At Friday's forum, students, faculty and staff told President David Schmidly he needs to pay more attention to their needs.
Communication and Journalism chairman John Oetzel presented statistics about the number of faculty and students at UNM and said the ratio is burdening both groups.
"Over the past 10 years, the number of tenure-track faculty is down 10 percent in the College of Arts and Sciences, while student credit-hour production is up 32 percent. The number of part-time instructors has increased 51 percent in the same time period," Oetzel said. "The teacher-student ratio has gone from 14-to-1 to 20-to-1."
Student Dillon Reardon questioned the prudence of Schmidly's plan to keep the University's cash flow up by increasing student enrollment in the midst of a hiring freeze.
"I'm wondering how increasing students without increasing the staff will help people graduate, particularly when virtually any educational study says that smaller class sizes benefit students the best," Reardon said.
A study released by the Pell Institute in 2007 found that small class sizes improve student success.
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Schmidly said keeping classes small at UNM is important but that the University cannot hire staff and faculty because of the economic crisis.
"We're talking, here, (about) the reality of having the dollars, and we don't know yet what the dollars are going to be, so I think we just have to be patient until we know that. And our first priority, as I said, will be to preserve education and research," Schmidly said in response to Reardon. "And then we'll go from there to address other priorities."
Reardon said the University is not focusing its efforts in the right direction to maintain research.
"A lot of departmental money is generated by research," he said in an e-mail. "If professors are over-exerted, they will not be able to invest as much time into their own studies. This means the University loses money and, potentially, credibility."
Schmidly said there are two ways a University can lose financial stability: by not receiving legislative dollars and by decreasing enrollment. The University must keep its enrollment up to support the budget, he said.
Marc Saavedra, director of Government Relations, said the state funding formula is based on enrollment and retention of students.
He said UNM's enrollment has been flat in recent years and that the Legislature did not increase funding to the University.
However, the freshman class this year was 10 percent larger than in 2007, meaning state funding could increase if UNM retains those students, Saavedra said.
"So, even though we have this huge freshman class this year, if we don't retain those freshmen - and say they drop out after this year - that prevents us from ... getting new dollars," he said.
Reardon said the University needs to focus more of its efforts on the individuals who are paying to be at UNM.
"By creating smaller classes, you decrease the burden on the professors and also make students feel more responsible for their education," he said. "It is a lot easier to ditch a class of 150 than a class of 15."
Reardon said the University is not focusing on important educational issues such as retaining students and increasing graduation rates.
"We should not be trying to entice people into a factory education system that already feels anonymous," he said. "The big selling point of the proposed student-recruitment center is that it will have a large parking lot. Perhaps better selling points would be high student-retention rates, high graduation rates and happy faculty and staff."
Faculty members also said the University administration needs to put more effort into cultivating an intellectual atmosphere to recruit and maintain students.
"We are in danger of losing our way at UNM," said Howard Snell, Faculty Senate president. "We have lost track of the simple thing that universities are about, and that is knowledge. In losing our way, we have become fragmented by levels at UNM that distrust each other."
Snell asked Schmidly what the administration will do to promote communication and restore what he called a lost sense of community between faculty members, deans and administrators.
"We have a new provost and executive vice president, who meet regularly with the dean; the deans have been asked to help us through this crisis period," Schmidly said. "The provost and executive vice president (are) giving the deans as much flexibility as possible as we move through this."
