‘Alarming’: UCSC budget cuts ‘affect the whole ecosystem’

Two influential UC Santa Cruz faculty committees released deeply troubling survey findings last week. The overall concern: faculty members’ ability to deliver their courses and the future sustainability of programs. 

The chairs of both committees spoke to Lookout in further explanation of the report, discussing the atmosphere among faculty. 

Tanner WouldGo, educational policy committee chair and a teaching professor in the Writing Program, told Lookout that the wide-ranging impacts of cuts on the campus reported by faculty are “alarming.” 

“This report also signals to me that if this continues, and all of these effects start to happen, I don’t see how we can continue to offer the same number of majors and degrees,” said WouldGo. “I really worry about suspension and programs not being able to fulfill their promise.”

WouldGo emphasized this point, that one cut in a department could have ripple effects. 

“We cut a couple of lecturers, or we aren’t going to replace a retirement – that actually affects the whole ecosystem,” said WouldGo.

Their report showed that faculty members are seriously concerned about the reductions to graduate student admissions, cuts to academic services like tutoring, reductions to lecturers and the slowdown of faculty hiring. Faculty members also say that the lack of clear and timely communication from administrators about budget information has severely diminished their ability to develop curriculum. 

“Responses show that morale is low and trending lower: ‘An outcome of these budget cuts and curriculum is the extremely low morale for faculty,’ wrote one,” the report reads. “One respondent illustrated the interconnectedness of a downward spiral of grad funding, undergraduate education, and morale: ‘Fewer grad students, because this field is collaborative, will mean fewer research opportunities for undergrads.’”

Megan Thomas, the teaching committee chair and associate professor in politics, told Lookout that faculty struggles to adequately teach aren’t new, but “the severity has increased.” 

“One thing that strikes me about the report is we really did see, not necessarily exactly the same problems everywhere, but a consistency of concerns about units’ capacity to offer what I might call basic parts of the curriculum. That came from all over the university,” she said. 

Thomas said the purpose of this survey – which isn’t part of their committee’s standard processes – was to record how faculty members were already feeling at the start of the university’s multiyear budget plan as well as the impacts that faculty expected further cuts would have in the future.

“It’s something that people in my committee thought might be important to do, to just take a moment to document what has already happened and what senate faculty fear may happen at the beginning of this promised multiyear process,” she said. 

The survey’s responses are focused specifically on the impacts of the university’s budget crisis, which began before the federal administration’s cuts to university funding. 

Before the federal government began cutting its funding to universities this year, UCSC officials said last year that they were starting to address the school’s structural deficit, which began in 2020. Officials say the deficit is primarily due to rising labor costs and a limit to revenues from constrained enrollment growth. 

In January, UCSC announced the rolling out of a multiyear plan through 2027-28 to balance the budget. Last week, officials said if current projections hold and if the university can reduce its deficit by $30 million, the school will close the 2025 fiscal year with a $81 million deficit. Faculty members say they had already started to feel the impacts of the university’s attempts to cut costs this past year. 

Thomas acknowledged it’s hard to know how faculty members feel now compared to how they felt in February without doing another survey. 

“It’s really hard for me to say, of course. I’ll put it this way, I can’t imagine that things are better,” said Thomas. “The federal context is devastating and, as we note in the report, our campus’s issues also predate that.”

Thomas and WouldGo said while Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Campus Provost Lori Kletzer heard a review of the report during the academic senate meeting Wednesday, the report hasn’t been fully or formally submitted to administrators. 

Academic Senate Chair Matt McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment about the next steps for sending the report to administrators or other efforts to meet the challenges noted. 

The UCSC Academic Senate committees on teaching and on educational policy conducted the survey in February. The committees meet regularly and oversee policy changes and program reviews for undergraduate education and also oversee instructional support services to promote good teaching.

The survey received 69 responses from faculty members who are involved in curriculum planning, including graduate program directors, department chairs and provosts. The respondents came from all five academic divisions: Physical and Biological Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and Baskin School of Engineering, and four of the residential colleges.

The survey questions covered how the budget cuts could affect teaching as well as five issues: faculty hiring, graduate admissions, funding for lecturers, adequacy of information, and academic support services.

Much has happened since faculty responded to the survey in February. The university has lost about $15 million in federal funding and departments have started to see how budget cuts are affecting their programs. The school’s Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics said that due to budget cuts and low enrollment in some languages, the university cut 23.5% of its courses starting in the fall quarter.

As part of those cuts, the department’s Persian and German programs were eliminated effective for the upcoming academic year. 

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.