Reform at Berkeley

After studying the student revolt, which shook Berkeley in 1964, a nine-man faculty committee headed by Professor Charles Muscatine has proposed a series of sweeping reforms to prevent "dehumanization" of the 27,000-student campus. In a report submitted last week to the powerful Academic Senate, the committee stressed the need to promote more contact between faculty and undergraduates, to channel student opinion to policy-makers, and to improve the quality of teaching. But the committee avoided extremist solutions--the temptation to compensate for past by granting students excessive power.

The most dramatic proposal contained in the 200-page report calls for the creation of a powerful seven-man faculty Board of Educational Development which will seek out and stimulate academic experimentation and innovation. The Board would be empowered to give degrees for projects outside the normal bounds of concentration; and a new vice chancellor would be appointed to serve as a kind of "manager of academic heresy." The Board is expected to be so powerful that one dissenting member of the committee warned it might become a "university within a university."

But even more important for discontented undergraduates is the set of recommendations the committee presented for giving students a greater role in academic policy-making. Muscatine and his group reached a careful compromise: they rejected the inclusion of students on faculty committees--pointing out quite correctly that not even inexperienced faculty members are invited to serve--and disapproved of student testimony in decisions of tenure. But they went on record as favoring some form of student evaluation of teachers' classroom performance. And they called for the creation of more effective machinery to transmit criticism from students to administrators and Department chairmen. They even suggested the establishment of "ad hoc courses"--seminars on topics such as Vietnam, which would be determined at the beginning of each term--to build the teach-in into the normal curriculum.

The compromise contained in this report should be approved by the Academic Senate. These proposals for channeling opinion to policy-makers will increase cooperation between faculty and students. The success of the report in practice, of course, will depend on the attitude of those who implement it; the machinery for transmitting undergraduate criticism will not function unless the elements of the Berkeley power structure--the Board of Regents, the administration and faculty--are receptive to suggestions for broader innovation.