Dear CHASS faculty, staff, students, and friends:

As the new academic year kicks off, we update you on the financial state of the College.

As one of the largest academic units across the entire UC, our research, instructional, and service missions are both ambitious and resource-intensive. Thankfully, the State remains committed to its sustained support of the University of California (subject to meeting undergraduate in-state enrollment and graduation targets). Recent state budgets have included some much-needed investments in the educational, climate justice, and health needs of Inland California, including UCR. 

CHASS has an annual budget exceeding $100 million, including a wide range of centrally-supported salary increases for faculty, staff, and academic student employees that took effect between July 1 and October 1, 2023. The College has found itself in an increasingly strong position to fund dozens of new staff and Senate faculty hires. The most recent undergraduate admissions cycle was a smashing success, with Statements of Intent to Register far exceeding targets. Each additional #YesToCHASS lends much-needed assurance that we will be resourced to educate current and future generations of Highlanders. With watchful eyes on student success metrics of undergraduate retention and credit hours, total student FTE trended in a positive direction last year, and we are working towards sustainable gains in the coming year. With a new instructional facility moving into advanced planning and Rooms for Increasing Student Engagement (RISE) technological upgrades across campus, we look forward to additional modern instructional, laboratory, studio, and rehearsal spaces worthy of an AAU member institution. 

Below, we provide some additional detail to this snapshot of finances and investments. We invite you to dig into the numbers and the strategic direction, described in the 2023 State of the College and related statistical appendices and data visualizations. 

Student FTE

One year ago, we stared down a loss of $170K in permanent budgeting, due to continued downward trends in undergraduate major enrollment and soft student credit hours. Instead, we ended the year on much stronger footing, with a net positive increase to our CHASS budget of more than $600,000, largely thanks to concerted efforts throughout the year to encourage more CHASS majors to reach or exceed the 15 hours per quarter on which per-student state funding is calculated. An unexpected uptick in non-resident tuition helped as well. 

Undergraduate Admissions

In AY23-24, CHASS welcomes more than 3,300 new first-year and transfer students. The growing partnerships with CHASS Academic Advising, Undergraduate Admissions, the CHASS Marketing and Communications, Events and Facilities teams, and various academic units yielded an over-target incoming class which reflects the diversity of our State, with noticeable increases in self-identified Hispanic/Latinx (from 935 to 1230) and Black/African-American (from 77 to 90) first-year students. As each new student pursues the major of their choice, the College receives funds from the State and tuition to support that educational journey. 

As of September 29, we anticipate about $175,000 in permanent new dollars for our success in the recruitment and yield of California residents. This estimate is preliminary, and any sharp drop in credit hours or out-of-state and international matriculating students may push final allocations back into negative territory. But for today, we thank each and all of you for your contributions to the good news of the last admissions cycle.

Graduate admissions 

Graduate admissions for the current academic year — and the underlying financing including fellowships and assistantships — are without major changes from previous years. However, we look forward to fresh conversations with the new Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate Division on admissions targets and multiyear funding packages that provide all fully-funded terminal-degree students with baseline salary levels equal to the United Auto Workers (UAW) contracts, while reimagining what has become a highly inefficient and unsustainable temporary teaching allocation process.

Investments in People

Faculty

Over the fiscal year that closed June 30, 2023, the College opened 23 Senate faculty recruitments, resulting in 16 faculty hires arriving between July 2023 and January 2024. The total salary investment for these hires is $1.7 million. This includes five hires supported by the President’s and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship hiring incentive, with an underlying UCOP-Mellon subsidy of approximately $2.5 million over five years.

Twenty-eight additional Senate recruitments have been authorized for a start date of July 1, 2024, or later. Historical trends signal that not all searches will necessarily succeed the first time around, but new hires should still outpace the number of separations, averaging about 17 per year. CHASS, hopefully, is returning to the Senate headcount that slipped during the hiring freeze. 

Investments include Senate faculty already among us as well. Between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, the College successfully retained a record number of 12 Senate faculty, with a total incremental salary and benefits investment of about $250,000, and additional research support of approximately $600,000. The funds for these retentions come from the College, with modest cost-share contributions from the home unit. 

The Office of Academic Personnel is slated to conduct its biannual faculty equity study later this year. Alongside recent salary and chair compensation studies, such reports prompt the campus and College to direct new investments in equitable faculty compensation.

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View Senate Recruitment Table

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Unit Heads 

Last year we made a significant investment in the department leadership, benchmarking chair compensation to the campus chair equity study and increasing and regularizing support for directors of non-departmentalized academic degree programs. This year, we extended a total of $250,000 in funding to academic departments and the two large-enrollment non-departmentalized degree programs to support the people and programs that advance student success. These funds come exclusively from the College.

Academic Student Employees 

Last year, the University of California reached a historic agreement with the UAW to increase compensation to our academic researchers, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student researchers, and teaching assistants. The financial obligations of these increases have been substantial. For CHASS, the salary increases totaled $400,000 in FY23. The FY24 figure is an additional $2.8 million. The campus has already committed to providing temporary resources to cover the first two years of contractual increases, and the Provost has convened a working group of administrators, Senate leaders, and financial officers to determine the funding sources for FY25. The permanent ongoing costs of these salary increases are yet to be determined, but we remain committed to meeting all obligations on time, including the ongoing additional costs borne by the College through temporary teaching and one-time supplements.   

Enhanced support for our academic student employees includes professional development opportunities that reach beyond any contract obligations. In the summer of 2022, the college funded 20 CHASS graduate students to participate in the National Humanities Center’s (NHC) Graduate Student Residency Program Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Classroom. In 2022-23, participants were offered an additional stipend and invited to share the expertise they developed at the NHC on campus through a hybrid classroom pilot program that is a partnership between CHASS and UCR Information Technology Solutions. That pilot program continues to develop and evolve in 2023-24 in the new Zoom classroom in the Interdisciplinary (North) building.

Staff 

In addition to an exceptionally active period of staff recruitment to fill existing vacancies in a competitive market, CHASS has taken proactive steps to grow our total staff FTE. We have increased by a net seven positions during FY23, with an additional five new FTEs currently in recruitment. Highlights of recent staff investments, from new positions and reclassifications, include a new divisional FAO, the creation of the CHASS Travel Unit, bolstered numbers and organizational leadership in academic advising, and some much-needed new positions in Human Resources and the Impact23 implementation teams. 

The start of the new year brings modest staff equity adjustments, cost-shared between the central campus and the College to bring salaries in line with market conditions. We also roll out the Staff Professional Development Scholarship Program to fund educational opportunities for professional development among career staff.

Strategic plans for the growth of staff FTE will be the focus of the CHASS Staff Task Force, which will make its recommendations in Winter 2024 after consultation with many key stakeholders throughout the College. Stay tuned.

Instructional Infrastructure 

Over the last four years, CHASS has been provided with a commitment from campus of close to $7 million in one-time California Lottery funds allocations. These funds are used to improve our instructional and rehearsal spaces, as well as purchase much-needed equipment for academic advising. To date, we have spent a little over $3.3 million in the areas of instructional technology, lab renovations, computer replacements, and upgrades to performance art spaces. This investment specifically includes computer lab upgrades for the Arts, as well as safety equipment and a boom lift for the performing arts.

Facilities adequate to our stature remain a challenge with few short-term solutions. Nonetheless, we are in advanced conversation about space reallocations in INTN and INTS, to better support the academic units and research centers historically located across the two buildings as well as the two new departments of Black Study and Society, Environment, Health, and Sustainability. On the horizon, we look to a model of centralizing some undergraduate student services to support holistic advising.

Looking forward

There’s still much work to be done, and many, many unmet needs. While the mandated budget cuts of the pandemic are behind us, we still live within conditions of austerity that do not permit the full return to the financial support available to faculty prior to the pandemic. The kickoff year to the CHASS-CIS Event Cosponsorship program has been promising, but we remain under-resourced in supporting major events in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. UCR ARTS does heroic work with funding secured from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Humanities, family endowments, and private foundations, but the gem in downtown Riverside must have better resources to sparkle. Our overtaxed contracts and grants administration infrastructure must rise to a staffing level that can support our AAU research activity. 

Continued intentional efforts to strengthen our visibility among legislative appropriators in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as well as program officers in key New York and Los Angeles foundations, have already yielded the respect and investments that we deserve. Perhaps a MacKenzie Scott will unexpectedly bless us with a transformational philanthropic gift, but the hard work of our development team remains the tried-and-true path to expanding opportunities for student scholarships, programming and exhibitions, and endowed and term chairs. 

For AY23-24, our financial health remains closely tied to strong undergraduate headcounts, retention, and student credit hours workload. Each and every unit in the College must see its students’ success — from admission yield rates through year-over-year persistence to full-time registration status through Commencement —  as a good unto itself for the students, their families, and our region, as well as as a major driver of the resources that we have at our disposal to carry out our ambitious research and service missions. 

Although we have significant work ahead of us, we are in this together as a College and as colleagues. We are looking forward to a new year filled with collaboration and creativity.