Clarifying the future of CCS Lit
Every year, Bruce (the dean of CCS) meets with students in each major to update them on the status of their program and ask for feedback on how well the program is working. This year, a lot of the Literature meeting was about the future of our program. Bruce is dedicated to making sure that CCS Lit is here to stay, and that it's here to grow stronger, but there are some interesting uncertainties about what the future will exactly look like. Here are my full notes from this meeting (also included at the end of this post).
All of this may sound worrying, but I've found that CCS Lit is an interesting and unique program, especially because many of the students are so passionate about it. We're very lucky as students that we get to participate in this improvement process — it's pretty rare that a dean of any department/college makes an effort to discuss internal department processes and politics with undergrad students.
CCS students get to participate in the construction of their educations on every level, from selecting much of your own course plan to freedom in choosing how to complete assignments — to learning about how the college works and being able to contribute real feedback to help direct the current and future state of the college. This is my favorite thing about CCS: it's an intellectual community influenced by all of its members, especially people who choose to actively put in effort to help organize and develop it, not just a standardized academic program that gives you a degree at the end.
Basically I love CCS to little pieces and I want all of you incoming freshmen to be really excited about it. And when you arrive here, I want to encourage you to make your education into the education you're looking forward to.
Comments about taking classes outside CCS Lit
I loved the English department! Taking classes there worked very well for me because my particular focus was in academic study of literature, media, and technology, not really in creative writing (CCS Lit is wonderfully flexible for people with unusual interests). So I took tons of upper-division seminar classes over in the College of Letters and Sciences. You do have to put some care and effort into picking your professors and classes, but I found a lot of smart professors and students in the English department.
I'd recommend that CCS Lit students check out the specializations available in English and see if any of them ring true for your interests, and if so, consider unofficially following their curriculum recommendations and the professors in that specialty. (I chose Literature & Culture of Information, unsurprisingly.)
Taking upper-division classes as a lower-division student is a privilege that's available if you want it. Some departments around campus are less willing to accept lower-division CCS students into their upper-division classes, even though you're technically allowed to take those classes, but it was easy in the English department. I also took a graduate-level class in the Comparative Literature program and it was great; I should have done more of those.
CCS Lit already includes a number of academic/theory classes — in my experience, they're often taught by people from other departments who want to have a chance to teach more specialized and experimental topics than they can in their "home" departments, since CCS allows for a lot of flexibility in class topics and usually has small class sizes. It sounds like CCS will be doing more of that in the future, and possibly in a more formal way, which sounds good to me. Generally it's good when CCS students spend time in outside departments and within CCS.
The Book Art classes within CCS are awesome, and everybody interested in art or books should take them. Sign up for them right away if you can — don't wait too many quarters to start!
My unsolicited advice
CCS Lit is not a program that works for everybody by default, but when you apply the effort to make it into something that does work for you (with a bit of luck along the way), you can't imagine having gone anywhere else. Bruce says that CCS is a place for "weirdly focused" students. I think it works especially when your interests and ambitions don't quite fit into a standard college structure — when you want more, when you want to determine your own intellectual path, when you want to work on what you're interested in, when you want to produce original work instead of filling out assignments for grades, when you are willing to find your own advisors from across campus and hang out with people in different majors to learn what you can learn. And maybe also for people who find interdepartmental politics fascinating. :)
Edit: My notes from the meeting
Since the CCS Literature Collaborative group is now a closed group, I'll repost my notes from that meeting below:
To ensure the survival of CCS, Bruce is working on integrating the college more effectively into the campus. External reviews over the past ten years criticized the inward-facing structure of the college because it was not terribly valuable to UCSB as a whole (although of course valuable to its students). Improving this will mean that we can keep our budget now and in the future.
The other majors have made a lot of progress, but CCS Literature is still inward-turned -- and there aren't enough qualified faculty in the program right now to lead the Lit major going forward, since Shirley is retiring next year. We need to add in more people from the rest of campus. But CCS Lit will continue to have creative writing as part of its unique value to UCSB and its students, especially since English and the Writing Program don't provide that kind of class. Bruce wants CCS Lit to stay here and stay strong, and it is obvious that it will be altered over the course of this growth process, but he does not yet know exactly how.
English is interested in increasing and developing its multimedia and multidisciplinary offerings. This will probably become a stronger part of CCS Lit -- but the idea is to open the additional doors of new media, not to close the existing doors of developing the craft of writing for readers.
Over the course of the transition period, current students will be able to continue with the program they signed up for (their intellectual contract with the college). New students will get the new program.
What can we do to help? Talk to our favorite professors about CCS and generally be good CCS citizens across campus. Get involved with campus jobs, especially as tour guides, and share information about jobs with each other. It'd be great if CCS could develop its alumni network more.
The current CCS Lit advising system is very weak. Bruce knows this and is working to get more faculty into the program to help with it.
Can't we make our current lecturers into stronger parts of CCS, as advisors and leaders? Not really, because of how the university is structured. There are three kinds of teachers here: "ladder faculty" who are long-term members of the staff hired for teaching, research, and service; "lecturers" hired for teaching and service (who can become longer-term members of staff after teaching for a while); and "unit 18s" who are hired to only teach (on a shorter-term basis). A lot of our teachers in CCS Lit are unit 18s, but the leader of CCS Lit is required to be a ladder faculty member.
How do we help the university and the broader community learn about CCS? Bruce knows that the CCS website is awful and is attempting to make progress on that front. Bruce is also working on getting CCS classes to not be "secret" on GOLD. Ellen also proposed the idea of a downtown reading series that would involve CCS students and alumni, to help promote the image of CCS and also benefit student and alumni writers.
