Faculty, staff and students will have something new to talk
about with the release of a report about the semester system this
week.
The committee appointed to research the pros and cons of moving
the UCLA calendar to semesters made its highly anticipated report
available to the public via its Web site Tuesday.
Academic Senate leaders and committee members expect both formal
and informal campus-wide discussion among faculty, staff and
students to ensue for the rest of the academic year. Specific
forums have yet to be determined.
The comprehensive 59-page document prepared by the Joint
Academic Senate/Administration Committee to Review the Academic
Calendar addresses three main areas: quality of education, workload
for faculty and students, and research.
When the administration formed the committee in January, it
hoped the product of countless meetings and research would provide
for an informed debate. After researching the issue for a couple
months, the committee asked for an extension on its anticipated
March deadline to provide the most exhaustive ““ yet brief
““ report possible on such a recurring topic. It has been
discussed at UCLA five times before.
The committee solicited several sources of information including
department heads all over campus. A large portion of students,
faculty and operational expectations were based on a case study of
the University of Minnesota which made the switch to semesters in
1999 after 86 years on the quarter calendar.
Two questions guided the committee’s research, said
committee co-chairman Ray Knapp, an ethnomusicology professor.
The first question gets at the heart of the committees
formation: it asks whether UCLA should move to a semester system,
placing more emphasis on a switch’s long-term
consequences.
The second question asks which calendar system better meets the
university’s three-pronged mission of education, research and
service. While both systems have the same basic goals for the
institution, the comprehensive report provides information, or
proof, to support whatever calendar is chosen, Knapp said.
The committee also used four guiding principles to determine
what to include in the report in terms of the long-term goals for a
possible switch, said Committee Co-chairwoman Judith Smith, also
the vice provost of undergraduate education for the College of
Letters & Science.
The goals served as a method to evaluate whether a switch would
make the campus more competitive with other high-brow research
institutions in the long run, said senate Chairman Duncan
Lindsey.
One goal for a switch is that it would enhance the effectiveness
of educational programs at UCLA.
A critique of the quarter calendar is that it is too
quick-paced. Many graduate students complained in the report that
they have to take “incompletes” in their quarter
classes because they just don’t have enough time for ideas to
“maturate,” or add new information to their existing
knowledge.
Another goal for a switch is to balance UCLA’s tripartite
mission of teaching, research and service, helping the three
elements to support and enhance one another.
A third goal of a switch is to maintain “workload
neutrality,” the idea that a switch would neither increase
nor decrease the amount of work time for students and
professors.
In their research, the committee found one troubling and
universal effect of conversion to semesters: a student workload
reduction that usually persists for one to two years.
The university receives funds from the state based on the
numbers of full-time enrolled students; if this number goes down
because students are taking fewer classes per semester, then state
funding will follow. According to the report, this happens because
of a misconception that taking more classes each term equals more
work.
The fourth goal the committee used to determine what to include
in the report is building a more “integrated and accessible
academic community.” Many students and faculty experience
unnecessary headaches due to divergent professional school and
undergraduate academic calendars. The easiest way to do resolve
this, the report concludes, may be to put all schools on the same
system to facilitate ease of interaction between the schools.
The administrative and faculty mixture also chose to include
contextual background information in the report.
According to the report, 87 percent of transfer students come
from either a semester or trimester calendar. Since 40 percent of
students who earn a bachelor’s degree from UCLA transferred
from a community college ““ 91 percent of them from a
California community college ““ many upper division students
have to adjust to the “fast-paced” calendar when they
start at UCLA.
While the committee made no recommendation ““ it was not
the design of the report ““ the material it gathered
identified both long-term benefits and short-term costs for a
switch at UCLA.
The big campus-wide question this year will be whether long-term
benefits outweigh short-term costs.
The committee submitted the report to Lindsey and Executive Vice
Chancellor Daniel Neuman on Nov. 4; the committee officially shared
the results of its study and distributed copies of the document at
a quarterly Legislative Assembly meeting Tuesday.
“This is only the beginning of discussion,” Lindsey
said, encouraging members to discuss the issue with their
respective academic departments after the meeting.
The senate is considering a vote in spring, he said, though the
decision to bring the motion to the University of California
president for a vote by the UC Regents is ultimately left up to
Chancellor Albert Carnesale.
If the regents approved the calendar switch ““ a two-year
process ““ the committee thinks it will take another three
years to implement. Thus the soonest it would be implemented, Knapp
said, would be the 2008-2009 school year.
The entire report is available online at
http://www.senate.ucla.edu/calendar.