Submission: Proposed “˜Conflict and Community in the Modern World’ GE requirement unrealistic for UCLA

By Matthew Malkan and Joseph Manson

This week UCLA faculty are voting on whether to require every new undergraduate in the College of Letters and Science starting next fall 2013, to take a general education course in “Conflict and Community in the Modern World.”

The proponents of this requirement have offered a remarkably vague description of the academic content that it would deliver. Conflict and Community-compliant courses would address “conflict” between “communities.”

“Conflict” is defined as “tensions … which arise between communities with incompatible purposes and claims.” “Communities” are defined as “groupings of many kinds, like families, tribes, clans, classes, clubs, corporations, villages, towns, cities and nations, as well as schools, colleges and universities.”

This broad language could encompass almost all human interactions involving more than a few people and the subject matter of most of the social sciences, the humanities and even the business school (given the inclusion of corporations).

Intellectually, it is difficult to distinguish the proposed requirement from the existing 15-unit General Education requirement in Historical and Social Analysis. If the current GE requirements are already providing our students with the material that the GE diversity requirement workgroup had in mind when they proposed it, then the Conflict and Community requirement is little more than a costly exercise in public relations.

The only attempt to designate which existing courses would fulfill the Conflict and Community requirement is a list of sample courses that “may” meet this standard. This list is surprisingly narrow compared to the rich offerings of GE courses in Foundations of Society and Culture and Foundations of the Arts and Humanities.

To fulfill the new requirement, thousands of students would lose a chance at exploring a subject that might not be favored by Conflict and Community administrators. These subjects include art history, classics, comparative literature, English, foreign languages, linguistics, philosophy and political science. There are no sufficiently clear principles that would allow instructors or departments to judge whether particular courses satisfy the requirement.

Nor does the proposal provide a plan for the creation of any new courses specifically for Conflict and Community. Thus, the faculty do not really know what they are being asked to vote on.
The worst problem, though, is the disruptive impact that the Conflict and Community requirement would have on faculty and students. Thousands of students per year would have to cut out one of the GE courses they had been planning to take and instead attempt to funnel themselves into a much smaller number of courses that they would not otherwise have chosen.

Course scheduling is already complicated for students, especially for science majors who struggle to satisfy long, challenging sequences of required courses. Even more difficult will be the plight of thousands of transfer students. The proposal should have explicitly exempted all transfer students but fails to mention them at all.

If the final list of Conflict and Community-required courses are based on the list of sample Conflict and Community courses, it would be impossible for a large fraction of students to satisfy the requirement.

Assume that three-quarters of the courses on the possible Conflict and Community list are approved without modification. Assume this includes all the listed GE clusters, even though they are not designed for students to “drop in” at the middle or end of the sequence. Assume further that only half of the students in one of these courses are taking any of the other Conflict and Community courses. Based on the actual enrollments in those courses over the last three quarters, we computed that only about 2,563 undergraduates per year are taking a course that would carry Conflict and Community credit.

This is less than 29 percent of new students arriving every year who would have to satisfy the Conflict and Community requirement.

Furthermore, the complex course enrollment process and the other constraints on students’ schedules, such as fulfilling requirements of their majors, means that they will need a large buffer of additional available slots if they are all to find a seat in a course satisfying the new Conflict and Community requirement. Thus, the above shortfall of a factor of 3.4 is actually a significant underestimate.

Conflict and Community proponents claim correctly that the new requirement would not increase the total number of required courses.

But this misses the point of how our undergraduate programs could accommodate a massive shift in enrollments. The newly designated courses ““ which are already mostly full or nearly so ““ would need to more than triple their enrollments. No new resources (e.g. teaching assistantships or temporary faculty) will be available to carry this out.

UCLA faculty and students are currently facing extreme resource pressures. Every student who must delay graduation for even one more quarter incurs serious costs not just to that student but also to the student’s family and all of UCLA.

There could not be a worse time to impose new restrictions on graduation requirements that would add new burdens to students currently struggling to graduate without delay.

Malkan is a professor of physics and astronomy and Manson is a professor of anthropology.