AU REPORT Winter 1997

Today's students at the University of Tennessee find it hard to believe that a decade ago, UT students roundly opposed the semester system they take for granted.

Jack Reese, chancellor of the Knoxville campus in the 1980s, says 70 percent of UT students favored the quarter system when the administration convinced the board of trustees to make the switch. Today, he says, quarters are a non-issue.

Ellen Zerigue, vice president of the UT Student Government Association, described quarters as "strange" and said she could not understand why her predecessors had favored them. "It seems that quarters would be harder on a student," she said.

"I feel that I am able to learn more information during the semester term," she added, admitting that she has had no experience with quarters.

Steve Kennedy, chairman of the Undergraduate Academic Council, said he interned last summer with students from Auburn. "I was able to start earlier and work longer," he said.

Kennedy said one of his engineering professors had shown him some advantages to quarters. He remained in favor of semesters but admitted, "I would have liked more electives like you get with quarters."

Dawn Duncan, president of the Graduate Student Association, said she can understand why UT and Auburn students take opposite views on the issue. "A person's comfort level is whatever you get used to," she said.

Panel's work cleared way for University of Tennessee conversion

Sounding like someone who has spent his life studying and teaching religion, Lee Humphreys says a university undergoing a conversion to semesters can expect to emerge anew from the struggle.

Humphreys, who was tapped by then-Chancellor Jack Reese to lead the University of Tennessee's conversion to semesters in the 1980s, recalls a time of turbulence that was overcome by careful planning and a commitment to a successful transition.

The religious studies professor was transferred from the classroom to a small office associated with the provost for the duration of the transition. He also was assigned a secretary to help track the miles of paperwork produced by a complete change of the curriculum and other changes resulting from the calendar change.

"It is critical that the project be directed by someone for whom this is their major concern," he says. "Make sure that you have a central transition office."

Humphreys handled the day-to-day work for a committee of faculty, staff, student officers and UT administrators during the three-year transition. This was a rolling set of personnel, who came and went during the process, but continuity was never a problem , he said.

Since the entire life of the university was affected, the committee brought in many others who would not ordinarily have a voice in academic changes, he said. For instance, by checking with the campus police, the committee learned that local merchants and landlords were expressing concerns to officers. The panel then met with representatives of merchants and landlords and involved them in the transition planning.

The external involvement, however, was minor compared to the debates that revolved around curriculum changes during the first year of the transition. "It was a tense time," Humphreys concedes. "People had a lot of questions; there was a lot of adjustment. Now I question whether all the tension and heat were about the right things, but every opposing argument got a hearing."

The general education program, or core curriculum, was drafted first, and departments built their curricula around the core. Under university policy, each unit had to reduce its offerings by one-third. "If you just repackage the courses, you will have to o many," he said. However, UT relied more heavily on three-hour courses than does Auburn, where most courses are five hours each.

As coordinator of the transition, Humphreys operated a one-man instant reaction force to stamp out ill feelings, as well as rumors and false information. "Whenever I would hear that someone had expressed a concern, I would call them up," he says. "We woul d not allow concerns to fester."

Although disputes on curriculum were usually handled in the departments, logistics at times threatened to derail the process. On at least one occasion, the chancellor had to get personally involved. After months of works by people all over campus, the com mittee was scheduled to present course books to all academic advisors. Then, two days before the presentation, Humphreys learned that the printing service had pushed back the delivery date of the booklets. He called for help from the vice chancellor and chancellor and they put the printing service on a round-the-clock schedule to get the booklets delivered in time.

Factors converged to bring about change at University of Tennessee

By the time the University of Tennessee's Board of Trustees had approved ending UT's 60-year experience with the quarter system in April 1985, Jack Reese, chancellor of the main campus at Knoxville at that time, was eager to get the campus on a semester c alendar as soon as possible.

Reese, a former and future English professor at UT, had always viewed semesters as providing a better learning environment than the start-and-stop pace of the 10-week quarters that had been the norm at the Knoxville campus since the 1920s. "The timing of the quarter system was wrong; we were out of sync in so many ways," he recalls from his basement office in the old library building.

But, rather than rush into the conversion, he took the academically correct step of appointing a committee to clear the path for conversion. Three years later, the committee's work complete, UT opened the fall term, 1988, on the semester system with hardl y a hitch.

When the issue came before the faculty senate in 1983, the faculty had been evenly split between those favoring quarters and those wanting to switch to semesters. Students were about 70-30 in favor of sticking with quarters. But semesters already had a nose under the tent when the UT law school switched to semesters a few years earlier to protect its accreditation. The law school's experience and the urge to unify the campus under one system tilted the argument in favor of semesters at the same time Aub urn was deciding to stay with quarters for its academic calendar in the 1980s.

Reese, now chancellor-emeritus with University Professor rank, said the three-year transition went smoothly for UT despite some complications with which Auburn will not have to deal. During the same decade that UT was changing its academic calendar, it wa s also imposing its first selective admissions policy and implementing a core curriculum. It also faced the daunting task of converting a curriculum in which the three-hour credit course, rather than the five-hour course, was the norm. These changes clo uded the issue but never threatened the process, he said.

In the fall of 1988, he notes, "People came back to school like always. There didn't seem to be any feeling that there was any change."

UT, UGA officials say Auburn has some advantages they lacked

Auburn may have a smoother transition from academic quarters to semesters than the University of Tennessee experienced in the 1980s or the University of Georgia is now experiencing, says the chairman of the UGA transition committee.

James A. Whitney, who studied UT's transition on behalf of the transition committee at the University of Georgia, noted that Auburn and Georgia have five credit-hour courses as their standard. Since these courses meet five times a week for 10 weeks, the same material can be covered as three-hour courses that meet three times weekly in 15-week semesters.

Since students have fewer back-to-back classes, UT lengthened the instructional hour from 50 minutes to 55. As a result, students spend approximately the same amount of class in a three-hour course per semester as they did in a five-hour course under the quarter system.

At Tennessee, however, the three-hour course was far more common in the quarter system than at Auburn or Georgia, so UT faculty faced far more hurdles in designing their curriculum, Whitney said.

Also, unlike at Tennessee, Auburn's change to semesters does not include adoption of a new core curriculum. In the 1980s, both Auburn and Tennessee began revamping their core curricula. Tennessee, however, made the revisions the central part of its chang e to a semester academic calendar, while Auburn concentrated on the core curriculum. Auburn's core curriculum is not targeted for a second round of wholesale changes.

UT complicated its transition even further by upgrading its computer registration system as part of the transition, said Ralph Norman, a former UT vice chancellor and co-chair of the transition team. "We had a very poor computer registration system, and w e were able to upgrade that in the process," he said.

"The computer people said the system would collapse under the strain, but it did not," said Norman, who is now a religious studies professor. The administration asked the computer operations staff to find a way. "They came back and said they would make it work, and they did."

Norman said improvements in computing since the 1980s should make the transition easier for Auburn.

At the University of Georgia, Whitney said Auburn will also be spared a problem which has plagued the Georgia transmission. The chair of the UGA transition committee said the panel's efforts have been stymied by frequent changes of direction from the Univ ersity System chancellor's office in Atlanta. The chancellor's office is trying to come up with a core curriculum for all public four year institutions in Georgia, and the resulting confusion is throwing planning efforts off track at the Athens campus, Whitney explained.

The UGA transition committee began work in early fall, 1995, with transition slated for completion in 1997. The completion date has been moved back to 1998 for most of the campuses and to 1999 for Georgia Tech, which was granted an additional delay becaus e its work with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

UT chancellor recalls easing of tensions once transition got underway

When someone speaks of quarters around Bill Snyder today, they may as well be seeking change for a dollar. Yet at one time he had found himself among a small minority of University of Tennessee engineering faculty who wanted UT to switch its academic cale ndar from quarters to semesters.

Quarters are seldom discussed today around Snyder, chancellor of UT at Knoxville. A decade ago, they were the hot topic on campus as the university was preparing to abandon an academic calendar based on quarters to adopt one based on semesters -- and Snyd er found himself in the middle of the struggle.

Dean of Engineering during the implementation, he had been a department head in 1983, when the faculty senate narrowly voted in favor of the switch. His predecessor as dean, who left the post shortly after the vote, and the majority of the Engineering fa culty had argued unsuccessfully to keep the university on quarters.

The biggest concern expressed by the previous engineering dean had been the possible harmful impact on the cooperative education program. Many other engineering faculty were also arguing that employers would withdraw their support for the co-op program i f UT went to semesters. Snyder, however, was getting the opposite feedback from employers of his engineering students.

"I had been in contact with people in industry, and they were saying semesters were a positive, providing fewer starts and stops. Industry people preferred the longer time of semesters" Snyder said.

Although he could not recall the numbers from a decade ago, Snyder said the co-op program grew -- rather than declining as some predicted -- after the conversion. "Some industries that did not like the time frame of our co-op program started hiring our c o-ops after we went to semesters," he added.

Once the UT board of trustees approved the conversion in 1985, Snyder, by then a dean, asked the engineering faculty to reinvent the curriculum. He urged the faculty to take to heart the slogan: "Reinventing engineering today to serve the needs of the fu ture."

The curriculum had become stagnant and cluttered over time, he said, and was in need of rethinking. The college needed a cleaner slate of programs more in keeping with modern challenges, and the faculty needed an opportunity to look afresh at all course o fferings, he said.

"We thought of it as cleaning up the curriculum," he said. "Once that was done, people set about the making the transition work."

Acceptance of semesters grew quickly, and quarters are now a non-issue on the Knoxville campus, he said. "Even in engineering, everybody has adapted. New faculty who come here from the semester system think that is the only way to do it," said Snyder, wh o became chancellor in 1992.

If he could do it again, Snyder said he would urge the faculty to look at merging programs while they were merging courses. "The current dean, with my encouragement, has found strong faculty support for merging programs," he added. His old department, En gineering Science and Mechanics, has since been merged into the department of Mechanical Engineering. "Now people realize that the resources are not there to do everything."

Rewriting curriculum recalled as toughest challenge for faculty

Auburn faculty can expect an intense year as they rework their curricula for conversion to semesters, say University of Tennessee faculty and administrators who remember their university's calendar transition.
"In the liberal arts, we had a knock-down, drag-out battle over the curriculum," says Lee Humphreys, a religious studies professor who coordinated the transition for the UT Knoxville campus.

Humphreys says debate over the curriculum should be welcomed, not feared. "It is in the nature of a university," he explains.

Marian Moffett, a professor of architecture and an administrator in the office of academic affairs, said departments had to make hard choices. This led to sometimes tedious debates that, in her department, drove people apart before they came together on t he new curriculum.

Moffett, who as faculty senate president when the process began in 1985, said the departmental debates raged over which courses to keep, which ones to revamp, which ones to merge and which courses to drop. "We could not increase the number of hours on stu dents, so we had to cut courses. Isolated three-credit courses could not stay," she explained.

"The debates had not much to do with curriculum but everything to do with personalities, " she recalled.

"Once we got through that, it was a matter of sorting things out," she added. "There was a lot of horsetrading by faculty members. A lot of electives were cut."

Department by department, as pieces fell into place, critics became leaders of the conversion. "When the naysayers became convinced that it would work, they convinced others," Moffett said.

What emerged was a curriculum that was stronger than the one it replaced, she said.

Complicating matters for UT was adoption of a core or general education curriculum. That had to be in place before departmental curricula could be drafted. The debate over service courses was the only one to involve the entire university, she said. Forei gn language was added, but opponents won a compromise when foreign cultures courses were included as an option for foreign languages, and a math-related music course was included as an alternative to mathematics for music majors.

Departments then built their curricula around the core curriculum.
Three-quarter sequences were easy to modify: Moffett recalls dividing the material into halves instead of thirds for a year's worth of classes. For some one-quarter classes, she was able to add new material and require term papers from her students.

"What got cut out were people's little specialties that they had to combine with others," she said. In most cases, faculty found a way to work their special interests into larger courses, sometimes through trading areas of less interest to faculty whose interests were the mirror image of their own. In some cases, faculty who previously opposed to one another became allies in developing new courses, she added.

The pain of developing a new curriculum for semesters, she said, was quickly forgotten once the process was complete. "With the switch to semesters, I welcomed the opportunity to rethink my courses," she said, adding that semesters now enjoy a wide follow ing on campus. "It is more effective. It puts order in our lives."

Doors opened but where were students?
University of Tennessee faculty and administrators thought they had covered all the bases when the university switched to a semester calendar in 1988 after three years of careful planning. But when the doors opened that fall, several hundred fewer studen ts came through.

Administrators and transition committee members had checked with several universities whose transitions to semesters were models for UT's switch, but no one warned about the sudden drop in enrollment, said Phil Scheurer, vice chancellor for administration and student affairs at UT.

Since he was responsible for admissions and records during the transition, Scheurer investigated to find out what became of the students.

He discovered that hundreds of students had taken extra courses the year before and summer quarter enrollment had surged as students rushed to graduate before getting caught in the transition to semesters. Countless assurances that they would not be hurt went unheeded by students who did not want to take the risk.

"There were a lot of students who did not want the transition noted on their transcripts," he recalls. "It was irrational, but that was the way they felt."

In the summers leading up to the transition, UT officials briefed new students and their parents on what to expect. However, the summer of 1988, immediately before the start of semesters, the anxiety level was rising among new freshmen and their parents.< P> "During the orientation program that summer, all the parents wanted to talk about was the transition," Scheurer said. "Some faculty had been critical of switching to semesters, and parents picked up on it. It took a couple of years to overcome the enrollm ent drop."

Scheurer said he did not know how many potential students were scared away by talk about the transition, but he traced the drop in enrollment to the same students who had led to the surge a year earlier in their rush to graduate early.

Listening to students paid off for planners

Marian Moffett, a member of the University of Tennessee's semester-transition team, found herself on the ideal committee -- one that held its organizational session and never met again.

Moffett was UT faculty senate president in 1985 when the university's board of trustees approved the transition to semesters, and she found herself serving on both the transition team and a board set up to hear appeals from students who were disadvantaged by the change from quarters to semesters.

The appeals board was set up in response to the UT board of trustees, which had issued one stipulation when approving the transition: Students were not to be hurt by the transition.

The transition committee put in many hours to provide a smooth transition in 1988, but the appeals board never had to meet, she said. No students filed grievances alleging personal harm from the transition.

Moffett said department heads, deans and academic advisors were given wide latitude to substitute courses for students who started under the quarter system and finished under the semester system.

Ralph Norman, then-vice chancellor and co-chair of the transition team, said the university headed off student problems by adopting the curriculum at the end of the first year of transition, giving faculty and advisers two years in which to steer students away from potential conflicts. "We spent a lot of time making sure no students were disadvantaged," he said.

"There were a lot of exemptions for students during the transition, but I don't think we ever compromised on the quality of the degree."

Starting a year before the transition, the university required all students to meet with their academic advisers to plan the courses they would need for the next two years or until graduation. Manuals, checklists and conversion tables were developed to ea se the process and advisers were trained in their use.

Students were prevented from starting sequence courses if they could not complete the sequence before the transition. The number of sequence courses and prerequisites was also drastically reduced under the new system, so the potential for conflicts was fu rther reduced, Norman said.

"There was a transition plan for every student," he said. "It was a lot less awkward than you would suppose."

Trip to NC State turned skeptics into advocates

Before the University of Tennessee semester transition team could begin planning for the transition, it had to overcome resistance from members who remained unconvinced they could implement the conversion mandate from UT's board of trustees.

Committee members from the College of Agriculture still maintained that a semester system was ill-suited for the teaching of seasonally based production agriculture, and some faculty members did not think it feasible to extend the standard class hour from 50 minutes to 55.

Skeptical members, however, changed their minds after the committee journeyed across the Smoky Mountains to North Carolina State University, a land-grant institution which had been on semesters since the 1950s. Members started coming together after seein g programs similar to their own under the semester system, said committee member Marian Moffett.

After the NC State visit, Moffett recalls, those opposed to extending class times decided the extended periods could work. And, she adds, "We didn't hear any more arguments about seasons."

UGA team leader says mission statements help spot problems

Departments preparing to revise their curricula as part of the transition to semesters should start with a mission statement, says James A. Whitney, head of the transition committee at the University of Georgia.

A mission statement can protect a department against rejection of its curriculum proposal by the dean, Whitney said.

UGA is using departmental mission statements to keep the curriculum changes of departments in line with the mission and goals of the university, he said.

Whitney cited the case of a large department which teaches part of the core curriculum for all students, yet the department defined its mission as to teach majors in its field. "That was totally at odds with the mission of the college -- only a few stude nts major in (the field), but everyone has to take it," he said.

The dean responded that if the department was only going to teach its majors, it would not need most of its faculty. He received a new mission statement from the department.

Larger classes? Not necessarily, says professor/administrator

Although larger classes are often cited as an outcome of the transition to semesters, University of Tennessee officials say experience does not justify the claim.

UT adopted its general studies, or core curriculum, during the transition, leaving officials with no basis to confirm or refute allegations that class sizes increase in required courses.

Further complicating the issue was a decision by UT administrators to reduce by one-third the number of course offerings in an attempt to reduce faculty teaching loads.

However, architecture professor Marian Moffett said she has seen no evidence of increases in class size in her department, nor in other areas with which she deals on behalf of the academic affairs office.

Another complicating factor cited by former Chancellor Jack Reese was the university's efforts during the 1980s to reduce enrollment from 31,000 to 25,000 through UT's first use of selective admissions.

During the semester transition, UT officials reduced some of the pressure on class sizes by eliminating many "gatekeeper" prerequisites that forced students to crowd into certain introductory classes before they could take other courses in their field.

At the University of Georgia, James Whitney, chairman of the UGA semester transition committee, said his committee is also taking aim at the gatekeeper courses. Departments have to demonstrate that they are not crowding students into large and difficult c ourses for the purpose of weeding them, he said.

Air conditioning costs go up with semesters

Eight years after the fact, some University of Tennessee students this fall were sweating out the university's conversion to the semester system.

They were the students in a handful of UT's oldest dormitories, which do not have air conditioning.

Those dorms are left vacant during the summer, but students returning for the start of the fall term in late August have to endure a few weeks of hot weather, UT officials concede.

The lack of air conditioning is more of a problem under the semester system than it was under the quarter system, said Ralph Norman, who was vice provost during the transition in 1988. "That may be more of a problem for Auburn than for Knoxville," he add ed.
Although students are spared the heat buildup that their predecessors endured in late May in early June, the heat and humidity are usually more intense in August, he conceded.

Raymond Hamilton, executive director of business and finance, said the administration hopes to have the remaining dorms air conditioned in the near future.

Although other savings offset much of the cost, Hamilton said, a university planning a switch to semesters can expect higher air conditioning costs because of the August start.

Faculty received extra paycheck when semesters started

The University of Tennessee -- and its faculty -- experienced a financial windfall in August, 1988, when the university implemented a semester academic calendar.

UT faculty on nine-month appointments collected an extra paycheck that year, when they returned to the classroom a month earlier than they had done under the quarter system.

The university could afford the extra paychecks because students paid tuition a month earlier and for half the academic year instead of one-third.

"There was a financial windfall the first year," said Raymond Hamilton, a veteran of the transition and now executive director of business and finance. "Faculty received an extra paycheck, but it didn't cost the university extra because tuition collection s were moved up."

The biggest cost, said Hamilton, was in faculty and staff time to prepare for a smooth transition.

The transition committee had used several means to communicate the financial aspects of the transition to the campus, many students would not believe that their total annual tuition was the same until they received a personal explanation.

"The first semester, you have to do a lot of explaining to students," said Denise Barlow, director of finance, who was assistant registrar that semester. "We can tell them the fees will be higher (to cover a longer period of time), but they don't really u nderstand what we are talking about until they get their first statement. It is not personal until then."