Hunger Pains
Valerie Luu & Arianna PuopoloCampus News Reporter, Health/Science Reporter
California’s cut to public education budgets is causing more and more university services to rely on private dollars, and less lucrative departments are forced to scramble for a source of reliable funding. While social sciences, physical sciences and engineering regularly rake in big grants, the arts and programs like ethnic studies and student media may be facing budget shortages in the years to come.
According to David Swanger, professor emeritus of education at UCSC, it’s a numbers game. “Success is determined by the amount of money the faculty brings in, by grants and the post-graduate success of alumni,” he said. “It measures itself numerically: the amount of money brought in, GPA, [and] the number of students who apply.”
In 2004, UC President Robert Dynes and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the “Higher Education Compact,” which has succeeded in slashing state funding, while raising student tuition fees. In addition, the Committee for Planning and Budget estimates that by 2010-2011, the UC General fund will fall $1.11 billion below the level originally anticipated by the Compact.
Though it’s not imminent, the university is subtly tilting toward privatization, as external funding is increasing annually. In 2006-07, 882 contract and grant awards totaling $111.2 million were made to UCSC faculty and researchers. This is the second year in a row over the $100M mark and a 40 percent increase over the previous five years.’
The university’s source of funding is changing and increasing privatization is pending. Bill Friedland, founding chair and professor emeritus of community studies, said that outside financing is neither good nor bad. Instead, he suggests looking at it as a developing alternative to funding.
Problems arise when departments can’t accumulate enough outside funding to finance their research or programs. While the arts and humanities are working on a shoestring budget, other departments are having better luck getting financed.
Though there are plenty of outside funding options for the arts, the sciences account for a heftier slice of these funds. The largest single donation last year was from NASA ($22.8M), followed by the National Science Foundation, which totaled in at $18M, and the National Institutes of Health ($10.1M). But of course, the sciences are much more expensive to fund than the humanities.
And the ability to secure these funds is where UCSC’s scientific edge comes into play. It currently has one of the best marine science programs in the country, as well as a nationally ranked linguistics program and several world-class astronomers, including UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal-and it is well-connected to the Silicon Valley.
Because the physical and biological sciences cost more to support and often produce more lucrative research, funding, in any spectrum, is more accessible to them. A comparison between such different departments is ineffective.
“In a sense what you’re talking about is apples and peanuts,” Friedland said.
Ivan Huang, a fourth-year photography and psychology major, is concerned about the direction of funding at UC Santa Cruz and, specifically, the well being of the arts department. Huang leads the Save Art Movement (SAM), a student organization whose members try to identify and offer solutions to the problems that are plaguing the arts.
“There’s a big gap between students and faculty, there’s not much communication going on between the two,” Huang said. “There are a lot of conflicts and disagreements, even within the faculty.”
SAM has worked on a variety of issues, ranging from the lack of an art class to satisfy the W general education credit, to the issue of insufficient space in studios and classes. The group addressed their concerns to the administration but was unhappy with the lack of change.
“Our school is getting a lot of money from students, [but] we’re not getting the answers and support,” Huang said. “It makes us wonder where all our money is going.”
Huang also wants to see a balance between the contemporary and traditional aspects of art. Within his photography major, he noted that the department is shifting toward digital photography and away from traditional wet-processing photography. Huang cited the creation of the digital arts and new media graduate program as an example of this shift.
“There’s still relevance in the classical that we’re leaving behind,” Huang said. “That’s unfair for students who are interested in classical art.”
To sustain some of those techniques, Huang and other SAM members have put together workshops to train students in different methods such as alternative photography processing and woodcutting.
Compared to other campuses across the country, Elizabeth Stephens, chair of the art department, believes UCSC is more successful in preserving the traditional arts, but at the same time recognizes the importance of teaching the newer art forms.
“We’re living in the heart of Silicon Valley, practically one of the wealthiest places in the entire world,” Stephens said. “It would be irresponsible not to teach digital technology to make a living.”
However, Stephens is still unhappy with the way in which the arts are represented. “This is a problem in our county, it’s not just UC Santa Cruz,” Stephens said. “Support for the arts on a governmental level is pathetic … and, as our economy gets worse, the support always weakens.”
At UCSC, for example, establishing a graduate program in the arts has presented the division with several obstacles.
Shelley Stamp, chair of film and digital media, said the budget cuts might delay the department’s ability to update equipment and implement the film and digital media Ph.D. program that was recently approved.
“The main struggle for us [is that] we’re a high-tech major, we use technology that is very expensive and is being upgraded and changing all the time,” Stamp said. “Even before the budget cuts, we had an inadequate replacement budget. We’ve always struggled with that.”
To compensate, Stamp said they are looking into various fundraising opportunities, such as an annual phone drive and a partnership with Apple Computers to offer even deeper discounts on software and laptops.
Along with raising money, Stephens said another goal of the arts division is to create a graduate art program, which she believes would benefit the undergraduate program attracting more financial and intellectual resources. However, implementing such a program would require more money.
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Like any private university, each academic division at UCSC has a development office that works to increase the flow of outside funds into the university. According to the university’s budget report, UCSC has been awarded almost one-half billion dollars in external funding over the last five years. Private donors provided $27.7 million in gifts and pledge payments in 2006-07-a 6.3 percent increase over the previous year.
Last year, the social sciences brought in more private funding from corporations, individuals and foundations, than engineering and the hard sciences combined. Sheldon Kamienecki, dean of social sciences, said he encourages faculty to apply for grants in order to obtain their goals, such as to hire more faculty to alleviate the heavy teaching loads. The social sciences division has the highest full-time student to full-time faculty ratio in all the divisions.
“That’s what all the other universities are doing, encouraging [faculty] to attract grant money, not only for them, but for graduate student support,” Kamienecki said. “We’re behind on that compared to a lot of research universities.”
Kamienecki believes doing research and applying for grants go hand-in-hand with teaching. “It’s not taking away from their teaching time,” Kamienecki said. “Quite the opposite, the best professors are those who can bring the finding and analysis [from] outside the classroom inside the classroom.”
Mike Rotkin, a community studies lecturer and Santa Cruz city council member, has noticed all the divisions’ efforts to obtain additional dollars.
“All the divisions are pushing [the faculty] really hard to spend more of their time to raise grants, and less of their time on student needs,” Rotkin said. “That’s the downside.”
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Jeffrey Kongslie is the key link between money and research for the department of Physical and Biological Sciences. The department’s dean, Stephen Thorsett, sets all research priorities, then sends them along to Kongslie, whose job is to pursue funding options.
UCSC currently receives little funding from the private sector, partially because the public institution has historically relied more heavily on state funds, but also because UCSC is a relatively young institution and it doesn’t have a tradition of fundraising, Kongslie said. UCSC also doesn’t have the alumni base that private schools, and larger state schools-like UC Berkeley-have. “That really puts the pressure on us to go out and engage with other donors,” Kongslie added.
Though he’s set his sights primarily on increasing alumni and community-based support for the university, Kongslie also reaches out to institutions and corporations, like those in the Silicon Valley. Part of his job is to flaunt the university’s achievements and generate interest in funding the university’s future endeavors, which he said isn’t very difficult. “UCSC isn’t a perfect place by any means, but we’re light years ahead [of other universities],” he said.
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While better-funded departments like the social sciences have more resources to cope with the lack of state dollars, journalism and ethnic studies are still searching for the resources to survive on campus.
Marlene Olson, director of student media, feels that student media is essential to the university.
“It really comes down to a basic thing: it doesn’t matter how remarkable your discovery, important your invention. If you cannot communicate it to the masses, it won’t matter,” Olson said. “Any important higher educational institution needs to look at this.”
Student media has fewer than four full-time advisers to support the many different programs and publications that involve about 1,000 students. Olson is concerned for the future of student media at UCSC, since soft funds that pay for two student media advisers will run out this
“We’re in a tough place with 30 percent cuts in staff and over 300 percent increase in students since 1990,” she said. “The equation is not balanced.”
Currently, student media supporters are trying to get Measure 34 on the ballot for the Spring 2008 campus election in May. The new initiative asks for a $4.14 increase in student fees – per student, per quarter, beginning Fall 2008 – to provide funds to “support and strengthen the diversity of the student voice in television, print, radio, and inter-media by ensuring training and advising for student-run media.”
Aside from the issues that surround student media, the absence of a journalism program at UCSC is preventing students from participating in student media as freely as they would otherwise.
Karolin Palmer-Picard, a first-year Merrill student, says she was disappointed to learn that UCSC’s journalism program had been cut due to budget cuts in 2003. She is now planning to transfer to a university that offers a journalism program.
“It’s a beautiful campus and I like the environment here, but it doesn’t have my major or minor, so there’s nothing I can do but work towards transferring,” Palmer-Picard said.
According to Palmer-Picard, the draw of journalism lies in a writer’s ability to “share ideas and, hopefully, give readers some inspiration.”
“The literature department is a good option for journalism students, but you can’t use that for TV and radio,” Palmer-Picard said.
The university’s lack of an ethnic studies program is also cause for concern among students like David Partida, the Student Union Assembly (SUA) director. “We need ethnic studies because we’re the only UC without one, and it’s really important for us to learn each other’s stories,” he said.
For the past 27 years, students have struggled for an ethnic studies department. Partida said that student organizations have taken matters into their own hands by establishing student-led seminars such as “Filipino Historical Dialogue” and “Asian-American/Pacific Islander Perspective.”
“They facilitate all of their own courses,” Partida said. “It’s for students, made by students. If the university isn’t going to teach it, we’re going to do it ourselves.”
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UCSC Professor Susan Gillman, Chair of the Committee on Planning and Budget, said that the best cure for the UC’s financial woes is to increase state funds. The 2006 budget report suggests that UC “returns to the funding norms that supported its historic operations and hence service to California [by recovering] its 1990 budgetary trajectory… The other scenarios, which rely more heavily on private funds, cannot support the University’s historic scope, quality, and contribution to the people of the state.”
It’s an absolute shame that the state doesn’t provide more funding, Gillman said-particularly when it comes to the cost of research. Though the state provides overhead funds for all federal grants, Gillman said it’s the factors that are hard to quantify, mainly time, that make these factors negligible when it comes to state funds. “It takes faculty a lot of time just to produce research,” she said. “The legislature does not have a good idea of what this entails, and neither does the public.”
Art Department Chair Stephens said the solution lies in working with the government. She says students and parents should go to legislature to fight for the arts.
“We have a dynamic art department, but we can also use more resources,” she said. “The thing to do is have more tax money in the arts.”
Film and Digital Media Chair Stamp advocates an approach that focuses on the university.
“I think that art faculty and students need to do a better job of explaining to the rest of the campus why what we do is so critical to the research university, to the state, and to the country,” Stamp said. “I do take some responsibility; we need [to do] a better job of explaining that, and arguing for the resources that we need to support our programs.”
According to Rotkin, students have successfully organized and made demands in the pass such as when art students demanded that the dean create more studio art classes
“It’s possible that student organization can make a difference,” Rotkin said. “It takes serious organization and real pressure on the decision maker. It’s happened a lot in the past, I’m sure it can happen again.”
SAM organizer Huang echoes that sentiment.
“Students need to step up and be more proactive so the school knows what’s going on,” he said. “As a single person, my voice is only so loud. If there are more students that are interested and passionate in the issues, if we all speak together, it will be more effective.”
Claire Walla contributed to this report