Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz faculty members are pushing back against planned cuts to the university’s languages department, including the elimination of all Arabic courses next year. Administrators say the reductions are necessary due to budget constraints and declining enrollment, while faculty argue that the cuts harm cultural learning and student community spaces.
For the second consecutive year, UC Santa Cruz administrators are making cuts to the school’s languages department, including eliminating all of its Arabic courses starting in the upcoming academic year.
Faculty members and students say the cuts to languages are a blow to the university’s mission, which aims to encourage students to be “engaged global leaders” and to build toward the “collective future of humankind and our planet.” But some also say that the loss of Arabic courses are particularly upsetting amid the violence in Palestine and Iran in recent years.
Muriam Haleh Davis, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, is part of a group of faculty members urging administrators to restore the language programs.
“It’s hard to overstate that learning language is also about learning about culture and creating community, especially for our students who are heritage speakers,” said Davis. “For so many students who’ve lived through the last couple of years with all of the grief and anger, having Arabic and having Persian was a space of reconnecting with the culture.”
After cutting the Languages and Applied Linguistics department’s course load by 23.5% last year, when it eliminated German and Persian, the university is planning to cut all of its Arabic courses and is making reductions to French, Chinese, Japanese and Italian courses, according to the faculty.
When implemented, the school’s languages department will have lost three of its 11 total language programs and seen a reduction of about 35% of its course load (166 down to 108) in two years. University officials say the cuts are necessary due to budget constraints and enrollment. The remaining programs will include French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Punjabi and Yiddish.
By cutting Arabic and reducing those courses, six lecturers are seeing their workloads reduced, and two of those six are being laid off entirely, according to a languages department faculty member.
UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said the university reduced its language courses “due to budget reductions and declining enrollments.” He didn’t provide Lookout with someone to interview about the cuts but offered a statement.
“UC Santa Cruz remains committed to offering a robust curriculum that provides students with opportunities to develop skills across a range of fields while they pursue their major course of study,” he wrote via email. “Students are still able to learn some of the world’s leading languages here”
He added that UCSC is working with the University of California system and its new Global Language Network to provide online language courses that are less commonly taught.
Davis expressed skepticism about the online format for language instruction.
“I don’t believe people learn languages online,” she said. “Online learning is pretty terrible, especially at the beginning years of a language – you really need it in person.”
Davis and 26 other faculty members signed a resolution expressing these concerns and urging university administrators to restore German, Persian and the reduced courses, and to keep Arabic. The resolution, which Davis co-submitted, will be presented during the faculty senate meeting next Wednesday, and faculty will vote on whether they approve of the resolution. If it passes, the resolution is a symbolic gesture showing support for restoring the languages but is not a binding document.
In the resolution, faculty not only argue for the value of the language programs, but they also criticize administrators for not consulting with them on the cuts.
“The Academic Senate calls on the administration to work with the pertinent senate committees in order to restore canceled languages and commit to the ongoing funding of language instruction at UCSC,” the resolution reads.
They also write that the university shouldn’t eliminate language programs during “a resurgence of xenophobia and jingoistic rhetoric in our country,” arguing that language is one of the vital tools that helps students engage with foreign cultures.
Davis collected student testimonials to demonstrate the impacts of UCSC’s Arabic courses. Laila Morsy, a 2025 graduate, said in her testimonial that while growing up in a family of mixed backgrounds she felt a lack of cultural belonging, but always longed for a stronger connection to her Egyptian roots.
“In my mind, being able to utter the guttural sounds with fluency — let alone decipher the foreign right-to-left script — was off the table,” she said. “Any doubts I had were immediately put at ease by [lecturer Abdelkader] Berrahmoun’s warm and welcoming demeanor. By the end of class, I felt like I knew everyone there.”
Morsy was raised by a father who is Egyptian but has long been in the United States, a mother who is Jewish American and a Filipina stepmother. Morsy said having Arabic courses at UCSC helped her feel a sense of belonging and quickly became her favorite part of her week.
She said if the program is eliminated, she feels it will not only limit opportunities for students, but it also erases a space for cultural understanding and identity.
“For students like me, the Arabic program at UCSC offers far more than just language instruction — it creates a space where students can explore parts of themselves that may otherwise feel distant or inaccessible,” she said. “For students of non-Arabic-speaking backgrounds, it offers a window into learning about a language and culture that is so often ostracized and villainized by society at large.”
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