Honors Collegium fosters remarkable teaching moments

It's not every day that curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art grant special permission for a blind student to caress a statue during a UCLA class field trip.

 

That's part of why Robert Gurval, associate professor of classics, enjoys devising and teaching classes for the Honors Collegium at UCLA. With just 20 students per Collegium class, Gurval almost always plans a museum visit, as he did for his class about representations of Cleopatra a few years ago, when the tour guide allowed Gurval's blind student to run her hands along a sculpture of the Egyptian queen and share her unique observations with the class.

 

"My most memorable teaching moments have been in my Honors Collegium seminars," Gurval said. "The students have often been the most interesting and brightest students I've had."

 

The Honors Collegium is a series of small undergraduate seminars offered as part of the Honors Program in the College. The Honors Collegium recruits teachers from all over campus, asking them to branch out of their home departments and invent classes that unite several disciplines under one umbrella class.

 

The resulting interdisciplinary Collegium classes — about 60 classes each year on topics such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the literature and poetry in India — tempt students into exploring subjects they would never touch within their major.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning UCLA scholar Jared Diamond has taught in the Honors Collegium; former Secretary of State Warren Christopher developed the seminar "International Flashpoints;" another Collegium class focused on the history of childbirth and how the invention of forceps allowed male doctors to usurp the role of midwives. At the time, women were not allowed to use "machines."

 

The Collegium courses represent a cornerstone of the Honors Program. Since the Honors Program began at UCLA in 1979, it has become a model for colleges nationwide because of its quality and size, said G. Jennifer Wilson, the assistant vice provost for Honors and director of the College Honors Program.

"Administrators from across the country contact me to find out how we do it on such a large scale," she said. "Most honors programs elsewhere are a very small, elite group of perhaps 100 [students]. But we're a huge public university. We have about 4,000 students in the program."

 

"We have to consider what happens to people in a large university who don't quite fit the mold, and who are on the high end academically," Wilson said. "So we have an honors program that includes as many people as possible while still maintaining very high academic goals."

 

To qualify for graduating with College Honors — considered one of the highest undergraduate academic achievements at UCLA — students must maintain a high GPA and take 28 to 44 honors class units, depending on whether they enter as freshmen or transfers. Graduating with College Honors typically requires taking two of those honors classes in the Collegium.

 

"These classes are like a breath of fresh air," said Kevin Longa, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in business economics. Longa is taking his second Collegium class: lecturer Dario Nardi's class, "Artificial Intelligence: Machines as People, People as Machines."

 

Nick Valluri, a 20-year-old junior majoring in economics, is also enrolled in Nardi's artificial intelligence seminar as his second Collegium class.

 

"I've really cultivated a relationship with the professors in my Honors classes," Valluri said. "The students are here because we're into the topic, so class discussions are really interesting."

 

One Wednesday morning early in the fall quarter, Nardi began the day's artificial intelligence lecture with the question, "What is intelligence?" The students — including a neurology major, a linguistics and philosophy major, a math major, and a political science major — received a sweeping overview of how understanding of artificial intelligence has evolved over the decades. Nardi raised the question of how to program machines to interpret plausibility and possibility, which set the class chuckling when that discussion led to an example about the impossibility of vampires attending USC or UCLA.

 

Eventually, the students will customize their own interactive virtual character. "These topics are a really refreshing change of pace from econ-accounting," said another of Nardi's students, Anna Pione, a 21-year-old senior majoring in business economics and accounting.

 

Nardi still keeps in touch with students he taught in his first Honors Collegium class 10 years ago, and said the seminars appeal to faculty as much as students.

 

"Every faculty member likes to create their own classes and have small seminars," Nardi said. He is actually part of the Department of Anthropology, but his artificial intelligence class would have to be less technical to fit into the anthro curriculum, he said. "This way, I can strike a balance between north and south campus."

 

Bob Goldberg, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology who taught a groundbreaking Collegium class on genetic engineering even before the human genome was sequenced, described the Honors Program as almost a college within a college.

 

"It's one of the most prestigious honors programs in the country," Goldberg said. "Students get the experiences they would get at an elite, small liberal arts college."

 

But for Goldberg, a huge draw is the opportunity to create a Collegium class with wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach.

 

"The appeal is to design a class that's different — something very different," he said.

 

That enthusiasm is part of what makes the Collegium experience so powerful, said Wilson. "Our students really love the Collegium courses," she said. "They are small classes with professors who are deeply devoted to teaching them, on topics that really excite them."