Gilleland, chairperson of the chemistry department at California State College, Bakersfield, has been getting good results teaching by the inquiry method, maximizing lab time, minimizing lectures, and challenging students devise and solve their own experiments. We are trying, she says, to de-emphasize learning content for content's sake and put more emphasis on applications and utility. She is trying out these methods in a chemistry department and a school of sciences and math that are wholly committed innovative teaching. As one document circulating in the chemistry department says, fact that California State, Bakersfield, exists is not widely known. The newest of California's state colleges, smelling pleasantly of continuing construction, it is a clean campus of rectangular surfaces of cream and lightyellow stucco and beige brick, a place of broad halls and vending machines in surprising places. The group of buildings stands out on a flat, open prairie outside of Bakersfield, a city of 180,000 in a section where the principal industries are agribusiness and oil. The college has about 3,000 students; the chemistry faculty of 5 teach about 500 students annually, and there are about 5 chemistry graduates a year. John R. Coash, the dean of the school of natural sciences and math