EVERY year the same thing happens. Classes fill up and professors are either forced to turn away students who in many cases are fourth-year majors in the subject, or deal with the consequences of an over-crowded classroom. This is what College students go through at the beginning of each year. The Government and Foreign Affairs department remains one of the most popular and at the same time most under-funded departments at the University. Therefore funding must be shifted from other departments and given to the government department.
Evidence of the need for more funding for the government department should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a class in the department. Waitlists seem like they go on forever, and while many professors are willing to go a little over what ISIS permits in the classroom, this never completely satisfies the academic demands of this University's students. There are simply not enough government professors and classes. Even though majors manage to get enough classes in the department to graduate, they often do so in over-crowded classes where the student faculty interaction is nowhere near where it should be.
All majors at the University experience similar problems at times. But the government department is particularly lacking in faculty. The best way to calculate the number of faculty in a department is the number of tenured faculty and tenure-track faculty. This is because lecturers, adjunct faculty and visiting faculty are only at the University for the short term. The number of tenure track and tenured faculty is measured by faculty lines, where one line is equal to one full time professor and is referred to as a Full Time Equivalent. According to government department chair Robert Fatton, the department was short by as many as 12-13 FTEs a few years ago and the situation has not improved. At present, the government department has an authorized 38.5 FTEs. Fatton has asked that the number increase to 44 FTEs.
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In a personal interview, Fatton said, "We hope and are confident that in the medium term [next few years] we will get to the 44 FTEs we are demanding. We should be given more than that, but given the economics and politics of the situation, an increase of about 6 FTEs would be real progress and allow us to do a much better job for our students."
Dean Edward Ayers, who became dean of the College on Aug. 25, said that he has been trying to fix similar problems with some of the most popular majors at the University.
Ayers said, "One of the first things I asked for, and received from the provost when I took over the deanship, were four lines [professorships] for departments that are particularly stressed this way."
The only way to get more professors is money, and here the question of funding comes in. The government department is under-funded when compared to its counterparts in the College.
According to departmental allocations from the 1999-2000 budget, the government department received $2,448,464 that year. This number may seem like a lot, but consider that the government department gave out 253 bachelor degrees in the same school year. History, on the other hand, awarded only 186 bachelors in that year, yet received $3,220,640. Psychology gave out 255 bachelors, two more than government, and received $2,747,340. This implies that each of those two extra students were worth almost $150,000.
The issue of cutting funding from another department and shifting it over to the government department is a messy one. One way around this could - in theory - be private fund-raising for the government department. In an effort to help this cause, the government department has begun printing a departmental newsletter for the first time in almost 15 years. Gifts to the department are printed in the newsletter, with the hope that publicity for donors will encourage more people to donate.
Yet the issue of fund-raising is further complicated by coordination with the College as a whole. The government department is not allowed to simply solicit private donations without getting permission first from the College.
A more practical problem is that it's difficult to find someone to go raise the money. The professors are preoccupied with teaching classes and research and therefore do not have time to actively solicit donations. Fatton estimates that hiring a professional to raise funds for the department would cost at least $120,000, money which the government department does not have.
The government department should continue to attempt to get private donations. But in reality, despite the obvious negative effects for other, less popular departments, the College must shift more of its money to government.
(Harris Freier's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at hfreier@cavalierdaily.com.)
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