By Marcelle Richards

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The College of Letters & Sciences said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Beginning fall 2002, the Fiat Lux, or “let there be light,” program will offer 150 one-unit seminars next year under the university motto.

This signifies a university move toward smaller interdisciplinary classes at the undergraduate level, especially for freshmen, who often take introductory courses with as many as 400 people.

“Part of what we need to do is engage students in small group dialogue, a small topic that allows students to debate,” said Judith Smith, vice provost of the college. “This is one way we’re looking at doing that.”

Fiat Lux is a continuation of the Sept. 11 series offered this year. The national tragedy sparked widespread faculty and administrative support for the creation of small discussion classes to address specific topics related to the attacks.

Fiat Lux brings something new to the table by boosting research spending for faculty.

Chancellor Albert Carnesale, who taught two of the Sept. 11 seminars, is using his discretionary funds to pay each participating faculty member $1500 to be used toward research, travel or other educational expenses. This wasn’t done during the Sept. 11 series.

The catch is that faculty must teach the seminars in addition to a full teaching load to get the money. Depending on the number of eligible faculty selected, Carnesale will spend up to $225,000 to support the program.

All interested faculty will submit seminar topics by April 23.

The topics will be based on faculty research or areas of expertise.

Some examples include The Gathering Storm: Winston Churchill, Britain, and Nazi Germany on the Road to World War II; Civil Rights Law in Higher Education; and Science in the News.

“The large size and superb quality of our faculty enable us to offer seminars on a rich array of topics,” Carnesale wrote in his invitation letter. “Moreover, undergraduates will experience what is most distinctive educationally about a premiere research university: learning from experts who themselves create new knowledge through discovery.”

UC Berkeley is the main source of reference for UCLA. Berkeley has had its freshmen seminar program in place since 1993.

“It’s really a program that led the way for other campuses,” Smith said.

UC Davis offers a similar program on a smaller scale.

About 50 seminars are planned for each quarter under Fiat Lux. Enrollment will be limited to freshmen for the first 24 hours, and then opened to other students.

Fiat Lux is only one of many changes in L&S that has slowly led to the evolution of undergraduate education at UCLA toward interdisciplinary and more holistic learning.

The Student Research Program, started in 1985, headed the move beyond classroom learning.

The freshmen General Education clusters, started in 1997, link numerous academic fields in a yearlong topic of study.

Finally, the Sept. 11 seminars carried on this trend, straying from the textbook approach by incorporating news articles and personal experiences of faculty.

Information about Fiat Lux is available at www.ucla.edu/fiatlux.