UCI Panel Responds to Cost-Cutting Plans

A UC Irvine advisory group that examined proposals to cut the university’s budget by about $4 million has asked Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening to keep the education department open but agreed with plans to close its comparative culture program, officials said Wednesday.

Since mid-April, the 19-member Academic Planning Council has pored over nearly 700 written responses from the campus community to two task force reports issued in February that suggested ways to trim the budget, a UCI spokeswoman said. Many of those letters opposed recommendations outlined in task force reports to close the education department.

The council’s recommendation to keep the education department open “sends a strong signal that these (educational) services are important contributions that the campus makes to the community,” UCI spokeswoman Karen Newell Young said.

“There’s been an outpouring of support for the education department,” she said.

The council--made up of faculty and staff members, administrators and students--gave Wilkening the report Monday.

Wilkening will consider the council’s report before she announces her plans on budget cuts sometime during the summer, UCI spokeswoman Linda Granell said.

Council members supported several suggestions on academic issues made by the two cost-cutting task forces: ending the comparative culture program for undergraduates and combining film studies and art history in an experimental department.

The council opposed various other task force recommendations on academic issues that included closing the physical education department; combining women’s and ethnic studies programs into other existing schools; and consolidating the Spanish department with Chicano/Latino studies and Latin American studies.

Wilkening announced Wednesday that she supports all the council’s conclusions on those academic issues, Granell said.

The Academic Planning Council, chaired by acting Executive Vice Chancellor Spencer Olin, set a lofty goal for UCI joining the upper echelons of academia, according to the council report.

“Our aspiration is to move UCI into the ‘front rank’ of the nation’s research universities,” the report said. “During the next decade, both UCI’s research and graduate programs, and its undergraduate programs, should aspire to be among the 30 best in the country.”

Council members suggested that administrators move forward with that vision by carefully managing campus money. They also suggested investing in programs at UCI that are already distinguished and contribute to bettering education as well as research.

“I’m very supportive of the . . . report’s focus on educational issues and moving UCI forward into the higher tiers of national universities,” Wilkening said.