As I led a huge tour of prospective freshmen engineering students last weekend, I worried about the state of my transfer applications.
The situation was rather odd, I must admit. Here I was, trying my best to remain loyal to my engineering school by pitching UCSD over schools that I had applied to and these freshmen had also been accepted to.
The best I could do without betraying the intentions of the engineering school — I am still loyal to it, despite my objections to the general focus on engineering and the general focus of engineering undergraduates at UCSD — was to tell them what brought me to UCSD while I made clear to them the fundamental problem: the failure of the college system.
Again and again, I am reminded that UCSD’s college system does nothing to solve the problem of a large public university: namely, the numerous barriers to social interaction resulting from a lack of repeated contact with the same people.
UCSD offers few of the social benefits of a large university. Lacking any football team to draw the university together and lacking any concentrated off-campus housing, the social environment at UCSD can hardly be compared to that of UCLA or UC Santa Barbara.
Both L.A. and Santa Barbara have a primary off-campus area saturated with college students. As a result, those campuses’ inadequate on-campus housing is offset by the social and commercial environment that permeates their vicinity.
The lack of any off-campus student housing center prevents UCSD from producing a positive atmosphere similar to that at colleges with viable off-campus populations. UCSD might as well be a community college when it comes to its off-campus population.
The six-college system is presumably the solution because it can tie off-campus students to a specific location, but it depends on creating viable on-campus communities.
UCSD is modeled after Cambridge, where 31 colleges independently admit and house students, but the university teaches all students and awards all degrees. Each college has a specific feel and history, and the individual colleges are interesting communities on their own. Some even have their own pubs.
Our system fails to emulate Cambridge for a number of reasons. The first problem is enrollment size; UCSD’s average college has 3,500 undergraduates, which is five to seven times Cambridge’s number. It’s even three times the average population of the residential colleges at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Also, UCSD only offers six choices, with no substantial differences between many of them except general education requirements.
The problem with large size and few choices is that it discourages characterization of the colleges as distinct individual entities. As a result, undergraduates don’t have any particular affinity for their college beyond its determination of their general education requirements.
Another failing of the college system is the obsession with building on-campus apartments. While this may be in response to student preferences, a crucial part of living together is eating together. The one-rate plan is a step toward that, but there are still inherent problems: Function follows form, and by neatly grouping students in fours or fives, on-campus apartments simply encourage the division of students. It is a travesty to place freshmen in on-campus apartments because the apartments so readily stifle social interaction.
Lastly, without any semblance of four-year housing, it is no wonder that there is no sense of affiliation with a college after freshman year. The absence of upper-division students in residential halls (with the exception of the RAs) destroys opportunities for older students to participate in the socialization process of younger ones, including the instilment of college-centered pride. Lack of housing is no excuse; unless a critical mass is situated on campus, how does anyone expect a college to gain any identity?
Some may argue that the failures of on-campus life, the commuter mentality and the homogenization of the colleges are growing pains in a young university. I argue the exact opposite: This problem is a result of deliberate decisions, and there is no reason UCSD should face the undergraduate crisis it currently has.
In addition, UCSD is heading further down this path. The conversion to on-campus apartments is growing, not dwindling. Old Revelle has the highest concentration of residential halls, but Warren favored apartments over dormitory housing. The long-range plan for Revelle calls for demolishing the Fleet buildings and Plaza Cafe to make room for more apartments.
Homogenization is bound to increase with enrollment. Muir college can barely house all of its freshmen, and while the 1963 plan for the campus called for 12 colleges, this has been scaled back to eight.
What can rectify these problems? The first solution is a comprehensive plan to house four years of students on campus. Applications for on-campus housing should be intimately tied to on-campus involvement and academic excellence, rather than a lottery system for a select number of sophomores. UCSD must value motivated and interesting undergraduates as the cornerstone of the college system.
Secondly, students in contiguous majors should take lower-division classes with students from their college. For example, certain sections of Math 20A should be restricted to students from a particular college, and classes with multiple lectures need to be segregated by college. With the increasing identification of students by their major rather than by their college, it seems that tracked class work can be a convenient means of exploiting the divisions in colleges caused by majors.
The campus must also move back to building residential halls rather than apartments, no matter how much students want to cook. Every living room and kitchen built for five people are two or three less beds for students on campus.
The model floor plan of on-campus housing needs to be the house system of Muir, where eight suites double-stacked in an H pattern converge on one point: the elevator shaft. It is an overarching principle of architecture: The way you build things will influence the way people will interact.
Without any viable off-campus college area to offset the housing problems of a large public university, it is critical that the university emphasize constructing undergraduate housing. We need to have at least 60 percent or 70 percent of students housed on-campus rather than the 40 percent we have now. If a college is to be the center of its students’ social lives, it must house a majority of its students.
UCSD is a great school academically. But college is not restricted to pre-professional development, nor should it be. The undergraduate mission of any university is to teach its students how to think critically and socialize them in a broader context with peers of like intelligence from a variety of backgrounds. UCSD does fairly well in the first realm, but fails completely in the second; the school might as well be a community college for all of its socializing potential.
As a sophomore, my only option next year at this school is to join the exodus and to restrict my social options mostly to people I’ve already met. I don’t know whether I’ll actually end up transferring. The odds, in any case, are against it. But I doubt I’ll be able, in honesty and good faith, to lead potential freshmen around this school come next year.