A BROKEN SYSTEM: WHY THIS IS HAPPENING
Most language instructors at Berkeley have the position of lecturer, and the salaries of all lecturers are funded by the Temporary Academic Staff (TAS) budget. The way it is structured now, the TAS budget is soft money (unlike other budgets within the university), and is particularly vulnerable to cuts in funding from year to year. This year, because of the shortfall in the University of California's budget from the State of California, EALC's TAS budget is being cut by 25%.
What this means for EALC is that the core teaching mission of the department--the teaching of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages--is funded on soft money.
A large part of the EALC's TAS budget goes toward teaching students outside the Humanities and outside the College of Letters and Science, yet EALC does not receive any contributions to its budget from these outside units.
Other departments across the Humanities teaching language and composition as a service to the university at large are facing the same cuts to their TAS budgets. This seriously affects the quality of education across the university.
We are funding essential teaching missions across the Humanities through soft money--this is a broken system that badly needs attention. Unless the university can restructure this broken system of paying lecturers, similar crises will happen again and again.