Faculty unites to fight fee hikes

Jennifer Case
Menaka Fernando
Published: Tuesday, April 6, 2004

If the message was not clear before, the department heads of the UCLA College are making sure their message about UCLA’s graduate programs are now heard loud and clear by the administration: The governor’s proposed cuts without adequate compensation from the university is unacceptable.

Faced with a graduate fee increase of 40 percent in the governor’s proposed budget, department chairs collaboratively sent a letter to Chancellor Albert Carnesale and Executive Vice Chancellor Daniel Neuman on March 31 that, in a tone of urgency, pleads for additional funding for the graduate program.

Authored by Professor Roger Waldinger, chairman of the sociology department, on behalf of 30 department chairs, the letter asks for “an immediate commitment” for a permanent $2 million to graduate funding in the 2004-05 academic year. The letter also calls for additional commitments of $1 million per year for the two following academic years.

The department heads said the future of UCLA’s reputation depends on the quality of its graduate programs, and without the much-needed funding, the university will be unable to compete with other universities for top graduate students.

“We must emphasize that we are in a crisis. The gravity of the situation requires your immediate action; it demands that you be willing to take unusual measures,” Waldinger wrote.

The letter also states that these additional funds should be made without any reduction in the support of recruiting and retention.

The letter was sent after both Carnesale and Neuman met with many of the chairs in a March 24 meeting to discuss the issue.

In a response addressed to Waldinger, Carnesale acknowledged the problem at hand but said the requests are impossible to meet.

“I understand the attractiveness of allocating additional funds to graduate student support without decreasing funding for anything else. Unfortunately, this is not among the options realistically available to us in the near term.”

Still, Carnesale added that some positive steps will be taken to remedy the situation.

“Before the end of this academic year, we will announce a special fundraising campaign focused solely on endowed professorships, graduate student fellowships and undergraduate scholarships,” Carnesale wrote.

Some administrators say steps that are being taken to solve the problem will include difficult trade-offs between other much needed programs.

“Immediately and in a significant way, the campus is going to have to put money toward graduate support. This is going to involve taking money from other places, but this hard decision is going to have to be made,” said Jim Turner, assistant vice chancellor for the Graduate Division. “How much money and where the money is coming from is the question.”

Faced with the budget crisis, professors believe that the only way to continue to appeal to quality graduate students is to cover the cost of fee increases. The requested funds will only cover a portion of the fee increases for some graduate students.

Department chairs say quality graduate students will only be attracted to UCLA if the faculty remains at its same quality. But they also believe that if the same quality of graduate students are not attending UCLA, the faculty will also leave.

Many chairmen said the issue of graduate funding will cause a “snowball effect,” which will in turn affect the quality of education undergraduate students receive in years to come.

Professor Timothy Tangherlini, chairman of the Scandinavian department, said the only way to attract the most qualified graduate students is to offer them the same amount of money competing schools are offering them.

“We wanted to make absolutely clear that you can’t have a great research university without graduate support. We need a recruitment and retention fund for faculty because if we don’t get this, we won’t have strong graduate fellowship packages. Without the best graduate students, you won’t have the best faculty,” Tangherlini said.

“UCLA has done a fabulous job of building an elite reputation; however, this reputation can be damaged very quickly,” Tangherlini added.

Turner, like many professors at UCLA, has acknowledged that UCLA has fallen behind other universities in terms of how much support the university awards each graduate student.

“Our competitors are offering three to four thousand more dollars than we are offering, yet the cost of living here in Los Angeles is so much higher than anywhere else,” Turner said.

College department chairs collaborated for the first time in January, sending an unprecedented letter to the University of California Board of Regents, urging the regents to reject the governor’s proposed budget.