Upon entering the second class session of my college career, I was promptly ushered from the auditorium: 1,300 Computer Science 61A students had filled it beyond capacity. Unsure of what to do next, I wandered about in a directionless haze, zig-zagging across campus until I somehow stumbled upon a recognizable landmark and made my way back to Foothill. Still completely lost as to how the required curriculum of the course was expected to make its way into my brain, I Googled idly and soon found my professor’s adorably idiosyncratic voice blaring forth in the comfort of my room.

“Don’t go to lecture. Watch the videos! They’re exactly the same!” As much as the idea appealed to my academic laziness, I had to question its accuracy. “I’m going to say the same things, use the same slides, make the same jokes. Lectures are crowded. Don’t go to lecture — watch the videos! They’re exactly the same thing!” he recited, as if emphatic repetition would make it more true.

Thus began my ongoing love affair with one of the world’s premiere computer science departments, filled with all the romantic melodrama of devotion and indifference, premised upon and prefaced with a beautiful lie. In my younger days of precollege naivete, with the unsuspecting haplessness of an incoming freshman, I believed in the enthusiastic declarations of “access to world-class faculty,” in the mythos of an institution filled with the scholarly and open-minded, dedicated to interdisciplinary discussion.

Rather, I’ve found myself on the scientific side of a growing cultural rift, pounding against what is comfortable, amicable but nonetheless an isolating box. And as I continually hear the willful self-ignorance of the technocratic echochamber, the desire to shout my rebuttals becomes unbearable.

My first lesson in computer science at UC Berkeley: Departmental reputation means little in the way of education. Whereas the world-class faculty is certainly there, the access is suspiciously absent. As much as I enjoy the pleasurable burn of my workload and the mathematical elegance it illuminates, as much as I’d like to believe the sweet nonsense of scalable classes and progressive education, I don’t. The professors and GSIs do work hard, and I do appreciate their tireless deliberation, but I can’t just turn a blind eye when problems manifest.

We can’t just pretend that watching a YouTube series is as good as a physical lecture where you can participate. We can’t just pretend it’s easy or comfortable to abruptly halt a lecture for a stadium of students and explain to the crowd that you don’t understand what just happened. We can’t pretend that professors have the time or the memory for one-on-one discussions with students. We can’t pretend that they can even recall the faces of all or any of the flood of students in need of references and recommendations. And we can’t even pretend that the bare essentials of the courses run without constant revision and copious administrative duct tape.

All this, however, is secondary to the more fundamental flaw of outdated curricular offerings. Make no mistake: The computer science classes that UC Berkeley has on display are modern and evolving and are taught by keenly perceptive experts. Where it lags is in classes that don’t exist.

The department seems to have its eyes and ears shut to a world wherein programming skills are increasingly required by nonprogrammers and noncomputer scientists. Being able to pass a basic fizz-buzz test makes social and natural scientists, business and financial analysts, actuaries, accountants, mathematicians and virtually anyone who regularly deals with data vastly more versatile, efficient and employable. They will never need to write iterator functions for recursive data structure, program functionally in scheme or build their own interpreters and IDEs. Nonetheless, their only option is to take CS 61A and compete directly with computer science majors under a rigorous curve. Think of the hypothetical uproar from legions of engineers and premeds if the math department were to force them into the honors series to learn calculus.

At worst, it’s elitist protectionism of the purity of a field. At best, it’s a lethargic pace of adaptation to a rapidly evolving job market, cutting off access to an increasingly essential professional skill.

But the indignant vitriol hurled in response to a critical editorial tells me that these words break uselessly against finger-sealed ears. The honeyed praise layered and heaped upon CS 61A — the amazing, magical course that everyone at UC Berkeley should take — tells me that students yearn to love the course too much to linger on its faults. The contrivances pulled together in spirited defense tell me that the faculty either don’t see or refuse to recognize their failings.

I’ve taken the classes and loved what I learned, but I did so in spite of a faculty struggling unsustainably to accommodate explosive demand. If you want this place to be the best educational facility it can possibly be, you have to swallow your pride and acknowledge that things could be better. But if you want to believe the obvious myth that the department’s prestige surfaces from its pedagogy, to complacently accept things as they are, then you can certainly roll your eyes backward into your UC Berkeley-EECS pride and shout away what I’ve said.

Albert Hsiung writes the Monday column on STEM student culture. Contact him at [email protected].