What to Do about Berkeley

It may soon take a computer to catalogue all the books and reports, mainly by outsiders, about the crisis of the University of California at Berkeley in 1964-65. Last week an official committee of insiders from the Berkeley faculty published the most practical report yet. It is a candidly critical 228-page analysis of what makes Berkeley buzz and what must be done if professors are to "rediscover the youthful spirit" and reach those many students who are "dissatisfied with their own unmotivated existence."

The report, compiled after a ten-month study by nine professors under the leadership of Medievalist Charles Muscatine, proposes 42 changes designed to maintain Berkeley's ranking as the nation's best public university campus. They pinpoint the ways in which a huge campus can generate what the report terms "a rich pluralism" in education, yet "preserve its integrity and stability while accepting change."

Latent Alienation. The report assumes that the campus-rocking Free Speech Movement was an event with a meaning worth discovering. One of its discoveries was that 80% of the students generally agreed with the F.S.M. goals of greater political independence and less impersonal education. About half felt strongly enough to boycott classes, although 50% said they opposed some of the F.S.M. tactics. "The ease with which a majority of students could find, however ephemerally, a commitment and a moral drive in opposing the university administration is evidence of a widespread, if latent, alienation," the report says. Furthermore, the committee found, Berkeley's brightest students were most active in the protests. "Whatever judgment is made of their behavior, Berkeley has to cherish this kind of student."

Conscience v. Status. The report says that most students express general satisfaction with Cal, yet even these "cannot isolate themselves from nonconformist attitudes and ideas: they react positively or negatively." The nonconformists believe that most American adults, including their teachers, are "sacrificing conscience to the quest for status" and that "a man must fight hypocrisy to live in a moral world." Yet their own obsession with "keeping cool" is also hypocritical, argues the committee. Their desire for "instant love, instant poetry, instant psychoanalysis and instant mysticism" is just a "form of escape from hard work," clothed in a "quasi-moral garb." The university must take these students seriously since "their picture of the world is not entirely a mirage"-but it must emphasize that "there are no short cuts to learning."

The committee finds, however, that there are plenty of ways to improve teaching. Berkeley, these teachers claim, "has not yet achieved that atmosphere or ethos of devotion to teaching that it must have to maintain its scholarly excellence." Some senior professors "show an extreme aversion" to undergraduate and lower-division teaching. At the same time, "there is danger that deficient performance of teaching is not adequately recognized and outstanding performance not given due credit." The committee has no intention of de-emphasizing research to correct this, since "research is of the very character of this campus" and teaching must be "suffused with the excitement and authority of research."

Instead, the Muscatine report proposes that a "formal dossier" on teaching performance should accompany department recommendations to promote a teacher to tenure rank. This would include the department chairman's estimate of the candidate's teaching ability, any exceptional course plans the teacher has devised, his own statement of how he views teaching and-breaking with academic tradition-appraisal by colleagues based on visits to his classroom. The committee also urges that students be given a chance next year to evaluate all undergraduate courses, for the guidance of the teachers only.

Shock of Entry. The report urges that "wasteful middle-sized courses" be eliminated to free faculty for smaller sessions in which "learning is based on dialogue." To acquaint freshmen with "the style and meaning of scholarly thought" and "alleviate the shock of entry" onto a big campus, the committee proposes an experimental program of freshman seminars (now common at Harvard and Stanford) next fall. It also proposes that students be permitted to study independently as much as their teachers consider sound and that they be given credit for off-campus work related to their studies.

If the report is adopted, Berkeley will also play down grades. The committee would let students in good standing take one course each quarter (out of their normal three or four) on a pass-or-fail basis that would not affect their grade average. Even more radically, freshmen could ignore all grades in their first term on campus. The aim is to "grade less often in order to grade better."

A major thrust of the report is to build innovation into Berkeley's bureaucratic structure on the theory that "the more a given discipline flourishes, the more likely that it will contribute to the obsolescence of its academic procedures." The report urges creation of a special board and the hiring of a vice chancellor, both charged with helping the faculty try out new courses and programs even when department leaders resist change.

Questioning the Ph.D. Most of the Muscatine recommendations would raise the need for more college teachers, and the report proposes a solution. It would create a new doctor-of-arts degree carrying all of the requirements of the Ph.D. except the long research dissertation. "The time has come to question the whole system which makes the Ph.D. the only acceptable form of certification for college teaching," says the committee, which is composed entirely of Ph.D.s. It argues that too many good teachers never finish their final paper because of the pressures of teaching and raising a family, and jeopardize their careers as a result.

The aim of most of these changes is to relate scholarship more closely to life -and to try, as trie committee puts it, "to build bridges across that gulf between generations that separates students from their teachers."

The report will be presented to the Berkeley academic senate this week, where, predicts one committee member, "there will be a lot of screams, but I think we will have a lot of this accepted." Another committee member, Chemist George Pimentel, included a minority recommendation for a slower approach to any "sweeping changes" that might imperil Berkeley's "precious position of pre-eminence." Chancellor Roger Heyns said he was "very pleased" by the report, called it "substantial" and "provocative." Student President Jerry Goldstein said the report "recognized and answered" many of the student problems, urged its adoption.

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