By
The Wildcat Opinions Board
The communication department has more than 800 undergraduates and only 15 - yes, 15 - faculty to teach them.
By contrast, the atmospheric science department has 10 faculty to teach 56 undergraduates.
Neither department is to blame for this imbalance. But the UA as a whole should be outraged, because the sad situation in the comm department elucidates larger, ongoing, university-wide problems. Faculty attrition and department underfunding are two problems that consistently exist within certain UA departments.
The issue affects more than just communication majors. The journalism department has 41 students to each faculty member; the philosophy department has a 34:1 student-to-faculty ratio.
But student-to-faculty ratios don't tell the whole story. The real issue, as everyone knows, is that the university does not pay faculty enough to keep them here - especially in the humanities and social sciences departments. We understand that there are issues with state funding. Getting money from the Arizona Legislature is like pulling teeth from a tiger. We understand that department revenue is a factor - the more money a department brings to the UA, the more money a department gets from the UA.
We also understand that not one of these reasons excuses the shabby attention given to humanities and social and behavioral sciences faculty and students. The point bears repeating: just like optics majors or football players, English and philosophy majors have paid for an education. The UA's main obligation is to give them this.
Furthermore, the communication department asked for an enrollment cap. An administrative committee denied the request. Though enrollment caps and other restrictions are not unheard of at the UA (both physiology and management information systems majors must apply for advanced standing, which is a means of controlling enrollment), an enrollment cap that prevents students from pursuing certain fields is unfair. It does not allow students to control their own futures. Unfortunately, funding policies have left the communications department with few, if any, other options. At least for the short term, an enrollment cap or application procedure would seem to alleviate the symptoms of this perpetual problem. Shame on the administrative committee that denied this stopgap.
But the question remains: what to do about teacher retention? Last October the Arizona Board of Regents approved $62 million for faculty retention. That's just a small piece of money coming in from the newly-instituted 0.6 cent sales tax for public education. How about Campaign Arizona and its projected billion-dollar windfall? It seems that UA departments submitted wishlists for the much-anticipated money; more faculty should have been on them.
It is hard to predict whether these sources of faculty funding can or will resolve our problem for the future. The present problem is that communication majors are getting screwed.
Apparently, communication as a field of study is a preference among UA students; it should therefore be a priority among UA administrators. Where the interests of the students lie is where the interests of ABOR and administrators should lie as well.
