UCLA Seeks to Expand Scope of Freshman Classes

UCLA officials are seeking to overhaul how students begin their college educations by requiring all freshmen to take a series of interdisciplinary courses on broad themes such as “the meaning and nature of democracy” or “the evolution of life and human species.”

The proposed curriculum change, which will be submitted to the UCLA Academic Senate for approval, departs from the usual approach of big research universities, which is to require undergraduates to sample a smorgasbord of introductory courses--in the sciences, arts and humanities--to fulfill “breadth” requirements.

Many small liberal arts colleges, in contrast, strive for well-rounded education by requiring all incoming students to take the same interdisciplinary courses, known as a “core curriculum.”

UCLA officials said they are seeking the best of both systems by creating a range of interdisciplinary courses--and allowing students to choose among them.

“The idea is to get students to move beyond their individual disciplines and look at large issues from a number of different perspectives,” said history professor Ed Berenson, who helped craft the “general education” revisions.

“We want to trade stand-alone courses for something that is more coherent and organized, where one course builds on [what] was taught in the one before,” he said. “Students retain more that way.”

Under the proposal, all of UCLA’s 4,400 freshmen would sign up for a set of “first-year cluster courses” on such sweeping themes as “theater as a projection of political power” or “the Earth’s physical environment.”

The first two courses in each broad area would be taken during the 10-week fall and winter quarters and consist of lectures by a team of instructors from various disciplines.

Students studying “the immigrant experience in the United States,” another suggested theme, might have professors from the literature, anthropology and history departments and the law school--all in class at the same time.

In the third cluster course, students would be assigned to small seminars, limited to 20 each, to delve more deeply into a specific area within the theme.

The proposal, two years in the making, is the latest effort by a major research university to change how undergraduates are taught.

USC restructured its freshman curriculum last fall, eliminating a requirement that students take 11 general education courses. Now they take six core courses spanning the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences.

Such changes come as educators try to make the college experience more compelling at a time when half the students nationally drop out during freshman year.

“We try different techniques when we fear that courses are not getting through to students,” said Linda Serra Hagedorn, a professor at USC’s Center for Higher Education Policies Studies. “The pendulum swings in education.”

To her, UCLA’s proposal “sounds not unlike what was attempted in the 1960s and 1970s, before we went back to traditional course work.”

Many universities have experimented with interdisciplinary programs for freshmen, though usually limited to a portion of the first-year students. UC Irvine, for instance, offers “humanities core” courses team-taught by history, philosophy and literature faculty to about a quarter of its freshmen.

UCLA’s program would cover all freshmen on a campus that has 23,900 undergraduates, more than any other school in California.

Monkeying with freshman curriculum can be dicey. Stanford caught flak from conservatives in 1990 by redesigning its freshman “Western Culture” courses so that time-honored reading lists included the writings of “women, minorities and persons of color.”

Brian Copenhaver, provost of the UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, predicted that the school’s Academic Senate--the faculty body--will adopt the proposed new curriculum, with modifications, in time to implement it in fall 1998.

“A lot of the conversations are about what needs to be fixed, and rightly so,” he said. “The new curriculum is about something other than academic specialization. It’s about what educated people have in common as citizens and human beings.”

Before drafting its proposal, UCLA surveyed hundreds of colleges and universities. Officials cribbed ideas from UC Irvine and the University of Washington, which puts students in social and academic clusters called Freshman Interest Groups.

Under the UCLA plan unveiled this week, the requirement that undergraduates take a dozen “general ed” courses would be reduced to nine, and three of those would be in one of the interdisciplinary first-year clusters.

In addition, professors from UCLA’s writing program would hold workshops in each cluster, enabling students to fulfill the traditional English composition requirement by writing about an area that interests them.

The proposal also calls for after-hours guest speakers in dormitories and field trips that coincide with the themes of study. Each cluster would have its own tutors and “peer counselors” from the ranks of upper-division and graduate students to help freshmen with study skills.

“What we have now is a number of things on campus that are disconnected from one another,” Berenson said. “We want to create a community for students.”