UCI Cost-Cutting Arguments Travel Internet Frontier

As today’s deadline approached for responses to two UC Irvine task force reports on cost-cutting recommendations, a barrage of electronic messages bombarded UCI cyberspace and ushered in a growing forum for campus debate.

Employees, students and others debated--via electronic mail--about which UCI programs should be sacrificed so the rest of the university can stay afloat through tough economic times.

“It’s the first time there has been a campuswide discussion like this,” UCI spokeswoman Linda Granell said. “It couldn’t have happened before. It would have been a heck of a phone tree.”

Professors across the campus debated the importance of teaching vs. research and graduate students pleaded for the survival of threatened departments such as Education and Comparative Culture, all on messages posted on an electronic bulletin board accessible to almost anyone logged on to the Internet through a computer and a modem.

More than 100 messages had been posted on the conversational bulletin board by Thursday. By this morning, UCI spokesman Scott Nelson said, more than 300 official responses to the task force reports--some electronic, others on paper--are expected to have reached the executive vice chancellor’s office.

Karen Young, another spokeswoman for the university, said that the 300 letters had not been compiled and categorized, so there was no way of knowing how many were related to the proposed closure of UCI’s education department, or how many opposed or favored that proposal.

The Academic Planning Council will examine all responses they receive by today’s deadline, and will submit recommendations to Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening by June 1, Nelson said. Some on the 20-member council, which is made up of professors, students and staff members, also have been skimming the public bulletin board, Nelson said.

Anyone can read comments on the bulletin board, but people who subscribe to the board get postings on their computers soon after they are sent. Nelson said 336 people are subscribed to the free service.

“Where else but at a university would this type of discussion happen?” Nelson asked. “It’s a multimedia public debate. People have talked over the bulletin board, at open meetings, town hall meetings . . . and at discussions either formal or informal.”

*

The bulletin board has produced other benefits, Nelson said. Early messages that questioned UCI’s mission, for example, have resulted in talks about redrafting the school’s mission statement, he said.

UCI’s E-mail system is more extensive than those of other local universities and colleges. Administrators often send memos electronically, to save time and the expense of paper.

And through the “gopher,” a computer program that helps users maneuver through bulletin boards and resources on the computer system, people can read information ranging from enrollment statistics to the latest releases of animated Japanese videos at the campus bookstore.

The task force bulletin board was created in February after the two cost-cutting reports were released, UCI officials said.

The academic task force recommended that three departments be “disestablished”--education, comparative culture and physical education. It suggested moving the teaching credential program to UC Extension or the California State University system, as well as merging several interdisciplinary programs and academic departments.

Contracting with private companies for some services that have been handled by university staff members was among the suggestions in the non-academic report.

Feedback to the task force bulletin board has been favorable, Granell said, so the computer forum will stay open after today’s deadline for responses passes.

Some of the messages are impassioned, others detached, academic and logical.

“The Balkanization of ethnic studies at UCI is a terrible step backward,” wrote one Comparative Culture graduate student.

Dennis Evans, associate director of the UCI education department, has posted his own messages on the bulletin board. He said in an interview that the board is an excellent device for “getting the word out for how you feel,” but he added that messages sometimes miss “that human touch.”

Part of its value also depends on whether those who subscribe to it are really those who can affect decisions at the university, he said.

Regardless of that, the bulletin board has advantages. Without it, Evans said, “we would’ve been limited to sending out written memos to whomever we felt it important to hear our side of things.”