Department or Graduate Group: pros and cons
In the UC system, departments have a number of important assets that graduate groups do not have: (1) Departments have assigned space; groups generally do not. (2) They have an assigned number of faculty and staff slots; groups generally do not. (3) They have an assured operating budget; groups generally do not. (4) They recruit and hire their own faculty; groups do not. In other words, a department has much more control over its future research and teaching direction than does a group. The group comprises a collection of volunteer faculty members who had been recruited and hired by departments.
A group does have some assets: (1) It has sole authority on a given campus for the academic degree programs assigned to it, including authority to admit students and set requirements and exams. (2) It has an assigned number of graduate-student slots (student FTE) for its programs. (3) It has an assigned number of graduate fellowships from the campus pool. (4) It has the potential for a vastly greater multidisciplinary mix of faculty and faculty labs than that available in any single department. The flexibility of the group's faculty membership allows an outside faculty member with a new idea for research in the group's field to join it to seek graduate-student research assistance on his or her project.
Quite reasonably, the Whitaker Foundation Governing Board considered the absence of an assured operating budget for the Group and the inability of the Group to hire its own faculty to be fatal flaws. The Whitaker Board members were interested in investing in a department, not in a graduate group. A major impediment to the formation of a department of bioengineering at Berkeley was the fact that the UCB/UCSF Joint Graduate Group already had sole authority for the graduate degrees in Bioengineering.
There was, however, precedence on the Berkeley campus for a Department working hand in hand with a Graduate Group. The area was Biophysics. All members of the Biophysics Department also were members of the Graduate Group in Biophysics. Administrative costs for the Group were line items on the Department's budget. The Department provided administrative space for the Group, and worked hand-in-hand with the Group in selection and recruitment of graduate students and the setting of graduate degree requirements. The Office of the Graduate Division had augmented the Group's student (FTE) quota sufficiently to cover the needs of the Department. This was a good model for Bioengineering.