The students are very good. Their high school grade point averages and college
entrance test scores are considerably higher than the average for first-year
students at UC Santa Barbara. 
By William Trombley "We can ask our professors questions and not offend them," said Maret Bower, a junior majoring in physics, who transferred to the College of Creative Studies from Stanford University to get away from "cookbook classes."
Jason Harris, who came to the college from a suburban Sacramento high school four years ago, said, "I'm passionate about literature and writing, and here I've found other people with the same passions...The emphasis here is on learning, not on playing the academic game."
The college that draws such unusual praise from its students is a tiny enclave-enrolling only 160 students-within the sprawling, 16,500-student UC Santa Barbara campus. It is one of the few undergraduate educational reforms to survive from the 1960s and '70s, and it has done so despite hostility from several of the regular academic departments at UC Santa Barbara and a considerable amount of indifference on the part of campus administrators.
The college offers courses in seven areas including art, literature, music, biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. An eighth subject, computer science, was added this year. Students spend most of their time studying a single subject, with minimum attention to general education courses or "breadth" requirements.
Would-be writers write; prospective painters paint; mathematics and science students work on research problems alongside professors and graduate students. "The idea is simple," said Robyn Bell, who has been teaching literature at the college since 1975. "You work hard at something you're interested in and maybe something will come of it."
The idea came from Marvin Mudrick, a UC Santa Barbara professor of English, who died in 1986. In the mid-1960s, the Santa Barbara campus, like many American universities, was searching for ways to respond to student complaints about large, impersonal classes, lack of contact with professors and bland introductory courses that offered little intellectual challenge.
Troubled by these features of the developing American research university, Mudrick proposed what became known as the College of Creative Studies as an optional approach for a small number of highly motivated students. The college opened in 1967, and, to the surprise of almost everyone except its students and teachers, has survived to this day in more-or-less its original form.
Classes are small-15 or fewer students-and the atmosphere is more like a graduate seminar than a typical undergraduate class. No one dozes against the back wall. "You have to be prepared," Harris said. "Here, you know people have always read the material."
Faculty members must work harder, too, since these students are unlikely to accept stale lecture notes with good grace, and they love to argue with their teachers. One visiting music professor was so dull and rigid in his approach that students left his class, one by one, until none were left and the class was terminated.
The emphasis is on depth, not on skimming the surface of a subject. Max Schott, a novelist who has taught at the college since 1969, devoted the entire winter quarter to a single poem: Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (sic).
Grading is "non-punitive," according to William Ashby, the current provost of the College of Creative Studies. Students are graded either "pass" or "no record." Faculty members award from one to six units of credit, depending on the quality of the student's work.
Most art, music and literature classes are held in the World War II-vintage "temporary" building that houses the college. Most of the science work is done in the regular departments, since it would be prohibitively expensive to duplicate laboratory facilities. In the sciences and in mathematics, College of Creative Studies students mingle with those enrolled in the academic departments, but their course work has been specially designed by faculty members who have chosen to teach in the college.
For example, Don Aue, who divides his time between the chemistry department and the College of Creative Studies, teaches a course on research methods to 15 students. "The goal is to bring students to the point where they can be integrated into a research unit," Aue said, "so they can get a head start on graduate work."
Evidently the goal is being achieved. Five of last year's eight physics majors were accepted for graduate work at Harvard University, another at Cal Tech. An external review team that examined the college in 1993 found that math and science students were "at least a year ahead of their L &S (College of Letters and Science) peers," and that "the vast majority are significantly involved in independent laboratory work at the graduate level."
The college has no full-time tenured faculty members. Some professors, like Aue, teach both in the college and in an academic department. Others, especially in art, music and literature, are non-tenured lecturers who teach only in the College of Creative Studies.
Sharing professors with academic departments, and paying lecturers remarkably low salaries (some earn less than $25,000 a year for what are often full-time jobs), the college functions on an annual budget of less than $1 million. But the entire budget is spent on undergraduate education. No money goes to support research or graduate students, which is most unusual in the University of California.
"The heart of the college's success is that the budget is set aside for undergraduates," Professor Aue said. "The money has to be spent on undergraduates. The only question is how."
The students are very good. Their high school grade point averages and college
entrance test scores are considerably higher than the average for first-year
students at UC Santa Barbara.
"In each class I have taught, there has been one brilliant student and three or four who were very good," said Apostolos Athanasakkis, a classicist who has been teaching at the college for three years. "And there has been at least one idea that you could broadcast to the academic community."
Said Robyn Bell, "They're really good...We just have to be sure not to mess them up."
"It's a professional school for kids who discover their talents early," said Max Weiss, a retired professor of mathematics who once served as provost of the college.
For that reason, "it is not an option for all students, not even for all excellent students," said Armand Kuris, a biology professor who is the current associate provost. "It requires that incoming students have made key decisions upon entrance."
For some, the intensity is too great and they drop out. But those who remain are likely to receive some of the finest undergraduate education to be found in the nine-campus UC system.
As might be expected, however, this sharp departure from conventional undergraduate education has many critics.
Although College of Creative Studies students take at least ten courses outside their major field of interest, there have been continuing complaints, voiced most recently by the 1993 external review team, that some students are so narrowly focused on their specialties that they may not emerge from the university with a broad education.
The review team urged that additional majors be offered, especially history and other social sciences, and that the college develop some interdisciplinary courses. However, many faculty members believe that interdisciplinary courses would defeat the purpose of the college, which is to develop each student's academic or artistic abilities to their fullest.
Provost Ashby said his "biggest problem" was persuading tenured professors in UC Santa Barbara's regular academic departments to teach part-time in the college. "We have lecturers who have been here for 20 years or more, but what we don't have enough of is ladder faculty from the regular departments."
Some professors do not relish the kind of intense interaction with students that teaching in the College of Creative Studies requires. Others are put off by the college's "off the wall" reputation. And many departments, having suffered heavy losses from UC's massive early retirement program in recent years, do not feel they can spare any faculty.
Since the college was established as a reaction to conventional undergraduate instruction, there has been tension between the college and some academic departments, especially English.
Some of the bad feeling between the college and the English department has to do with personality conflicts of long standing; some has to do with the approach to literature. The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory.
The external review team found that the college's literature faculty was "extraordinarily inbred," most being former College of Creative Studies students who had received their Ph.D.s from UC Santa Barbara, and recommended that they be replaced by English department faculty.
The literature lecturers disagreed. "It's almost impossible to find people who have enough of a sense of what's going on here to teach here," said Max Schott.
"It is true that we don't spend time talking about intellectual fads like 'deconstruction' and the 'new historicism,'" said Kia Penso, another college lecturer. "Primarily we read the literature and talk about what we have read. But the fact that we don't devote a lot of time to literary theory doesn't mean we are less rigorous."
The comments of the external review committee have been lost in a maze of academic committees, and Ashby does not plan to implement their recommendation that he replace the literature lecturers with English department professors. On the other hand, the provost will not hire any more of the college's graduates as teachers. "It was true, they were totally inbred," he said. "The college, of all places, should have diversity of opinion."
Said Schott, "I'm afraid over the long term, the (external) review will have bad effects. I'm afraid the college will lose its purpose."
Some fear the College of Creative Studies may fall victim to its own success.
Mudrick, the founding provost, believed in lying low, in not presenting a target to enemies in the academic departments or in the campus administration. He did little to publicize the college, assuming that the right students and faculty members would find their way there.
"We can't afford that attitude in times of budget crisis," said Ashby, the current provost, who does his best to promote the college as a successful alternative to conventional undergraduate education, a model that could be duplicated on other campuses.
But many who teach in the College of Creative Studies would agree with Ian Ross, who once taught biology at the college and who said in a 1983 interview, "The concept of the college should be university-wide, but it cannot be because of the way people are...It has to sort of happen. You cannot legislate the college."
