The Daily Bruin has recently run an article on the possibility
that UCLA might abandon the quarter system (under which it has
operated since 1966) and return to the semester system.
Yet there are two striking defects of the semester system, which
can be seen in the Nov. 1, 2002, report of the Joint
Academic/Administration Committee to Study the UCLA Academic
Calendar.
The report states, “The typical experience at other
institutions that have switched to semesters is that the number of
course offerings is reduced significantly in the process of
conversion.”
All else being equal, this means students would be exposed to a
potentially less diverse set of course offerings, with less time to
explore crazy or exotic fields outside the students’
majors.
As someone who teaches two languages and three literatures
usually considered highly exotic in the United States, I anticipate
that any switch to a semester system would effectively reduce the
number of students willing to take out some time to explore such
unusual areas.
Under an enrollment-driven system such as ours, this means
unique courses that draw in fewer students might eventually be
phased out. Hence, in the long run the semester system would seem
to foster decreased intellectual choice and increased academic
timidity.
In the worst case scenario, the students would simply trundle
through the system efficiently, taking standard, average, ho-hum,
run-of-the-mill general education and major-fulfilling courses,
looking neither to the right nor to the left, and having few
chances to explore anything really off-the-wall, to emerge on time
with diploma in hand. They would become (to use a phrase of Oberlin
College’s Wilfred T. Jewkes from 40 years ago) little
pasteurized, homogenized and standardized “B.A.
batter-cakes,” rolling off the assembly line and plopping
(ka-thunk) into the job market, ready to be consumed.
The other thing one notices as a faculty member at a major
research university such as UCLA is that under the semester system,
there would seem to be measurably less time for faculty to do their
research.
It takes nine quarters (three academic years) to earn one
non-teaching quarter (10 weeks) of sabbatical time at full pay,
whereas it takes nine semesters (4.5 academic years) to earn one
non-teaching semester of sabbatical time (14 weeks) at full
pay.
In other words, it would seem that a 50 percent increase in the
amount of teaching time (going from quarters to semesters) before a
professor is eligible for sabbatical yields a 40 percent increase
in the amount of “free” time for research.
As I must assume that the foundations of arithmetic have not
changed in the past few weeks, I would characterize this at first
glance as an impoverishment of research opportunities.
If we professors had wanted an environment with systematically
less research and systematically more teaching, wouldn’t we
have opted for the California State University system rather than
the University of California system? Why, after all, is one of the
prized awards from a UCLA dean to a faculty member a
“non-teaching quarter”? In three decades at UCLA I have
never heard of a faculty member at UCLA being rewarded for
intellectual or administrative achievement by being given
additional “teaching quarters.”
I know the current discussion of semesters versus quarters is
just beginning, but how many times in the past have we already
considered this same question?
I encourage all readers of the Daily Bruin ““ students and
faculty alike ““ to actually procure copies of the report and
really consider the multitude of issues it raises. For example, in
what is presumed to be a meticulous, detached and impartial view of
the question of semesters versus quarters, why is there no case
study in the report of an institution such as the University of
Chicago, which, in contrast to the report’s example of the
University of Minnesota, has not changed from the quarter system to
the semester system and apparently sees no need to?
Finally, something else to think about is that any switch to the
Semester system will take a great deal of time and effort and cost
somewhere around $6,000,000, according to the report.
At least the switch from quarters to semesters would thus give
all of us ““ again students and faculty alike ““ a
magnificent opportunity to watch our tax dollars at work.