College Haven for Eccentric, Bright Periled

In the late 1960s, the University of California, Santa Barbara, established a separate college for what one admirer described as “bright but eccentric kids”--students who did not necessarily do well in the traditional educational system yet displayed extraordinary promise in one or more areas of the arts or sciences.

For more than a decade and a half, the College of Creative Studies has survived as an unusual haven for unusual students. There have been no lecture classes, no grades and no requirements in the traditional sense. Students have been given the freedom to pursue their own interests at their own pace.

Those who have gone through the college, for the most part, have done exceptionally well. Of the total 490 graduates, an extraordinary number are practicing artists and scientists. At least 14 have become MDs, 33 have received Ph.Ds and 57 have earned master’s degrees. Many have been awarded the most prestigious awards and prizes in their chosen fields.

Yet today, the College of Creative Studies is under siege and in danger of being subsumed into another program or shut down altogether.

The case, many faculty members say, is a clear sign that the era of experimentation in undergraduate education is at an end.

During the last year the 17-year-old college, surely one of the most successful of many attempts within the UC system to provide alternatives to the traditional undergraduate program, has begun to face hard times, with shrinking budgets and declining enrollments. It has already undergone an extensive evaluation and is now the subject of a major review by faculty and administrators to determine whether it should become part of a proposed new honors program.

Last April, top administrators on campus fired the first provost, Marvin Mudrick, a renowned literary scholar who is widely regarded as the mastermind behind the college. The grounds for his dismissal were that the college’s academic standards had begun to deteriorate and that the provost was guilty of insubordination for failing to carry out explicit directions in operating the facility--charges that Mudrick firmly denies.

Mudrick, who has studied and taught in the UC system for nearly 35 years, has been allowed to retain his position as a tenured professor in UC Santa Barbara’s English department. But he has appealed his dismissal as provost of the college to the Academic Senate, the university’s faculty governing body, and to David P. Gardner, the president of the nine-campus UC system.

100 Students Enrolled

Despite the controversy, the college has continued to operate with about 100 students who are selected by faculty members to study in one of seven fields: art (painting and sculpture), biology, chemistry, literature, mathematics, music (theory and composition) and physics.

Unlike most undergraduates who must endure large lecture classes while getting little, if any, direct exposure to the heart of their chosen disciplines, Creative Studies students are immediately immersed in intense creative or academic projects for as long as they and their professors, who essentially serve as tutors, deem appropriate. Many students work on a single project for their entire academic careers, operating in the studio or laboratory in much the same way as do their professors. Some undergraduates even teach their own classes.

“It is the kind of program that, if one is a real formalist, is likely to appear questionable,” said Keir A. E. Nash, political science professor and vice chairman of the Academic Senate.

“But, if one believes there ought to be an odd place for interesting minds, it is a pretty good program.”

The university administration, however, seems to believe quite differently.

On the record, the administration’s official explanation for the decision to re-evaluate the college and to dismiss the provost is that the college has become, in the words of Chancellor Robert A. Huttenback, “terribly stodgy” after years of successful experimentation.

Those involved in the case--both those who oppose the college and those who defend it--have been reluctant to discuss details publicly, arguing that disclosure of all the facts would only reflect poorly on the university, which is striving for national standing as a major research center, and on the college itself, struggling for its very survival.

Even Mudrick, a popular teacher who has a reputation as an outspoken critic, has been unusually reticent to discuss the case publicly.

“They’ve killed me off. Now they’re going to kill off the college,” he said. “But I don’t want to talk about it because it will appear that I’m trying to drag the college through the mud, which is precisely what I do not want to do.”

In confidential interviews and in documents obtained by The Times, however, the comments of those associated with the case have been less restrained.

Administration Criticized

In recent telephone interviews, for example, several of Mudrick’s defenders argued that the administration had behaved “shabbily” and “recklessly” in handling his dismissal.

Mudrick’s detractors, however, paint a different picture.

The college, one critic said, had become a “kooky place for undisciplined kids and unqualified teachers.”

Specifically, the documents show, Mudrick was charged by Vice Chancellor Raymond L. Sawyer with failure to follow appropriate guidelines in hiring instructors. In at least one department of the College of Creative Studies, individuals who had been rejected as graduate students at the university were hired as instructors.

The administration also criticized the provost for allowing students to teach their own courses without supervision--in direct violation of university regulations. Finally, the administration charged, the college has begun to attract only “low-quality” students from other divisions of the university.

University Challenged

While admitting that some students had taught courses without adequate supervision, Mudrick and the executive committee of the college contend that the problem has been cleared up. Moreover, they deny that the college has failed to follow required hiring policies and challenged the university to produce evidence that students enrolled in Creative Studies courses are in any way less qualified than other students on campus. Indeed, they argue, there is ample evidence that the typical Creative Studies student has far more potential than the ordinary undergraduate.

At Mudrick’s request, the case has been sent to the Academic Senate’s Committee on Privilege and Tenure for review. Although the committee has refused to evaluate the reasons for the firing itself, it did find in February that the procedure by which Mudrick was dismissed was improper and was in fact in violation of a UC Board of Regents’ standing order. That order requires that any UC chancellor consult with an appropriate committee of the faculty on the campus before dismissing a provost.

In handing down its opinion on the case, the committee noted that Huttenback may have “behaved in good faith” that he could terminate a provost “at will and at any time with or without cause.” But, in fact, he could not, the committee said.

Panel Studying Case

The committee stopped short of demanding that Mudrick be reinstated or paid back wages but it did tell the chancellor that an advisory panel should be established immediately to “consult with you on the rationale for Marvin Mudrick’s dismissal and on whether it is appropriate for you to consider his reinstatement.”

That panel has been set up and is now studying the case.

In the meantime, some professors on campus have expressed concern that, without Mudrick’s forceful personality and unusual ideas, the College of Creative Studies cannot survive.

Even the administration’s plan that the college become a part of a general honors program undermines the very nature of the College for Creative Studies, the college’s supporters said.

As Mudrick himself put it: “An honors program is exactly what it isn’t. . . . It isn’t a place for students who collect high . . . (grade point averages). It is a place for extraordinary students who do not do well with the . . . regulation and regimentation of traditional education.”