Dear Provost Dumont,
We hope you are enjoying your first full semester as Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of UC Merced.
We are the UC Merced Faculty Association—a member of the statewide Council of UC Faculty Associations. We represent the interests of the UC Merced Senate Faculty regarding faculty work conditions, employer-employee issues, and faculty well-being. We are an independent counterpart to the Academic Senate. While the Senate is the faculty’s voice in shared governance, the Faculty Association is a means to express our concerns as workers. Our aim is to support faculty in ways that can build and sustain a thriving research and campus community.
We look forward to being partners in advancing your vision for the growth, resilience, and success of UC Merced.
As you know, the faculty of this campus are outstanding. We provide a world-class education that advances social mobility for a socio-demographically diverse student body. Alongside our mentees, we produce cutting-edge research that addresses global challenges while ensuring that knowledge and innovation improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of the San Joaquin Valley. In a visit to campus, UC President Drake noted that “UC Merced stands alone as the national leader” for advancing social mobility through education. This was affirmed by the recent Wall Street Journal rankings, which also rated UC Merced #18 in the nation.
However, behind this earned and projected image touted in outward-facing advertisements are deep challenges that affect the faculty’s ability to carry out the university’s educational mission and strategic plan.
As you may be aware, faculty morale has reached a critical low. From where we sit, the campus has disinvested from its academic and research mission. We have seen a decline in faculty, instructor, and teaching assistant lines at the same time we have been asked to increase the sizes of our classes to serve more students. The faculty have been encouraged—and overwhelmingly responded to the call—to create new academic programs (e.g., majors, minors) with the goal of increasing recruitment, retention, and the budget. However, these new programs are expected to be cost-neutral, requiring existing resources (e.g., faculty time, administrative support) to either be stretched further or poached from existing programs. Campus leadership says it wants to reach R1 status, but has encouraged graduate programs to reduce PhD recruitment, failed to provide accessible grant-getting resources to all faculty, and removed incentives for including graduate students on grants (e.g., the 25% tuition-reduction; offsetting costs to keep students under salary caps). Many of these burdens have specific detrimental effects on faculty from structurally marginalized backgrounds. These programmatic, policy, and financial decisions often appear to be made without faculty input, undermining our autonomy and eroding our ability to do our jobs well. All of this gives faculty the feeling that the administration is directing us to do more and more with less and less. As a result, a clear rift has emerged between the faculty and the administration with declining mutual trust.
We sincerely believe that administration and faculty share the same goal of building and sustaining a world class research university, and hope to build on that commonality. We understand that the state has been defunding public higher education, that enrollment was negatively affected by the pandemic and the recent FAFSA issues, and that looming university debt exacerbates the economic consequences of these factors. However, we believe that an austerity mindset is incompatible with sustaining and building on the prominence that UC Merced has achieved. UC Merced can be budget-conscious and attract donors without engaging in “tolerable suboptimization” of education.
To initiate this partnership and an ongoing conversation, we outline some key priorities. While not an exhaustive list of things that would resolve faculty concerns and rebuild faculty trust, these priorities address areas where we believe practical and immediate action by the Provost’s Office is feasible.
- Promote a shift in the culture of the campus back toward one of collaboration between faculty and administration.
- Provide clear communication regarding the present vision for how we will achieve the strategic goals of the university given resource constraints.
- Deliver regular, transparent, and detailed reporting to faculty on the consequences of the campus’ financial decisions.
- Work with other administrators, faculty, and stakeholders on a balanced and timely approach to the academic budget that takes into account the unique historical circumstances that contributed to issues, rather than a reactionary austerity-driven approach.
You are in a key position to push for and provide greater transparency to the faculty about decision-making and to help rebuild the university’s crumbling culture. Faculty and administration need mutual trust as we tackle our current circumstances together. The faculty can be a voice for and a partner in advancing the sustainability of our university in a way that ensures ongoing investment in making UC Merced an “empowering and equitable place to work and learn.”
We would welcome a chance to meet with you and discuss our concerns, understand your perspective, and build a plan for how we can work together to promote faculty thriving.
Sincerely,
UCMFA on behalf of the faculty
CC: Senate Faculty
