Dear UCR Faculty Members,
Please find below a link to a petition being circulated by the Riverside Faculty Association, opposing any further expansion of UCR without proportionate funding. The petition will be delivered to UC President Janet Napolitano, as well as John Perez, the Chair of the UC Regents.
RFA is particularly concerned about plans to expand UCR’s enrollment to 35,000 students by 2035, an expansion we oppose unless UCR receives funding proportionate to other UC campuses, and to the cost of educating our students. UCR receives less state funding per student than any other UC campus, which has resulted in deteriorating conditions for our teaching and research.
This petition is an opportunity for us to draw attention the poor conditions at UCR, and to demand that the UC system reverse the structural inequalities that undermine our ability to serve California’s students.
For your convenience, the text of the petition is posted below. Please feel free to sign and circulate widely among all UCR faculty:
https://forms.gle/hBuCRDWbDcYYS8md8
Best regards,
The Board of the UC Riverside Faculty Association
Chris Chase-Dunn, Sociology (Vice Chair and Treasurer)
Farah Godrej, Political Science
Michel Lapidus, Mathematics
Patricia Morton, Media and Cultural Studies (Chair)
Ellen Reese, Sociology (Secretary)
Setsu Shigamatsu, Media and Cultural Studies
Samantha Ying, Environmental Sciences
https://ucrfa.org/http://ucrfa.org
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No Expansion Without Proportionate Funding
To: Janet Napolitano, President, University of California
John Perez, Chair, Regents of the University of California
From: University of California Riverside Faculty
Dear President Napolitano and Regent Perez,
We, the undersigned, demand that no further expansion be imposed on our campus without any proportional increase in allocation of resources and funding from the Office of the President.
Under the Long Range Development Plan process currently under way, UCR is projected to expand to 35,000 students by 2035 (the “35/35” plan). No other UC campus is expected to take as many additional students.
Our campus is currently at breaking-point: deeply under-resourced, understaffed and over-burdened. This crisis is exacting costs on the collective well-being of all:
* Students do not have sufficient, functional classrooms in which to learn;
* Students do not have sufficient access to classes required for timely degree completion;
* Both faculty and students are increasingly required to attend late-night or early-morning classes that exact a toll on work-life balance;
* Many faculty do not have sufficient financial or administrative resources to run their research labs or even take on the grant funding critical to further research;
* Both faculty and staff are increasingly pressured to take on additional work as overall staff support diminishes, with no corresponding increase in resources.
This crisis situation imperils both the quality of the education we can provide and our status as a research university, threatening to reduce our campus to a “diploma mill.”
While we are eager to serve more of California’s students, we simply cannot do so at the current rate. As a woefully underfunded campus, University of California-Riverside (UCR) has far fewer resources for our current students than other UC campuses. According to figures provided by Chancellor Wilcox’s office, UCLA is allocated $11,545 in state funding per student whereas UCR receives $8,647 per student. UCR educates a higher percentage of Underrepresented Minority Students (42%) than 8 of the 9 UC campuses, and the discrepancy in funding exacerbates racial inequities. We will use estimates of the levels of financial support that UCR has had over the past years in order to establish baseline targets for monitoring the maintenance of adequate support in the future.
We demand that the State Legislature and the UC Office of the President commit to providing such support. In the absence of these commitments, we will mobilize the students, staff and faculty of UCR to resist the planned expansion until the needed resource commitment has been obtained.