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Executive Summary      Introduction      Principles of General Education for UCLA      The Categories of Knowledge      The New General Education Curriculum: Courses and Requirements          Writing and General Education          Quantitative Reasoning and General Education          Foreign Languages and General Education          The Distribution of General Education Courses          The Interdisciplinary Course Cluster          The Structure of the First-Year Cluster          Academic Socialization          Single-Quarter General Education Courses      Governance of General Education      Selection of GE Courses and Course Criteria      Graduate Student Instructors      Teacher Training      Students and the New GE: Orientation, Counseling, and Courseload      Costs and Financing for the New GE      Conclusion

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Executive Summary
After two years of intensive study, the members of this Workgroup unanimously recommend that UCLA undertake a fundamental change of its General Education (GE) curriculum. The proposed new curriculum will make general education requirements simpler, fewer, more coherent, and clearer in purpose than is currently the case. We urge that it be required of all UCLA under-graduates who begin as freshmen.

The centerpiece of the new program is the First-Year Cluster, a team-taught interdisciplinary series of courses that extends throughout the freshman year. Students will choose one cluster from among the ten or more offered in a given year. Each cluster will be devoted to a broad theme such as "the global environment" or "the democratic experience" and grounded in a set of intellectual principles that emphasizes the importance of general knowledge, integrative learning, citizenship, cultural diversity, primary works, and basic skills. During the fall and winter, instruction in the clusters will consist of lecture courses taught in concert with discussion sections and English composition tutorials. In the spring, each student will enroll in one of a number of small satellite seminars, whose topics radiate from the cluster themes.

Beyond the First-Year Cluster, students will fulfill the remainder of the GE requirement by taking a maximum of 11 single-quarter courses, each of which will reside in one of three interdisciplinary categories: the "North" (arts, humanities, and social sciences), the "South" (engineering, health sciences, mathematics, and natural sciences), and a "Bridge" category linking the first two. English composition, quantitative reasoning, and foreign languages will become part of the GE curriculum.

To oversee the new GE, the Provost has appointed a faculty chair of general education, who reports to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and will be guided by a GE Advisory Committee with 21 members. The committee's 15 faculty and four student members will be appointed by the appropriate governance agencies. The other members will represent the campus library and counseling staffs. The Advisory Committee will review proposals for all GE courses and forward outstanding ones to the Undergraduate Council for official action. Successful proposals will show careful thought about the purposes of general education, attention to basic skills such as critical thinking, writing, rhetorical effectiveness, information literacy, and creative expression; inclusion of faculty with outstanding undergraduate teaching records; emphasis, where appropriate, on cultural diversity; consideration of historical perspective; and reliance on primary works.

About half of the new curriculum’s costs will be financed by resources from Honors and Undergraduate Programs now used for other purposes and from the current English composition requirement. The net new costs of GE will be covered entirely by additional state revenues that UCLA expects to receive in the form of added student FTEs. The new funding will enable UCLA to double its writing requirement, create new TA positions, and finance course releases for cluster faculty.

We are confident that the new GE curriculum will make undergraduate learning at UCLA general in the best sense. It will encourage students to ask pivotal questions while preparing them for further study, productive work, and active participation in a democratic, multicultural society.


Introduction
After two years of intensive study and consultation, the eight faculty and three student members of this Workgroup unanimously recommend that UCLA undertake a fundamental change of its general education curriculum. As the quality of undergraduate education becomes an increasingly critical public issue, we have the opportunity to make our institution a model for research universities nationwide by taking a new approach to the early years of college study.

The new system we propose will make general education requirements simpler, fewer, more coherent, and clearer in purpose than is currently the case; its centerpiece will be a series of team-taught interdisciplinary clusters of courses devoted to broad themes such as "the global environment," "the democratic experience," and "myths and mythology." These clusters will be designed not only to introduce students to key areas of knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences and engineering, but to help them prepare for life in a democratic and multicultural society.

Under the new curriculum, students will take a maximum of 14 general education courses instead of the 17 currently required. Included in these totals are the English composition, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language requirements, which for students in the College of Letters and Science have traditionally been separate from general education. We recommend making these requirements part of the GE curriculum. Three of the general education courses will belong to a First-Year Cluster, and all freshmen will choose one of the ten or more clusters offered each year. Students will complete the remainder of the general education program by taking single-quarter courses similar, in many cases, to those now given by individual departments. All general education courses will be lower division offerings in one of three categories of knowledge: the "North" (arts, humanities, and social sciences); "South" (engineering, health sciences, mathematics, and natural sciences); and a "Bridge" category linking the first two. We recommend that these requirements apply not only to the College but to the three professional schools with lower division students: Arts and Architecture; Engineering and Applied Science; and Theater, Film, and Television.

Why are members of the GE Workgroup unanimous in the belief that UCLA’s general education curriculum must be transformed? An extensive analysis of our current system as well as GE programs at other universities has convinced us that minor changes will not suffice. Although many of our existing GE courses are excellent, the program as a whole lacks coherence and a strong intellectual rationale. It provides no systematic basis for ensuring that GE courses will complement one another or that the knowledge learned in one class will build on or prepare for the intellectual experiences of others. Instead of providing students with an integrated perspective on certain key realms of knowledge, general education at UCLA is a large and loosely structured set of departmental offerings designed to introduce undergraduates to particular academic disciplines. Such introductory work is essential, but a variety of basic courses does not assure students a strong general education. It is time now to redesign the early years of undergraduate study.

In considering how to reshape UCLA’s GE program, we looked carefully at the variety of general education curricula in prominent American universities. (See Supplemental Document A.) On one extreme is Brown University, which does not have a general education program: students take electives and courses in their majors without fulfilling any breadth requirements. On the other extreme is the core curriculum for which Columbia University is known. There, all students take essentially the same sequences of courses in their first two years. Neither of these models seemed appropriate to UCLA. We believed it important that our students take some foundational courses and be exposed systematically to the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. As for the core curriculum, we found it too limiting, too narrow to enable undergraduates to take advantage of the range of knowledge and research interests our distinguished faculty represents.

Between these extremes, we discovered a large number of GE programs involving "distribution requirements"; similar to our own in which students take one or more courses from each of several distinct categories. Such curricula assure a certain amount of breadth, but they do so at the expense of coherence and intellectual depth. We also found a variety of interdisciplinary curricula, but only rarely at large research universities like our own. GE programs tend to be entirely interdisciplinary mainly in small colleges and universities where departmental barriers are relatively fluid.

The Workgroup found itself drawn to interdisciplinary approaches to general education, but not to the exclusion of courses given by individual departments. The quality and diversity of our faculty and the wide variety of disciplines they represent enable us to give students the best of both worlds: an interdisciplinary sequence of courses in the freshman year complemented by single-quarter departmental GE courses taken over six to nine quarters. The new GE program we recommend draws, therefore, on the interdisciplinary core curricula for which certain small colleges and universities are known without sacrificing the disciplinary scope and specificity characteristic of large research institutions.

Interdisciplinary courses speak strongly to the special purpose of general education, as distinct from other parts of the undergraduate curriculum. That purpose is grounded in the belief that a university education should concern itself not only with specialized knowledge in individual disciplines, but with broad questions that engage people as citizens and human beings. Thus, in addition to preparing students for further study, both in their majors at UCLA and in graduate and professional schools, an interdisciplinary curriculum will accomplish two other crucial but often neglected goals. It will provide the skills and understanding that promote informed citizenship and give students the general knowledge and intellectual flexibility needed for a rapidly changing world of work. Goals such as these invite methods of teaching and learning that focus on conceptual and thematic connections among a variety of discourses, methods, and ways of knowing.

A large body of recent research gives us confidence in the potential of such interdisciplinary work. In studies of undergraduates nationwide, Alexander Astin and others have shown that interdisciplinary courses hasten intellectual growth by enhancing knowledge of particular fields and disciplines, improving critical thinking and communication skills, and preparing students for further academic or professional study. In addition, students who take interdisciplinary courses register higher satisfaction with most aspects of the undergraduate experience than those who do not.

As valuable as interdisciplinary work can be, we nonetheless recognize the great importance of courses in individual academic fields. Such courses allow undergraduates to complement the thematic breadth of their interdisciplinary clusters with more focused inquiries into particular fields. By combining these two approaches to general education, we will give our students a curriculum that will be generalin the best sense. Such a curriculum will encourage undergraduates to ask the large questions fundamental to social, political, and cultural life, to individual psychology and behavior, to the meaning and methods of science, and to the nature and implications of artistic work.


Principles of General Education for UCLA
In its most basic sense, general education is the portion of the undergraduate program devoted neither to a departmental major nor to freely-chosen electives. It originated in the late nineteenth century as a counterpoise to the specialized majors that had become the core of the university curriculum. In the twentieth century, general education has been assigned various functions, often in response to perceived strains in the national culture. At present, it is commonly viewed in the context of national concern over such issues as the fragmentation of knowledge, the loss of shared values, and an increasing emphasis on professional specialization.

What role should general education play at UCLA, now and in the years to come? A general education curriculum should introduce the sources, assumptions, and methods central to distinct fields of inquiry while encouraging exploration of possible connections among those different fields. General education courses should also strengthen basic intellectual skills, among them writing, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and information literacy. But they should do so in ways that point beyond both basic skills and professional preparation to a broader and more comprehensive exploration of what it means to be well-educated.

Our proposal does not specify the content of the GE curriculum; that responsibility should lie with the faculty who will design and teach General Education courses. Instead, we advance an overall framework for the program and a set of intellectual principles that we urge our colleagues to keep in mind as they conceptualize their courses. The principles listed below will apply in different ways to the different kinds of GE courses described in subsequent parts of this proposal. They are meant to help faculty formulate readings, writing assignments, problem sets, creative exercises, and methods of instruction in ways that will give students a firm basis for further study, productive work, and active participation in a democratic and multicultural society. These principles include:

General Knowledge: the importance of developing general knowledge so that students are familiar with an ample spectrum of learning in the natural and social sciences, engineering, arts, and humanities. General knowledge extends beyond facts to include paradigms and ways of knowing central to these intellectual domains.

Integrative Learning: the value of developing a broad and inclusive context for lifelong education by learning to compare different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives and to appreciate the power of synthesis and the ways in which contrasting approaches can illuminate a problem or set of issues.

Citizenship: the ability to function as an independent individual prepared to assume both the responsibilities of citizenship and the demands of leadership in a complex, democratic society.

Cultural Diversity: the need to expose students to a diversity of cultural perspectives with the aim of enhancing understanding and tolerance of difference while illuminating the values, ideas, and goals that distinct individuals and groups hold in common.

Primary Works: the importance of studying primary sources and works of enduring value while recognizing that individuals and cultures will differ over what constitutes a significant work and that the estimation of quality, beauty, and timelessness often changes from one place or period to another.

Intellectual Skills: the importance of teaching intellectual skills, not in isolation, but in the context of rich academic subject matter. These skills include:

• basic tools: writing, reading, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language;
• critical thinking: the ability to make critical and logical assessments of the evidence at hand, whether that evidence be texts, images, performances, artifacts, or the findings of research;
• problem-solving: the ability to determine what knowledge is needed and how to acquire it, and to use that knowledge to describe and solve a problem, even in the face of ambiguity or incomplete information;
• rhetorical effectiveness: the ability to frame and deliver a reasoned and persuasive argument in speech and writing;
• library and information literacy: the ability to search, select, organize, and manage relevant information from a variety of sources, both traditional and digital;
• creativity and artistic expression: the ability to express and interpret thought and emotion in the different arts—musical, visual, and literary—and to appreciate how works of beauty and aesthetic power give life meaning and pleasure.

The Categories of Knowledge
To make the principles of general education an everyday reality of undergraduate instruction at UCLA, we must develop a curriculum at once interdisciplinary and grounded in distinct categories of knowledge. We propose, therefore, to structure the diversity of learning represented at UCLA into three broad categories, categories that acknowledge the distinctions between arts, humanities, and social sciences on the one hand, and natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering on the other, while seeking to bridge UCLA’s divide between the north and south campus.

The first or "North" category—arts, humanities, and social sciences—includes all subject matter normally taught by Letters & Science departments and interdepartmental programs on the north campus, and by the Schools of Arts and Architecture; Law; Management; Education and Information Studies; Public Policy and Social Research and Theater, Film, and Television. Given the breadth of knowledge represented by this category, the size of its GE requirement should be somewhat larger than that of the other two. The second or "South" category — engineering, health sciences, mathematics, and natural sciences — includes the subject matter normally taught by the College’s south-campus programs and by the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, and Dentistry. The third or "Bridge" category spans the first two, providing the link between North and South and, in effect, unifying the students’ experience of UCLA.

In recommending these three categories, we have not treated the divisions of the College as separate intellectual domains. Distinctions created for legitimate administrative purposes between "humanities" and "social sciences" on the one hand and "life sciences" and "physical sciences" on the other do not accurately reflect the state of teaching and research as actually practiced at UCLA. Historians (division of social sciences) have as much in common with humanists as with social scientists; faculty in language departments (humanities) regularly engage in sociological or anthropological study; and cultural anthropologists (social sciences) have been profoundly affected by semiotics and other forms of literary theory. Increasingly, humanists and social scientists find themselves linked by common theoretical concerns and interested in many of the same objects of study: culture, race, ethnicity, politics, among a great many other phenomena.

In the sciences, it is difficult to consider biology (life sciences) and biochemistry (physical sciences) as two distinct intellectual realms. Mathematics (physical sciences) is crucial to all the sciences, and cell and molecular biologists (life sciences) can hardly divorce their teaching and research from physics and chemistry (physical sciences). Although there is growing convergence between faculty on the north and south campus - economists who do mathematical modeling, computer scientists interested in design, neuroscientists preoccupied with the meaning of consciousness - it nonetheless seemed important to maintain the distinction between the natural sciences and other fields. The extent to which current research has blurred traditional contrasts between the north and south campus will form, in part, the basis of the Bridge courses.


The New General Education Curriculum: Courses and Requirements
The design of the proposed curriculum will enable us to fulfill the principles and goals of general education discussed above. It mixes interdisciplinary course clusters with stand-alone one-quarter classes, permitting students to experience a wide but balanced range of methodologies, ways of thinking, and subject matter, while learning the relevant intellectual skills. To satisfy the GE requirement, students will take a maximum of 14 general education courses (including what are now five separate course requirements in English composition, foreign languages, and quantitative reasoning). Three of these courses will belong to the First-Year Cluster, eight will be single-quarter GE courses, and the other three will be in foreign languages. As a rule, GE courses will carry five units of credit, except for foreign languages, which will continue to carry four.


Writing and General Education
Because writing is fundamental to all academic work, the general education program will make a special effort to develop writing skills. We propose to do so in two ways: by having all clusters assign substantial amounts of writing and by requiring that all students take two single-quarter GE courses specially designed to teach English composition. UCLA’s existing one-course writing requirement is by far the smallest of any University of California campus. By emphasizing writing in the clusters and doubling the College’s current English composition requirement, our proposal will bring UCLA’s commitment to writing instruction up to the UC norm.

One of the main pedagogical purposes of the First-Year Clusters will be to give freshmen writing experience in the fields these courses represent. Each quarter, students will write at least three papers on topics presented in the clusters; TAs will evaluate those papers for both content and form. In the small discussion sections central to each cluster, students will have the opportunity to discuss their papers and the subject matter they present. To give students additional help, writing tutorials staffed by tutors from the College of Letters and Science will be associated with each cluster.

Most single-quarter English composition courses will be taught by humanities departments and modeled in part on the current Humanities 2 sequence, a series of courses that fulfill the existing College writing requirement. Humanities 2 uses the study of literature to teach expository writing, offering two hours of lecture and two or three hours of small class meetings per week. In those small groups, students learn subject matter in large part by writing about it under the close supervision of a writing instructor. The new writing courses will function in a similar way, except that the subject matter will not necessarily be great works of fiction. Any humanities department may offer such courses as long as they are designed to give students formal instruction in English composition.

Although most students will take their writing courses in the humanities, where writing has traditionally been taught, we propose that a small number of courses outside the humanities be created to teach English composition as well. Such courses would enable some students to take one of their two writing courses in the natural or social sciences. Like the humanities writing courses, these other courses must have as one of their principal goals the development of students’ writing skills; to develop those skills, faculty must follow the guidelines established for all writing courses. Given the relatively slight experience of teaching English composition outside the humanities, the number of non-humanities writing courses will be limited.

It is important to note that UCLA Writing Programs will be crucial to the expanded writing requirement. In addition to teaching many of the courses, faculty from the Program will play a major role in training TAs from a variety of departments to serve as writing instructors. In some cases, regular faculty and Writing Programs faculty will work together to design and teach the new writing courses.


Quantitative Reasoning and General Education
Like writing, quantitative reasoning is central to general education. We propose, therefore, that the existing quantitative reasoning requirement, with modifications to be determined by a faculty workgroup, become part of the new GE curriculum. Students can fulfill this requirement either by taking particular courses in math or statistics or by selecting one of a group of additional courses designed to develop quantitative skills through subject matter in a variety of disciplines. These single-quarter GE courses will be analogous to writing courses in their focus on building a crucial intellectual skill. The faculty workgroup charged with improving instruction in quantitative reasoning will review existing courses, formulate an explicit set of criteria and objectives for instruction in this area, and determine the number of units these courses should carry.


Foreign Languages and General Education
Because the study of a foreign language is crucial to general education, we propose to regard it as part of the new GE curriculum. Language instruction introduces students to cultures different from their own and enhances citizenship by enabling people to communicate across linguistic divides. In a recent review, the Academic Senate confirmed the importance of the foreign language requirement, and the GE Workgroup endorses the Senate’s action. Students who enter UCLA without the equivalent of level 3 of a foreign language should take language courses as early as possible in their university careers; doing so opens the possibility of developing greater proficiency through upper-division work.


The Distribution of General Education Courses
Students required to take the full GE curriculum of 14 courses will have five in the North category (two of them writing courses for most students), three in the South, two in the Bridge, one in quantitative reasoning, and three in a foreign language. The minimum number of GE courses is nine—four North, three South, and two Bridge—for entering students with advanced placement credit in English, proficiency in quantitative reasoning, and the equivalent of level 3 of a foreign language.

The distribution of single-quarter courses will depend on what clusters students take. Table I (page 10) portrays the GE programs for students who place out of none of the GE requirements. The first row, for example, depicts the distribution of single-quarter courses for students who choose a First-Year Cluster in the North category. They will take two single-quarter courses in the North (which in most cases must be humanities classes that emphasize expository writing), three in the South, and two in the Bridge in addition to their quantitative and foreign language requirements.


Table I Distribution of Single-Quarter Courses by Category (Maximum Requirement)

First-Year Cluster Taken	North†	South	Bridge	Quantitative Reasoning	Foreign Language	Total GE courses
North (3 courses)	2	3	2	1	3	14
South (3 courses)*	5	0	2	1	3	14
Bridge (3 courses)^	4 or 5^	3 or 2^	0	1	3	14

† For most students, two of these courses will be humanities writing courses.

*Because students in the life sciences (except those in general psychology and cognitive science) take a four-quarter interdisciplinary sequence of core courses in the sciences, they will be encouraged to take their cluster either in the Bridge or North categories.

^The third quarter of the Bridge Cluster will be designated as either a North or South seminar. Students whose third-quarter seminar belongs to the North category of knowledge will take 4 single-quarter courses in the North and 3 single-quarter courses in the South. Students whose third-quarter seminar belongs to the South category will take 5 single-quarter courses in the North and 2 in the South.

In terms of total GE units, students taking the maximum requirement would earn 66 or 67 (15 in the clusters; another 35 in the single-quarter North, South, and Bridge courses; four or five in quantitative reasoning; and 12 in foreign languages). The minimum requirement would total 45 units (15 in the clusters and another 30 in the single-quarter North, South, and Bridge courses since these students would take only one writing course). By comparison, in the College the current GE system, including English composition, quantitative reasoning, and foreign languages, totals 68 units and 17 courses. Table II compares maximum course and unit requirements in the proposed GE with those of the existing requirements in the College (87% of undergraduates) as well as the three schools with lower-division programs.


Table II Comparison of Proposed GE Requirements with Existing Requirements (Maximum Requirements)

	Proposed GE Requirements	Existing GE, Including Other Requirements
		L & S	A & A	SEAS	TFT
General Subject Matter Courses	8	12	8	7	10
Writing Courses	2	1	2	1	2
Quantitative Reasoning Courses	1	1	1	part of major	0
Foreign Language Courses	3	3	3		3
Other					3 (literature)
Total Courses	14	17	14	8	18
Total Units	(66-67)	(68)	(56)	(32)	(72)

L & S = College of Letters and Science

A & A = School of Arts and Architecture

SEAS = School of Engineering and Applied Science

TFT = School of Theater, Film, and Television

The Interdisciplinary Course Cluster
The centerpiece of the proposed new curriculum is the interdisciplinary First-Year Cluster, which consists of two quarters of lecture and discussion and a one-quarter seminar. The ability to pursue a topic over three consecutive quarters will permit students to develop a firm grounding in the material, explore subject matter in greater depth than is possible in a single quarter, and build a community of learners who will benefit from sustained intellectual exchange. When the new GE program reaches its steady state, we recommend that it offer approximately 15 clusters each year—five to seven in the North category, three or four in the South, and five to seven in the Bridge. In the first few years of the new GE curriculum, the number of clusters should be limited to 10 or 12, given the resources required to establish them and the time needed for faculty to become accustomed to team teaching. Our ability to take advantage of UCLA’s size and richness by offering choice among a range of clusters distinguishes the proposed GE program from the fixed core curricula that often exist at smaller colleges and universities.

Examples of cluster topics include the following possibilities, which we present for illustrative purposes only; they are meant neither to prescribe the development of actual courses nor to represent their full range or character. In the North category, one cluster might be devoted to citizenship and ethnicity in the United States, taking as its central problem the question of what it means, and has meant, to be an American. Those teaching in the cluster might approach the subject matter from perspectives that link sociological and anthropological theory with literary interpretation, constitutional law, and historical analysis. In preparing and teaching such a sequence of courses, faculty members from sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, English, foreign languages, law, history, and other fields would collaborate in an effort that emphasizes the points of convergence or conflict among their different fields. Another North campus cluster might be devoted to myths and fictions; it would focus each year on a particular literary theme such as "stage of life" narratives in, for example, Native American myths, the Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, David Copperfield, and Jill Conway’s The Road from Coorain. Faculty from English, the language departments, classics, philosophy, history, and the arts would be involved. A third cluster might consider the theater as a projection of political power by examining Greek drama, French drama of the reign of Louis XIV, and the Chinese dramatic tradition. This cluster would be taught by faculty from theater arts, history, political science, classics, and various language departments. A fourth cluster might take up the meaning and nature of democracy and include faculty from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and law. A fifth would consider the immigrant experience from the perspectives of literature, anthropology, law, history and other disciplines. A final example would be a cluster that examines the interplay among literary, pictorial, and musical art-forms taught by faculty from a variety of departments in the arts and humanities.

In the South category, students might take a cluster on evolution beginning with the origin and evolution of the physical universe and extending to the evolution of life, and, ultimately, the human species itself. Another possibility is "The Earth’s Physical Environment," which would incorporate the study of the earth from the perspectives of geologists, atmospheric scientists, and oceanographers. A third would be a cluster on the nature and meaning of the scientific enterprise that introduces students to scientific reasoning, the nature of scientific discovery, the relationship between science and technology, and the limits and possibilities of scientific knowledge. Another possibility would be a course devoted to the "Mathematical Order of the Natural World" taught by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. In such a cluster, a chemist might illustrate proportion and ratios, systems of units, and very large or small numbers, while a physicist could address the concepts of derivatives and rates using the notions of velocity and acceleration. An astronomer might discuss distance measurements of nearby stars, and a geologist could illustrate growth and decay using natural radioactivity and the opportunities it presents for understanding age determinations and the problems of nuclear waste.

The goal of the Bridge category is to encourage students to explore the interaction between the sciences and other key aspects of culture and society. In Bridge courses, students might consider the social and cultural implications of scientific discovery and technological change or explore the extent to which science and technology both create and resolve global problems such as pollution, malnutrition, overpopulation, and disease. They could analyze the ways in which political and cultural imperatives shape scientific research, or consider how works of imagination can inspire scientific breakthroughs and technological change.

To prevent Bridge courses from becoming overly general and diffuse, faculty teaching them may want to focus on a particular scientific or technological trend (e.g., genetic engineering, the computer revolution, or climate change), and then examine the economic, social, legal, historical or cultural consequences of that trend. An alternative would be to structure such a course around an illuminating contrast such as "nature and technology" or an intriguing parallel such as "modernist literature and early twentieth-century revolutions in the physical sciences." One example of a Bridge cluster would be a sequence of courses on the information revolution that brings together faculty from sociology, computer science, design, and psychology, among other disciplines. Such a cluster might consider how the explosion of information has affected everything from individual psychology to social structures. In a cluster on the concept of energy, a physicist might define and illustrate the concept while an engineering professor examines it from a technological perspective. An historian might then examine the origin of the concept and its relationship to the scientific and industrial revolutions, after which a specialist in art or literature considers how the human imagination has represented energy, and a political scientist addresses the increasingly important politics of energy. Another cluster could be devoted to human biology and focus on the nature and meaning of human life as defined by evolutionary principles, genetics, socio-cultural attributes, language acquisition, and creative expression. It might be taught by faculty from arts, anthropology, biology, law, medicine, and philosophy.

In all three categories, cluster courses will be designed to stretch students’ minds beyond the confines of any given discipline and encourage them to consider global and inclusive views of key events, phenomena, ideas, and methods. The joint efforts of the faculty involved would emphasize the points of intersection and opposition among their different fields. Where theory, methods, and findings diverge, students might learn how different approaches can complement one another or investigate the implications of the intellectual dissonances that separate them.

As faculty members collaborate over a number of years, they are likely to incorporate into their own thinking and teaching many of the ideas, methods, and theories of their colleagues from other parts of the University. In some cases, these teaching collaborations will spawn interdisciplinary research partnerships that would not have developed on their own. In others, faculty who already work together in IDPs, ORUs, and other interdisciplinary units will develop clusters based on existing research projects and pedagogical concerns. Our goal is not merely to field courses taught by professorial coalitions whose members represent their own individual fields of inquiry. Rather, it is to encourage faculty members to reach beyond the traditional concerns of their own departments to embrace new ways of knowing. In doing so, they will be able to create an experience of general education broader and richer than the one students now receive.


The Structure of the First-Year Cluster
Each cluster will be led by a coordinator (or two co-coordinators) appointed by a GE Advisory Committee (see below). The individuals selected for this role will be distinguished teacher-scholars who give conceptual leadership to general education and lend substantial prestige to the program. Coordinators will assume primary responsibility for planning and organizing the cluster; they will also give a portion of the lectures, teach one honors discussion section and one third-quarter seminar, and supervise the graduate instructors assigned to the cluster. These responsibilities may constitute the coordinators’ entire teaching load.

Other members of a cluster team include additional faculty members (usually two or three) to share the teaching during fall and winter quarters; ten graduate student instructors to lead discussion sections and some spring quarter seminars; an average of ten supplemental faculty selected from emeriti, the professional schools, and the Honors Collegium to teach third-quarter seminars; staff from the Library and counseling/tutorial services; and one graduate technology consultant to assist with the on-line and multimedia aspects of the clusters. The figure on the following page represents the structure of the cluster team.

Graduate Student Instructors (10)	Other Cluster Faculty Teaching in Fall and Winter (average 3)	Librarian
	CLUSTER COORDINATOR
Counseling and Tutorial Staff	Supplemental Faculty for Third-Quarter Seminars (10)	Graduate Technology Consultant

We propose the following format for First-Year Clusters: the first two quarters will consist of three hours of large-group lectures per week, complemented by two-hour section meetings of about 20 students. Most discussion sections will be led by teaching associates and teaching fellows, although faculty may teach them as well. In the third quarter of the First-Year Cluster, students will enroll in one of a number of small "satellite" seminars, each of whose topics radiates from the general cluster theme. The cluster on the nature and meaning of democracy might, for example, have seminars devoted to subjects such as the classical heritage, Enlightenment political theory, literature and freedom of expression, multiculturalism and democracy, or the formation of new democratic societies. In principle, there could be as many different topics as seminars, or only a single topic for all seminars, or something between these extremes. Those leading third-quarter seminars will include cluster faculty, emeriti, faculty from the professional schools, and teaching fellows. In addition, a number of Honors Collegium courses will function as third-quarter seminars, providing additional opportunities for freshmen to take small classes with ladder faculty. Table III depicts the weekly class meetings of each cluster:


Table III Structure of the First-Year Cluster

Fall (five units)	Winter (five units)	Spring (five units)
Lecture—3 hours Discussion Section—2 hrs Writing Tutorial	Lecture—3 hours Discussion Section—2 hrs Writing Tutorial	Seminar—3 hrs Writing Tutorial

With approximately 20 students each, the third-quarter seminars will provide every UCLA student with an especially powerful opportunity to profit from the intimate learning experience that only such a small forum can provide (see Supplemental Document F). Small group instruction permits students to engage directly with the material at hand and allows them to work collaboratively with one another and to benefit from discussion and debate. All seminar leaders will work intensively with their students on writing and encourage the development of critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, logical argumentation, and other intellectual skills. Librarians and the Graduate Technology Consultants will help cluster faculty and instructors develop students’ research abilities, enabling them to understand and make use of the explosion of information available on-line. In this context, students will be encouraged to work closely with primary source materials—literature, philosophy, works of art, music, historical documents and the like—or with concrete problems requiring quantitative analysis.

To reinforce the small-group experience, we recommend use of the Web to create virtual learning communities parallel to the GE program’s seminars and discussion sections. These virtual groups will extend the academic experience beyond the limits of the traditional classroom and strengthen intellectual relationships that in some cases will last throughout a student’s university career.

Some of the satellite seminars will include experiential and service learning projects in which undergraduates will apply knowledge and theory learned in lecture by working in a variety of settings outside the university. In these and other third-quarter seminars, students will have the opportunity to develop the intellectual and personal skills central to general education on the strength of the subject matter already learned during the first two quarters.


Academic Socialization
One important advantage of the cluster concept is that it establishes a community of people—students, teaching fellows, and faculty—who work together in a common enterprise throughout the whole of an academic year. Such a learning community fosters "academic socialization," the development of social and intellectual bonds between students and their teachers and, above all, among students themselves. Since some 90% of freshmen live in the residence halls, the Covel Commons will become a focal point for both the education and the socialization of first-year students, a central space that links the students’ course work with academic support services and helps integrate classroom experiences with everyday lives. To promote academic socialization, the GE program will train counseling assistants, peer facilitators, and others responsible for student support to work directly with the clusters. By doing so, we will link the personal, social, and academic sides of students’ lives, while enabling faculty, counselors, and tutors to work with students in teams, something that happens too rarely at large research universities.

We envisage educational activities jointly sponsored by the GE program and the Office of Residential Life that enable students to build on what they have learned in their clusters. Such programs might include presentations and debates by journalists, political leaders, artists, and UCLA students; visits to museums and other cultural centers; and trips to concerts, plays, and films. Each cluster might publish its own newsletter or calendar of events and encourage students to meet informally in their residence halls or in Covel Commons. To accommodate students who live off campus, we recommend that they each be affiliated with a particular residence hall.

The use of educational technology extends academic socialization even further by taking advantage of new media of communication. The Workgroup considers it essential that all students have ready access to computers and highly desirable that they come to campus with hardware of their own. We urge the University to make it possible for all students to purchase or lease computers. With all students in possession of a computer, members of a cluster can be linked electronically so that instructors can use the Web to post assignments, answer sheets, sample papers, exam questions and the like. E-mail communications, moreover, can flow freely at any time. The many other electronic forums that already exist will be enhanced when UCLA’s Virtual Learning Project (see Supplemental Document G) is more fully developed. Although it is certainly possible to establish virtual communities in a one-quarter course, faculty and students are more likely to do so when they have an entire year in which to forge their intellectual relationships.


Single-Quarter General Education Courses
Although the First-Year Cluster will lay the foundation for the new GE curriculum, the bulk of general education courses will be single-quarter classes mostly given by individual departments. We have already described a set of special single-quarter courses focusing on writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign languages. The other stand-alone courses will be primarily concerned with subject matter in particular disciplines, although some faculty may want to propose interdisciplinary courses as well. Whatever their subject matter, stand-alone courses must also devote considerable attention to basic skills. To treat both subject matter and basic skills effectively, they will need to carry five units of credit.

To qualify for the GE program, single-quarter courses (except foreign language levels 2 and 3) must be accessible to students with little or no prior knowledge of the field; they must also address those principles of general education appropriate to their subject matter. These principles include the acquisition of general knowledge, the experience of integrative learning, the encounter with primary works, the exploration of cultural diversity, the meaning of citizenship, and the development of intellectual skills central to further learning and civic life. Single-quarter courses should introduce students to new realms of knowledge and do so in a way that focuses on the essential concepts, theories, methods, and ideas of the field. Many of the general education courses currently offered will doubtless qualify under the new GE system, because faculty will be able to show how those courses fulfill the purposes of general education and why they merit five units of credit.

The need to staff these courses with our most able teachers, and the desire to avoid the current proliferation of GE courses implies that the number of single-quarter courses should be limited—though not so limited as to prevent interested departments and faculty from participating fully in the program. The number of single-quarter courses ought to be small enough to allow the GE Advisory Committee (see below) to maintain effective guidance over the program, but large enough to acknowledge the diversity of student interests and range of faculty expertise. The GE Advisory Committee will ensure that single-quarter courses are distributed equitably among the four divisions of the College and the relevant professional schools and that students have access to the courses they need.

Governance of General Education
A General Education Advisory Committee, appointed by the appropriate governance agencies, will advise the General Education Chair and assist in developing rigorous and intellectually exciting courses. The Advisory Committee will consist of 15 faculty and four students (two undergraduate and two graduate) as well as two non-voting members representing the library and counseling staffs. We propose that the Academic Senate’s Undergraduate Council appoint eight faculty members from among those recommended by the GE Chair, whose nominees will be drawn mostly from those teaching in the GE program including faculty from the professional schools. The other seven faculty members will be appointed by the Letters & Science Faculty Executive Committee (L&S FEC) and the FECs of the three professional schools with lower-division students. The L&S FEC will name four members (one from each division), and the relevant professional school FECs will name one member each. All faculty members will be appointed to staggered three-year terms; others will serve two-year terms.

The General Education Advisory Committee will review all proposals for clusters and stand-alone courses. Its recommendations will be forwarded to the Undergraduate Council for discussion and official action. The GE committee will also review department nominations for teaching fellow positions and help recruit faculty from the professional schools to participate in the program.

Another crucial role of the GE Advisory Committee will be to evaluate the quality of all general education courses. Together with the GE Chair, committee members will visit classes and meet regularly with faculty teaching clusters and single-quarter courses, working with them to develop strengths and overcome weaknesses. The committee will prepare a formal evaluation of each cluster every two years and of each single-quarter course every five years. We expect that the Academic Senate will review the GE program as a whole every eight years.

To oversee the proposed new GE system, the Provost, having consulted with the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the L&S FEC, has appointed a faculty chair of general education to a three- to five-year term. The GE Chair will be guided by the GE Advisory Committee and will work closely with the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education to whom he reports. Together with the GE Advisory Committee, the GE Chair will fulfill the following responsibilities:

• develop requests for proposals for the new GE clusters and individual GE courses, in keeping with the principles set forth above;
• identify prospective faculty who will be excellent teachers for the GE program and inspire them to submit proposals;
• assist faculty in the development of proposals, including the design of sections, workshops, studios, and small seminars for the third quarter of clusters;
• assist the General Education Advisory Committee in recommending appropriate GE courses from among those proposed in an effort to ensure coverage of the different intellectual domains within each category of knowledge;
• ensure adequate staffing of clusters and individual GE courses over time and monitor quarterly GE course offerings;
• convene meetings of cluster coordinators and other GE faculty to discuss pedagogical issues and other matters crucial to the program;
• with the Advisory Committee, evaluate and monitor the quality of GE clusters and courses to ensure excellence in teaching and continued adherence to the philosophy and objectives of GE;
• with the OID, help departments with the training and enlistment of TAs for discussion sections and assist the core faculty in reviewing proposals from advanced graduate students for third-quarter seminars;
• with the Vice Provost, develop programs within and associated with GE clusters that will promote the "academic socialization" of lower-division students;
• with the Vice Provost, oversee the economy of GE, including working with departments to ensure that adequate faculty time and other resources (such as TAs) are available for GE;
• with the Vice Provost, raise funds from University and extramural sources to support the GE program;
• with the Vice Provost, devise a system that makes participation in GE attractive to the best faculty, including necessary administrative and other support for core faculty, release time for cluster development, and special professional development opportunities for core faculty. The Chair must nurture esprit de corps among those faculty and promote the mission and importance of GE to campus constituencies.

Selection of GE Courses and Course Criteria
Once the Academic Senate approves a new general education structure, the GE Chair and Advisory Committee will ask faculty members to propose clusters and single-quarter courses. The committee will consider proposals for clusters and stand-alone courses separately. In reviewing cluster proposals, the Committee will give its highest rankings to those that most convincingly emphasize:

Interdisciplinarity of approach and subject matter: All clusters should cover multiple domains of knowledge and different ways of knowing. They should consider how the various disciplines involved relate to one another and examine the ways in which their approaches to particular problems converge and diverge. In clusters, "interdisciplinarity" implies a team-teaching effort, with instructional contributions from two or more departments. A particular premium would be placed on clusters whose faculty come from more than one division or school; in the Bridge category, clusters must offer such breadth by definition. Course clusters in the "arts, humanities, and social science" category would be required to have representation from at least two of those three broad areas;

Exemplary teaching skills: Clusters should be proposed by faculty with a strong record of effective and dedicated teaching, as evidenced by past teaching performance (based on student and peer evaluations, teaching awards, demonstrated commitment, or pedagogical innovations). This criterion would also apply to the selection of graduate student instructors. The organization and direction of GE courses should be carried out by ladder faculty with active research programs;

General knowledge: Clusters should show evidence that they impart general knowledge in one or more of the categories of knowledge discussed above. General knowledge includes paradigms and ways of knowing - questions and conflicts - central to these intellectual domains;

Citizenship: North campus clusters should emphasize such phenomena as democracy, law, civil discourse, ethics and values, economic and cultural literacy, the role of media and the arts, and other crucial matters; Bridge clusters should consider the social, political, and cultural implications of scientific concerns; and South campus clusters should help students understand the implications of such issues as the revolution in genetics or the feasibility and cost of energy systems;

Diverse cultural perspectives: Wherever appropriate, general education courses should examine multicultural interactions and develop students’ ability to analyze multicultural issues from different perspectives. Here the term "multicultural" includes cultures from around the world and in different historical settings as well as gender-based cultures and racial/ethnic cultures within the United States and other countries;

Historical perspective: Clusters should help students place disciplines and discourses in historical context by examining the development of concepts and knowledge in the natural and social sciences, changes in artistic and literary method and style, and/or the evolution of technology;

Primary and foundational sources: As much as possible, clusters should focus on the basic texts, problems, ideas, and materials of the disciplines in question;

Effective use of small class meetings: Clusters should establish cooperative learning communities through sections and seminars designed to engage the students with one another and with the course material;

Essential intellectual skills: Courses should foster critical thinking, problem solving, rhetorical effectiveness, and creative expression in addition to the basic tools of writing, reading, quantitative reasoning, and information literacy. To enable students to strengthen their basic learning skills, clusters should have the following attributes:

• strong emphasis on writing clear, logical and effective prose, as well as on other forms of expression, where relevant;
• concentration on quantitative reasoning, especially in courses from the South and Bridge categories, and in those that include methods and ideas from the social sciences;
• innovative use of information technology by taking advantage of library resources, establishing virtual communities linked to assignments or student interests, using class-based Web sites, or by assigning problems that can be addressed with software available in a computer lab.

In reviewing single-quarter course proposals, the GE Advisory Committee will examine the extent to which they provide:
Accessibility: Single-quarter courses need not be specifically designed for students with little or no prior knowledge of the field, but they should be structured in a way that enables the uninitiated to benefit from the material;

Conceptual learning: Courses should introduce students to the central concepts, theories, ideas, and methods of the discipline in question;

General knowledge: Single-quarter courses should have broad implications and present material that gives students a foundation for further learning;

Diverse cultural perspectives: Where appropriate, single-quarter courses should expose students to a variety of cultural perspectives in ways that help prepare them to be effective citizens. Courses in foreign languages are crucial to this process;

Essential intellectual skill: As in clusters, single-quarter courses should develop students’ writing and, where appropriate, quantitative reasoning and foreign language skills, while requiring them to think critically, solve problems, read effectively, and use information technology. Writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language courses will devote specialized attention to these fundamental skills.

Graduate Student Instructors
Graduate student instructors will play a major pedagogical role in the general education program as teaching fellows, teaching associates, and teaching assistants. Teaching fellows will be employed primarily in clusters, leading discussion sections during fall and winter quarters and, under the supervision of cluster faculty, teaching their own seminars during spring quarter. Teaching associates will function as discussion section leaders in both clusters and single-quarter courses but will not teach a spring-quarter seminar. Teaching assistants will participate only in single-quarter courses.

Graduate students selected for clusters must rank among our best teaching associates and teaching fellows. Most will have advanced to candidacy and have at least six quarters of teaching experience. All must be proven teachers of the highest caliber. The GE Advisory Committee, in consultation with cluster coordinators, will select teaching fellows and teaching associates from those nominated by their departments. The committee will aim for an equitable distribution of graduate instructors among the different campus units, recognizing that the relatively small pool of teaching fellows in many science departments may require some flexibility in teaching assignments for South clusters. In assigning teaching fellows to third-quarter seminars, we recommend the model already adopted by the Collegium of University Teaching Fellows (CUTF) in which fellows design and lead their own seminars under the direction of faculty supervisors. Since it is crucial that the workloads of graduate student instructors do not exceed the 20 hours per week stipulated by University employment regulations, the size of discussion sections and seminars will be limited to approximately 20 students, and each instructor will teach no more than two sections or one seminar per quarter.

We envision a close partnership between faculty and graduate instructors in which both contribute to the design and implementation of cluster courses. Faculty and graduate instructors will meet regularly throughout the academic year to discuss the progress of their courses and to work collaboratively on all aspects of their common efforts. Such partnerships will help prepare graduate students, especially fellows, to move beyond traditional teaching apprentice roles as they assume the additional responsibilities of formulating and leading seminars of their own. The pedagogical experience graduate instructors will gain from the GE program can only enhance their ability to compete for faculty positions once they receive their degrees.

The new resources we propose to devote to graduate student instruction will enable all departments to maintain, and many to exceed, their current levels of graduate student support. Sixty of the 100 teaching fellows needed for the First-Year Clusters represent new campus resources; the other 40 teaching fellows are already working on other assignments. Because the new uses of these 40 teaching fellows may diminish TA resources in certain departments, especially small departments unable to participate extensively in the new program, the College will provide resources during a five-year transitional period to meet this need. The Workgroup expects decreases in TA resources to be rare. Indeed, many campus units will gain graduate student support, since 60 new TAships will be allocated to those whose faculty teach in the clusters. Departments of cluster faculty will each be entitled to at least two year-long teaching fellow positions.


Teacher Training
Interdisciplinary projects like the Social Science Clusters, the Social Science Collegium, and OID’s Collegium of University Teaching Fellows have already demonstrated the ability of graduate instructors to teach seminars with considerable success. We are confident, therefore, that advanced graduate students can be effective teachers for the clusters. To ensure the highest pedagogical quality, regular faculty members will supervise the fellows’ work, and the GE program will provide extensive classroom training during the summer before the cluster begins. A central part of the GE system will therefore be a series of activities in which teaching fellows and faculty will work together to develop their classroom skills.

Each summer there will be a two-week seminar for instructors in the GE program. This seminar will draw on the expertise developed by the OID and a number of departments in TA training and will initiate a conversation about effective teaching that extends throughout the academic year. The seminar will be led by regular faculty members who have achieved distinction in their own teaching and by individuals trained in writing instruction, multimedia, interdisciplinary education, technology and information services, and other critical pedagogical concerns. Seminar leaders will model classroom techniques that foster student participation through cooperative learning and other forms of interactive work. With the help of faculty members, graduate students will devote part of this seminar to developing the courses they will teach during the third quarter of the clusters.

During the academic year, cluster faculty and graduate student instructors will meet weekly to discuss their teaching and consider ways to encourage the best student work. Faculty and TAs will also meet often with librarians, counselors, tutors, and others who provide academic support. In addition to fostering pedagogical development, these meetings will enable members of the cluster team to reflect in a general sense on the process of teaching and learning in the context of interdisciplinary instruction and to make those reflections a regular part of their scholarly and professional discourse. In this way, clusters can do for teaching what professional meetings and other forms of scholarly interchange have long done for research: advance knowledge through collegial discussion and debate.


Students and the New GE: Orientation, Counseling, and Courseload
Such pedagogical development on the part of faculty and graduate student instructors will constitute one of the greatest benefits of the new general education program. Undergraduates will profit not only from an improved GE curriculum and from more sustained attention to writing and quantitative reasoning, but from a collective effort to make teaching one of our highest priorities. In this spirit, the Workgroup thought carefully about the effects of the new program on the students’ academic lives. In particular, we asked how entering students would learn about the clusters; what might happen if they were unable to complete the first-year sequence; and what impact the proposed GE curriculum would have on students’ workload and progress to degree.

Each summer more than 90% of UCLA’s entering freshmen attend a three-day orientation during which they enroll in their fall courses. The new GE program will enrich the academic content of these sessions by introducing students to the intellectual themes of each First-Year Cluster. These introductions will enable students to select a cluster and perhaps to choose a book or other material to read in preparation for the course.

The Workgroup recommends that there be no preferential enrollment in the cluster classes and that all clusters be listed as "impacted courses," meaning that students will not be permitted to drop after the third week of classes. Orientation counselors will make clear to students the importance of remaining for the full year in the clusters they choose; those who drop their cluster will have to take a full three-quarter cluster the following year, although they may receive credit for one or two single-quarter GE courses depending on how much of the original cluster they have completed.

Once students enroll at UCLA, it is crucial that they be able to fulfill much of the GE requirement in their first two years without delaying preparation for their majors or their overall time to degree. To determine whether such expectations are reasonable under the new GE, we asked counselors from both the College and individual departments to analyze selected majors from each of the four divisions. This analysis, summarized in Appendix B, shows that students in eight representative majors (Biology, Chemistry, English, French, History, Mathematics, Physiological Science, and Physics) will indeed be able to complete a cluster and some stand-alone courses while progressing normally toward their degrees.

Students who transfer to UCLA from other institutions will continue to fulfill part or all of their general education requirements before coming to campus. Each year between 50 and 75 percent of our transfer students enter UCLA having completed their general education requirements through the Intersegmental GE Transfer Curriculum (IGETC), a curriculum accepted by all UC campuses. We recommend that students who transfer without having finished the IGETC must have completed no fewer than four general education courses before enrolling here. Once at UCLA, these students will satisfy the rest of the GE requirement by taking a maximum of ten single-quarter general education courses, including one writing course, at least one course from the Bridge category, and the quantitative reasoning and foreign language courses they need. The courses taken at UCLA should be selected from categories of knowledge that balance those of the GE courses already completed.

UCLA students have long fulfilled some general education requirements by taking summer courses in community colleges and other universities. Under the new system, they may continue to do so, but with certain limits. Students are free to develop the foreign language proficiency that UCLA requires by taking courses elsewhere, and they may take one of their two writing courses and complete their work in quantitative reasoning through other summer courses. Of their remaining GE courses, they may take no more than two in summer programs outside UCLA. Clusters must be taken at UCLA.

Students who participate in the Education Abroad Program may petition the GE Advisory Committee to receive GE credit for courses taken in foreign universities. Such credit will be granted for single-quarter courses, not clusters. "Winter Bruins"—entering students whose admission is deferred to winter quarter—will be able to join a cluster in fall quarter by enrolling through University Extension.


Costs and Financing for the New GE
How much will it cost to implement the new curriculum? Once the new GE program enters its "steady state" —the point of normal operation it will reach after undergoing a three-year transitional phase — we estimate an annual budget of about $6.7 million (see Appendix A). This budget encompasses the costs of the First-Year Clusters and the new writing courses—mainly reimbursement to departments for faculty teaching in the clusters and funding for new TAs. Since single-quarter courses other than writing courses cause no change in methods of funding, the resources to teach them will continue to come from current sources. Of the $6.7 million budgeted, 48%, or approximately $3.2 million, represents existing resources (e.g. counseling, English composition lecturers, and HUP staff) that will be incorporated into the new GE. The other 52%, or $3.5 million, is the new funding we will need.

Such a sum can only come from new funding. Financing a substantial improvement to general education is impossible within the instructional resources currently allocated to departments and programs. Fortunately, UCLA is in a position to receive some $9 million in new funding from the state. Beginning in 1998-99, the Office of the President expects to make available to UCLA 1,250 new student FTEs. An FTE is based on an average student workload of 15 units per quarter and valued at about $7,000. To claim the additional FTEs and the permanent new funding that accompanies them, UCLA can either admit more students than is currently the case, or increase the average workload, now 13.75 units per quarter, of our existing number of students. Since 15 units per quarter represents an FTE, each of our students counts as 91% of an FTE. For this reason, if we were to claim the new 1,250 FTEs purely by increasing enrollment, we would have to accept 1,400 more students each year than we do now. But if we were to increase the workload of our existing number of lower-division students by slightly more than one unit per quarter, from 13.75 to 15, we could claim more than half of the 1,250 FTEs without increasing the size of our student body accordingly.

Since our campus resources are already overtaxed, it is clearly preferable to increase the workload (or FTEness) of our existing number of students than to admit 1,400 additional undergraduates. One key feature of the proposed new GE curriculum is its ability to systematically increase the FTEness of all our lower-division students. The sample course plans detailed in Appendix B show that lower division students will complete approximately 45 units each year instead of the 41.25 units that currently constitute an average course load. To put it another way, lower-division students will increase their average units per quarter from 13.75 to 15. They will do so because the proposed GE will add several new units beyond what students now take: three to five new units in the freshman year and three in the sophomore year. Thus, instead of the current pattern of 12 units in the fall, 12 in the winter, and 16 in the spring, freshmen will take an average of 14, 15, and 16 units when the new GE system is in place. Sophomores will also average 15 units a quarter. Overall, lower-division students will each accrue 3.75 more units per year than they do now.

By increasing the FTEness of our lower-division students in this way, the new GE curriculum would add 646 FTEs to the campus total, accounting for more than half of the 1,250 FTEs the Office of the President plans to make available. A further claim against the new FTEs comes from an earlier uncompensated enrollment increase of 450 student FTEs. These 450 FTEs plus the 646 associated with the new GE allow us to account for nearly 1,100 of the available FTEs. We need, therefore, to add only 150 FTE in new enrollments. We recommend that these new enrollments be largely transfer students, who will place less strain on campus resources than freshmen do.

Because the new GE’s structure accounts for so many of the additional student FTEs available to UCLA, the Chancellor has agreed to use a portion of the $9 million in new state money to finance the proposed general education program (see letter from Chancellor Young, April 1, 1997). The net costs of GE, therefore, will be covered entirely by new revenues; none of the proposed program’s additional resources will come from current allocations to departments and programs.


Conclusion
Very few research universities of UCLA’s size and distinction have attempted such a comprehensive and innovative effort to improve their undergraduate education. The reforms we propose represent no small undertaking, but Workgroup members firmly believe that the potential gains from the new curriculum will repay our efforts many times over. Faculty will enjoy new intellectual stimulation, undergraduates the challenge of lively and demanding courses, and graduate students the opportunity to teach in a rich interdisciplinary environment.

The First-Year Cluster adapts the idea of a core curriculum to the unique circumstances of the large research institution by giving students both a common educational experience and ample curricular choice. The cluster connects students’ academic work with their residential life and ensures that every freshman can reap the educational benefits that only a seminar can provide. In an era of intellectual fragmentation, our proposed curriculum promotes interdisciplinary engagement while integrating the development of writing proficiency, information literacy, and other intellectual skills into the content of their courses. With this new approach to general education, UCLA will marshal its impressive resources in service of its bright, talented, and ambitious student body. In doing so, our campus can fulfill its promise not only as a premier research university but as a center of undergraduate learning second to none.

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