The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) last hosted an external review team from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) in 1986. This visit resulted in the extension of its accreditation for an eight-year period. During the summer of 1992, UCSC began anew the cycle of self-assessment in an environment of fiscal uncertainty which continues to cloud the campus's ambitious plans for expansion and development.
Associate Academic Vice Chancellor Mark Traugott was appointed Accreditation Liaison Officer and asked to form a campus Steering Committee, the initial composition of which was as follows:
The campus was notified of the self-study process through electronic bulletins, an official mailing to all faculty and staff, and notices published in the student newspaper. Soon thereafter the Steering Committee began to meet, collect data, and plan its strategy of assessment.
At an October 5, 1992, workshop on the UCSC campus, Steve Weiner, Director of WASC, met with representatives of the campus community including Chancellor Karl Pister and Executive Vice Chancellor R. Michael Tanner. All parties affirmed their commitment to a review process aimed at improving the effectiveness of the institution's efforts to achieve its educational objectives rather than mere compliance with the formal review standards. It was agreed that the Steering Committee would better serve the interests of both UCSC and WASC by interpreting the task defined in the "Handbook of Accreditation" in light of the local context. While the self-study would include an appendix devoted to the standards, its primary focus would be on a limited number of immediately pressing concerns. Restricting the effort expended on responding to the standards would allow a greater depth of inquiry into those issues most directly connected to the current and future direction of UCSC's development. A prospectus for the self-study was prepared, reflecting this approach and identifying issues to be covered. The resulting report is now presented to WASC and to the campus.
INSTITUTIONAL OBJECTIVES
As a center of higher learning funded by the taxpayers of California, UCSC is committed to creating and maintaining, in all aspects of the campus community, a humane educational climate which reflects the state's diversity. It attempts to serve the population of the state, with its wealth of talent, in three primary areas:
True to its founding principles and a quarter-century of experience, Santa Cruz aims to provide instruction of quality for its undergraduate students by combining the breadth of perspective of a liberal arts institution and the opportunity for specialized study with a research-active faculty of recognized distinction.
As a campus of the University of California, UCSC seeks to fulfill its designated role under the provisions of the Master Plan for Higher Education by offering graduate training to prepare the next generation of teachers, researchers, and professionals.
The Santa Cruz campus also strives to advance the state of human knowledge through research and creative activity, confident that its achievements will contribute to the welfare of the citizens whom it serves and will support and enhance the instruction provided in its classrooms. Through programs that disseminate the results of this research to segments of the state's population not directly part of the campus community, UCSC seeks to fulfill its designated role in public service.
The faculty, staff, and students of the University of California at Santa Cruz remain committed to the simultaneous realization of these distinct objectives. In affirming them as worthy goals, this community also recognizes that the three coexist in a state of dynamic tension and that no one goal can be pursued single-mindedly without placing at risk the vitality of the institution of which we are a part.
SETTING A CONTEXT FOR THE WASC REVIEW
UCSC is a young institution still in the process of defining its core values. It is strongly attached to those traits that are seen as distinguishing it most clearly from other institutions of higher learning. From the outset, it aimed at providing a unique educational setting for undergraduates that emphasized small, student-oriented residential colleges capable of creating a sense of intimacy within a large and sophisticated university. The majority of teaching was to be conducted in small seminars; evaluation of students was to take place through individualized, faculty-authored narrative descriptions of student performance rather than through letter grades.
These features were expressive of the ethos that guided the campus in its early years and that remains an important point of reference for its educational aspirations. But, with the increase in the scale and complexity of UCSC and the evolution of its faculty and student body over the past twenty-eight years, the meaning and role of these institutional features have changed. The college system has undergone major redefinition on at least three occasions, most recently in the form of a 1991 administrative reorganization. Despite these changes, the role of the colleges in the academic curriculum has never been fully resolved.
Under pressure of declining enrollments in the 1970s, the narrative evaluation system was modified to permit students to request a letter grade (in addition to an evaluation) in all upper-division courses. But, while discursive evaluations remain a nearly universal aspect of student assessment at UCSC, questions have continued to arise periodically concerning their appropriateness and feasibility in large classes and in situations where teaching assistants, and not faculty, are the only ones who know a student's work well enough to provide a grounded assessment.
The innovative aspects of UCSC's founding conception were intended to produce a more balanced allocation of faculty time between undergraduate and graduate students' needs and the faculty's own research and creative activities than has been true in many research universities. In fact, because the growth of the campus was arrested by changing demographic and economic conditions before much of the intended graduate component could be set in place, this campus served an overwhelmingly undergraduate population for its first fifteen years. The founding cohort of faculty became (and remains) strongly attached to the ideal of excellence in undergraduate education; concerns specific to graduate study were not as strongly supported or clearly understood in the initial period of campus growth.
Another artifact from this time period is an uneven distribution of graduate programs across divisions, with a heavy concentration in the natural sciences. Some believe there has been a corresponding unevenness in faculty workload, the allocation of fiscal and physical resources, and support for faculty research and creative activities. Graduate students in certain programs experience a much higher degree of career success than in others, for too often boards lack the critical mass necessary to provide sufficient educational and social support mechanisms, especially for underrepresented groups.
Only in the past decade has rapid growth resumed and brought in new cohorts of faculty and students. With this change, the campus has been forced to redefine its objectives. Today it seeks to maintain the quality of its undergraduate instruction as an increasing share of its attention and resources is devoted to creating the graduate and professional degree programs necessary to move it toward the goal of becoming a full-fledged member of the UC system. These trends have raised concerns about faculty workload, class size, the evaluation of teaching, and the quantity of extramural support.
Undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and research and creative activities interact in complex ways. Undergraduate enrollments generate teaching assistantships, but boards that do not have graduate programs must recruit their teaching assistants (TAs) elsewhere. The modest number and size of our graduate programs have made it both possible and necessary for this campus to rely on teaching assistantships as a primary means of supporting graduate students. Few opportunities for graduate research assistantships and traineeships have existed (particularly outside the natural sciences), even though these are less demanding of graduate students than teaching and may accelerate time to graduation.
If UCSC is to achieve its research mission, it is crucial that it provide an environment that encourages scholarship. It must create a setting that not only enables junior faculty members to successfully launch their careers and achieve tenure, but is also conducive to the lifelong maintenance of research and creativity by senior faculty. Appropriate space and infrastructure, mentorship and guidance in the tenure process, the availability of teaching and research assistantships, reasonable teaching loads, and service expectations that are in proportion to other responsibilities-all enhance productivity.
During the 1990s, students, faculty, and staff will all experience the tensions and conflicts generated by the institution's attempt to achieve simultaneous excellence in these differentiated aspects of its mission. The tradeoffs with which all groups will inevitably have to contend are of special importance at the time of this self-study, as the next eight-year accreditation review will take place just as the campus is slated to reach "buildout" (expected around the year 2005) at the agreed-upon upper limit of approximately 15,000 students. Soon, the most crucial of the campus's structural choices will have been settled.
DIVERSITY
Diversity is an issue of special concern at UCSC. The state's changing demographics make it imperative for the University of California in general and our campus in particular to serve and be enriched by an increasingly diverse population. We aspire to create a campus community where all individuals will feel welcomed, supported, and respected, and where they will be able to contribute to and gain from membership in that community.
The Steering Committee has attempted to characterize the state of campus initiatives in this area and to assess the relative successes and failures that recruitment efforts aimed at diversifying faculty, staff, and both undergraduate and graduate student bodies have produced. A related but distinct set of issues is posed by the differential retention and promotion of faculty and staff and the differential rates of progress to degree among students.
While the concerns just outlined are common to every public institution of higher education in the State of California, there are questions specific to the local context that are important to raise. Not only have UCSC's non-urban setting and non-traditional orientation been seen as raising potential obstacles to its diversification efforts, but certain structural elements of the campus organization also appear to be significant. The Steering Committee's intention was to go beyond the typical quantitative measures of success, examining the experiential dimension of different groups' participation in the campus community and thus providing a benchmark in the ongoing effort to diversify the university.
THE SELF-STUDY PROCESS
The Steering Committee used the set of issues sketched above to guide its work. It met on a nearly weekly schedule throughout much of the 1992-93 academic year. Lead writers and conveners, drawn from among members of the Steering Committee, were appointed to work with subcommittees on specific sections of the self-study. Students, faculty, and staff with appropriate expertise were asked to participate in the subcommittees or to serve as consultants. The subcommittees unearthed statistics, requested interviews, conducted surveys, held discussion groups, and prepared draft reports, which were then submitted to the Steering Committee as well as to appropriate individuals and bodies on campus.
A draft version of this self-study was widely circulated in late fall 1993 and early winter 1994, and campus comment was actively solicited. A partial list of recipients includes Chancellor Pister, Executive Vice Chancellor Tanner, the relevant Senate committees, divisional deans, board chairs, the Student Union Assembly, the Graduate Student Association, the heads of relevant student service and administrative units, the Staff Advisory Council, consultants to the Steering Committee, WASC, and the chair and vice-chair of the external review team. In addition, copies were made available at both McHenry Library and the Science Library, as well as being posted electronically on the campus InfoSlug network. A large amount of useful feedback was received during the review period and subsequently incorporated, to the extent possible, into a substantial revision of the self-study.
In its work, the Steering Committee also paid special attention to the nine recommendations made by the 1986 WASC review. Those concerning undergraduate and general education, colleges, and efforts to increase diversity on campus have been addressed in specific sections of the self-study; core courses are discussed in both the "Colleges" and "General Education" sections; concern about the accuracy of information contained in the General Catalog is covered in "Reflections" and in WASC Standard 1.C.1; faculty distribution is discussed in "Teaching"; and retention issues are included in "Advising."