By William Trombley
Every Thursday, in the late afternoon, a handful of history graduate students and a single professor meet in a "teleconferencing room" on the University of California, Riverside, campus to discuss topics in British History with their counterparts on four other UC campuses in a televised seminar.
The idea is to expose the graduate students to a wider range of expertise, since none of the five UC campuses involved (Davis, Irvine, Riverside, San Diego and Santa Barbara) has more than one or two British historians.
"You need to provide as broad a range as possible for your students," said John A. Phillips, a British historian at UC Riverside. "And you also need to do everything you possibly can to enhance their marketability--I hate to be crass but, given today's job market, that's the reality."
The British History consortium, and similar efforts in a few other fields of history, mark the first tentative efforts at collaboration among UC campuses, but there are likely to be more.
"We're going to encourage this kind of thinking and these kinds of efforts," said C. Judson King, UC systemwide provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. King said campuses will have to cooperate more because of budget constraints.
Twenty-five or 30 years ago, when money was flowing generously to the UC system, each of the general campuses hoped for the kind of across-the-board academic excellence that UC Berkeley and UCLA have achieved. But increasing competition for state dollars--from health care, public schools, welfare and the prison system, combined with reductions in federal research spending--have made that an unrealistic goal.
"I think we all agree that we don't have the money to do all we'd like to do and that we're not likely to have it in the near future," said Carol T. Christ, provost at UC Berkeley and one of the driving forces behind the collaboration movement.
Inter-campus cooperation might make it easier for selected departments on the smaller campuses to achieve high academic rank. Collaboration also might help the smaller campuses avoid a fate that has been suggested from time to time--that much of the university system's specialized research and graduate study be concentrated at Berkeley and UCLA.
Academic vice chancellors from the various campuses began to talk seriously about collaboration two years ago. A year later, college and division deans took up the discussion and decided to concentrate on cooperative efforts in education, foreign languages, history, physics and the library system.
Of these, history seemed especially promising, Provost King said, because "it is an area with an enormous number of specialties and sub-specialties and no one can cover them all."
In addition, he said, history "was one of the academic areas that was a victim of the random decimation of the faculty" that took place when UC persuaded more than 1,000 full-time faculty members to take early retirement, to cope with the budget cuts of the early 1990s.
History department chairs, and academic vice chancellors, from the eight general campuses met in San Diego last month to discuss the kinds of sharing that have taken place so far and to examine future possibilities.
They heard Professor Phillips describe the British History consortium and they heard about a Russian History graduate seminar that currently involves four UC campuses in southern California (Irvine, Riverside, San Diego and UCLA), with UC Santa Barbara expected to join next year.
This seminar focuses on Imperial Russia one year, Soviet History the next. About a dozen students and four or five faculty members usually are involved. Last year, they traveled from Irvine, Riverside and San Diego to UCLA on the same bus that carries books and other library materials from campus to campus. But this year the seminar is being televised.
UCLA offers a television seminar in Armenian history to graduate students at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. The UC system's medieval historians and its Latin American specialists have begun to discuss possible cooperation.
Almost all of the inter-campus efforts so far have been at the graduate level.
"There was general consensus at the (San Diego) meeting that 'distance learning' doesn't work well for undergraduates," said Karl G. Hufbauer, head of the UC Irvine history department. "Our discipline resists the notion that the university can offer a bunch of TV courses and get rid of the faculty."
Carol Christ agreed that "there doesn't seem to be much interest" in televised undergraduate courses in history and other humanities subjects but she noted that other fields of study--engineering, for example--are beginning to embrace the idea.
The history department heads also talked about cooperating in the appointment of new faculty members. Few favored joint appointments--one professor teaching in two places--but there was some enthusiasm for sharing information about possible new hires.
Reginald Zelnik, history chair at UC Berkeley, said he discussed a job opening in History of Science with his counterparts at UC Davis and at the UC Medical Center in San Francisco, so that all three would not hire professors with the same special interests.
There was concern among the department chairs that collaboration might turn out to be an excuse for trimming budgets. "Does inter-campus cooperation lead to program enrichment or does it simply lead to further budget cuts?" asked Ronald J. Mellor, history chair at UCLA.
Christ said that would not happen. "The motivation is to find ways to enhance our programs, not to save money," she said.
Some wonder if inter-campus cooperation in the University of California ever will move beyond conversations, meetings and the occasional example like the British History consortium.
Ted W. Margadant, history department chairman at UC Davis, thinks it will.
"We're seeing a convergence of administrative planning, brought about by fiscal need, and the interests of faculty on the mid-sized campuses in developing better programs," he said. "I think this will keep us moving in the direction of more collaboration."