Open Letter
Dear Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Dean Breslauer, and Dean Broughton:
The graduate students in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures emphatically protest the budget cuts that have been assessed on the department for the 2008-09 academic year. As a result of these cuts, 1,530 currently enrolled language students (as well as the countless others the department already cannot accommodate) will not be able to continue their studies of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In addition, students working outside the College of Letters and Sciences—a generation of future litigators, entrepreneurs, journalists, and engineers—will no longer be able to acquire the language skills they need to pursue their work in the global arena.
We write to express our grave concern about the negative impact these cuts will have on EALC's efforts to recruit qualified personnel—and, more particularly, about the danger they pose for the future of a viable Berkeley Korean program. The lack of a legitimate Korean program will provoke a redirection of outside funding away from Berkeley and toward other institutions. This will make it more difficult for Berkeley students of all East Asian languages to pursue overseas language study, and will discourage future applicants from coming to Berkeley.
In view of this situation, we demand the following:
- Increased transparency in the budget allocation process at every level of university administration.
- Establishment of permanency in lecturer positions and the creation of language education chairs.
- The disbursement of discretionary funds to EALC from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor/Provost to mitigate the current crisis.
We believe these measures are the only way to ensure that future budget cuts do not take departments like ours by surprise and do not have the disproportionate impact on language education that these have had. We thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
The Graduate Students of the
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures