College of Letters and Science streamlines academics in response to budget crisis
By Shoshee Jau
Nov. 24, 2010 1:37 a.m.
Anticipating further cuts to academic programs next year, the College of Letters and Science has been restructuring its curriculum to match a shrinking budget.
Academic departments have continued to implement Challenge 45, reducing upper division requirements to 45 units for each major.
Though Challenge 45 proposals first began spring quarter 2009 in response to budgetary constraints, the changes are here to stay, said vice provost of undergraduate education Judi Smith.
“We’ve seen Challenge 45 do things we should have done years before ““ it made major requirements more manageable and rational,” Smith said.
But fewer requirements have increased competition for some courses. Since departments began to reduce requirements, there has been an 8 to 10 percent increase in class sizes, Smith said.
As a result, the College has created programs to reduce competition for impacted courses, said Penny Hein-Unruh, assistant vice provost of academic advising.
The College developed the College Summer Institute program for incoming freshmen this summer, enrolling 220 students during summer Session C. The program, which hopes to enroll 300 students next summer, allowed participants to take high-impact courses early, combining orientation with a session of classes.
Next fall, the humanities division hopes to begin a new program for its students, called the Humanities Residential College. In the program, some students will live together in Hitch Suites and take specific courses highlighting various disciplines in the field, said Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of humanities.
“It’s based on models from Harvard and Yale,” she said. “The idea is a building dedicated to freshmen studying humanities. It’s a way to attract new majors to other parts of the humanities.”
To further reduce traffic in competitive courses, the College has looked into e-sections, which may enroll up to 20 percent more students in a course. The students will receive lecture instruction online via Bruincast and attend a live discussion once a week. E-sections will allow professors to admit more students than lecture hall capacity, Smith said.
Departments have also merged curricula, creating M-courses, multi-listed courses that satisfy requirements for multiple majors, Smith said.
Some faculty have created C-courses that enroll both graduate and undergraduate students. In these concurrent courses, students in the College study the same topics as graduate students and attend the same lectures, but are under less stringent expectations.
Along with streamlining their curriculum, academic departments have generated revenue through summer courses, Smith said.
“When departments teach courses over the summer, they get a portion of student fees,” she said. “Departments like the idea of being entrepreneurial.”
However, the College will not be able to match costs and revenue, even with the 8 percent fee hike, Smith said. To temporarily relieve the burden, departments are replacing ladder faculty, tenured professors who conduct research, at a lower rate, hiring lecturers or bringing back retired faculty for a limited time, Hanna-Harwell said.
But the reduced hiring cannot continue for long, said Raymond Knapp, chair of the Faculty Executive Committee.
“The process of shelling faculty positions is not in our long-term interest,” he said. “It’s a difficult situation, and we can probably only do it for a maximum of two more years. We need to keep the excellent faculty coming to conduct research and keep UCLA at the forefront.”
While faculty and administration have generally decided that the measures will save money, the College does not know how they will specifically affect the budget, said Robert Cox, manager for institutional research in the UCLA Office of Analysis and Information Management.
“Everyone can agree that there are ways in which these things can lead to savings, but no one has put a ticket on it to show how much you can save,” he said. “At the policy level, you can see where the policy would tend to take the result, but figuring out how it can fill the hole in the budget, you can’t do it; the issues are too complex.”
