Conclusion: Integrative Component

The Berkeley Campus Culture

The decentralized campus culture at Berkeley means that initiatives frequently develop from the bottom up to meet the needs of students, programs, departments, and the campus overall. The advantage to this entrepreneurial culture is that campus faculty, administrators, and staff have the freedom and flexibility to create excellent courses, offerings, and programs that meet specific needs. As a result, Berkeley has developed many outstanding initiatives that reflect the diversity, innovation, and creativity that is characteristic of the campus. Collectively, the efforts described in this report demonstrate that a variety of efforts rather than a single centralized approach can best meet the needs of such a large and complex institution.

Diversity is a hallmark of the campus culture, and we recognize it as one of our overarching strengths. It is noteworthy that the single curricular requirement that the Academic Senate has mandated for all undergraduates is an American Cultures course, with its comparative focus on cultural diversity. In the Chancellor’s Response to the Strategic Academic Plan, the Chancellor pointed to diversity as “essential to the greatness of Berkeley.” He reiterated a commitment to preserving diversity in its traditional sense of preserving access for underrepresented groups, but he also called for a broadening of the dialogue about diversity to encompass “how religious and cultural differences, international influences, immigration, and growing economic disparities alter considerations of diversity” and “how our curricular and extra-curricular programs can embrace these broader definitions.” The Chancellor has charged the Campus Community Initiative with launching this new dialogue in 2003-04. This commitment to diversity is also reflected in the campus’s parallel effort to identify new areas for research and teaching that span traditional disciplinary boundaries. The New Ideas Initiative, an outgrowth of the Strategic Academic Plan, is designed to nurture and foster interdisciplinarity outside of traditional departmental structures. As part of this process, the campus will also need to develop new administrative structures at a campus-wide level that will support the development of these new ideas.

The challenge for the campus is to preserve the diversity and entrepreneurial energy that are our strengths and at the same time to identify when more coordination and integration in our organizational and administrative structures are needed to allow us to further our institutional goals. We list below these areas where we have identified gaps and discuss some of the emerging structures we are putting in place that we expect can help us sustain and extend our progress in teaching, learning, and undergraduate education in the next ten years.

Developing a Campus-wide Vision for Undergraduate Education

Our investigations reveal that while individual faculty members and departments and programs may have developed learning objectives and expected outcomes for their students, the campus has not yet fully articulated and embraced a shared vision of what we expect our undergraduates to take away from a Berkeley education. As noted in the introduction, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Council of Undergraduate Deans have taken an important step in that direction by drafting an initial statement of desired outcomes for students. This statement is based on recommendations emerging from the Commission on Undergraduate Education Final Report, the Strategic Academic Plan, and the Campus Accreditation Process. This draft statement will need to be more fully articulated and vetted with faculty, students, staff, administration, and alumni. Once established as the campus vision for undergraduate education, it will provide the conceptual structure to integrate the many pieces of the undergraduate experience, identify gaps and shortcomings, guide new initiatives, and provide the basis for evaluation of student outcomes. As we move forward, the Vice Provost, together with the Academic Senate and the Council of Undergraduate Deans, will continue to oversee the continuing progress of the campus in undergraduate education.

Optimizing Our Teaching Resources and Supporting Teaching Excellence

To help students meet the learning objectives we identify for them, we need to consider how instruction is delivered, find ways to optimize our teaching resources, and support teaching excellence for all who participate in the teaching enterprise. Many of the recommendations in this report speak to specific strategies for leveraging teaching resources, rethinking the faculty reward system, improving instructor development, and building our physical, technological, and administrative infrastructure. To help us continue to move forward in these areas, it will be important to identify key organizational structures that can coordinate efforts across the multiple academic units and support units that play a role in instruction. The Council of Academic Partners, a consortium of academic support units that is an advisory group to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, is working to coordinate instructor development efforts on the Berkeley campus. The Academic Senate Committee on Teaching (COT) also has been taking a more proactive role in providing leadership in relationship to the culture of teaching on campus. Through the Council of Academic Partners and the Academic Senate, the recommendations related to teaching will be pursued.

Emphasizing Student Learning at the Institutional Level

Student learning is most often assessed at the course level; with the suggested improvements for academic program review described in this report, it will begin to be addressed systematically at the departmental level as well. To fully embed student learning into the fabric of the institution, however, will require a shift in the teaching-learning perspective: away from a focus on teaching and the delivery of instruction towards a greater emphasis on the conditions that foster student learning. This means, for example, making decisions about new initiatives in terms of how they will promote student learning, using data on student learning in making programmatic decisions, infusing a learning perspective into institutional documents and policies, and forging a sense of collective responsibility for student learning among the different segments of the Berkeley community. While such a shift may not be easy to achieve, we have noted throughout this report both subtle and significant changes in this direction that are already under way, and we expect to make continued progress in this area.

Institutionalizing Assessment of Undergraduate Education

The final area we want to highlight is assessment. The Preparatory Review Visiting Team focused attention on the need to continue to improve campus coordination of data collection, analysis, and dissemination. To know how well we are meeting our educational objectives, we need to continue institutionalizing campus-wide mechanisms for assessment. Academic program review serves as a critical lever for promoting change at the institutional level, and the academic program review process that we described in the preceding essay will be an important way in which we can incorporate evaluation of how well Berkeley is meeting the campus-wide learning objectives we establish for our students. However, the academic program review process alone is not sufficient to monitor educational effectiveness. Even with a review cycle that allows departments to be evaluated once every seven years, there is still a need for more frequent institutional mechanisms for assessing effectiveness.

The campus currently has in place a variety of tools for assessing undergraduate education, including the Quality of Undergraduate Education Assessment Project (QUEAP), the pilot Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey, the Career Destination Survey, the campus Performance Metrics project, the Institutional Data Gateway project, and the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES). The latter instrument includes key indicators of student engagement and has advantages over the benchmark National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) instrument, against which it will be periodically cross-validated, of scale (the campus collected responses from more than ten thousand undergraduates in Spring 2003), flexibility (UCUES data are integrated into other student data systems, including longitudinal databases), and more in-depth coverage of areas of particular relevance (e.g., undergraduate research opportunities).

However, we also face a number of challenges in effectively using the extensive data we already do collect to inform decision making:

• Many of our undergraduate education assessment tools are labor intensive to utilize and do not take advantage of the most recent developments in campus web-based data integration systems such as Cal Profiles and Cal Profiles Plus.
• Data indicators are overseen by different control units, sometimes resulting in duplication of effort and a lack of coordinated oversight of the collection of education effectiveness data to further institutional goals.
• We have an abundance of indicators, and no clear way of prioritizing which indicators are most important for assessing how well we are meeting our educational objectives.
• We lack mechanisms for ensuring that data are disseminated to key decision makers and used consistently for institutional planning.

To address these challenges, the campus proposes to undertake a systematic catalog of the kinds of undergraduate education data we collect, to evaluate and prioritize those data, and to create a web-based undergraduate education annual report that will be issued by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The following principles will guide the development of this report. It will

• be integrated with current and future data collection systems on the campus, such as the student data warehouse, and will permit us to retire overly labor-intensive or less-standardized instruments and tools;
• prioritize the most meaningful indicators that will allow us to track performance over time;
• provide both a campus-wide snapshot of undergraduate education as well as disaggregated comparative data by department that can allow Deans, department chairs, and faculty to know how well they are meeting key objectives for undergraduate education;
• be coordinated with system-wide reporting requirements, including those still under development (e.g., the Annual Report to the Legislature on Undergraduate Education and the UC Office of the President undergraduate research data-gathering initiative);
• potentially serve as a mechanism to identify departments that are in more immediate need of an academic program review; and
• be publicized through an annual letter on the state of undergraduate education at Berkeley, which can serve as a way to recognize departments for positive accomplishments and provide information to departments about resources that can help them achieve institutional goals.

Such a report will also enable us to track our successes in meeting the educational objectives put forth in this self-study and help us measure how far we are able to travel in the next decade towards meeting our goals.

Some Final Considerations

We submit this self-study within a budgetary context that is severely limited and is probably not going to improve in the near future. The extent to which we will be able to make progress in the identified areas will inevitably be shaped by these resource constraints. We recognize that some recommended changes can be implemented fairly easily, while others may be more challenging to implement in the current budget climate. Still other efforts already under way may be difficult to sustain without an infusion of additional resources. Nevertheless, this report represents a blueprint for change that can be implemented more fully when the budget climate improves. The campus is also committed to preserving existing resources and finding new resources for undergraduate education. The Chancellor has identified undergraduate education as one of his four key fundraising priorities. The featured objectives for the undergraduate education fundraising campaign also dovetail with the priorities established by this self-study process. They are

• Undergraduate Scholarship Support, including awards that will support financially needy students to engage in co-curricular and extra-curricular learning experiences;
• Teaching Excellence, including funds for teaching awards and rotating endowed chairs who will make significant contributions to undergraduate education, especially in large-enrollment courses;
• Enriching Faculty/Student Interaction, including funding for more small seminars and for undergraduate research opportunities; and
• Improving the Learning Environment, including support for classroom renovations and new instructional technologies.

Despite the difficult budget climate and the constraints that accompany it, we feel confident that we can continue to strengthen teaching, learning, and undergraduate education at Berkeley.

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