UC Davis undergraduates will continue with a two-course composition requirement set in place more than 30 years ago - at least until a new plan comes along.

That decision was made June 6 when only one person voted for a proposal in the College of Letters and Science designed to improve undergraduate writing by adding a third discipline-based requirement.

Some faculty members at the meeting argued that the proposal actually would leave UC Davis graduates with worse writing skills than they have now. Others were concerned about the lack of resources and adequate faculty training to teach writing in disciplines other than the humanities.

Although this change would officially affect only students in the College of Letters and Science, the two other undergraduate colleges - Engineering and Agricultural and Environmental Sciences - have a vested interest in any changes, since they depend on L&S to teach composition classes for their students.

The L&S college's faculty representatives faced an amended English composition requirement that would have:

• Still required two courses in English writing but deleted a three-decade-long requirement that the second course be taken in the upper division and
• Added a "writing requirement" determined by the faculty of each major within the college.

(The Zender report recommended that either the second composition course or the third writing course in the major be upper division. In practice, students would have fulfilled the upper-division requirement through the third course, since courses in the major are upper-division, points out Jim McClain, geology professor and chair of the L&S Executive Committee of its Representative Assembly.

After the vote, Lenora Timm, professor of linguistics and the next chair of the L&S executive committee, said her eight-member team will revisit the composition issue in the 2002-03 academic year.

Faculty concerns

Opponents on June 6 split between faculty members concerned about lack of resources to provide more writing experience with the new third writing course and those opposed to losing the upper-division writing requirement. Some were also critical of the idea of decentralizing the authority for the third requirement to allow each major to have its own standards.

After the meeting, English professor Karl Zender said he doubted a faculty mandate exists to change the L&S writing requirement at UC Davis. Last academic year Zender chaired the Task Force to Review the L&S Composition Requirement. Before chairing the group, Zender visited superior university writing programs across the nation to gather ideas on how to improve UC Davis writing.

That task force produced a report in spring 2001 that said UC Davis could do two things to improve writing: add a third writing-intensive course housed in disciplines throughout the college and create a centrally housed and funded Center for the Teaching of Writing.

Writing center a campuswide issue

Since the writing center needs to be addressed as a campuswide service, the L&S executive committee dealt only with the idea of adding a third requirement, according to McClain.

"We find the spirit in the Zender report is preserved but tempered by what is possible given the fiscal restraints," McClain told the L&S faculty representatives. "The biggest difference is we watered down significantly the third course."

Faculty members and deans told the executive committee it would be very difficult for some departments to deliver a writing-intensive course due to scarce resources - many hundred students in the major and only a handful of faculty to grade papers.

The proposed change, authored by executive committee member Greg Clark of economics, would have allowed departments to make their own determination of what is a "writing experience" for its majors. For instance, one department could decide that a third English composition course would suit its major while another might redesign one of its courses to include a more vigorous writing assignment with revisions, Clark said.

"This 'writing experience' gives me some pause as a person in the humanities," said Russian professor Harriet Murav. "Decentralizing doesn't always mean a more successful education."

What are the potential costs?

Communications senior lecturer John Vohs asked if the executive committee worked with the Office of Resource Management and Planning to look at the cost of adding a third requirement. McClain said no.

The proposed legislation also differed from the task force report in no longer specifying that one of the required writing courses be in the upper-division.

"Dropping of the upper-division requirement is pedagogically ill-conceived," said Gary Sue Goodman, director of the composition program, who said juniors and seniors are more cognitively advanced than freshmen and able to learn more sophisticated writing skills. She also worried that community-college transfer students would miss critical writing instruction at UC Davis without the upper-division requirement.

Goodman also said the proposal could replace longtime lecturers, who teach the upper-division courses, if students opted to take the lower division courses (taught by graduate students).

One criticism of the existing requirements is that students take a composition class early in their freshman year and then wait until late in their senior year for the second, leaving little time to employ the skills they learned in the second class while in college. Goodman called the legislation a "blunt instrument" for correcting the problem.

Representing the College of Engineering, Niels Jensen of Applied Science said his college is concerned about the "trickle effect of changing the English standards" on engineering students.

"Isn't this a case of 'If it isn't broken, don't fix it'?" asked history professor Ted Margadant. "The evidence is it is broken," McClain replied.

Changing workload

Mentioning that he had 600 pages of term papers to grade sitting on his desk, art history professor Jeff Ruda said he believed in teaching writing but he cannot do the same job he could 10 years ago because he has gone from teaching 50 to 150 upper-division students a year.

"We cannot deliver the intensity of writing courses given by the composition program," Ruda said.

As for the future of a writing center, Patricia Turner, vice provost for undergraduate studies, reported that she will be working on the issue this next year with the incoming English department chair, David Simpson, and Elizabeth Langland, dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies.

Vote applies to accreditation

Turner, who heads the campus accreditation process, also said the L&S Representative Assembly's decision to defer changes to the composition requirement means that UC Davis will maintain "a fairly solid writing requirement for a large public campus."

She said that she expects the accreditation team from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges to look favorably on the L&S decision, especially since several other UC campuses don't have requirements for composition courses in the upper division.

Two team visits from WASC will occur next academic year, one in December and the other in March. For more information about WASC, readers can consult http://undergraduatestudies.ucdavis.edu/wasc/wasccvr.cfm.

For the original compostition report, go to http://www.ls.ucdavis.edu/Academic/HARCS/Reports/Comp_Req_task_force_report.pdf.