Selby Kia: UCLA needs more lecture halls, buildings to accommodate increased enrollment

It’s a new quarter, and as Bruins head to their classes with high hopes for a productive spring quarter, many will open their lecture hall doors only to find a seat on the floor.

With an undergraduate population of 31,000 and only a handful of large lecture halls, it’s no surprise that UCLA is starved for space. Professors, students and teaching assistants all find themselves short on classroom space, with undergraduate departments’ counseling offices often having to navigate the quarterly logistical nightmare of scheduling.

But inadequate classroom space isn’t because of poor scheduling. Denise Mantonya, the undergraduate counselor and coordinator for the chemistry and biochemistry department, said the UCLA Registrar’s Office works hard to accommodate faculties’ classroom needs. UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vazquez said increased undergraduate enrollment has led to an increase in the number of classes offered. Space constraint thus results in more lectures at 8 a.m. and past 4 p.m., with professors having to use other departments’ classrooms.

UCLA can solve this problem by building more lecture halls and classrooms to accommodate students, professors and teaching assistants. Creating more lecture halls will help alleviate the current difficulties in finding rooms and will ensure that students have adequate learning space.

But UCLA doesn’t seem to have these ideas in mind. Rather than focusing on how to turn a water closet into the next classroom and further pack the already filled-to-capacity buildings, UCLA administrators should be focused on constructing new buildings and designing classrooms to promote optimal learning in light of increasing enrollment.

Many students end up sitting in the aisles because of overenrolled classes and waitlists, especially during the first week of the quarter.

“You really can’t go in late because you won’t find a seat,” said Nathalia Rodriguez, a second-year human biology and society student. “I got to Chemistry 14B (lecture) late and I had to sit on the floor.”

Sitting on the floor during class is not only a hazard, but also causes unnecessary stress for students trying to take notes without desks.

While crowded classes become less of a problem later in the quarter as fewer students attend or some drop the courses altogether, the issue resurfaces during midterms, when all enrolled students must be present. Professors often need “overflow rooms” to accommodate hundreds of students taking midterms for a single class.

This often means using three different rooms for a midterm so that students have adequate space between them during exams – something Heather Tienson-Tseng, a biochemistry lecturer, knows all too well.

“If I’ve got a room that fits 350 (students), I can’t have the exam in that room because everyone’s right next to each other,” Tienson-Tseng said.

Mantonya said the need for overflow rooms has resulted in professors scheduling more evening midterms, which is a concern for students and professors who have other commitments outside of normally scheduled class sessions.

And professors aren’t the only ones who need space. Classes can have as many as 12 discussion sections with roughly 30 students in each, said Tienson-Tseng. Mantonya said finding rooms for discussions also becomes increasingly difficult. The shortage of classrooms has, for example, caused the chemistry and biochemistry department to use departmental seminar rooms not intended for instruction as upper division classrooms.

UCLA renovated lecture halls in buildings including Moore Hall and Young Hall over the summer in an attempt to address the enrollment increase. But just adding around 50 additional seats in a handful of lecture halls is not enough. Highly impacted classes in chemistry, computer science and economics can have as many as 400 students in each lecture. There are only so many scheduling gymnastics the university can do to give this many classes the lecture hall space they need.

UCLA has tried to take initiative with the Classroom Advisory Committee, which was created in 2016 to advise the Campus Space Committee on classroom usage. But aside from making a list of 31 recommendations for improvements to current classroom utilization and conducting surveys, the Classroom Advisory Committee hasn’t really done much else.

Classroom Advisory Committee and Campus Space Committee should work to lay the groundwork for a substantial infrastructure growth plan to construct new lecture halls rather than add to existing ones.

“We’ve built research buildings and conference centers and other things, but especially in the last 10 years, when we’ve seen an increase in undergrad population, we haven’t added more (academic) buildings,” Tienson-Tseng said.

The Classroom Advisory Committee agrees with this sentiment. In its committee report, it states that the university should devote resources and funding to deliver a 21st-century education to students.

An obvious concern is who would pay for the additional buildings. The Classroom Advisory Committee lists identifying donor opportunities as one of its recommendations for capital projects. This is a much better alternative than pulling the cost out of students’ pockets.

And while finding the space to build more lecture halls may seem infeasible, the recent successes of capital projects including the Mo Ostin Basketball Center, Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, Wasserman Football Center and six-story Geffen Hall point to the university’s continued ability to make space for campus community members.

So far, the only measures taken to alleviate class space issues have been to make departments share rooms, shift assignments and hold more classes at inconvenient times. No long-term plans for building more lecture halls have been announced, despite an ever-growing student population.

Many students fondly refer to UCLA’s acronym as standing for “Under Construction Literally Always.” It’s time for some of this growth to be put toward classroom space as well.