Students, Teachers at UCSD Speak Out Against Fee Hike, Proposed Budget Cuts

Outraged students and faculty members at UC San Diego blasted proposed budget cuts and fee increases at a campus press conference Thursday, terming the measures part of what one teacher called “a general attack on our young people.”

University of California Regents recently approved a student fee increase of $650 a year (about $216 per academic quarter), bringing fees for state residents to $2,470 a year. Annual fees for such students now total $1,820.

Gov. Pete Wilson recently proposed a $2.19-billion budget for UC schools, which falls $2.2 million short of what the UC system received for the 1990-91 academic year, and which is $295 million less than what the university says it needs to maintain existing programs.

The regents have since proposed salary freezes, staff reductions, enrollment cuts and fee increases to make up the budget deficit. Regents say the cuts could get worse, depending on votes in the legislature.

“I’m really appalled,” UCSD history professor Michael Monteon said at Thursday’s press conference. “I agreed to make a statement out of a sense of frustration and disgust at this general attack on our young people.

“We’ve already seen California fall from being one of the best states, in terms of its support for public education, to one of the worst. We now have one of the highest teacher-student ratios in the United States. We’ve surpassed Mississippi in that regard.”

UCSD sociology professor Richard Madsen said he fears research will be a casualty of the cuts, and, as a result, lead to a gradual erosion of academic standards.

Madsen said the Scripps Institution of Oceanography--one of the university’s most prominent research endeavors--would be taking “a much heavier hit” than most undergraduate programs.

“However, at a university like this,” he said, “research and teaching are closely interconnected.”

He predicted belt-tightening in the school’s library, meaning the loss of academic journals vital to research; the laying off of part-time faculty members and secretaries who now aid in the teaching of students and an increase in students assigned to any one teacher.

Madsen and others said fee increases run the risk of limiting the university to a far more affluent student body, and of cutting off the underprivileged altogether.

“The state should consider that a 40% increase will drive many students out of the university or dramatically slow the progress of their students,” said Susan Griffin, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers.

“Those hurt will obviously include minorities the university has been trying to recruit for more than two decades,” Griffin added. “A higher-priced campus, with an even greater emphasis on grades and test scores for admission, will become more exclusively white and restricted to the financially secure.”