Cal Lutheran Discontinuing Interim Session : Colleges: The decision to kill the one-month term has met with mixed reactions from students and faculty.

Undergraduate students at California Lutheran University traditionally spend January retracing St. Paul’s footsteps in the Mediterranean, dabbling in improvisational theater, or perhaps working as interns in local schools or hospitals.

But all that’s ending at the 3,000-student campus in Thousand Oaks.

This is the last year that the private, liberal arts university is offering an interim session. The 20-year tradition is dying not only at Cal Lutheran but throughout the country.

The one-month sessions between the fall and spring semesters were required at least three of a student’s four undergraduate years. The decision to kill the interim session has met with mixed reactions from students and faculty.

Frank Ponto, a premed junior from Camarillo, said he enjoyed interim classes in personal financial management and film noir and is looking forward to taking Japanese in January.

“They were something different from the regular courses,” Ponto said. “The whole goal of interim is to do something other than your major.”

But other students and some professors questioned the scholarly value of the interim session, and many faculty members complained that they had no time to prepare adequately for their spring semester classes.

“I think interim had been abused,” said Michael Arndt, drama professor and chairman of Cal Lutheran’s faculty.

“Students found ways of getting by without doing much work, and some classes were not the same quality” as courses offered during the regular semester, he said.

The decision to eliminate the interim session stemmed from an accreditation study conducted two years ago by the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, which recommended that the university “take definite steps to reduce faculty workloads.”

“By dropping interim, we were able to meet this goal,” said Hoda Mahmoudi, associate dean for institutional planning and director of interim.

Professors currently teach nine courses a year--four each in the fall and spring semesters and one in the interim--and also are expected to do research and scholarly work.

Mahmoudi said the university surveyed the faculty members and held hearings to get student opinions. Most professors favored the elimination of interim, and student opinions varied, she said.

“Some students thought it was a wonderful experience,” Mahmoudi said. “But we also had a number of students who said the course was too easy, or ‘I’m an adult and I’m working and it’s difficult.’ ”

Started in 1970 as a move away from the quarter system and toward the system of other liberal arts colleges throughout the nation, the interim session offers dozens of classes in all major disciplines.

In January, for instance, students can pick from more than 70 courses, some of which are tailored to this year’s theme, “The Earth as Teacher.”

The classes, all pass-fail, range from traditional art, humanities and science topics to unconventional offerings such as “Crossword Construction for Profit and Fun,” “Cinematic Jesus” and “Some Fun Things to Do with Math: Games of Chance, Fractals, Secret Codes.”

Also offered are trips such as “In the Footsteps of Paul: Greece & Turkey,” “Earthscape,” a study of Northern European architecture, and “Tour with the Arts,” a performance-study excursion for the university choir.

In addition, students have the option of doing independent study projects, getting credit for internships, or studying--at no extra cost, except travel expenses--at one of 25 exchange colleges and universities throughout the nation that offer the interim session.

Mahmoudi said the interim has offered a good opportunity for professors to experiment with courses--some of which later become part of the regular curriculum--and to try different teaching styles.

But the system’s advantages were outweighed by the workload, she said, and a traditional two-semester calendar was adopted for 1991-92.

The decision to drop the interim classes at Cal Lutheran is apparently not unusual. In 1973, interim sessions were offered at 393 institutions of higher education throughout the nation. That had dropped to 250 by the 1989-90 academic year, Mahmoudi said.

Despite the end of interim at Cal Lutheran, the travel trips may continue to be offered, though for only three weeks, and they may be limited, she said.

Donaldo Urioste, a Spanish professor who has led interim excursions to Mexico, said he “loved to take students on these trips--it’s living language.” But he said he also favored eliminating the interim “because the workload is tremendous.”

Karin Nussle, a senior majoring in athletic training and physical education, said she thought the travel courses had no educational benefit.

“A lot of people feel interim is a waste of time,” she said. “I used it to my advantage.”

Unlike most students who take courses outside their disciplines, Nussle took athletic training courses and this January will do an independent study with a ski patrol in her home state of Washington.

On the other hand, senior Gunvor Hatling, a Norwegian student who has taken two interim trips to her home country to study marketing and advertising, said the travel sessions are particularly valuable for American college students.

“It’s great for them to see the rest of the world,” she said. “It’s not just California that’s the world.”

Perhaps Cal Lutheran’s biggest mourner of the interim’s demise is Fred Tonsing, a professor of religion and Greek who is leading the “Paul’s Footsteps” trip in January.

“I’m very sad about it for a number of reasons,” Tonsing said. “It’s been for me one of the most delightful class periods of the year because the students can concentrate on one class. And you have time for field trips.”

Tonsing, who in 17 years has taught courses on apocalypse and on daily life in the time of Jesus, said the interim schedule allowed all-day trips to such places as the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The other thing that was delightful was it attracted students from throughout the country,” he said.

Tonsing doesn’t believe that eliminating interim really addresses the faculty’s workload because it does not reduce the number of classes required to be taught each semester. And he disagrees with critics who contend that interim classes are not scholarly.

“I regret that some professors didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “That attitude was communicated to the students, who then believed it.

“To have fun in a class, to be intrigued by subject matter, to be excited about it, doesn’t mean it’s not scholarly.”