(Editor’s note: This marks the second in a series of Dateline articles that will examine how campus colleges and schools are being affected by state budget cutbacks. This week, the three divisions of the College of Letters and Science are highlighted separately.)
Faculty and staff members in the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies will be cutting out long-distance phone calls, photocopying, student assistants and conference expenditures to handle a permanent state budget cut this year.
“We’ve held off from laying off staff — to the extent possible — because we’re growing and already understaffed,” said Lucy Bunch, assistant dean of the division.
Her division took a $475,000 permanent cut to its operational budget this year, which followed the $394,000 one-time cut in 2002-03. Last year, the division handled the reduction through eliminating that year’s budget set-aside for equipment replacement and cuts from the central reserves. This year, in addition to last year’s cuts, the division had to dip into the support budget for each faculty and staff member, trimming permanently an average of $650 from each employee’s annual allowance.
“That means money for telephones, supplies, mail, speakers for undergraduate and graduate students, conferences, student assistance and equipment will be cut,” Bunch said.
Each program director or departmental chair will have the flexibility to decide how the ultimate cuts will be taken, she added. Rather than across-the-board cuts, the division has minimized cuts for units hiring more new faculty and handling an influx of new majors, Bunch said.
Similar to the Division of Social Sciences, HArCS is having to handle a growing student body with fewer resources. The division has seen its majors blossom, with an overall 33 percent increase since 1997-98, with the big departments — English, Spanish, theatre and dance, music, and art — growing by 26 percent. However, the smaller programs almost doubled that rate, with a 44 percent increase in the same time period.
The division had 2,152 majors last year, not counting its double majors.
With the aid of Undergraduate Admissions, the division has been working to increase the number of students in the division. It will begin a new major this winter in technocultural studies, plus a new major in film studies for next fall. Both of these majors are already drawing prospective-student attention, and the division is expecting to see strong demand.
HArCS has been hiring faculty to handle the increase in students. Last year 30 new faculty members were added to the roster; another 11 positions are being recruited for this year. In all, the division counts 180 ladder-rank faculty members, about 75 lecturers and 85 staff.
Division of Social Sciences
The Division of Social Sciences is handling its budget cut by lengthening the replacement time of its many instructional computers and by reducing the number of student advisers.
The $447,000 permanent cut taken to the division’s operational budget follows a one-time cut last academic year of $389,000, also aimed mostly at equipment replacement.
But that fact doesn’t really tell the story of how the state budget woes are affecting the division.
The workload faced by the division’s staff and faculty is growing at a faster clip than the burgeoning student body at UC Davis, thanks to a growing attraction to the social sciences. In fact, since 1997-98, the number of majors in the division increased by 61 percent. This year, more than 6,000 of the 22,000 undergraduates are majoring within the division.
Over the same time, the number of student credit hours — that is the number of students times the units per course taught by faculty — increased by 43 percent. Much of that boost in majors and teaching load has arrived in just the past three years.
Steve Roth, assistant dean in the division, expects that students will get less personalized attention from staff, in particular at the Undergraduate Education and Advising Office, where the division cut $72,000.
“No career staff advisers were cut, but we will have fewer temporary staff and student assistants,” Roth said. “We’re compensating by investing in more Web based information to advise students.”
While $17.5 million of the division’s overall budget is set aside for faculty salaries, that part of the budget throughout the campus is sheltered from cuts because of the overall University of California pledge to preserve the quality of instruction for students. What is left to absorb the funding decrease, in the case of Social Sciences, is $7 million for staff salaries, supplies and operations. Those dollars will be stretched thinly to cover work confronting the division, Roth said.
“We elected not to lay off any staff because we can’t get the work done if we do,” he said. To handle the growth, the division has 206 ladder-rank faculty, 36 lecturers and 106 staff members. Some 19 of those senate faculty are new this year, and the division is recruiting for another 22 ladder-rank positions in the coming year, according to Dean Steven Sheffrin.
Cutting $375,000 in a replacement fund for student computers, the division is hoping that its equipment will last longer than originally planned. However, the division also is exploring new Web-based mechanisms to deliver statistical instruction in a variety of classes in its division.
Math and Physical Sciences
Budget cuts in the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences will increase staff workload and limit the division’s ability to respond to opportunities, according to Dean Winston Ko.
As a result of state budget cuts to UC, the division must reduce its permanent budget by 6 percent, or $552,000. Those cuts are proportionally similar to most other colleges and divisions, except for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and Ko said he expected that many of the solutions are similar to those that will be employed elsewhere.
While some of the budget reduction can be met initially by using one-time funds, the division’s permanent budget must be reduced by this amount within three years, said Assistant Dean Kathy Olsen.
Ko said he is using some permanent funding from the Dean’s Office to help offset cuts in the division’s five departments. The Dean’s Office divisional accounts will absorb $310,285 of cuts with the remaining $241,715 passed on to departments.
While Ko does not anticipate layoffs, the division will reduce staff numbers by not filling vacant positions, putting planned new positions on hold and limiting the use of casual and student employees.
“We’re in the hard position of being in the middle of rapid growth, with faculty recruitments and growth in student enrollment,” Ko said. Despite the cuts, morale among the faculty remains “pretty high,” Ko said. The division’s faculty is expected to grow by about 10 percent this year, driven by rising student enrollment and commitments to initiatives in areas such as computational science, cosmology and nanotechnology. Faculty salaries are exempt from cuts.
Because the division teaches a number of large lower-division courses required for many majors, it sees the effects of enrollment growth ahead of other colleges and divisions, Ko said. Mathematics chair John Hunter said his department will teach about 5,000 students this quarter in courses that are prerequisites for almost all science-based majors. In the chemistry department, General Chemistry alone has 1,600 students enrolled for fall quarter, with another 40 to 50 on the waiting list, according to department chair William Jackson.
“The student body has grown considerably, but the faculty is below strength,” Jackson said.
The mathematics department is meeting the current cuts from reserves, by reducing offerings of elementary preparatory courses, making modest reductions in reader support and leaving vacant staff positions open, Hunter said.
“I’m really concerned for what happens next year if there are more cuts,” Hunter said.
Outreach programs are particularly hard hit by the state budget cuts. For example, the California Summer School in Math and Science (COSMOS), a fee-charging program for exceptional high-school students, faces a 20 percent budget cut. COSMOS is a UC program with sites at UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz. The UC Davis center is based in the department of mathematics. The UC Office of the President will likely shift funding for the summer school away from state funds and towards private sponsorship and student fees.
“Although the division is making every effort to protect staff positions, in the event that staff layoffs are ultimately identified, the division will take steps to help staff move into other jobs by utilizing the Special Transfer Opportunity Program (STOP),” Olsen said. Several departments are also participating in the voluntary time-reduction program, START, which allows staff to work shorter hours with a corresponding pay reduction while retaining full benefits.
The cuts will also limit the dean’s ability to respond quickly to opportunities through the awarding of grant matching funds for new projects and startup packages for promising new faculty, Ko said.
“It will take longer to get things done,” he said.