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As Seattle University finds itself in a period of transition, students have raised concerns regarding the school's budget appropriations to the College of Arts and Sciences. Seeking to clarify the larger issues the college has been facing, the Student Executive Council organized a campus-wide forum, titled "Where Did The Money Go?" April 29.
Working in conjunction with ASSU, the SEC gathered President Stephen Sundborg, SJ, Executive VP Tim Leary, Student Development VP Robert Kelly and Associate Dean Paulette Kidder as the executive panel to address the students of Seattle U on the changes currently pending in the CAS.
The panelists addressed student concerns about class cuts, the move to Division I and more for the coming school year at Seattle U, but the single biggest topic of discussion at the event was the elimination of the university's German department. Paulette Kidder, the newly appointed interim dean of CAS, explained to a frustrated audience that classes simply cannot be offered at Seattle U unless they have at least 10 students registered to take them.
"Overall, class sizes are increasing," said Kidder. "The College of Arts and Sciences has been running more courses than we have funding for. We cut probably 30 classes to get closer to the funding for next year."
"I think that the university compromises its diversity and its integrity when we lose programs like Italian and German. It's completely unfair for the students in the programs who are half-way through and now can't finish what they started," said Michael Greer, SEC co-chair and senior criminal justice major.
According to Rene Wagner, the president of the German Club, the college's rationale for class cancellation is inapplicable to the German program.
"In some of my computer science classes, we have seven students," said Wagner, sophomore computer science major, "and none of them have ever been cut. The German program has 31 students, and it won't even be happening anymore."
Despite Kelly and Leary's insistence that the shift to D-I has not affected the university's academic programs, the audience remained unconvinced based on the facts and figures the panel delivered in response to most of the student-asked questions.
"The answers from the administration were a bit vague," said Greer. "There weren't a lot of answers given as solutions or alternatives to what is planned to happen now."
Despite a constant chatter concerning budget numbers, the panelists never hinted at what many considered the simple solution to the current problems in the CAS: scale the college back.
"If we have to cut courses to accommodate for the limited budget we have to work with," said Greer, "shouldn't we just stop admitting so many students so we don't run over again?"
Leary, however, maintained that the university should have no problem accommodating the needs of new students.
"If the university adds new students in the fall, and we need additional English courses, we have to budget for that," said Leary.
Still, the administration admitted that budgeting has been a problem over that last few years, and that it would take time before the university would fully recover.
For Greer, however, the question remains as to why the college ran over its budget limit to begin with.
"The last thing they [the panelists] wanted to do was to say they should have been on top of the college's spending," said Greer. "If they knew about it years ago, it's really a question of why they didn't do something to prevent the cuts from happening by taking preventative measures before it became a big problem."
Worst of all, the course cuts likely won't provide a permanent solution to the college's problem. When asked about the status of the budget situation in CAS, Sundborg responded: "I simply don't know. Eshelman doesn't know himself."
SEC sought to bring panelists from across the university to address the many facets of the issues.
"Since we're the dean's advisory group, the forum was really beyond our scope individually," said Greer. "But, by pitching it to ASSU, we were able to take it to the whole school and address the larger issue."
The forum began with moderator Shana Yem, a sophomore political science major and ASSU's current At-Large Representative, asking the panelists a set of preliminary questions to get the forum started.
"We were originally going to have Ron Smith on the panel, and we were going to ask Tim Leary to moderate it," said Greer. "But since Ron Smith couldn't be there, Tim sat on the panel. Since it's a university-wide event, we thought it was only appropriate that ASSU play a role in it."
The event came to fruition as a follow-up to a forum held with Dean Wallace Loh in winter quarter, and brought the concerns expressed to Loh to the full spectrum of Seattle U's student body.
According to Greer, the event came as a response to Loh's inability to address every issue that needed to be resolved in the prior forum.
"There were questions left unanswered after the first forum," said Greer. "Since some of the issues presented were outside of his [Loh's] scope, we thought it would be good to go ahead and hold a school-wide forum."
Despite the current condition of confusion in CAS, Greer is optimistic that there is still time for the students to affect change.
"By being able to hear the feedback from the students, the panelists were given a perspective they don't get in their executive meetings," said Greer. "This feedback allows them to tailor the changes they are making to benefit everyone."
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