IDS students insecure about their program
Department’s budget problems, loss of chair raise concern
By Terri Aquino
Daily Bruin Contributor
After losing the chair and experiencing budgetary problems for the past two years, the international development studies program now faces questions from students in the major.
The administration has assigned two faculty groups to find a new chair and to ensure enough resources exist for the program to survive.
“I intend to ensure that (IDS) retains a central place in the international interdisciplinary education at UCLA,” said Geoff Garrett, vice provost of the international studies and overseas program, under which the IDS major falls.
Forming advisory groups is a step in the right direction, both students and counselors say, but IDS students also say they fear the major could be canceled because of the program’s budgetary problems.
IDS counselor Lahra Smith said the program has not heard anything from the administration that the major may be canceled, and that students already declared as IDS majors will graduate with it.
“We have no reason to think the major will be closed,” she said.
The university is not disclosing budgetary figures, said Nick Hernandez, director of budget and management systems of the College of Letters & Science.
According to former IDS chair Joshua Muldavin, he and the Faculty Advisory Committee found that the $80,000 in funding available for the program in the spring had dropped to $0 in the fall, causing core classes to be canceled.
But after negotiating with the administration, core classes were reinstated, said Muldavin, who has accepted a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College in New York after the university denied him tenure last spring.
The core classes, IDS 100A and 100B, are offered every quarter this year – the most these classes have ever been available. They will possibly be offered next year as well, IDS counselors say.
If classes are cut, they will be substituted with different classes approved by IDS heads to fulfill requirements for the major, Smith said.
But substitution of classes is unacceptable, some students say.
“IDS has provided me with a paradigm. The only way you can really have that paradigm is with the larger framework that core classes provide,” said second-year IDS and political science student Eric Blocher.
Christine Riordan, a fourth-year IDS and Spanish student, said communication between them and administrators is necessary.
With the dramatic increase in student enrollment in the major, students said the focus of discussion in classes has changed.
IDS, formerly under the joint jurisdiction of the social sciences department and the international studies overseas program, reached its peak in student enrollment last year with nearly 300 students declaring IDS as their majors – five times greater than the 60 declared in 1994.
“Due to the size of the classes, our discussions have become lectures,” Riordan said.
Reviewers said IDS and other interdisciplinary development programs won’t exist much longer if they continue to fall into the “reinforcing vicious cycle” of insecure resources, according to the 1999-2000 Academic Senate IDS review, published in January 2000.
Tenured professors hesitate to join the IDS program because “they are not attracted to the program without the incentives of buy-outs from their departments,” Piers Blaikie, development studies professor at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, stated in the review.
Other renown institutions like Stanford, Harvard and UC Berkeley have development studies centers and programs, and UCLA cannot afford to be without one, Blaikie stated.
Until faculty groups fully find solutions, the growing number of IDS students must be aware of the possibility for changes within the program, IDS counselors said.
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