Diego authored a letter calling for UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Cruz to be closed as a way to save money. Their reasoning was that these institutions were "in substantial measure teaching institutions". In response to this UC President Mark Yudoff wrote a letter to the leaders of all ten campuses to assure them that there would be no campus closures.
In 2010, the new student housing facilities, The Summits, opened to provide two additional residential halls for incoming students. The two four-story buildings, Tenaya Hall and Cathedral Hall, are reserved primarily for incoming freshmen students. Three years later, another housing facility, Half Dome, was built next to the existing Tenaya and Cathedral Halls. Half Dome houses both freshman and continuing students.
In 2010, the United States Census Bureau made UC Merced its own separate census-designated place. The university is a census-designated place (CDP) that is uninhabited as of both the 2010 and 2020 census. In addition to lacking population …
