The Rise and Demise of the UCSC Colleges

The Rise and Demise of the UCSC Colleges
 
Carlos G. Noreña, 367 pages, Book #413X, $24.95

CONTENTS

• Foreword by John DizikesAcknowledgements
• By Way of Introduction

BOOK ONE

What the UC, Santa Cruz Colleges Were Planned to Be: The McHenry Legacy

• Introduction to Book OnePART I
     The University of California in the Postwar Period (1945-61): Growth and Innovation
  • 1 The Challenges to Undergraduate Education
  • 2 UC Santa Cruz: Clark Kerr and Dean McHenry
  PART II
     The Planning of the UCSC Colleges (1961-65)
  • 3 Early Steps
  • 4 Faculty, Administrators, and Advisors
• PART III
     The Plan Adapts to Reality: The McHenry Chancellorship (1965-74)
  • 5 Cowell College: The First Year (1965-66)6 The 1966-67 Academic Year and Stevenson College7 The 1967-68 Academic Year and Crown College8 The 1968-69 Academic Year and Merrill College9 The 1969-70 Academic Year and College V (Porter)10 The 1970-71 Academic Year: Self-Criticism11 The 1971-72 Academic Year and Kresge College12 The 1972-73 Academic Year: Oakes College and College VIII13 The 1973-74 Academic Year: A Crisis Escalates14 The McHenry Chancellorship: An Assessment
  • 15 The UCSC Plan: A Critical Appraisal

BOOK TWO

The Dismantling of the Colleges as Academic Units

• Introduction to Book OnePART IV
     A Period of Tumultuous Debate and Administrative Instability (1974-77)
  • 16 The Christensen Episode
  • 17 The Taylor Interval
  PART V
     The Sinsheimer Revolution (1977-87)
  • 18 Sinsheimer: The "Savior" from Outside
  • 19 Reorganization: Implementation Problems
  PART VI
     The Post-Sinsheimer Era (1987-95)
  • 20 The Stevens Chancellorship (1987-91)
  • 21 The Pister Chancellorship (1991-96)
  Appendix I: The Colleges as Social and Educational CentersAppendix II: Academic Advising and Counseling in the CollegesAppendix III: Excerpts from Report of the Advisory Group on the Colleges, Fall 2000
• Selected Bibliography

FOREWORD

Professor Noreña's thoughtful and fair-minded historical study of the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California will rightly attract most attention as institutional history that sheds light on the difficulties of academic innovation. It calls to mind Niccolo Machiavelli's provocative words:

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.

Of course, the "danger" Machiavelli warned against was associated with the transfer of political power; and though state and national politics played an important role in shaping events in Santa Cruz, Professor Noreña's subject is an academic one in which decisions were arrived at and expressed peacefully, mostly through meetings and memos, of which we are given a very full account. But if there were no danger, there was an abundance of passionate commitment with serious consequences. Careers were aborted, reputations ruined; joy and heartbreak were often mingled with a sense both of accomplishment and an awareness of failure. Civility and decorum were often barely maintained, and the author is delightfully scathing about the too-numerous instances when ignorant sloganeering overwhelmed reasonable argument.Even as Noreña explores the difficulties of innovation, the attentive reader will realize that his study demonstrates a proposition the reverse of Machiavelli's: that to sustain a new order of things is as difficult as to initiate one. He has a dual subject, the demise as well as the rise of the collegiate system at Santa Cruz; and the chronicle of decline is treated more extensively than that of origination. Indeed, it seems to me that the most important insight to be gained in reading this history is that the rise and demise were inextricably intertwined, that the ultimate failure to maintain colleges was connected with the lack of clarity and compromises embedded in their founding. The author rightly credits the founding chancellor, Dean E. McHenry, with visionary zeal and tenacity; but he also suggests strongly that the McHenry idea of what colleges should be was a drastically compromised version of what the university president, Clark Kerr, had desired: a radically decentralized system, accompanied by a determination to recruit and employ faculty who would be willing to take part in a system that undoubtedly compromised conventional professional definitions of academic purpose and success.This interpretation will, I hope, occasion debate and discussion. At the same time, the concentration here on administrative history, on budgets and enrollments, largely obscures what went deeper than administrative arrangements, what was cherished by those who, like Noreña, were fortunate to take part in the first years of college founding, but also, against all the odds and relentless opposition, was sustained even into the sunset in the 1990s. What was it? The answer has to do with teaching-not teaching as one of several obligations, not teaching as subordinated to publication; but teaching as the center of one's career. That answer is sketched in all too briefly and relegated, curiously but somehow appropriately, to three appendices at the end of the volume. There one can gain at least a faint idea of the intellectual, cultural, and social excitement generated by teaching in the intimacy of the collegiate system. How often can one describe teaching as an exciting collective enterprise? But so it often was, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for students and faculty to learn and teach together.