Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1981

Another thing we did at Irvine was successful. We started some new alignments of fields. For ex­ ample, rather than having Business Administration, why not teach Administration? Why separate Govern­ ment Administration or Hospital Administration, or Education Administration? The principles are much the same. Also, the people who go into government ought to know what the people in industry that they are regulating are thinking and how they are trained, and people in business ought to know something more about the government aspects of regulation and control. In another area, rather than having a depart­ ment of English, a department of French and so forth, we set up a department of Comparative Litera­ ture, covering literature across the board, comparing modern Japanese literature with, say, 19th-century Russian literature— two societies undergoing great change. But the languages themselves were largely taught by electronic means rather than by faculty or teaching assistants in separate departments that combined language and literature. In biology, rather than organizing departments by traditional areas of entomology, zoology, botany and so forth, we organized instruction by level of organic complexity from the cellular level up to the environmental level. Let me say that really worked because it was moving in the direction in which the intellectual world was moving. It was somewhat ahead of its time, but that is the way the intellectual world was moving and the reform was accepted and successful. At the University of California at San Diego, we set up colleges which were bigger. We also wanted to decentralize there, about 2,500 students to be in each college. The college was big enough to house a whole department, which was not the situation at Santa Cruz where we put economists in all the different colleges. We wanted, however, to have a mixture at each of these colleges—and this is where the thing did not succeed. The idea was that within each of the colleges there would be some full depart­ ment representing each of the great streams of human t hought -a department from the Physical Sciences, from the Biological Sciences, from the Social Sciences, and from the Humanities, so that in the little faculty club for that college you would have people talking across these great streams of thought. As we added professional schools, we wanted one professional school to be attached to each of the colleges so we would bring in the theme of the professions, too. The scheme did not work. One of the colleges ended up being essentially for the Sciences, one for the Social Sciences, and one for the Humanities. We still have the separate colleges-that is some decentralization that worked—but not the mixing of people from the different streams of thought that we wanted. Another thing we tried at San Diego was to organize the university from the top down. We began first at the Ph.D. level, which was agood idea because there do not have to be departments across the board to have a Ph.D. I f there is aPhysics Department, you can train physicists. When you bring people in at the undergraduate level, there have to be departments across the board. That is much more difficult to attain. So we started from the top down, giving the Ph.D. in as many departments as we could set up, then moved down to the Master's level, the upper division level, and the lower division level. I might say it was a little hard for the faculty to make that last transition, but generally it worked quite well. That was an experiment which really worked. The reform in which we invested the most intellectual commitment was the mixtures by fields of learning. That did not work. San Diego is an enormous success as a campus, but it is in my mind, compared to what we had in mind when we started it, rather a failure from the point of view of academic reform. San Diego as a new campus is drawing, in competition with all the research universities in the nation, the fifth highest level of foundation and federal support. That is fantastic for a campus that got its first students in 1964. It started at the peak level. When I say that "reforms failed", I do not mean that “ the campus failed". Elsewhere, in the University of California at Berkeley, there were two colleges started, one in my time. I fought extremely hard against the Board of Regents (our board of trustees) to get the Tussman College established. Joe Tussman (in Philosophy) wanted to recreate the Wisconsin Experimental College, which had taken four great periods of history and looked at them in their totality. One was the period of Athens and Pericles and the Peloponnesian War; others were the periods of the French and American revolutions and the new ideas emerging at that time in the current United States. The Regents looked upon this as the "college on revolution" because the periods chosen were all periods of great change. We had very great difficulty getting approval for it. Now the Tussman College has disappeared. Later another experiment called Strawberry College also disappeared. It was based on a different idea. There, faculty members ， instead of teaching their last book, taught their next book. For a variety of reasons that did not work either. 'Stopout' The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education 7