Quick Take
As budget woes afflict the UC Santa Cruz campus, a high-level faculty report points a finger at poor administration communication and planning. A campus spokesman denies "administrative error" as cause for a budget deficit recently projected at $81 million.
Two UC Santa Cruz faculty committees released a report this week summarizing a faculty survey conducted earlier this year that describes dire impacts of the school’s budget issues on teaching and learning.
The report summarizes the survey results, which showed serious concerns about the impacts of budget cuts.
“These [findings] include poorer curricula with poorer delivery of classes, diminished and disappearing graduate programs, diminished levels of student success in ways that exacerbate inequity, threats to our R1 [universities with robust research capabilities] status, and impingements on senate authority over curriculum,” the report reads. “Our highest campus administrators, our report finds, are communicating poorly in ways that exacerbate these negative effects.”
The report found that faculty morale is low and continuing to decline as cuts negatively affect learning and research, and have a “domino effect” on UC Santa Cruz’s status as a prestigious research institution. Cuts to graduate student admissions reduces the number of teaching assistants and also leads to fewer research opportunities for undergraduate students, faculty wrote.
Further, it states that the budget crisis and cuts were “due largely to an earlier administrative accounting error the details of which have not to date been made public.”
UCSC officials this week reported that the school is on track to end the fiscal year, June 30, with a projected $81 million deficit, following several years of a structural deficit beginning in 2020. In January, it announced a multiyear plan to balance its budget starting the next fiscal year through 2027-28.
Two influential faculty committees – the Committee on Teaching and the Committee on Educational Policy – released the report, dated May 16, during the UCSC Academic Senate meeting held Wednesday.
In February, the committees conducted a survey asking fellow faculty members about the school’s budget cuts, impacts and how respondents felt about the budget information the administration has shared, as they plan their courses for the next year. The survey was conducted prior to the Trump administration’s funding cuts to universities.
The survey received 69 responses from faculty members who are involved in curriculum planning, including all five academic divisions (Physical and Biological Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and Baskin School of Engineering) and four of the residential colleges. That total includes both department chairs and college provosts.
The survey questions covered five topics and how the budget cuts may impact teaching: faculty hiring, graduate admissions, funding for lecturers, adequacy of information and academic support services. The survey asked participants to respond to a question which they could answer on a quantitative scale of 1 to 5, and a second question to which faculty members could respond with open-ended comments about the five topics.
Faculty leaders were not available for further comment Thursday. Campus spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason didn’t provide any comment from Chancellor Cynthia Larive or Campus Provost Lori Kletzer.
Hernandez-Jason did address claims in the faculty report about the budget crisis stemming from errors made by administrators.
“We have described the combination of factors that led to our budget challenges,” he said. “There was no administrative error that caused the budget deficit. I cannot speak to why they are saying that.”
Campus officials say the structural deficit was caused by rising costs, primarily salaries, and constrained student enrollment growth, which limited revenues they receive from student tuition.
The committees’ report authors cite the minutes of the fall 2024 senate faculty meeting, specifically pages 5-7, when Kletzer describes the budget deficit.
“Our revenue projections were overly optimistic, and our expense projections not as timely and informative as they should have been,” Kletzer said, according to Page 7 of the minutes. “I take responsibility for not asking some questions that I should have asked. In particular, until spring of this year, the entirety of our payroll expenses was not readily available. I asked for this analysis and now we have it.”
Here are some key parts of the report:
Faculty hiring
The report highlights many faculty members’ concerns about the combination of reduced faculty hiring, and retirements and separations especially given planned increase in enrollment over the next several years. Respondents were asked, “How do you anticipate the announced sharp reduction in faculty hiring will affect your curricular planning over the next five years?”
According to the report, one respondent said, “Expecting 3-4 retirements in the next 5 years amidst the projected faculty hiring freeze, the size of our faculty will shrink to a level incapable of sustaining our graduate program.”
The report authors said that concern “is mirrored by many who completed the form. Failure to replace faculty will result in an insufficient number of faculty to cover core courses for many undergraduate and graduate programs.”
Graduate admissions
The survey asked participants: “How do you anticipate budgetary challenges will impact your graduate admissions process over the next five years?” In March, campus officials said that the university could be reducing its doctoral admissions by 9% for the upcoming academic year.
Of the 62 responses to that question, 60% said there will be a very negative impact.
“While 20% indicated that their graduate programs had already been reduced due to diminishing support in recent years, the compounding impact of these budget cuts affects a wider range of programs, and puts some graduate programs at risk of suspension or closure,” the report states.
The report describes how vital graduate students are to the university’s undergraduate educational quality and to faculty research.
“Graduate students support critical elements of the campus’s undergraduate curriculum, including small-group sections, writing-intensive courses, and hands-on lab courses. They also serve as mentors for undergraduates,” they wrote. “In fields in which graduate student research is a crucial component of faculty research, budget cuts are potentially affecting the ability of faculty to conduct research and so to achieve tenure.”
The report says that some respondents shared that their departments are deciding which faculty members are able to recruit graduate students and which can’t.
“Faculty retention is thus affected by budgetary impacts on graduate student recruitment,” it reads. “Two programs described the combined impact on research and education as ‘a potential extinction-level event.’”
Adequacy of information
The report asked participants to answer the following: “To what degree do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘My department has enough budgetary information to make clear curricular planning.’”
Of the respondents, 40% said they strongly disagree, 39% said they disagree, 20% neither agree nor disagree, 1 participant agreed and none strongly agreed.
The report’s authors said they didn’t ask the participants to provide what they believed to be the “source of the problem.”
“But perhaps the most striking consistency across responses across academic divisions, is that many volunteered that the problem is with central campus administration rather than their division leadership,” the report’s authors write. “As one of these responses stated, “I need to say very loudly that we are NOT receiving the information we need. (I do not blame the division for this – it’s an upper administration problem.) We have always received our budget allocation in fall, and this year, we STILL have not received it, without absolutely no reason why. To say this is stressful is a grand understatement.”
During Wednesday’s Academic Senate meeting, one faculty member summarized a collective frustration: that the “lack of information is itself harming our ability to plan curricula, and that campus central administration is the origin of the delays and lack of information.”
One faculty member cited in the report compared the loss of resources to the young adult dystopian novel turned film series: “It’s turning into the Hunger Games around here.”
To read the full report, click here.
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