By Dean Janet Broughton

State funding for the University of California is likely to be cut very significantly next year. Berkeley, like the other UC campuses, has no choice but to absorb its share of the anticipated cuts.

As the dean of the division of Arts & Humanities, I am responsible for supporting 19 departments and five interdepartmental teaching programs during this time of budget shortfalls, and I must also help Berkeley meet its obligations to support GSIs and Continuing Lecturers.

In recent years, Arts & Humanities has been able to keep its departmental major programs strong, meet its obligations to instructors, and allocate further funds to serve the needs of students across the entire campus. In fact, last year I requested and received the campus’s first-ever language-instruction supplement. Expressing the campus’s commitment to language instruction, the central administration provided nearly half a million dollars that enabled eight departments to offer extra sections of language instruction. In the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures alone, the supplement funded twenty extra sections.

This year, the state budget uncertainties mean that Arts & Humanities cannot count on receiving enough funding to maintain its departmental major programs and meet its standing obligations, while at the same time meeting the full range of student demand for its course offerings. Inevitably, this means that cuts in funding for next year are not uniform across departments, because what any one department needs for its major programs may vary greatly from one year to the next, and because the extent to which different departments offer employment to GSIs and Continuing Lecturers varies as well.

In some Arts & Humanities departments the result is that many sections have been cancelled and many non-continuing lecturers have been let go. This is devastating for individual instructors and for the many students who rely on our courses to make progress toward their degrees. While I hope very much that the budget outlook will soon improve, I cannot sugarcoat a serious crisis.

I am particularly concerned about the budget’s impact on language sections. One of Berkeley’s glories has been its long record of strength in language instruction. We currently offer an average of 58 different languages every year, something that we need to do in order to fulfill Berkeley’s mission of preparing students for informed and humane participation in a global world. I am committed to restoring our language programs as quickly as possible to the level at which they can support Berkeley’s ambitions.

One of the complications that deans at Berkeley face is that academic planning and the state budget process are not in synch. Deans must make their allocations of annual funding by the middle of spring semester, but they do not find out what they will actually be receiving from the central administration until June at the earliest, because the central administration does not know enough about the state budget until then.

Of course, my hope is that the central administration will be able to provide more to Arts & Humanities than I currently anticipate. While I am confident that our campus leaders will do what they can, I also know they cannot change the fact that we are in a time of budgetary austerity and uncertainty. I thus strongly encourage concerned faculty and students to let California’s governor and legislators know what cuts to higher education will mean to them.