passed muster with a panel of scientists from across the country.
Introduced by Rep. Vic Fazio, D-West Sacramento, Vanderhoef told the subcommittee that the two facilities are "a single program with the single goal of solving the urgent demand for strengthened pest exclusion, early detection, and alternative strategies for managing pest and disease problems." The centers would involve researchers from throughout UC and from other universities, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"I'm especially hopeful because, in follow-up discussion, the body language and the questions from subcommittee members were all the right ones," Vanderhoef said. "And subcommittee chair Skeen [Joe Skeen, R-New Mexico] seemed to have good feelings from his visit."
Vanderhoef hosted Skeen and fellow subcommittee member Frank Riggs, R-Napa, last month for a tour of the campus's National Grape Importation and Clean Stock Facility and of the UC Davis Oakville grape and wine research laboratory. The visit also better acquainted the two with UC Davis research capabilities.
While on Capitol Hill, Vanderhoef also testified on behalf of UC for continued funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"The mission of the endowment actually mirrors many of our goals as California's public university," he told the House Subcommittee on the Interior. "The challenge we face in California, with our highly multicultural population, is to find and celebrate those things that bind us together as Californians and as Americans. The national endowments help thousands of California's students, faculty and citizens explore, renew and expand our cultural and artistic heritage by allowing Californians of all income levels and all areas of the state no matter how remote, access to information on our common cultural heritage."
Vanderhoef said he was "a little more skeptical" about this committee's response to his testimony, though the "chair does seem intent to keep a budget" for the endowment rather than cut it entirely. Criticism of controversial art tends to spill over from the National Endowment for the Arts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vanderhoef noted, making it all the more difficult to win adequate support for the humanities.
In the past five years, UC has received $28 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants, plus $2 million in fellowship stipends and travel awards. The grants support preservation of endangered books, documents, newspapers and artifacts; cataloging and editing of collections of manuscripts, documents and papers by important historical and cultural figures; curriculum innovation; and outreach programs such as summer seminars for high school and college teachers.
"The total sums sought and granted for humanities scholarship are smaller by orders of magnitude than those in many science disciplines but they are no less important," Vanderhoef testified.
"The infrastructure of the humanities does not generally accrue to individual scholars and projects. It is, rather, commonly held and shared in libraries, archives and collections in which they are stored, cataloged and preserved for use by infinite sets of scholars and citizens across the generations."
While in the capital, Vanderhoef also visited with UC Davis alumnus Rep. Calvin Dooley, D-Visalia, to thank him for his support of an initiative that would provide new funding for agricultural research, and with Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Sacramento, to discuss the UC Davis Medical Center's application for additional Medicare funding.
