Trouble in paradise as “the touchy-feely school”sings the blues
Richard Moll, 45, a tweedy graduate of Yale’s Divinity School, has become a Dr. Fix-It for colleges that complain of sagging enrollment. As director of admissions for Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., Moll brought a slice of pizazz to the countrified, 186-year-old alma mater of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Moll persuaded Bowdoin to allow applicants to skip the College Board exams, an attention-getting move, and he issued a new college brochure splashed with photos of sunsets, lobster pots and the Maine seacoast. Resultsduring Moll’s eight years at Bowdoin, applications increased from 1,183 to 3,473.
Then Moll moved on to Vassar, a school whose identity fuzzed after it went coeducational. Between 1975 and 1980, Moll mobilized alums, sent admissions staffers to prowl high schools and issued a new brochure whose cover was a cartoon showing a young male student in a Vassar T shirt being jeered by men from Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Again applications rose—from 1,877 to 3,388.
Now Dr. Fix-It has taken on yet another patient, this time a newish school suffering from a trendy reputation rather than the handicaps of tradition—the University of California at Santa Cruz.
For 15 years after its founding in 1965, U.C.S.C. did not bother to play the highly competitive college admissions game. No one, in fact, was designated to serve as full-time dean of admissions. Nevertheless, during the early ’70s there were three applicants for each class niche.
One attraction was the breathtakingly beautiful campus built amid a redwood forest high above California’s Monterey Bay (students quickly dubbed the resort-like U.C.S.C. “Uncle Charley’s Summer Camp”). Another was Santa Cruz’s remarkable educational mission. Clark Kerr, longtime president of California’s statewide university, had conceived Santa Cruz as a quiet, human-sized island within the state’s gargantuan system. It was built around a collection of intimate colleges for students and faculty, as at Oxford. To Kerr’s unexceptionable dream were added other more radical ideas in tune with the rebellious ’60s. One campus house, Kresge College, was briefly run as a floating encounter group of students and faculty. Campus-wide emphasis was placed on independent study. Most strikingly, it was decided that Santa Cruz students would get no grades; instead, each quarter, instructors wrote careful narrative appraisals of each student’s work.
For a time, Santa Cruz’s reputation as “the touchy-feely school” was a recruitment plus. As Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer puts it, “The image developed that Santa Cruz was a place to come and sort of ‘lay back’ in the redwoods.” Today, though, the most popular undergraduate major at U.C.S.C. is not Zen Buddhism or cosmic consciousness but biology. Only 4% of the students have opted for do-it-themselves interdisciplinary majors.
Still, the school’s laid-back image has lately begun to work against it. Students today are reluctant to confront graduate schools and employers with unconventional college grade transcripts. As a result, enrollment at Santa Cruz began to slip after reaching 6,134 in 1976. Last year U.C. President David Saxon warned that the campus would have to trim its faculty unless enrollment rose significantly by 1983. This year the student body is up to 6,472 but that figure includes 460 students who wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley and came to U.C.S.C. only because they were promised they could transfer to Berkeley later.
One such “redirect,” Sophomore Susan Evans, 19, says she likes U.C.S.C. and believes the professors “bend over backward” to help their students. She wants to graduate from Berkeley, though, because of its prestige. But redirected Berkeley Applicant Emily Buchbinder, 18 plans to stay at Santa Cruz, because, she believes, it has a better program in her major, politics. “I’m definitely glad I came here,” she says. “I feel I belong, and I don’t think I would have felt that way if I had gone to Berkeley.”
Preventing the threatened faculty cut backs is Richard Moll’s goal as the new dean of admissions. Author of a guide book for high schoolers and their parents titled Playing the Private College Admissions Game, now selling well in paper back, Moll is at work on a second book, The Public Ivies: Admission to a New National Elite. Joined by new recruiters, Moll plans to visit 600 high schools this year to sell Santa Cruz. Predictably he has also printed 30,000 copies of U.C.S.C.’s first glossy “view book” full of color photos of the Pacific seacoast and sunsets amid the redwoods. The essence of his sales pitch, though, is no more flamboyant than Clark Kerr’s original vision of Santa Cruz. Moll calls the school “the near perfect hybrid,” blending the large public university and the small private college. “This place feels like Vassar or Bowdoin,” he says. “The academic tone, the small size and the location all contribute to the feeling of a private college. But we draw on the resources of a famous, good — maybe the best — public university system.”
Moll also intends to compete on price, since the yearly cost at state-supported Santa Cruz is as low as $3,400 for Californians. Says he: “Any number of families will strain to get the money for Stanford or Harvard or perhaps Duke. I’m not certain that those families will strain as hard to get $8,500 or more for less prestigious private colleges such as Skidmore or Vanderbilt or Boston University — superb as those institutions are. Here sits a state university that feels like one of those private colleges, at a lower price for an out-of-stater, and in a state where one can become a resident within a year and pay in-state prices for three years.”
Faculty members at U.C.S.C. are anxiously awaiting the fruits of Moll’s efforts, and have even pitched in by personally telephoning prospective students and offering to answer questions about the school. This year applications have increased. Many faculty members fear, though, that Santa Cruz’s narrative evaluation system is threatened by the enrollment drive. Last year the academic senate came close to authorizing optional grading for students who desired it. Says American Politics Professor Karl Lamb: “If you have both systems, the grade, which is much easier to give, will drive out the evaluations.” Adds his faculty colleage John Dizikes: “The narrative evaluation system is part of a cluster of things that help us take teaching more seriously. I believe it’s a superior system.”
Responds Moll: “I’m torn. I like the idea and what it means to Santa Cruz tradition, but high schoolers — and their parents — perceive it as a real liability. I’m faced with the hard fact that it doesn’t seem to sell.”
—By Kenneth M. PierceReported by William Hackman/ Santa Cruz
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