Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1981

"cognitive learning." This again in some places is quite popular. The first time I heard about it was at a university convocation at the University of California, Santa Barbara ， the year when Aldous Huxley was giving a convocation address. He attacked the University of California for emphasizing the mind; it was not the mind which should be trained but the senses. At the time he gave the speech I thought it was absolutely crazy, but since then I have decided there is a little something to it. There are institutions which have gone very strongly on the affective side as compared with the cognitive side. I have not been sympathetic with that. Let me now say as a generalization that most reforms failed, or disappointed their initiators. I base this, in part, on one study which has been made in one of the states in the United States which I think is indicative of the situation generally. It found that of the reforms which had been attempted (that this study had counted), only somewhere between 20 and 25 percent had lasted as long as 10 years. And from my experience, a great many of the 20 to 25 percent which survived for as much as 10 years have been so watered down that they were real disappointments to the people who introduced them. Experience of the University of California Let me turn to the University of California. I was President during a time when we started three new campuses. We wanted to make each one different from each existing campus and from each other. Each new campus was to have its own personality from the beginning. One of the new campuses was at Santa Cruz where we started with a series of small colleges designed to have 500 or 600 students each. Each college was to have somewhat different academic pro­ grammes and to have completely different architec­ ture so they would look different from each other. My goal for the Santa Cruz campus was that the University of California ought to seem smaller to the individual student even as it became larger. We were then in the process of doubling the size of our student body in a single decade. It was anticipated that at least half of the courses would be given within the individual colleges. And since these colleges were small, they would be broad courses of an interdis­ ciplinary nature. This is what we called the "cluster college concept"—the University of California, Santa Cruz, being the outstanding example of it within the United States. David Riesman once wrote that it was the most interesting, potentially fruitful of all the experiments undertaken in the United States. What has happened from the point of view of one of the founders of the campus? We thought that by having these small colleges with all faculty mem bers attached to a college, there would be a much greater sense of community between the teachers and the students. The faculty members have, to a substantial extent, withdrawn from that contact. They claimed that they were overloaded, not only in terms of time, but they also commented that they were psychologically overloaded because, when they got to know the students, the students began to try to have them help them with their personal problems, and then the faculty began to withdraw. Recently that campus dedicated a building carrying my name, but a building that carries the opposite of what we intended. The social sciences building is now Clark Kerr Hall, into which the faculty have retreated from their offices in the colleges which we started. Now, instead of half the courses being given in the colleges of a broad nature, the departments have taken over and 85 percent of the courses are now given by the departments (or Boards of Studies, as they are called there), only 15 percent in the colleges. Santa Cruz is still a rather unique place. From the point of view of students that go there, it is better than the alterna­ tives. There is some residue of what we attempted, but it falls far short of what the dreams had been. At Irvine we tried some other things, and they worked somewhat better as reforms. Let me say very quickly that a campus can be successful as a campus even though the reforms fail. I do not mean that Santa Cruz failed, even though the reforms failed, to a large extent. At Irvine, we wanted to go in a quite different direction. We began by having every class room equipped with the most modern electronic technology; we planned to have, in almost every class, computer-assisted instruction. There were some- arguments that in a lot of fields and for some students this was a better way of doing things. The students could pace themselves; it might take one student longer than another to complete a course of study but in the end everyone came out at the same place. The computer is infinitely patient. What we quickly found, even as we were building the campus, was that the students did not love those computers in the way they should. They wanted contact with a human being. It became necessary to put seminar rooms next to the computer terminals and to put an assistant professor or teaching assistant there. This made education more expensive than expected. Irvine now has more computer-assisted instruction, more emphasis upon the new electronics in language in struction and elsewhere, than on almost any campus in the United States. But is it what we thought it would be? I would say it is a partial success. 6