Pro Quarters

Under quarters, UCLA has become a world class research university and without question the most distinguished university founded in the last century. UCLA attracts more undergraduate applications than any other university in the country. Students who apply to UCLA do so, in large part, because of the favorable views they have learned from others regarding the quality of education they will receive, if admitted.* 

Faculty at UCLA find the quarter system an effective structure to support both teaching and research.  Most faculty view the quarter system ideal for teaching and research. The quarter system makes it convenient to schedule sabbatical leaves to pursue research interests around the world.  In addition, Senate faculty are able to schedule “light teaching quarters” when they can catch up on writing and research or pursue funding opportunities. Graduate student support packages and class schedules can become flexible enough to permit 3-month terms when research is pursued without interruption.  Under quarters, UCLA graduates have had great success gaining entrance into top jobs and postgraduate opportunities. UCLA faculty has been very successful with funded research, and switching to semesters would not be expected to change that in any measurable way.

Greater Variety with Quarters

Under quarters students are exposed to a greater diversity of subjects by taking one-third more courses, presumably with exposure to one-third more instructors.  Emphasizing this advantage can lead to endless disagreements between those who prefer depth versus breadth. Yet, diversity and depth can be achieved under either academic calendar. Opportunities for diversity are particularly important within complex departments or interdisciplinary programs. Within the Life Sciences, for instance, we see many examples wherein students can “sample” courses in departments given by specialists in those fields.  Further, nothing prevents programs under quarters from requiring A+B courses (20 weeks) to achieve depth, and nothing prevents semesters from combining two courses (15 weeks) or having half semester courses to achieve diversity.

Coordinating Prerequisites

A notable difference between quarters and semesters is in coordinating prerequisites for a major with courses from other departments.  With quarters it has been possible to get students to enter upper division in the Life Sciences (LS), and thereby become involved in research labs, by the junior year.  Under a semester format, prerequisites in math, chemistry, and physics delay entry into many degree programs.  Indeed, the redesigned 4-course Life Sciences core, which has been in place since 1996, was engineered to move students more efficiently into upper division after receiving a broad introduction to the major approaches in the Life Sciences.  The LS core would not translate well into either 2 or 3 semesters and still satisfy all constituents.  This core was carefully conceived and coordinated with other departments.

Semesters Won’t Eliminate Large Classes

The teaching faculty has many reasons to be proud of our undergraduate programs which are extremely efficient and successful in “preparing and educating” students via large classes in quarter terms, although UCLA has been criticized because its undergraduate programs relay on large introductory courses.  One may personally abhor large classes as learning venues, but during 2002 there were 101 undergraduate courses (28 departments) that had AY enrollments of more than 450 students (max. 1544), and 210 courses had AY enrollments of 100-450.  Assuming that most of these required courses and enrollments will persist, even if in some altered form, under semesters the same enrollments in those courses would have to be accommodated in 2 rather than 3 terms.  Each department needs to decide how to meet these instructional needs, and each must calculate for semesters what it would take to increase faculty teaching loads, TAs (ala union guidelines), and laboratories or discussion rooms, calculations done by assuming class sizes that professors can effectively manage.

In many fields there would have to be 50% more labs or discussions scheduled, and some departments (e.g., Chemistry and other sciences) are already either operating at or limited by lab capacity. In 2007 there will only be 19 large general assignment lecture halls (10 = 293–419 seats; 9 = 157–239 seats), with little prospect of building new ones. Under semesters in 2007, when UCLA will be admitting more than 4,700 students as a freshman class (10% more than today) plus transfer students, our necessary reliance on large classes is predicted to create the ultimate nightmare for fitting these courses into rooms and a sensible work week for faculty and students. Already scheduling large classes in lecture halls is difficult.  If semesters are being proposed to improve the quality of undergraduate education, forcing the campus into larger classes is probably not the correct trajectory.

Leaving quarters for semesters in the abstract has many dangers, because the devil is in the details. Are there adequate rooms of each size class for the changeover?  We have had losses in campus rooms for decades while now entering a growth phase. Will departments be able to field enough additional instructors to teach the perceived extra lectures of lower division and GE courses?  Will additional funding be provided to augment TA support for the extra discussions and labs associated with large courses?  What will be an expected or standardized teaching load? 

Conclusion

We end where we began. Would switching to semesters improve education and research at UCLA? What do we know with confidence? First, there is no empirical evidence that semesters are pedagogically superior to quarters—it's simply a matter of taste. Second, UCLA has made a substantial investment in the development of a curriculum designed around a quarter calendar. Switching to a semester system will require many hours of curriculum review and development to retrofit current quarter courses into a semester format (see the comments of UC Berkeley faculty on this issue). Research and teaching workload assignments will need to be renegotiated to adjust to the semester format. It is unclear that the enormous effort and risk involved in switching to semesters is warranted by the limited pedagogical gain proponents of the semester system claim will result.

The issue facing the faculty is not whether we are opposed to change, but whether the enormous investment in completely restructuring our instructional offerings, a burden primarily carried by us, is justified to move to a new calendar.

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*Admittedly, few students select a campus based on quarter or semester. Among the top reasons for selecting a college this is, no doubt, in the lower 100. The choice of semester or quarter is a matter of taste. Yale, Brown and Berkeley use semesters; Stanford, Chicago and UCLA use quarters. It is unlikely that more than a dozen students on any of these campuses were influenced in their campus selection by the academic calendar. In fact, most probably were not even aware of the calendar the campus used when they made their choice. The same can also be said of faculty.

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Pro Semesters

Very soon after the UC campuses were forced to adopt quarters in 1966, a sporadic series of initiatives began, especially at Berkeley and UCLA, to move back to semesters.  Berkeley finally moved back in 1983, but UCLA failed to do so and has gradually become more settled into quarters.  In the past decade or so, whenever the calendar issue has been rejoined at UCLA, fierce opposition has been mounted, sometimes by the administration but more often by members of the academic senate, who like to imagine the push to return to semesters is coming “from above.”  We are now, in effect, a broken campus, with some units operating on semesters (Law since 1978 and Medicine since 1987) and the rest on quarters.

The move to quarters was ill-considered in many respects, the spawn not of academic or pedagogic concerns but only of perceived practical necessities (stemming from Tidal Wave I and the push for a year-round calendar).  The frustrations of operating on quarters—at least in the classroom if not administratively—have been for many enormous and without respite.  Through quarters, some have come to argue, we offer a wider variety of goods.  But these are more cheaply fashioned, and delivered as if tossed off a moving vehicle—not because we don’t care, but because driving the vehicle takes too much of our attention.

All of us have tried to make quarters work, with differing degrees of success.  Many have found a way to work effectively within this structure, and when this happens the slight administrative advantages offered by quarters seem all the more compelling.  But there are entire categories of courses that cannot be well taught in quarters, including the very ones through which UCLA aspires to be ranked among the finest research universities in the world.

Graduate seminars under the quarter system always seem to end with a panicked dash to the finish line, leaving most projects incomplete, unpolished, or otherwise disappointing of their promise, leaving behind a battlefield strewn with the corpses of abandoned enquiries, undigested essays and books, and sometimes brilliant ideas left to wither through lack of attention. 

In undergraduate courses under quarters there is no time to focus adequately both on the material being covered and on the difficult path (which many may be undertaking for the first time) toward contributing something of value to the scholarly discourse, whether through research or writing.  The quarter system does not allow enough time for students to consult adequately with faculty, to share developing ideas with a larger group, or to bring more ambitious projects to a satisfying conclusion within a process involving sustained creativity and the too often neglected phases of revision and polishing.  Courses that require both the assimilation of material and the realization of a larger project based on original ideas should be the ones to define the UCLA experience, not the many content-rich courses that squeeze more easily into quarters, important though the latter might be. 

From the local perspective of those who have found their way with quarters, it may seem unfair to be asked to redesign curricula (which will be mandated in any case by other pressing concerns, such as Tidal Wave II).  But these we must respectfully ask to look around at the persistent and vast amount of discontent with quarters among colleagues.  Is it really plausible that converting from quarters to semesters could result in a parallel phenomenon (thus, under semesters: “If only we had less time to pursue this ...”)?  It is, on the face of it, a far easier thing to run a “quarters” course in semesters than the reverse.  Moreover, we all stand to gain tremendously from the decrease in the administrative wheel-spinning that occupies us at each term’s beginning- and end-points, which would be reduced by a third under semesters.

In considering our place in the historical trajectory of the quarters experiment, and knowing that our decisions have consequences for many generations of students and faculty, we ought to base this particularly important decision on some kind of vision of the future.  To be sure, moving to semesters will involve a great deal of work, and we should not commit lightly to undertaking that work.  But this isn’t just about us as individuals, toiling away, blinkered, in narrow furrows defined by habit and convenience.  It is about us within an institution, increasingly integrated with each other and our colleagues at similar institutions.  And, as the report of the joint committee makes clear, both students and faculty stand to gain in myriad ways from being on what has become increasingly entrenched as the default calendar, since many events and programs (conferences, education abroad, internships, etc.) are planned with semesters in mind. 

As a rudimentary form of visualizing UCLA’s alternative futures, we might pretend that we have already made the choice now before us, and try to imagine a future UCLA, perhaps twenty years from now: 

Assuming that we now move to semesters; would there at that later date be a strong effort on campus to reopen the question of the academic calendar?  As documented in the report of the joint committee, national trends are overwhelmingly in the direction of semesters, with no initiatives on the horizon for semester schools desiring to move to quarters.  Since this kind of effort is not evidenced at semester schools now or in the recent past, the answer would seem to be: “Clearly not.”  Moving to semesters would effectively close the books on this issue.

Assuming that we decide to stay with quarters; would there be a strong effort on campus twenty years from now to reopen the question of the academic calendar?  Can anyone seriously doubt that there will be?  This is not a problem that will simply go away. 

Among some of our colleagues, we have sometimes heard a version of the “argument” that semesters may well be better, but that it is too much work to convert.  In our view, this is a shamefully irresponsible position to take; imagine a campus full of professors approaching their individual work in this way, not caring to take the trouble to improve it even though the path toward doing so was clearly marked before them!  UCLA is our collective work, and the legitimate focus for our well-earned pride.  We should not shy away from the effort required to make it the best it can be, and at the very least a place where we can offer the full range of courses expected of a major research university.

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