College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Dear CHASS faculty, staff, students, and friends:
As the new academic year approaches, I write with important updates on the financial state of the College.
As the fourth largest academic unit across the entire UC, as measured by undergraduate enrollments, our ambitious research, instructional, and service missions are resource-intensive. Every year, but especially the current fiscal year, the costs of our legitimate needs push beyond the available sources of revenue. The cyclical nature of the California economy has squeezed the State’s premier research university system, and UCR finds itself balancing aspirations for growth with the harsh reality of budget cuts. See below for a snapshot of revenues and expenses prior to the cuts. See also the July 16 communication from Provost Watkins and Vice-Chancellor Bomotti on the campus response to the State budget.
Revenue and Expenses
But it’s far from doom and gloom across the classrooms, studios, and laboratories where we advance educational attainment and world-class research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Faculty excellence remains exceptionally high, renewed by the arrival of 25 new Senate faculty in the calendar year 2024. At least eleven more confirmed Senate hires will be joining us in 2025, and three additional recruitments are still in negotiations. In the face of historic underinvestment in staffing, our staff professionals remain equal to our stature, and they, too, are renewed through new hires. This past June, our brilliant students crossed the commencement stage at solid 4- and 6-year completion rates, rejoining California communities as first-gen change makers.
CHASS’s accomplished alumni show up at Homecoming, at our extraordinary cultural events, and increasingly in my office and off-campus to discuss philanthropic engagement. By the tens of thousands, prospective applicants – our future alumni – come to campus to learn more about our curricular offerings. They dispel the false notion that a college degree has limited value or that the liberal arts diminish one’s life chances. 2024 was extra special for the rollout of special efforts to welcome our multilingual families to the College. “Los Highlanders” t-shirts are everywhere!
To make it quite personal, nearly all non-represented employees, as well as our academic student employees, will be earning more in FY25 than they did in FY24, thanks to across-the-board range increases, targeted equity adjustments, and collective bargaining agreements.
On August 7, when we still faced some uncertainty about the size and form of budget cuts, Assistant Dean Cindy Williams and I wrote to your chairs and directors, the FAOs, and the Faculty Executive Committee Chair with updates and a request for feedback on how we manage growth in a time of constraint. We also asked how each unit head would use resources at their discretion to join the College in smoothing out the pain of a cut that ended up representing just shy of 3% of our State payroll. On Tuesday, August 27, we held an online town hall for the same group to review updates to the numbers and discuss available tools and strategies to address the cut. We then devoted about an hour to the results of a survey that asked each respondent to priority-rank needs. Staff growth ranked highest in that survey, confirming what we know in the day-to-day as well as in the detailed results of the Staff Task Force report, published earlier this week.
Input: Chairs, Directors, and FAOs
I encourage all members of the College to turn to their unit heads and chief finance professionals to learn more about the conversation. The specifics of staff growth (which received the highest rank-priority) will be the topic of the CHASS Staffing Town Hall, scheduled for October 8, 2024, 10:00 am-11:30 am.
RSVP: CHASS Staffing Town Hall
CHASS recruitments
Based on what’s known to date and the urgent need to move forward with Senate recruitments and a number of essential staff hires, I am pleased to announce the following authorized recruitments.
Senate recruitments for a start date of July 1, 2025, or later:
- Art: One Professor, Open Field, Assistant Professor
- Black Study: One PPFP/CFP Search Waiver, Open Field, Open Rank
- Dance: One Professor, Dance Practitioner, Assistant Professor
- Economics: Three Professors of Teaching, Open Field, Open Rank
- Economics: One Professor, Microeconomics, Assistant Professor
- Hispanic Studies: One PPFP/CFP Search Waiver, Open Field, Open Rank
- Media and Cultural Studies: One PPFP/CFP Search Waiver, Open Field, Open Rank
- Philosophy: One Professor of Teaching, Philosophy of Law, Open Rank
- Political Science: One PPFP/CFP Search Waiver, Open Field, Open Rank
- Psychology: One Professor, Behavioral Neuroscience, Open Rank
- Society, Environment, and Health Equity: One PPFP/CFP Search Waiver, Open Field, Open Rank
Each of these authorized Senate recruitments is worthy based on their academic merits, and each addresses additional needs and priorities. The open searches tackle immediate threats to curricular viability in the studio art, dance, economics, and law and society undergraduate programs. The Black Study and SEHE recruitments build out new programs embraced by our faculty and students. All PPFP/CFP search waivers signal our ongoing leadership in a premier University of California initiative.
At this time, regrettably, the College is unable to support the many other worthy hiring proposals submitted in June.
Staff recruitments for a start date of January 1, 2025, or later:
- Financial Analyst II, English/Philosophy/History
- Financial Analyst II, Comparative Literature/Hispanic Studies
- Financial Analyst II, Art History/Art
- Academic Personnel Analyst III, APO (Non-Senate faculty)
- Financial Analyst II, Economics/Political Science
- Grant writer, VCRED and Advancement/CFP Liaison, two-year contract position
- Contracts and Grants, Pre-award, two-year contract position
The College is in advanced negotiations with Undergraduate Education to cost-share the appointment of an academic advisor in the Pre-Professions Advising Office (a coming rebrand from the Health Professions Advising Center).
Looking Forward
Facilities remain a pinch point. The solutions will come at high costs and long time horizons. Nonetheless, we are moving forward on some important facilities upgrades of special importance to the arts. The Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Facility, now under construction, will benefit our teaching mission within the next two years. I commit to continued advocacy for upgrades to our research labs and facilities, both at UCR's Campus Finance Committee and at the system level.
As other pain points surface, I am committed to carrying out promises previously made. Cindy and I recently reminded your leaders that:
Previously announced funding commitments for graduate fellowship quarters in AY24-25, faculty start-up packages, chair [and director] compensation, student success funds, laptop replacement, staff tuition reimbursement, temporary teaching, and PPFP/CFP recruitment incentives remain untouched. Our highly popular CHASS-CIS Event Co-Sponsorship continues. Our ongoing institutional sponsorship at the National Humanities Center provides CHASS faculty, graduate students, and staff access to scholarly residencies and institutes. With the support of lottery funds, the seeds of a social sciences laboratory are beginning to sprout.”
We undoubtedly still face hard choices in the coming year. Even as we slow the pace of Senate hiring relative to separations, careful cash management, UCOP subsidies, indirect cost recovery, and the philanthropic pipeline will not be enough to cover a permanent cut of about $3M in one single fiscal year. Constraints may still be with us in Fall 2025.
Given our current budgetary position and the unknowns of new collective bargaining agreements, major expenses, including supplemental, temporary teaching allocations, spousal accommodations, new PPFP/CFP recruitments, outsize start-up or retention asks, and unfunded instructional releases, will be reviewed carefully for feasibility. Some costs will have to be shifted from the College to local units or delayed until our fiscal picture improves.
I look forward to the ongoing discussion of our budget, and I invite you to attend the State of the College on Wednesday, October 23, 2024.
Best wishes to all for an enjoyable end to this long, hot summer and a spectacular start to the new academic year.
Daryle Williams
Professor and Dean
College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
University of California, Riverside