Ensuring the availability of courses to enable our undergraduates to graduate in a timely manner is a collective responsibility that we take very seriously. At the highest level, decisions regarding teaching funds and faculty FTE are made with an eye to student enrollment patterns. At the departmental level, decisions about which courses to offer, when to offer them, what size classroom to request, etc. are based on a careful analysis of not only enrollment trends, but also major declaration trends, interdisciplinary interconnections, major and breadth requirements, and the like. In this section we mention just a few examples of both the routine and the inventive strategies employed by the faculty and staff who take responsibility for delivering the curriculum.

One of the most serious limiting factors in our ability to accommodate the full student demand for courses is the finite amount of classroom space at our disposal, especially for large lecture classes. (There are only twenty-seven classrooms on the Berkeley campus that seat more than one hundred students, and only two of those seat more than five hundred. Beginning in fall 2000 the space situation will reach a crisis point: thirty-nine of our 240 classrooms will be unavailable due to seismic construction.) Classroom assignments are very carefully managed so as to maximize the enrollment capacity of the campus. Departments do their best to project the enrollments for their courses and to request rooms of an appropriate size; however, at the beginning of the semester, once the enrollments are official, the Classroom Scheduling Office moves classes that did not meet their enrollment projections into smaller classrooms to make room for classes that exceeded their projections. The departments also remain flexible as the semester commences, often hiring on extra Graduate Student Instructors or Readers to accommodate an unusually heavy demand for a course.

Sometimes an increased demand is easy to predict and prepare for. For instance, the Sociology major is growing, which means that the courses required for the major are also growing. Between 1994-95 and 1998-99, the core courses in Sociology grew by 18% and 23%, for the lower-division core course and the upper-division core course sequence, respectively. The Department anticipated the increased demand and raised the number of sections scheduled (and Graduate Student Instructors hired) accordingly.

Of course the most important element necessary to deliver the curriculum is faculty. As a campus we are constantly doing what we can to maximize our teaching power. For years Berkeley has tapped one particular unorthodox source of teaching power: the faculty of the professional schools and colleges, which don’t offer any undergraduate major programs of their own, and whose faculty have not traditionally contributed to the undergraduate teaching mission. Great numbers of professional school faculty members teach in the Freshman Seminar Program, for instance, and we have also had success with the Hewlett Courses in General Education, which we described in last year’s report. Each Hewlett course is team-taught by a faculty member from Letters and Science and a faculty member from a professional school. The Hewlett courses are interdisciplinary, and each satisfies at least one breadth requirement. As of last year’s report, we had offered only the first of ten Hewlett courses. In 1998-99 we offered five Hewlett courses, four new ones and a repeat of the first one. The new topics were Introduction to Environmental Studies (Robert Hass, English, and Gregory Gilbert, Environmental Science, Policy and Management), Children in History: Social Practices and Social Welfare (Paula Fass, History, and Mary Ann Mason, Social Welfare), Death, Dying, and Modern Medicine (Tom Laqueur, History, and Guy Micco, Health and Medical Sciences), and Make War, Not Love (Thomas Barnes, History, and Malcolm Potts, Public Health).

Our new undergraduate major program in Bioengineering has increased the number of qualified faculty participants by recruiting four superb UCSF faculty members whose teaching loads at their home campus are minimal. These faculty members have been identified as a consequence of a decade-long collaboration between faculty at Berkeley and UCSF. The UCSF faculty members will participate in advising, in the development of new courses, and in the teaching of existing required courses in the department. Bringing these faculty members into the program will have at least two added advantages: their health-science expertise will complement the engineering expertise of the Berkeley faculty, and the students will be exposed to real clinical uses of technology and to clinical situations where contemporary bioengineering problems are being formulated.

Some departments employ alternate sources of teaching power not by choice but by necessity. For instance, the English Department has been chronically short of faculty since VERIP (the early retirement incentive programs), and the process of rebuilding the faculty to a size adequate to deliver its curriculum is slow. At the same time, several English faculty members are holding full-time positions in the campus’ higher administration. Therefore, although the Chair strongly believes that upper-division seminars are best taught by regular faculty, the department has resorted to a temporary strategy of hiring its own recent Ph.D.’s as postdoctoral lecturers to teach these required seminars.

The campus has a long-standing goal of redirecting enrollments, to the extent possible, to the underutilized departments. The foreign language and literature departments, for instance, could use more undergraduate student enrollments in their courses, to balance the teaching load more evenly across the campus. The Department of Italian Studies provides one example of an effort to attract student enrollments: the department has introduced two lower-division courses taught in English, one on Dante (taught for the first time in spring 1999) and the other on Italian Culture (which had its highest-ever enrollment-–56 undergraduates–-in fall 1998).

Increasingly, departments have come to rely on the summer session to offer additional sections of courses that experience high student demand. And increasingly, students are relying on summer sessions to help them finish their degrees in a timely manner. Last year we reported that

8,177 Berkeley undergraduates enrolled in summer classes in 1998. In the summer of 1999, 8737 Berkeley undergraduates enrolled in summer classes. This figure represents a 7% increase from the previous year. Another way to look at this figure is to say that the number of Berkeley undergraduates taking summer courses in summer 1999 was 39.5% of the number of Berkeley undergraduates enrolled in the spring just prior to this summer session. Last year we also reported on an innovative partnership between Summer Sessions and the Financial Aid Office. Here is an updated chart, showing a 5% increase in the number of awards and a 17% increase in the total dollars awarded:

Year	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999
Total Awards	1,738	2,506	3,242	3,649	3,832
Total Dollars	$1,597,711	$2,257,117	$3,264,096	$4,025,114	$4,723,071

The number of Berkeley students on financial aid, however, did not increase this summer, so we can attribute the higher numbers of Berkeley students who attended summer session to a combination of increased pressure for courses during the regular academic year, increased convenience of summer scheduling and a broader selection of summer courses.

Departments also plan carefully to ensure that required courses aren’t scheduled in conflicting time slots. Often this means looking at each track or area of emphasis in a given major separately. At other times it means cross checking the courses required of a certain cohort–first-year Engineering students, for example, or the junior year in Forest Science. The lower-division work for science and engineering majors is rarely limited to the department offering the major: in these cases the staff and faculty have to work across departmental lines to ensure that no serious conflicts emerge.

Despite the best planning, some students will be turned away from the most popular courses in some semesters. In most cases, the students have several alternatives, including taking a different course that satisfies the same requirement, or taking the same course in a subsequent semester. Certain departments make a special commitment to the students who are not accommodated. Students who try unsuccessfully to enroll in Film 25 (the core prerequisite for the major) or College Writing 1A, for instance, are put on a priority list and guaranteed enrollment in the following semester.