Improving Undergraduate Education

Lower Division Education in the University of California: a Report (University of California, 1986) 

On October 17,  1985, [Senior Vice President William] Frazer reported to the regents that a major review of UC’s lower-division programs…was being undertaken [by the the Universitywide Task Force on Lower Division Education] and that I had asked [UC Berkeley] Professor Neil Smelser to chair…The task force was not meant to intrude on…campus initiatives or plans, but to benefit from the work recently done on the eight campuses offering lower-division work and to take a less particularized and more broad-ranging view in assessing UC as a whole.  Such an endeavor would help inform the eight campuses and the regents themselves about what was happening in general education across the university.  It would help sustain a universitywide interest in this important but commonly neglected part of our work.  And it would signal my interest in discovering ways by which UC’s education, especially of our freshman and sophomore students, might be improved.

It would also respond, in part, to legislative and other external judgments about the university’s commitment to these students, and the perceived overuse of TAs and underuse of the professoriate at this level of instruction.  This was important, as whenever I met with the university’s alumni, state legislators, donors, service clubs, and the editorial boards of newspapers, I heard the complaint that as a research university we were less interested in undergraduates than either CSU or the community colleges were. (Earning My Degree, pp. 231-32; see also ppp. 233-35)

Lower Division Education in the University of California: a Report (University of California, 1986):

A complete list of recommendations, by category, follows (pp. 3-4).

Reforming Curricula and Programs

(1) Campuses should institute and expand freshman-sophomore seminars, or functionally equivalent educational processes that constitute a chance for lower division students to interact with ladder-rank faculty in a small classroom setting.

(2) Campuses should develop and extend general education courses of an integrative or synthetic character in both their lower and upper divisions.

(3) Campuses should develop curricular change and other policies that enhance the international, multicultural, and global learning experiences of students.

Improving the Quality of Teaching

(4) Departments of colleges and schools should assign their most brilliant and effective teaching faculty, regardless of title and rank, to large, introductory lower division courses.

(5) Faculty evaluation should be improved, making internal peer review more systematic, and including teaching effectiveness on the agendas of external reviewing bodies.

(6) Mechanisms should be developed for the more systematic selection, review, and evaluation of temporary faculty, and for their better incorporation into the educational life of the campus.

(7) Teaching assistants whose native language is not English should be required to pass the oral TOEFL examination.

(8) Campuses should review and improve mechanisms for the training, supervision, and evaluation of teaching assistants, especially at the departmental level.

Improving Educational Continuity

(9) Colleges and schools should seek more flexible ways of adapting the numbers of courses and sections available at the lower division, so that students will be able to take these during the first two years.

(10) The University of California, at appropriate levels of faculty and administrative responsibility, should work toward developing and improving: (a) articulation of specific courses with institutions from other segments, especially on a regional basis; (b) a selective common core of general education courses that, if taken at a specified level of performance in the other segments, would satisfy the general education requirements of the University of California campuses; (c) reciprocity among campuses with respect to curricular requirements that will meet the general education requirements on all campuses.

Improving Information and Quality Control

(11) The University and the campuses should secure more extensive and more nearly comparable information on the educational roles of different categories of instructors.

(12) Colleges and schools, as well as campus and systemwide administrations, should develop mechanisms for periodic and systematic review of the quality of lower division education.

Reaffirming the General Mission of the University

(13) As a long-term matter, the University and its several campuses should continue to observe the changing balance of its educational emphases--disciplinary balance, the balance between vocational and liberal education emphases , the balance among lower division, upper division, and graduate education — in the light of the shifting character of knowledge in society.