Teaching at UCLA

“Boost UC Teaching Status” (editorial, Dec. 6) describes what President Hunter Rawlings and his colleagues are doing to improve undergraduate education at Cornell. The Times says that “the UC system should put its feet on a similar path.” UCLA has been on that road for some time. Four years ago we began reshaping general education at UCLA to focus instruction by senior faculty on first-year students. Rawlings’ predecessor, Frank Rhodes, led one of the UCLA-Hewlett Forums on General Education that started this process.

As The Times also recommends, UCLA’s Student Research Program puts about 2,400 undergraduates annually in labs to work one-on-one with faculty who push the frontiers of science. The Student Research Program is only one reason why UCLA won the first Recognition Award for Integrating Research and Education, in 1997, from the National Science Foundation. UCLA is integrating teaching with research across a broad front.

On one important matter we differ. The Times recommends a “two track” approach to tenure--one track for teaching, another for research. To divide our faculty and to isolate our primary missions in this way would abandon a great ideal in American democratic education: access for all citizens to learning at its very best. This critical access door opens widest at the premier research universities, where undergraduates connect with the process of discovery because researchers who create knowledge are also teachers who transmit it. UCLA will continue to pursue this ideal.

BRIAN P. COPENHAVER, Provost of the College of Letters & Science, UCLA

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OK, I am confused. We taxpayers require that our grammar, middle and high school teachers all be accredited in our public schools. We are even talking about more exams to be sure they’re qualified. Yet when we get to our most advanced learning institutions (the UCs), teaching assistants, who at best are graduate students and certainly are neither credentialed nor tested for teaching ability, are doing the majority of classroom teaching. And it would appear the actual professors are more managers than anything else. Is this what I’m paying for when I send my son to university? Either I really don’t get it or, being a product of the UC system myself, I was never taught how to figure it out.

FRED SHAW, Newbury Park