Education: Dr. Fix-It Goes to Santa Cruz

Trouble in paradise as "the touchy-feely school"sings the blues

Richard Moll, 45, a tweedy graduate of Yale's Divinity School, has become a Dr. Fix-It for colleges that complain of sagging enrollment. As director of admissions for Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., Moll brought a slice of pizazz to the countrified, 186-year-old alma mater of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Moll persuaded Bowdoin to allow applicants to skip the College Board exams, an attention-getting move, and he issued a new college brochure splashed with photos of sunsets, lobster pots and the Maine seacoast. Results during Moll's eight years at Bowdoin, applications increased from 1,183 to 3,473.

Then Moll moved on to Vassar, a school whose identity fuzzed after it went coeducational. Between 1975 and 1980, Moll mobilized alums, sent admissions staffers to prowl high schools and issued a new brochure whose cover was a cartoon showing a young male student in a Vassar T shirt being jeered by men from Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Again applications rose—from 1,877 to 3,388.

Now Dr. Fix-It has taken on yet another patient, this time a newish school suffering from a trendy reputation rather than the handicaps of tradition—the University of California at Santa Cruz.

For 15 years after its founding in 1965, U.C.S.C. did not bother to play the highly competitive college admissions game. No one, in fact, was designated to serve as full-time dean of admissions. Nevertheless, during the early '70s there were three applicants for each class niche.

One attraction was the breathtakingly beautiful campus built amid a redwood forest high above California's Monterey Bay (students quickly dubbed the resort-like U.C.S.C. "Uncle Charley's Summer Camp"). Another was Santa Cruz's remarkable educational mission. Clark Kerr, longtime president of California's statewide university, had conceived Santa Cruz as a quiet, human-sized island within the state's gargantuan system. It was built around a collection of intimate colleges for students and faculty, as at Oxford. To Kerr's unexceptionable dream were added other more radical ideas in tune with the rebellious '60s. One campus house, Kresge College, was briefly run as a floating encounter group of students and faculty. Campus-wide emphasis was placed on independent study. Most strikingly, it was decided that Santa Cruz students would get no grades; instead, each quarter, instructors wrote careful narrative appraisals of each student's work.

For a time, Santa Cruz's reputation as "the touchy-feely school" was a recruitment plus. As Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer puts it, "The image developed that Santa Cruz was a place to come and sort of 'lay back' in the redwoods." Today, though, the most popular undergraduate major at U.C.S.C. is not Zen Buddhism or cosmic consciousness but biology. Only 4% of the students have opted for do-it-themselves interdisciplinary majors.