History professor Gregg Herken mulls the question while he eats lunch at a small diner.

What do he and other University of California at Merced faculty do all day, with no campus and no students?

Herken is eating with Luke Clossey, who interviewed that morning for a faculty position. Clossey, 28, hopes to teach world history.

"It's a mystery to me, too," Clossey said, adding that he fields similar questions from colleagues at UC Berkeley, where he is scheduled to finish his dissertation this month.

"I imagine they imagine us sitting in our office and looking out our window, checking our watches to see if it's 2005," Herken said.

Since joining the faculty in September, Herken, who most recently was senior historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, said he has done anything but stare at his watch.

Creating a new University of California campus requires setting up cutting-edge curriculum and developing policies addressing everything from smoking to plagiarism.

Each university's curriculum is unique, and UC Merced founders hope theirs will be relevant to people who live and work in the Central Valley.

There is talk, for example, of developing an advanced degree in security studies, in conjunction with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Herken said.

Founding faculty also are busy recruiting and interviewing dozens of applicants. For each person hired, three or four more are interviewed, the founding faculty members say.

Candidates carefully screened

The faculty also review up to eight letters from each candidate -- four from people closely associated with each candidate's work and four from people whom the university selects in each candidate's field to explain why the person's work is important.

At the diner, Herken was a bit bleary-eyed behind his round tortoise-shell glasses. He started his workday at 7:30 a.m., writing a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books.

In the letter, Herken defended his book, "Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppen- heimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller" -- the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction.

In the book, Herken concludes that while Oppenheimer belonged to the American Communist Party in the late 1930s and early '40s, there was doubt about whether he spied for the Soviet Union.

Herken said he looked at all 10,000 pages the FBI has on Oppenheimer in researching the book.

"It's a labor of love," he said. "It's a spy story. It's a case of following a thread that leads you to another thread."

Coincidentally, in moving into UC Merced's temporary quarters at the former Castle Air Force Base, this Cold War scholar is working at what used to be a Strategic Air Command base, where B-52 crews learned how to drop bombs.

Personal projects also await

When he is not working on his books, Herken gives talks, such as one recently to prospective teachers on how to use information from an eyewitness to an event. He also recently testified to the National Academy of Sciences.

When the first students arrive at UC Merced, Herken will know something of what it is like for them. In 1969, he was among the first to graduate from UC Santa Cruz.

He said he remembers the enthusiasm there.

"They read assigned coursework and asked for additional readings," he said. "I was impressed with the pioneer spirit of my peers."

He said he sees similarities at UC Merced. "That same desire to be a part of something new, something big, is what motivates me and other faculty at the campus," he said.

For now, his least favorite part of the job are the many committee meetings that he must attend. "There's even a committee on committees," he said.

But there is plenty to keep his interest, including his own work. Later, on the day he interviewed Clossey, he got a call from a co-author on his next book about a passenger aircraft that disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Wreckage was found, but the cause of the crash was never determined.

Said Herken, "I can safely say there's not much time spent looking out the window."