Dear CHASS Chairs, Directors, and Faculty Executive Committee Acting Chair:

I begin with my sincere thanks to each of our graduate program leads for taking the time in the fall quarter to sit down with me, Associate Deans Lamar Prieto and Tomoff, and Dean Kos to discuss the PhD and MFA programs that advance our core research and creativity mission. At a time of uncertainty, we recognize that the expanded availability of three-quarter fellowship recruitment packages turns our top-quality admits into the promising newcomers who joined us at Welcome Week. More broadly, we learn about the best of our scholars and artists across all stages of their graduate studies at UCR. 

We take comfort that recent, quite serious disruptions to the higher education landscape have not diminished our commitment to sustaining quality graduate education. I remain grateful to each program for the honest feedback about cohort size and funding at all stages of graduate training. These conversations also support programmatic improvement and adaptation, informed by experimentation among our peers as well as local metrics available in the dashboards published online alongside the 2025 State of the College. 

Our major challenge remains the adequate funding of high-quality graduate education at a time of increased costs and limited new revenues. The Dean’s Fellowship packages are both a good and a costly investment. The expanded availability of dissertation or MFA thesis completion support draws upon our limited pool of funding. As we continue to meet the obligations of the standing UAW contracts, we must plan for additional increases in compensation for all academic student employees. Those same increases also cover our new students on first-year fellowship quarters as well as students on competitive internal and external research or dissertation/thesis completion fellowship support. 

In the absence of new funding to support the graduate fellows and academic student employees who are with us now, we are faced with an uncomfortable reduction in new cohorts. The scope of contraction in graduate admissions in CHASS is modest in comparison to peer institutions across the United States. Nonetheless we face the necessary reality that targets for the next cycle of graduate admissions will be lower than targets set for the past two years. 

Therefore, funded admission slots for Fall 2026 are set at a combined 104 matriculating funded PhD and MFA students —  an 8% decrease over the combined five-year average.

There are no limits placed on unfunded direct-to-MA admissions.

In FY27, all funded admissions packages shall continue to carry two quarters of fellowship to be taken exclusively in the first year of study. About one fourth of these funded packages will carry one additional fellowship quarter — the CHASS Dean’s Fellowship —  also to be taken in the first year. Tuition, benefits, and most fees are also covered for students on fellowship as well as Academic Student Employees. For PhD programs, CHASS continues to backstop four-year packages, inclusive of the first-year fellowship quarters, for Fall 2026 admits who remain in good standing. The same guarantee is set at two years for the MFA programs. To offer packages competitive with our peers, individual programs may extend longer guarantees, drawing from departmental resources as the backstop. The Dean of the Graduate Division is also making available additional resources to supplement packages offered to each program's top recruit to help us compete with other offers. 

The following table reflects the number of authorized multiyear funding packages for Fall 2026 matriculated students, inclusive of the CHASS Dean’s Fellowships allocations.

In January, Cova and Perla will be following up with a more detailed explanation of the CHASS Dean's Fellowship allocations and the overall timeframe and workflow of the admissions season. 

Cova will also be coordinating our participation in the ACLS Doctoral Futures initiative. The work will include structured discussion about the wisdom of permitting departments to allocate fellowship quarters in the second or third year of study, biannual admission cycles, the delinking of graduate admission targets and the staffing of undergraduate instruction, and other options discussed over the past few months. Finally, the associate and assistant deans and I will be proposing necessary adaptations to temporary teaching to sustain our obligations to the undergraduate curriculum. 

For this December, I wish each of you rest in the coming two weeks and peace in the New Year.

Yours sincerely,

Daryle Williams
Professor of History and Dean
College of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
University of California, Riverside