UC Chief Blasts Call to Increase Teaching Load : Education: Gardner says requiring faculty members to handle one more course a year would fundamentally change the character of the university.

University of California President David P. Gardner on Monday vigorously denounced a proposal that UC faculty members teach one more course a year, saying it would “fundamentally change the character of this institution.”

In her analysis of Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1992-93 budget last week, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill said that if UC’s 5,600 regular faculty members taught an average of six courses a year, instead of the current five, the state eventually would save $47 million a year.

Hill’s message has struck a receptive chord with many legislators, who are looking for ways to save money as the state once again struggles with a large budget deficit.

In an unusual appearance before a state Senate budget subcommittee, Gardner called the Hill suggestion “fundamentally the most destructive recommendation that has been made” during his nine years as UC president.

He said it would require the nine-campus UC system to accept 15,000 to 20,000 new students over the next six years without adding any new faculty members.

As a result, the student-faculty ratio would increase from 17.6 to 1 to more than 20 to 1, which Gardner said was much higher than the teaching load at such UC competitors as the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan and Ohio State.

UC Budget Director Lawrence C. Hershman said in an interview, “If the faculty began to see this actually happen, we’d lose some very good people” to competing universities.

Gardner said the legislative analyst’s proposal was a “polemic, with no analysis.”

Hill replied that it was a “reasonable recommendation that ought to be debated in these critical times.”

Hill noted that “we’re not asking the faculty to work harder, we’re not asking them to add anything, we’re asking them to change the mix a bit,” so that more time is spent on teaching, less on research, public service or professional activity.

Outside the hearing room, Gardner said the Hill proposal was part of a “hostile, sometimes even irrational” attitude toward the University of California that is developing in Sacramento.

Gardner, who will leave the UC presidency next October, said this atmosphere has been created partly by a third consecutive year of tight budgets and by Proposition 140, whose legislative term limits have “soured attitudes and relationships (between legislators and educators) in a very pronounced way.”

In addition, “this is an election year and everybody is under additional pressure and stress,” he said. “The economy is much worse than any of them had thought six months ago, when they took very tough steps to deal with the deficit.”

“Put all these things together and you have people reaching out for simple solutions for what are very complex problems,” Gardner said, “and the legislative analyst’s recommendation is one of these.”

Gardner said there are better ways to improve undergraduate education.

He has asked campus chancellors to tell him by July 1 how they plan to provide more courses and class sections in required subjects, more freshman seminars and more opportunities for freshmen and sophomores to engage in research.

The president implied that he will implement some of the recommendations made by a university-wide committee last fall. These include increased emphasis on teaching, instead of research, as a basis for promoting UC faculty members.

However, observers who have watched repeated attempts to improve the quality of UC undergraduate instruction since the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s have expressed skepticism that this latest wave of reform will succeed when others have failed.

Sen. Nicholas Petris (D-Oakland) and Sen. Becky Morgan (R-Los Altos Hills) expressed support for Gardner but Morgan warned that in the Senate Republican caucus “there is not as much empathy as I would like to have heard” for UC’s position that the faculty should not be required to teach more.