Bleak UCSD Forecast : Education: Chancellor tells faculty that the school can expect tough times as the budget crunch gets worse.

State budget cutbacks for the University of California have been “a disaster” for UC San Diego, causing an 8% slash in campus funding and creating low morale and pessimism about any short-term turnaround, faculty members were told Tuesday.

Chancellor Richard Atkinson, in his annual state-of-the-campus speech before an unusually large gathering of professors, warned that the situation will grow worse if Gov. Pete Wilson decides an additional, mid-year budget cut is necessary because of insufficient revenues.

The San Diego campus has as many as 40 vacant faculty positions, and, although officials still expect to appoint at least 20 new professors, few if any vacant positions might be filled under contingency plans that Atkinson is drawing up to meet any worsening situation.

Atkinson cited a report last week by the governor strongly suggesting that the state’s budget problem is not a short-term phenomenon but structural in nature because the number of taxpayers is declining at the same time more Californians require educational and medical support from the government.

“I am very, very worried about how we will hold together this year . . . and next year,” Atkinson said.

Up until now, the UC system has avoided layoffs and significant class cuts, unlike its California State University system counterpart, which has suffered the loss of hundreds of lecturers and elimination of class offerings, most notably at San Diego State University.

But Atkinson and other UC officials regard their world-renowned system as the crown jewel of the state’s educational hierarchy, and the chancellor Tuesday harshly condemned the comparatively mild effects the budget crisis has already brought to UCSD.

Professors received no cost-of-living or merit increases while students received 40% increases in the fees they pay for classes and other services. The level of administrative and other student and faculty-support services was trimmed substantially, including telephone time and secretarial help, and research-related travel.

UCSD also received no money to increase its proportion of graduate students to undergraduates, now at 12%. Atkinson wants the percentage around 20%-25%, the figure at most major American research universities, in order to increase the number of graduate teaching assistants and provide more professors with research help.

In fact, Atkinson said Tuesday that UCSD has received increases in its basic budget only sufficient to cover the growth in the number of undergraduates. And he strongly defended the campus’s quality of undergraduate teaching in the face of statewide criticism over UC’s role in balancing teaching and research.

“I get disgusted with the remarks” from state legislators and others about the idea that the UC system does not care about good teaching, Atkinson asserted. “I don’t think that is the case. . . . I think we are doing a fabulous job.”

Atkinson said he has never seen any evidence that the number of hours professors spend in the classroom has gone down, as some legislators have asserted.

“By and large, the quality of teaching here is very high . . . but it’s not a matter for thoughtful discussion but a drumbeat (by some) to get public sympathy” for cutting UC’s budget by increasing the professor-student workload ratio.

The faculty began a months-long debate Tuesday over two major reports, one from UCSD colleagues and a second from professors from all nine campuses, calling for an increased emphasis on teaching, public service and attempts to solve real-life problems.

The UC systemwide report, chaired by UC Santa Cruz interim chancellor Karl S. Pister, said professors are caught up in a “vicious circle” of obtaining research grants and publishing research papers, similar to criticism being expressed on other major American university campuses.

Faculty senates throughout the nine UC campuses are wrestling with the report’s conclusions, which call for a broadening of criteria for awarding faculty raises and promotions. The systemwide Task Force on Faculty Rewards said that a teaching evaluation by a professor’s peers should be given the same weight now given to research evaluation.

The parallel UCSD report, from a committee chaired by chemistry professor Katja Lindenberg, proposes similar changes, suggesting that academic activities other than research “should be rewarded to a considerably greater extent than they now are.

“The task force recommends that the range of creative contributions regarded as meritorious (especially after tenure is achieved) be widened to include a number of activities that can be categorized as the creation, dissemination, and organization of knowledge, i.e. scholarship in the broad sense.”

But Atkinson said Tuesday that the two reports lend no justification to increasing the workload of professors from the existing 17.6 students to one professor as a way to improve teaching.