Risk Management

Risk Management is the comprehensive approach to identifying & managing the full range of risks the University faces. Risk Management serves a critical strategic purpose for UCR. Risk Management is aligned with UCR’s strategic and operational goals specifically, to ensure productive stewardship of campus financial, real property, and human resources. Success requires the identification and management of insurable as well as uninsurable risks associated with campus activities consistent with the University’s mission of education, research and public service. Risk Management’s focus is not on simply reducing or avoiding the cost of risk, but on evaluating risks and potential hazards systematically.

All individuals must practice risk management to some extent in the course of their normal operations to broadly assess risks or threats that can have an adverse impact on the University’s ability to carry out its mission. Individuals of each business and academic unit are responsible to “own their risk” and evaluate their risk factors and risk issues with respect to their enterprise. Each individual needs to understand the five types of risks encountered in all University enterprises: strategic, financial, operation, compliance, and reputational. Each enterprise must raise the awareness of risk assessment and communicate the risks within each respective area.

Each individual is responsible for incorporating risk assessment into their decision-making processes, in such a way as to ask the question “have I thought of…?” when making decisions. Total risk avoidance and total risk transfer through insurance are rarely available options at UC. Therefore it is imperative that everyone be more strategic, imaginative, and long-term risk management solution focused when making decisions.

The strategic nature of the University’s research and academics mandates that risks be taken. All stakeholders must take ownership and champion risk control and mitigation strategies with a balanced view between the upside and downside risks – one that attempts to minimize hazards, influence and control uncertainties, create greater financial stability and protect the University’s reputation and resources from losses, both economic as well as non-economic. Valuing risk increases the University’s capacity for informed decision-making by anticipating, identifying, analyzing, financing, and mitigating potential sources of risk, both known and as yet, unrecognized.