Please sign our petitions

Please read and sign the English department's petition. The East Asian Languages and Cultures petition has moved here.

Why This Matters To All of Berkeley

On the level of state budget, the most important thing at hand is to urge Governor Schwarzenegger to rescind his cuts to state-funded higher education. Pertinent representatives of the California State Assembly should work to restore funding to higher education in California.

On the level of university budget, there is a major problem in the way the Humanities is structuring its foundational undergraduate education. Most language instructors at Berkeley hold 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 thus 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, many departments in the humanities are being forced to cut their TAS budgets drastically.

What this means for the humanities is that the core teaching missions of certain departments will be seriously impacted—such as the teaching of Reading and Composition skills for English, and the teaching of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages for EALC. Thousands of undergraduates are being turned away from these much-needed classes that are high in demand across campus.

This seriously affects the value of a Berkeley humanities education. Berkeley will feel the damage from this short-sighted budgetary situation for years to come. 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.

For more information, see either the English petition itself, or a further analysis by EALC here.

Note to other departments

If other departments facing cuts in language instruction would like information posted here, we are only too happy to help. The importance of language education to Berkeley's stated goals and competitiveness is universal. Please send the materials you'd like to see on this site to here.