<p>UC</a> San Diego profs come up with budget fixer: Close UC Merced - Local - Merced Sun-Star </p>
<p>discuss</p>
<p>original letter</p>
<p>[Chris’s</a> Blog Archives: UC San Diego Faculty Statement on Budget Crisis](<a href=“http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.com/2009/07/june-15-2009-dear-i-write-on-behalf-of.html]Chris’s”>Chris's Blog Archives: UC San Diego Faculty Statement on Budget Crisis)</p>
<p>apparently banana slugs don’t care if their school closes down. so sad</p>
<p>It’s not that nobody cares, it’s that it isn’t going to happen. They’re just whining about getting they’re budgets slashed and want to dump it off on somebody else. Plus, they’d close Merced before anything else. </p>
<p>Maybe if they closed all 3 they’d disperse the displaced students across the system.</p>
<p>That’s really rude. We care. Apparently you didn’t hear about the week-long protest on the base of campus in order to resist budget cuts and save our Community Studies department.</p>
<p>Maybe this is more relevant to the UCSC population :</p>
<p>[UCSD</a> Professors Recommend UCSC Closure - KION - Monterey, Salinas, Santa Cruz - News Weather-](<a href=“http://www.kionrightnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=10720992]UCSD”>http://www.kionrightnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=10720992)</p>
<p>UC President Mark Yodof responded in a letter last week, “I am writing to all 10 chancellors to provide a simple, explicit statement that neither the closure of any campus or a deliberate action to deemphasize the research mission of any campus will be under consideration,” reads Yodof’s letter.</p>
<p>amby, go away. The main discussion is taking place in the UC general discussion, where it should be discussed. </p>
<p>This ‘news’ is just noise from some UCSD professors with sticks up their butts because they are looking at small pay cuts. There are better things to talk about, like you know, things that are really happening? Like say an additional 800 million in budget cuts and watching programs get cut at every UC.</p>
<p>who says we don’t care; the government budget cuts and icreases in our tuition is not helping our strive to fight it, i know atleast 30 people in my last quarter who have dropped out because they couldn’t fund their educations. plus this is just a rumor, the real attack is on the important programs that are presently being cut. Why should we waste our time on fighting against a “rumor” when we could be fighting for a real reason. get your facts straight before you go jumping to conclusions</p>
<p>Bananaslugbabe, do you know which programs are being cut?</p>
<p>Community Studies is on the top of the list. But meanwhile, they’re just making every other program short staffed and cutting classes.</p>
<p>My current Italian class is taught in two sections with capacities of 25 students apiece. The next Italian class that I’ll be taking in the Winter will only be taught in one section with a capacity of 35 students. So far, this is the only cut I’ve been able to recognize in my own studies.</p>
<p>Still, the students who constantly demonstrate and occupy buildings and demand that there be no program cuts or fee increases are ridiculous, unrealistic dreamers who are contributing nothing of value to the resolution of the budget crisis and are generally wasting everyone’s time.</p>
<p>Totally agree with you about this occupation nonsense. Even those that are the most far left liberal hippies think the occupation is stupid. If you don’t like it, don’t pay for it. They are going to now occupy the library to protest the hours, which I agree 100% are ridiculous, but this isn’t going to do any good. It is only going to worsen the situation. If it is anything like the last occupations, they are going to graffiti the library and make a giant mess so it won’t be open on Sunday for real students to use.</p>
<p>Not that I’m defending the silly occupations, but I have heard that if the UC were to change some of its priorities (eg construction), a lot of stuff could be saved without hikes.</p>
<p>Just what i heard, though.</p>
<p>I don’t know. That is always true in the most general sense. The university could shut down various programs and services and that might free up enough money to prevent fee hikes. However, then we’d have students protesting about the loss of these programs and services instead of fee hikes.</p>
<p>As for the construction, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. This is of course just speculation, but in many cases this type of construction is made possible by outside funding, by donations from either private sources or from the federal government. These kinds of donations often have stipulations attached to them. If it were as simple as free money for the university to use as it sees fit, then perhaps it could be diverted away from construction projects. However, if the federal government gave money to the university to construct new facilities for the science department because this department is contracted to do research by the department of defense, then this money can hardly be used to spare the students a fee hike.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the money dedicated to these construction projects was likely set aside quite a while ago, before the university was in a position where it had to consider raising fees. Even if the money could be used at the university’s discretion, there is likely an extensive approval process involved that makes it difficult to redistribute money that is already committed to a project of that magnitude. This is a characteristic of Congress and it shouldn’t be surprising that it extends to smaller bureaucracies, like the UC system.</p>
<p>I propose a good place to make cuts in programs on the academic side is to chop any major or department that contains the word “studies” in its descriptor.</p>
<p>So you would do away with about half of the Humanities and Social Sciences programs. This wouldn’t affect my major, but it would prevent me from taking Italian, so I’m inclined to disagree.</p>
<p>I imagine you’d get along with Andrew Scull, the “Distinguished Professor and Chair” of Sociology at UC San Diego.</p>
<p>Not at all am I preventing you from learning Italian. That falls under the Linguistics Department. Language Studies falls under some multidisciplinary mishmash that jumbles together classes from many departments to create a “studies” discipline. Now you have to staff such discipline with a Chair/Department Head to give it appropriate gravitas. Then the costs really start kicking in.</p>
<p>As I understand it, the Linguistics department contains the Linguistics major and the Language Studies major. There is also the Italian Studies major, which is actually what my Italian classes are listed under. However, even if you did away with Italian Studies and Language Studies and rewrote the catalog so that the language courses were listed under Linguistics, I still wouldn’t really support this plan. Even though I am personally uninterested in all of the departments and majors that have Studies explicitly stated in their titles, I feel that some of these programs are still academically important (with the obvious exception of Feminist Studies, which is silly). These programs involve a cross-discipline approach that encourages students to see the big picture and the interconnectedness of different fields of study. One problem that has developed in science over time is that scientists are becoming increasingly specialized in their research and expertise, while the science itself has always been thoroughly interconnected. This problem could just as easily affect other academic programs. I’d like to think that the goal of the “Studies” majors is to produce modern Renaissance men and women.</p>
<p>To be fair, I am less concerned with the bottom line than I am with the quality of education because I am young and my source of funding is secure.</p>
<p>“I’d like to think that the goal of the “Studies” majors is to produce modern Renaissance men and women.”</p>
<p>That’s a strange thing to say with your username. At best, these majors are just a big waste of time. At worst, they spread propaganda and promote relativism. </p>
<p>I definitely agree with RSBuletz that they should be the first target of cuts in funding.</p>