School Chief Has Harsh Words for UC System

Before the University of California builds any new campuses, it should improve undergraduate education and become more “cost effective” on existing campuses, state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said Thursday.

In a surprising and wide-ranging attack, Honig said in an interview that UC undergraduates are short-changed, that faculty members do not teach enough and that some of their research is of questionable value.

He also said the university “is not responsible to anyone” and the UC Board of Regents, of which Honig is an ex-officio member, ignores all these problems.

“I’d like to see a cost accounting of the university,” the schools chief said. “I’d like to know if the state is really getting its money’s worth.”

Charges Discounted

UC President David P. Gardner and other top statewide university officials were not available for comment. However, administrators at UC Berkeley and UCLA countered with charges that Honig is poorly informed and has not kept up with educational improvements on those two campuses and in the UC system generally.

“Bill (Honig) does not have the details; he’s not aware of what the university is doing,” said Andrea L. Rich, vice chancellor for academic administration at UCLA. “It’s easy to paint a big public research university with the broad brush of ‘we don’t care about undergraduates’ but it’s simply not so.”

Honig tied his criticisms closely to UC’s plans to build as many as three new campuses to accommodate a projected enrollment increase of 63,000 students by the year 2005. Each campus will cost about $300 million, for a total estimated initial outlay of roughly $1 billion.

“That’s a big public investment,” he said. Before making it, “we ought to decide if we want three more campuses run the same way, or are there better ways to educate undergraduates? Is there a way to make UC more efficient?”

Honig zeroed in on UC Berkeley and UCLA for not providing undergraduate courses that provide students with “knowledge of the basic ideals of Western democracy.”

“The Chinese students in Tien An Men Square had more knowledge about democracy than most of our students,” he said. “They were quoting Locke. Many of our students probably don’t know who Locke is.”

(Western democratic ideals are considered to have been based in part on the writings of 17th-Century British political philosopher John Locke.)

Academic departments are run by “congeries of individual entrepreneurs” who pursue their individual specialties, Honig asserted, “but where does the part of the university that expresses a common purpose come from? Who is doing that?”

There should be programs or “groups of courses” that examine such “basic questions as democratic ideals or moral philosophy but they don’t exist,” he added. “The deal that’s been cut is the faculty member says, ‘I’ll do my research and you leave me alone.’ That’s not good enough. The people of the state are paying the bill for a lot of this and they deserve a better accounting.”

Roderic B. Park, vice chancellor at UC Berkeley, said Honig “does have a grain of a real criticism here” but he said a “core curriculum” or “general education program,” is “almost impossible in a large place like Berkeley that values creativity on the part of its faculty. You just can’t get the faculty to agree on what ought to be taught.”

Rich of UCLA said Honig’s criticisms might have been accurate 10 years ago, but “we have innovations all over the place” now.

She mentioned new undergraduate survey courses that link one academic discipline to another, better training for the graduate student teaching assistants, who handle much of the instructional load for freshmen and sophomores, and the greater availability of small courses for first- and second-year undergraduates.

“We are not Hampshire College (a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts) and we can’t pretend to be,” she added, “but we can offer certain select programs for students who want them--and many, by the way, do not.”

Honig also criticized light teaching loads at UC--usually two courses per academic quarter, or six classroom contact hours per week--which often are defended as necessary in order to give professors enough time to do research.

“Obviously, there is a necessity for the research function of the university,” he said, “but does everybody have to do research? Couldn’t some faculty concentrate on teaching instead?

“You look at the published stuff some of these guys do and you wonder if it’s all that valuable.”

Professors’ Work

Park replied that the typical Berkeley professor works 50 hours or more a week doing research, supervising graduate students and preparing courses for both graduate and undergraduate students.

He said the teaching load “is more demanding than in the Ivy League and those are the people, after all, we’re competing with.”

Park noted that a “two-class faculty”--some who concentrate on graduate training and research, others who teach undergraduates--had been tried without much success at the University of Chicago 40 years ago.

Honig suggested that UC might become “more cost efficient” by leaving the first two years of undergraduate instruction to the community colleges and the California State University System, concentrating its energies instead on upper division students (juniors and seniors) and graduate and professional students.

The superintendent conceded that the questions he is raising are not new, that they go back at least to the student protest movement of the mid-1960s. But he said that this is a good time to raise them again because of UC’s ambitious plans for new campuses.

“The new governor has some tough choices,” he said, referring to whoever succeeds George Deukmejian in 1991. “What does the state invest in? Do we build new UC campuses, for relatively few people, or do we provide better opportunities for a larger number of students?

“I don’t know the answers, but one thing I do know--before taxpayers invest billions in these new campuses, some of these questions ought to be asked.”

Honig said he has tried to get the Board of Regents to discuss these issues but the Regents “have drawn a citadel around the university and any question is seen as an attack on the university. . . . That’s an unfortunate point of view because they have a lot of work to do.”

He said he will try to raise the issues again at a Regents’ meeting in the near future.