New Directions in Agricultural Economics Curricula, University of California, Davis

Abstract

T HE entire College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been challenged to find and implement innovative educational programs by the 1970 New Directions report on undergraduate teaching in the College. Recommendations were gathered from a year of study by three committees charged by former Dean C. O. McCorkle with considering goals, curricula, and majors, and the administration of teaching programs. The direction in administration was quickly effected by creating five interdisciplinary teaching divisions so that the needs and objectives of the various undergraduate teaching units could be considered independently of departmental research missions. (The five undergraduate teaching divisions are Agricultural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Food and Consumer Sciences, Resource Sciences, and Applied Economics and Behavioral Sciences, the latter consisting of three majors with primary emphasis on agricultural economics and four in the area of applied behavioral science). Stressing the need for curricular flexibility both to meet the unique objectives of individual students at each point in time and to provide for systematic adaptability over time, seven reforms proposed by the study committee have been instituted. The first four measures affect all undergraduates in the College: (1) increased emphasis has been placed on the dual role of faculty advisors in assisting each student to obtain her personal educational objectives and in seeking student input into changing curricula; (2) all college-wide breadth requirements have been dropped; (3) students may take up to one-third of their total units on a pass-no record basis (P > C-) with no restriction on so taking major courses; (4) course prerequisites have been eliminated or replaced wherever possible with bodies of knowledge. In addition, individual students may elect to take of inquiry-problem solving courses whose specific content is determined by a student or students and one or more faculty with a common interest. Likewise, the Explorer program permits an individual student, in consultation with an advisor, to tailor an individual major by describing his special educational objectives and proposing a study list to accomplish them. Finally, the existing majors have been requested to substitute broad areas of knowledge for specific requirements (e.g., 10 units of natural science in lieu of requiring Physics 1 and Chemistry 5). The direction in goals of the College's undergraduate teaching program stresses the involvement of students in both determining educational policy and in evaluating the teaching and advising output of the faculty. The purpose of this involvement is to obtain more information about students' demand for the educational product instead of our traditional reliance upon whatever course structure and content faculty have chosen to supply. In agricultural economics, substantive changes in both the undergraduate and graduate curricula reflect the recommended new