Quick Take
The UC Santa Cruz administration is moving forward with a three-year budget plan intended to decrease deficits and face hard times overall. While few of the cuts are so far public, the campus’ well-regarded Languages and Applied Linguistics department’s cuts are now clear.
UC Santa Cruz’s Languages and Applied Linguistics department will lose its Persian and German language programs – two of its 11 total language programs – and see reductions to its remaining courses as the university grapples with an estimated $81 million budget deficit and low enrollment in some language courses, according to faculty. The elimination will be effective starting in the fall quarter.
As a result of the cuts, two lecturers who teach German and one lecturer who teaches Persian are being laid off, according to a faculty member in the department who requested anonymity for this story out of fear of the Trump administration’s initiatives confronting higher education and international students and faculty.
During a quarterly meeting of UCSC’s Academic Senate on Wednesday, faculty members expressed concerns about the reductions to the languages. They also voiced continued frustrations about the impacts of the school’s budget cuts and fears over the Trump administration’s major funding cuts higher education cuts and threats to deport international students.
Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Campus Provost Lori Kletzer provided the meeting with an update on the general state of the budget deficit, noting that the school’s third-quarter report shows that the 2025 fiscal year will end with a projected $81 million deficit. That’s if the university continues with its trajectory of reducing its deficit by about $30 million. University officials say the deficit is being primarily caused by rising labor costs and constrained student enrollment growth – and therefore revenues from student tuition.
Larive acknowledged, as she did in a recent meeting with Monterey Bay area community leaders, that the university has also lost about $15 million in federal research funding. She said those dollars mostly came from grants or awards from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other agencies.
“The federal government is currently cutting federal research funding in a number of ways,” said Larive. “There have been termination of current grants, slowdowns in making awards and attempts to reduce reimbursements for negotiated facilities and administrative costs – known as F&A – or indirect costs.”
She emphasized that future federal funding for research is full of uncertainties.
“However, the uncertainty I’ve highlighted in my remarks means that we need to exercise caution and continue to monitor actual as well as projected revenues and expenditures quarterly, and we’ll adjust the budget framework as needed,” Larive said.
In January, UC Santa Cruz announced a general plan to implement reductions over the next three fiscal years, beginning with 2025-26 and through 2027-28, to balance the budget. The university’s five academic divisions (Physical and Biological Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and Baskin School of Engineering) would absorb the lowest reductions of 8%, while the other divisions or units are making reductions of 12% to 19%.
Of the university’s much larger multiyear budget plan, reductions to the Languages and Applied Linguistics department are just one piece of this first year of cuts. Campus Spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason didn’t provide Lookout with specifics of how other departments are being affected.
“Deans are working closely with departments to finalize course offerings for the coming academic year,” he wrote via email. “We remain focused on maintaining academic excellence and supporting students’ educational pathways as they pursue their degrees. As this process is ongoing, it’d be premature and incomplete to summarize our schedule of classes.”
The Languages and Applied Linguistics department employs seven senate faculty and more than 20 lecturers who teach its 11 languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Spanish and Yiddish. UCSC started teaching German a year after it was founded, in 1966. This current academic year, 158 students took courses in German, including around two or three who are applied linguistics majors with concentrations in German.
In total, the university reduced the department’s course load by 23.5%, from 166 to 127, starting this upcoming fall due to budget cuts and enrollment.
University staff provided the department with the approval of those courses last Friday, including the reductions and the elimination of the Persian and German courses. The professor told Lookout the department’s faculty were distraught to learn about the cuts.
“They were saddened, they were angry, they were disappointed,” the professor said in an interview. “I never expected these cuts to be so deep.”
During the Academic Senate meeting on Wednesday, two faculty members asked Kletzer and Larive about the course reductions. Kletzer said the university must offer courses in a way that is “financially sustainable” and “attentive to class size.”
“I fully acknowledge that we are in a time of extraordinary challenge in offering a suite of languages at the class sizes that we have done in the past,” said Kletzer, adding that the university could explore routes including offering some languages online.
The professor said the notification of the course schedule came much later in the year than usual, which makes planning more difficult and the news more painful.
“I wish we would have had more, earlier notice. These notifications are especially painful when they’re happening so late in the academic year.”
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