Standard 2

Standard 2, Achieving Educational Objectives Through Core Functions, is divided into three sections: Teaching and Learning, Scholarship and Creative Activity, and Support for Student Learning. While the portfolio is a systematic presentation of our evidence in these areas, this essay will highlight three main points. After noting some successful outcomes that indicate effective teaching and learning, we will examine in detail two of the contributors to that success: student advising and student engagement. These are included in Criteria 2.11 and 2.12 within Support for Student Learning. One of the most difficult aspects of the Teaching and Learning Criteria is the general education element in 2.2. Later in this essay, we discuss the developments at UC Davis regarding general education.

We begin with some statistics that demonstrate successful teaching and learning at UC Davis. Our surveys indicate that approximately 63% of our students who choose to pursue graduate education obtain their first choice and 19% obtain their second choice of graduate schools. A report tracking June 1999 graduates indicated 79% of our students were employed full time and were working in their first-choice careers. This evidence contributes to our belief that we are fulfilling our educational objectives through our core functions. This belief is further reinforced for most faculty members by their own contact with successful UC Davis alums. Indeed, at the 2000 WASC Annual Meeting, members of the UC Davis team recognized a familiar face across the room. It was the institutional research director for another California university. A mid-1990's alum of the undergraduate curriculum at UC Davis, he earned a Ph.D. from UCLA and was now as engaged in the WASC review process as we were. Thus our students go on to pursue useful careers, and they distinguish themselves as remarkable citizens. From producing television programs such as ER, editing Newsweek, running the California State Department of Education, and preparing institutions of higher learning for accreditation reviews, UC Davis alumni succeed in many arenas.

Aggie Advising

There are many factors that contribute to this success. Among them is advising, which is an area in which we have made important improvements in recent years. The high value we place on multiple levels of advising is a good example of the attention we give to support for student learning. In 1996, the Vice Chancellor-Student Affairs (VCSA) and the Vice Provost-Undergraduate Studies (VPUS) realized that the campus student growth necessitated that we think more holistically about the advising services we provide. Multiple offices have ownership for advising but, at that time, communication among them was limited and somewhat ad hoc. The VCSA and VPUS formed the Undergraduate Advising Council (UAC) that meets once a month. The membership includes all of the associate deans with responsibilities for undergraduates; the associate director of Student Housing, the directors of the Learning Skills Center, Advising Services, and Student Affairs and Research Information; the Internship and Career Center; the chair of the Academic Senate Committee on Educational Policy (CEP); and a student representative assigned by the Associated Students of the University of California, Davis (ASUCD). This group coordinates campuswide advising efforts. UC Davis still has a decentralized, but now very effective, system of advising for our undergraduate students that really begins before students arrive at UC Davis.

To complement personal contacts with prospective students, the print and cyber materials that represent UC Davis are continually updated. We also host numerous information sessions designed to help students and their families make an informed choice. We encourage prospective students to read our websites, come to campus for visits, attend information days, and speak to relevant members of our community. In this way, we hope to attract those students who will be most likely to flourish at UC Davis.

At the UAC's recommendation, the letter that invites newly admitted students and their parents to Summer Advising stresses that this process is an expectation we have for our incoming students. They learn about their majors, the opportunities for double majors and minors, and our internship programs. Summer Advising functions as a crash course in the University's organization. With professional staff in the workroom, they go on-line and register for their fall courses.

Again, following a recommendation of the UAC, we have successfully utilized the residence halls for regular advising during the evening hours. This schedule complements the availability of professional staff advisors housed in the dean's offices during regular hours. Larger, more complicated, majors such as those in engineering and most of the social sciences have professional staff advisors. Smaller, leaner majors rely upon a combination of staff advisors and faculty advising. Most of our special undergraduate programs, e.g., the Davis Honors Challenge and the Education Abroad Center, are staffed by professional student affairs officers (SAOs).

Aggie Engagement

Many recent higher education treatises have identified student engagement as an important indicator of student learning. And in his inaugural address of 1994, Chancellor Larry N. Vanderhoef eloquently challenged the campus community to "be a fully engaged campus". Through numerous co-curricular programs (Criterion 2.11), we foster student engagement. Ample evidence of this can be found. Students participate in over 370 clubs. We have a vibrant, large, and talented multicultural Gospel Choir whose performance venues have included the Sacramento Jazz Festival and Carnegie Hall. We have one of the higher rates of Peace Corps participation in the United States.

UC Davis athletics reflect this high degree of student engagement. We have a very high rate of participation in intramural sports, and our intercollegiate teams are comprised of true student athletes. From water polo to basketball, we have distinguished records in Division II sports. At present, we are carefully considering an invitation to join Division I sports in a Western Conference. If we believe this move suits our educational objectives, then we will make the change. Even our opponents comment on the UC Davis sense of school spirit. The 300-plus members of our spirit club, better known as the Aggie Pack, make our sporting events fun for all.

This engagement is seen in other areas as well. We arrange about 6,000 internships per year, far and away the most significant percentage in the UC system. Although we cannot guarantee every student the exact internship s/he wants, we are rarely unable to find an appropriate match. Similarly, some students who want to study abroad may not get their first choice of countries, but, if they are flexible and meet the criteria for acceptance, they will be able to study abroad. The same is true for our Washington Center and the Bodega Marine Laboratory programs.

Most UC Davis students recognize the importance of pursuing a broad range of curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities. Many of our students enroll in double majors with ostensibly unorthodox pairings such as Chemical Engineering and Comparative Literature. Many others graduate with one or more minors. While it is the case that we do not have an upper division GE requirement, many upper division courses carry GE credit so students are likely to enroll in ambitious courses outside of their majors.

The Evolution of GE at UC Davis

Our emphasis on stressing opportunities and minimizing requirements is key to understanding our approach to general education. Between the multitude of academic offerings and the numerous extracurricular activities, UC Davis is replete with opportunities for students to achieve many of the goals of traditional general education programs. In its 1997 Interim Report on UC Davis, the Commission urged the campus to "insure that by the time of the next WASC visit, there is a comprehensive, functional, viable, and operational general education policy and program in place." Like many colleges and universities, UC Davis has struggled with the design and implementation of a solid GE program. We are quite proud of the uses we have developed for running a surplus nuclear reactor; we are proud of the way we responded to student demand for instruction in Farsi; we are proud of the high placement rates of our students; but we know that our work on developing and delivering a good GE program is incomplete. However, since the Commission's letter in 1997, we have pursued a better alignment of our GE curriculum and our Educational Objectives.

Few faculty members would deny that in the early 1990's UC Davis suffered from major difficulties in the implementation of an effective GE program. Apparently we were not alone, according to the recently published Students in the Balance: General Education in the Research University, a report on the 2001 Symposium on General Education at Pennsylvania State University.

"The presentation and discussions at the first meeting of the symposium all pointed to the conclusion that in balancing their mission of research and specialization with a commitment to General Education, research universities put a heavy emphasis on the former. General Education is not a high or natural priority for many, and perhaps most, members of the academic community. Yet at the same time, institutions advance a philosophy and rhetoric that call for a robust emphasis on General Education, and they do so for the weightiest of reasons: freedom, democracy, and opportunity." ¹

For years faculty from across the UC Davis campus struggled to develop a challenging, coherent GE program. While there was consensus on the broader goals of the curriculum, the devilish details confounded our communities. The diversity and writing requirements were particular sources of angst and aggravation. Undergirding the many discussions of philosophy were core financial and human resource realities. How could we offer a strong curriculum in a timely manner? Students and their parents were understandably upset when our inability to offer sufficient seats in GE courses prevented them from graduating on schedule. So we streamlined our curriculum and increased the number of GE courses. This enabled students to graduate in a more timely fashion. However, many faculty believed we did not try hard enough to make the old curriculum work. Other members of the faculty questioned the premises upon which a GE requirement is based. It should be noted that UC Davis offers a very broad array of undergraduate majors. We have Colleges of Engineering, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, a freestanding Division of Biological Sciences, and within the College of Letters and Sciences, there are three divisions. As this breadth suggests, UC Davis does not embrace a "one-size-fits-all" academic philosophy.

Our institutional research shows that many of our students do not need coercive requirements. They elect to add considerable breadth to their courses. For example, over a third of our students major in the Social Sciences, and they take half of their courses in humanities, science, and engineering. In the context of GE, each major falls into one of the three topical breadth groupings: science and engineering, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Overall, 38% of units taken by UC Davis students are outside of the grouping that contains the student's major. More detailed information is in our on-line portfolio.

In 1999, the Academic Senate leadership began to scrutinize its committee structure to determine if the then-current model was optimal for serving undergraduate education in general and GE in particular. At the graduate level, UC Davis has one council that undertakes the curricular business of the campus's many graduate programs. In contrast, the work of the undergraduate curriculum was under the stewardship of multiple committees with minimal central oversight. Given the success of our Graduate Council, several Senate leaders and senior administrators made the case that we could streamline our efforts by developing a single Academic Senate Undergraduate Council that would connect and help advance the efforts of several committees. Since it represented a departure from business as usual, this process required extensive consultation. However, the change was ratified by the Representative Assembly of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate in June of 2002, and the new council will begin its work in fall 2002. One of the key elements of the new structure is a committee of this council that will focus on General Education.

One of the more auspicious moments in UCD's General Education saga came in spring 2001 when the campus received a $150,000 William & Flora Hewlett Foundation Grant for General Education in Research Universities to improve GE. Improve is a key term here, because there was no campus interest in pursuing a major overhaul of the general education requirement. The full proposal is in the WASC Related Links page, but there are three key components of the grant: 1) renewal; 2) assessment; and 3) new clusters. Renewal is a key feature of that grant, because we wanted to use these external resources to expand programs already supported by our faculty. In particular, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) faculty had organized several GE clusters with an audience of students in Letters & Science humanities and social sciences curricula. While the course clusters were quite attractive, CAES lacked the resources to market them aggressively.

The grant was written after more than a year of focused campus conversations on whether to change the Division of Education into a School of Education and dramatically increase the size of its faculty. Consequently, the grant was written to strengthen the clusters that faculty had already designed and to develop a strong new one in the area of education. We think our most ambitious students will see multiple advantages in the GE Scholars cluster opportunities. We had evidence, albeit anecdotal, from some employers who hire our students that some of them had weak abilities to write and to work in teams. Thus, one component of the grant is dedicated to strengthening the GE writing course requirement.

After we've had more time to implement the grant, we suspect that GE will reflect our approach towards "opportunities" rather than "requirements." Unless a particular college or division chooses to do so, we doubt there will be any major changes in the core GE requirements for graduation. The exception here could prove to be that the courses with the Writing designation will be uniformly stronger as we work with faculty to develop more sophisticated assignments. However, we will strongly advise students to consider taking one of the GE clusters leading to GE Scholars status. This would not be required, but it would be available and we would certainly encourage our most motivated students to choose this route.

While we do not expect that the new Educational Objectives will directly affect specific General Education requirements in the short run, it is likely that, with their emphasis on general education subjects, the objectives will begin to affect the way that all requirements are viewed. Over time this will have an impact.

In this discussion, we have highlighted just three of the many important topics in Standard 2. The portfolio has much more evidence of our commitment to the core functions. Criteria 2.8 and 2.9 deserve comment. The former includes the promotion of instructional innovation. The application of educational technology is one of our Educational Effectiveness self-study topics. Institutional capacity to support that is included in the evidence for Criterion 2.8.

Evidence presented in conjunction with the discussion of Criterion 2.9 demonstrates our capacity to engage students in the research and scholarship of the University, and this is our other educational effectiveness topic.

Reflections

It is Standard 2 that is most concerned with the mission of student learning. We have discussed student engagement and advising as important parts of the process. Bookhead is an Arneson Egghead sculpture poised in front of Shields Library. An upside down head, firmly ensconced in the pages of an open book, it is noteworthy that this was the first of the sculptures the artist prepared for campus. At the same time that the egghead idealizes a total dedication to learning, it also cautions against a learning process that neglects wider engagement.

Robert Arneson, Bookhead, from The Egghead Series, 1991-92, Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection, © UC Regents.

¹ Students in the Balance: General Education in the Research University. The Penn State Symposium on General Education. The Pennsylvania State University 2002 20