(Editor’s note: This marks the first in a series of articles in Dateline that will examine how individual campus colleges and schools are being affected by state budget cutbacks.)
The College of Agricultural and Environ-mental Sciences is merging four of its departments to increase competitiveness in the plant sciences and is looking to retirements, resignations and one-time transition funds to ease faculty and staff downsizing.
The college is absorbing state funding cuts, which from 2002 through 2004 are carving about $9.8 million from what was formerly the college’s $50 million state budget for research and public service.
During the next two years, the college plans to eliminate 68 faculty positions through attrition, totaling $8 million, as well as approximately 28 staff positions amounting to about $1.8 million. Although hoping that staff layoffs will not be necessary, the college has activated its relocation network so that positions elsewhere can be identified for staff members whose jobs may be in jeopardy.
“These are cuts of historic proportions,” said dean Neal Van Alfen, noting that the college has not had an opportunity to replenish its faculty after tight economic times in the early 1990s led to extensive voluntary early retirements. Although agricultural colleges throughout the nation are wrestling with shrinking budgets, the financial situation at UC Davis is as bad as anywhere in the country, he said.
The dramatic decrease in state support began for the college in July 2002, with a $3.7 million reduction in funds for the Agricultural Experiment Station, which funds UC agricultural research. An additional $3.4 million cut for the experiment station and $2.72 million decrease for Cooperative Extension were included in the recently final state budget for 2003-04.
Plant Science consolidation
Perhaps the most visible change accompanying the financial cuts would be the proposed consolidation of the departments of pomology, vegetable crops, environmental horticulture, and agronomy and range science into one plant science department. A college planning committee has been studying this possibility for several months, and Van Alfen is expected to announce soon when the plan will move forward.
“We are consolidating to position ourselves to be more competitive in the future and to focus our efforts across the plant sciences into high-priority areas,” Van Alfen said.
The departments, currently housed in four different buildings, would not be physically unified, but would be administered centrally, Van Alfen said. He noted that some savings would result from the efficiencies of a larger combined faculty, but the primary benefit of the consolidation would be the college’s ability to respond to future opportunities for the plant sciences.
During the next four months, the new department would be named and three sections established within the department. The 80-some faculty affected by the consolidation would then choose to affiliate with one of the sections. Vito Polito, chair of the pomology department, would head the committee charged with implementing the consolidation.
“Faculty members would get to redefine their research and teaching interests, as well as who their colleagues are,” said John Yoder, chair of the vegetable crops department. “Essentially, they would have the opportunity to redefine their careers.”
He noted that the consolidation would allow faculty members to work with a broader spectrum of commodities and enable the college to coordinate courses across current departmental lines. Additionally, the greenhouses and campus experimental farms now run by the four departments would be managed centrally, resulting in enhanced efficiency.
The consolidated plant science department would lose 20-25 percent of its faculty over the next five years through attrition, Yoder said. “The difficulty is that we have no control over who retires, so it is possible that we could lose high-priority programs when people retire,” he said, adding that the merger would allow for sharing of faculty expertise that otherwise would be devoted strictly to one of the four department. No staff layoffs are anticipated in the four departments affected by the proposed consolidation.
The plant science consolidation is part of a collegewide reorganization effort. Earlier this year, the college decided to support the transfer of the Department of Environmental Design to the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies within the College of Letters and Science, because resources were no longer available in the college to rebuild the design program.
Transition funds allow for phased reductions
Across the college, the average support budget reduction for academic departments is calculated to be 12.8 percent for 2003-04, with some departments facing support cuts as great as 23 percent. The dean’s office will provide a total of $450,000 in transition funds that will allow the staff and support reductions to be eased in over the next two years, rather than being immediately enacted, and to limit the hardest-hit departments’ reduction this year to no more than the average 12.8 percent departmental cut.
The dean’s office has decided during these budget cuts not to eliminate any Cooperative Extension specialist jobs, which unlike other faculty positions are not part of the tenure system at UC.
“We want the cream of the crop here, and we won’t get that if we get the reputation that we don’t protect our Cooperative Extension faculty,” Van Alfen said, explaining that the campus would be at a competitive disadvantage to other agricultural colleges that provide their extension faculty with tenured positions.
Although the Cooperative Extension specialist positions are being preserved, money for extension outreach activities will be extremely limited, noted Gary Anderson, chair of the animal science department. “Cooperative Extension is supposed to make educational programs available for the people of California. If there is no money to support these outreach efforts, the public visibility of the University of California will decrease considerably,” Anderson said.
Tough to meet teaching demands
He added that meeting departmental teaching demands will also become more challenging as faculty positions go unfilled. While budget cuts were targeted at research programs, with a clear mandate from the state to preserve instructional programs, some teaching programs will be indirectly impacted.
“It means we have to close the ranks and do our teaching with fewer people, increasing teaching loads on the remaining faculty,” Anderson said. To fill the gaps left by retired faculty members, temporary lecturers are being hired to help teach some of the high-enrollment courses for the 6,000-some students enrolled in various animal science courses. Permanent faculty members are taking on additional lower-enrollment elective courses.
Meanwhile in the dean’s office, staffing has dropped through attrition by more than six full-time positions during the past 18 months.
Careful planning paves way for optimism
Despite the bleak budget situation, the dean’s office is encouraged that enrollment in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences remains high, that the college is attracting students of high academic caliber, and that faculty members continue to be productive in bringing in external funding for research.
“I think it speaks to the strength and extramural productivity of our programs that we’re not witnessing a complete collapse of those programs in the face of such extreme budget cuts,” said Tom Kaiser, executive assistant dean of administration.
“In spite of the financial cuts, we still see a lot of excitement in the college,” he said. “We are realizing that this is an opportunity to examine our programs, refocus and move forward. We’ll have fewer faculty, but we will be strong as a result of the academic planning that has gone in to preparing for the cuts.”