ERC Report

ERC Report

Spring 2013 Dean's Memo

The Needs Attention project and this site have remained in hibernation while the new dean was being selected and the humanities-wide external review was being conducted. However, we believe that it is time to begin using this space for the dissemination of information. The new dean, professor Georges Van Den Abbeele, has sent out a spring memo on the situation of the humanities and how he plans to move ahead. While we remain optimistic, some of the language of the memo concerns us. Specifically, he is still using the language of "workload inequalities in the School." "Workload inequalities" has been used in the past to emphasize students as pure numbers (majors-to-faculty and student-credit-hours-per-faculty) over quality, cutting-edge teaching and research in the humanities. Let's hope that Dean Van Den Abbeele will not forget the latter in repositioning the school for maximum success down the bottom line.

The other major concern is the lack of any student input, undergraduate or graduate, in the ad-hoc committee. We might want to consider asking for student representatives, because who else besides students have a vested interest in maintaining quality education over quantity?

Spring Memo 2013

Update on the Foreign Language Requirement

Our friends from Spanish and Portuguese have informed us that the School of Humanities at UC Irvine decided to not tamper with the Foreign Language Requirement after all. Currently, all Humanities Majors are required to take a Foreign Language (other than English) up to the 2C Level to fulfill a general education requirement. All other majors only have to take up to 1C or the equivalent.

But, really... we just keep getting all types of information saying one thing and then another. Perhaps it is time to settle things and ask that the responses to the Needs Attention Memo be made more clear and transparent.

DECADE's Response to Needs Attention

TO: Michael Gottfredson, EVC/Provost
Vicki Ruiz, Dean, School of Humanities
James Steintrager, Acting Dean, School of Humanities

RE: Department of Comparative Literature Response to “Needs Attention” Designation

As graduate students in the Social Ecology Group for a Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience (DECADE), a group established to address issues of climate, access, and retention of racial and ethnic minority graduate students in the School of Social Ecology, we are writing to express our concern about the “Needs Attention” memo provided to various units within the School of Humanities by the UCI administration. We add our voice to the ranks of various groups and academic units that have spoken out against potential cuts to the Humanities. In addition to the intrinsic value of a liberal arts education, many Social Ecology students take classes in the Humanities and have established emphases in Critical Theory, Women's Studies, Asian Studies, African American Studies, and Visual Studies. Our fields of knowledge are interrelated and the Social Sciences often look to the Humanities for inspiration, theory, and critique. These factors were not included in the “Needs Attention” memo, but these connections are crucial. We strongly urge the administration to look beyond rigid quantitative indicators such as student-faculty ratio when evaluating programs and consider the importance and value that these programs provide to both undergraduate and graduate students at UC Irvine who are not officially “in” the humanities. Cuts to these programs are not the answer to fiscal crisis and will only harm the university as a whole over the long term.

Respectfully submitted by:

Social Ecology’s Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience (DECADE) Group

Two Birds With One Stone Or How UCI Managed to Dumb Down Students and Become a Threat to National Security

Two years ago there was a proposal being tossed around amongst the decision makers at the University of California, Irvine regarding several of the general education requirements. The thought was to cut general education requirements (including the multicultural and foreign language categories) in order to make it more enticing for students to pursue a degree in other fields (i.e. engineering, science). There was a protest in which students and faculty discussed how the particular targeting of these categories amounted to an assault on culture but it only made the university governing body flinch a bit and delay what they believed to be the inevitable based on their poor assessment of education and student needs. Subsequently, and during a month of active student protest which included a mock funeral for education on the campus, three people (an undergrad, a grad, and a faculty member) were allowed to witness about 10 minutes of a two hour meeting in which they were told by the decision makers that nothing was going to be cut, that everything out there was merely a rumor gone viral.

A year passed by and the foreign language requirement got cut in half.

Later, the Humanities faced a large budget shortfall. In order to save the faculty and the school, the Dean of Humanities proposed, among other drastic measures, that the foreign language requirement be shortened or cut (just like it was proposed the previous year), although it is still unclear how this would save the Humanities any money. The logic behind this, was the infamous "Needs Attention" memo, predicting a grim future for the Humanities at UCI.

Today, UCI's requirements in categories VI, VII, and VIII (Foreign Language Other than English, Multicultural Studies, and International/Global Issues, respectively), have been reduced to a single course per category (See UCI General Catalog Page 56), while categories II and V (Science and Technology and Quantitative, Symbolic, and Computational Reasoning) still stand at three courses minimum requirement for all undergraduates.

With this overhaul, the University of California, Irvine has managed to accomplish only three things: dumb its student population down, increase their health risks, and contributed to heightened threats to national security.

How exactly have these results come about?

The New York Times reports that according to two separate studies performed in 2004 and 2009, researchers have found out that bilingualism is a fundamental strategy for problem solving that not only increases brain function but helps people to live healthier lives:

"Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset."

Surely, a single course in foreign language is not enough to develop "proficiency" in it.

Moreover, a recent meeting from the Council on Foreign Relations which included former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and New York's former school teacher's Chancellor, Joel I. Klein, announced that threats to national security are heightened when there is an inadequate (or poor) emphasis on foreign language learning at schools. Albeit, the focus of the Council's meeting was prompting the creation of a more adequate "human capital" pool for a "volunteer army", the fact that even the military is recognizing the need for more and better language learning and teaching only emphasizes the real and immediate consequences that poor decisions by other types of capitalists like UCIs decision makers have on the future of America.

Yes we are becoming dumber, less healthy, and we are letting our poor military down... (read the sarcasm on the last point). But at what gain?

How much money has the School of Humanities really saved in all of this? How long can it sustain itself by making equally worthless decisions that will, no doubt, end up creating a vicious cycle in which there will be less students taking foreign language, thus needing less T.A.s to teach the courses, thus needing less Faculty to teach graduate courses, thus needing less of everything over and over again?

This is a race to the bottom that all of us will lose.