Dear CHASS faculty, staff, students, and friends: 

The past two weeks have brought much budget news about UCR’s fiscal year that ended June 30 as well as the University of California in the 2022-23 State Budget. Chancellor Wilcox’s July 1 communication about $47M in one-time funding for climate initiatives at UCR and an additional $51M for campus expansion (with intent to receive more in 2023-24 and 2024-25) is especially welcome. While there is no line-item allocation to CHASS in the 2022-23 State budget, our college benefits from all campus investments to remedy our seat deficit and to prepare for future enrollment growth. 

Below, we share additional context specific to CHASS, as we transition from one fiscal year to another. 

Closing out FY22 with pandemic budget reductions behind us

The economic disruptions and revenue shortfalls brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic exacted a heavy toll on the College budget. While mandatory cuts turned out to be not as severe as originally forecast, CHASS still confronted a total reduction in excess of $5.9M. Over the past two years, we have also faced enrollment leakages that caused another $3.1M in permanent reductions. 

In order to meet the cuts and lowered revenues from leaking major headcounts and instructional workload, we took the hard step of relinquishing salaries on unfilled faculty and staff lines. We also significantly slowed new hiring and endured a range of painful belt-tightening measures. 

The good news is that, effective July 1, 2022, that $5.9M reduction has been fully resolved. We turn to FY23 with the capacity to address the deferred maintenance in our academic mission and to make investments across people, programs, and facilities.

Moving into an investment phase

Faculty Hiring 

Since June 2021, the College has authorized a total of 22 Academic Senate recruitments with a start date of July 1, 2022 or later. Of that figure, we have 12 signed commitments and one outstanding offer. In the coming year, we will continue to open up new recruitments through open national searches and target of excellence hires. Two new searches come under the UCOP Advancing Faculty Diversity initiative. CHASS shall continue to invest heavily in the UC President’s and Chancellor’s postdoctoral program hiring incentives as a central vehicle for the recruitment of excellent research and instructional faculty across all units of the College. 

Under the terms of the newly ratified Unit-18 contract, the College also invests in the salaries and benefits that support new and continuing lecturers.

Staff Hiring 

Our Student Academic Affairs staff will be a direct beneficiary of new investments, both from central campus and the College. In summer 2022, CHASS opens the recruitment of two additional advisors with specialties in the social sciences. In AY 2022-23, in partnership with the VPDUE Associate Dean for Student Success and the Career Center, we will be exploring additional new investments in shared staffing and services, such as pre-professional advising and Black Student Success.

Additionally, CHASS is opening a travel unit that will process travel reimbursements in conjunction with the roll-out of the new CONCUR travel system. The new hires and infrastructure investment in centralized travel services will free up time and bandwidth among transactional staff in the units. 

In mid-July 2022, the College opens a recruitment for a permanent Divisional Financial and Administrative Officer for the Multi-Disciplinary Unit (MDU), the Performing Arts (PAA), and various research centers. This recruitment shall be part of a larger reorganization of staffing and supervision across our clustered academic and research units.

Instructional Infrastructure 

Between 2019 and 2021, CHASS received close to $900K in one-time California Lottery funds allocations. These monies were used to improve instructional space, to purchase teaching equipment, and to support effective pedagogy. An additional $850K has been distributed out to the units as block allocations, to be used by December 2022. A highlight of the block grant allocation is funding 20 CHASS graduate students to participate in the Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Classroom training seminar, run out of the National Humanities Center. 

The next major investments from Lottery funds come from the $4.5M allocation to CHASS, announced by the Provost. To be spent over five years, these funds will support additional purchases of instructional equipment and technologies. With these one-time monies, we can equip new instructional laboratories in the humanities and social sciences and support world-class instructional practice and exploration in the visual and performing arts. In partnership with Central campus, Lottery funds also expand the instructional capacities of the Center for Ideas and Society, UCR ARTS, and the Palm Desert Center.

College Leadership

The launch of new academic departments and programs, the expansion of the research enterprise, and our focus on holistic student success require investments in the college leaders responsible for these activities. Effective July 1, 2022, each of the three associate deans move from 75% to 100%, expanding a portfolio that includes partnership with Research and Economic Development, Undergraduate Education, and Enrollment Services as well as external partners including the Social Sciences Research Council College and University Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies Research Consortium, NACADA, and CASE. 

With the capacity to work at full-steam, the Associate Deans join our Assistant Deans for Development, Finance and Administration, and Marketing and Communications; Directors of Academic Personnel, Human Relations, and Facilities; the College Chief Information Officer; and the Equity Officers as CHASS leaders and champions.

Unit Leadership 

We are investing an additional $200K to support the heads of our many departments and instructional programs. This investment in unit leadership is the first increase in chair compensation since 2017. 

In FY23, we solicit proposals to invest in faculty and staff leaders at all levels, through initiatives such as the UC-Coro Systemwide Leadership Collaborative, the UC Systemwide People Management Series, the Building Core Supervisory Competencies program, and the American Council on Education Fellowship.

Challenges

Although we have covered our permanent budget reduction and we start the new fiscal year with a spirit of optimism, our historic under-resourcing, suboptimal staffing, and unmet facilities needs remain. Our temporary teaching expenditures are growing faster than the underlying resources to support them. The costs associated with new faculty hires are outpacing any savings associated with separations and increases in UC pay scale. 

Enrollment trends remain of significant concern given the highly responsive nature of the UCR budget model. (Enrollments go up, revenues go up the same year; enrollments go down, revenues go down. In either scenario, fixed costs cannot be adjusted in real time.) 

In the coming year, we must be pay close attention to: 

1. The urgent need to focus on undergraduate recruitment, retention, and completion, to ensure robust enrollments across the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

2. The unknown impact of the new credit hour weighting formula that takes effect July 1, 2023. 

3. The financial necessity of strong summer term and concurrent enrollments as well as robust investments in sponsored and extramural research, advancement, and advocacy. 

4. The investments necessary to retain, develop, and advance existing faculty and staff.

5. The importance of expanding graduate student support. 

6. Finding the budgetary bandwidth to resume regular faculty workstation replacements, book subventions, conference support and other investments in our research and programming.

Although we have significant work ahead of us, CHASS remains a community of academic excellence and sound fiscal management. We are looking forward to a new year filled with collaboration and success.

For more data about CHASS, see the appendices to the State of the College.