UCLA’s general education system failing students

Monday, September 22, 1997 UCLA’s general education system
failing students OVERHAUL: ‘Clusters’ would enhance writing skills,
create coherency, increase learning

By Jamil Jaffer

Before I arrived on this campus as a freshman in the fall of
1994, I had never heard of general education. Little did I know
that upon filing my Statement of Intent to Register at UCLA, I had
essentially signed away one full year of my college career to
taking general education classes.

Little did I also know that by the time I had begun to register
for classes at UCLA, people would have already begun giving me
advice on how to navigate easily through this program while keeping
my GPA as high as possible. I soon found out that most UCLA
students look at the GE requirements as little more than a filler
for the empty space between their "real" classes, and that for the
most part, students think of general education as a waste of their
valuable and limited time.

One only needs to go as far as the nearest large lecture hall on
campus to see proof of this phenomenon – while some GE classes
regularly enroll in excess of 500 students, the only time even half
of these people show up is for the midterm and the final.

Now, all of you who have been here for more than one year know
exactly what I mean when I say that there is an "underground
curriculum" here at UCLA. For all the freshmen out there, however,
I will explain.

The second anyone begins discussing a class they are taking, the
question that always comes up is how difficult the professor
teaching the class is. Students often use this information to
decide which GE classes to take. This creates an "underground
curriculum" of easy GE classes which everyone knows about.

Without mentioning any by name, I can think of a number of
courses which people have recommended for keeping my GPA high with
minimum effort. Let’s just say that if someone is even vaguely
interested in studying certain human afflictions or in staring at
the skies, I know exactly where they can look for a GPA-booster.
While I think a lot of faculty would deny that such a reputation
can bring a high level of enrollment to a given class, it is often
true.

Let’s be honest. How many of you feel like you learned something
substantial through UCLA’s general education system? If you are the
typical Joe Bruin, focus group interviews show that you are highly
dissatisfied with the current state of general education here.

And well you should be. UCLA’s primary role is to be a liberal
arts institution of undergraduate education – a role which UCLA has
increasingly failed to play in the lives of its students. It is not
primarily a research institution nor is it mainly a
graduate/professional school. Both of the roles are critical to the
mission of the university, but they are peripheral to the role UCLA
is supposed to play in shaping the minds of the future leaders of
this nation.

Now, I am not saying that UCLA is a bad school by any standard.
Indeed, it is consistently ranked as one of the top public
universities in the nation. What I am saying, however, is that as a
liberal arts university, UCLA has not been doing what is necessary
to prepare its students for life in an increasingly globalized and
competitive society and job market.

I find it almost criminal that students can progress through
their education at one of the nation’s premier undergraduate
institutions without ever once having to write a serious paper. I
find it appalling that UCLA students can graduate from this
university without a basic understanding of how various disciplines
relate to one another. I find it pathetic that UCLA has created a
system of general education that is a gigantic maze of requirements
and not a program for broadening the minds. It seems clear to me
that in its role as an undergraduate liberal arts institution, UCLA
has indeed fallen flat on its proverbial face.

However, there is hope on the horizon. For the past three years,
a student-faculty committee has been examining the issue of general
education here at UCLA. With the support of Provost Brian
Copenhaver, the deans of the College of Letters & Sciences, and
former Chancellor Charles E. Young, this workgroup recently issued
a document which will set the tone for reforming the GE system at
UCLA. As a member of this workgroup since its inception, I can
honestly say that this document embodies a vision for UCLA which
will go a long way towards correcting the problems discussed
earlier.

The centerpiece of the new general education system will be a
first-year cluster which all entering freshmen will be required to
take. It will be made up of two quarters of lecture and a
one-quarter seminar. This three-quarter sequence will benefit
students in a number of ways. As many of you know, UCLA is a campus
with a large commuter population. This, coupled with the sheer size
of the student body, often acts as a barrier to the formation of
interpersonal relationships – especially in an academic
setting.

The simple fact that students will be with the same group of
their peers, first in two quarters of lecture, then for a quarter
in a small-group setting, suggests that at the very least, students
will have a better opportunity to form such relationships with
their peers. In addition, this year-long interaction between a
group of faculty members, the students and graduate teaching
assistants will allow all three of these groups to come together
and form an academic community over the course of an entire
year.

Another problem that these clusters will address is the fact
that many UCLA students often do not see a relationship between the
various subjects they study. The classes that compose this new
cluster system will be interdisciplinary in nature. They will be
team-taught with professors from various departments and
disciplines.

Such an experience of teachers from various backgrounds coming
together to teach a single cluster built around a common theme or
subject will allow students to see the links and the interplay
between subjects and disciplines which they may never have known
existed.

Finally, these clusters will target one of the most serious
problems that UCLA faces: the inability of many UCLA graduates to
write a coherent paper on a given subject. By containing a strong
emphasis on writing (indeed, students will be required to take a
writing tutorial during the first two quarters of the cluster), the
new GE system will insure that UCLA graduates have achieved some
substantial level of proficiency in English prior to leaving this
institution.

As a result of all of these changes, there is no doubt that the
new GE system will be more robust and rigorous than the system
currently in place. Because of this, it is also very likely that
this new system will be more academically taxing on UCLA
undergraduates. But ask yourself seriously if this is really such a
bad thing.

Sure, we all talk about how we wish classes were easier, how
horrible it would be for the system to be more difficult. Still, if
you truly think about it, you will discover that the benefits a
student will garner by progressing through a stronger, more
coherent curriculum than the current hodgepodge of oftentimes
irrelevant classes will easily outweigh your concerns about having
to work a little bit harder for a grade. Besides, the inventors of
this system realized that it would be more difficult, so they
arranged for students to get five units per GE class instead of the
standard four.

This will speed up your stay here at UCLA, while at the same
time acknowledging that these classes are of critical importance –
both to you as a student and to the university as a whole.

Thanks to the new GE system, the chess game of academia will be
less likely to treat you as one of its pawns.