Editor,
It is very puzzling to teach at a university where the president of the Board of Regents and the University president treat the faculty with open disrespect and as adversaries because they have questioned the diversion of institutional funds. While these administrators say they welcome dialogue, it is clear that both are dismissive of faculty voices and are concerned only that our voices might be heard by the Legislature. When we express concern for our programs and our students, we are seen as complainers while they portray themselves as the ones truly concerned with student welfare.
The faculty has a right to be concerned. Over the last three years, there has been an erosion of programs Universitywide that has endangered our credibility as an academic institution. Case in point: My department, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is a small department, but it has 55 master's and Ph.D. students, and it teaches about 6,000 undergraduates ever year, a large number of whom are minority students. Officially, we
have 12 faculty members, but because of administrative duties both in the department and in other units, in reality, we have only eight full-time faculty members. Over the last two years, we have lost two faculty members whose positions have not been replaced, another who is on leave and who has been recruited by another university. This year, we are losing the only full-time faculty member in Hispanic Linguistics, who is going to Penn State. This position also will probably not be soon replaced. Many of these faculty members have left because of a lack of support on the part of the University.
The president states that we have increased our graduate applications by 25 percent, but I believe that in Spanish, we will have to suspend the admittance of Ph.D. students in Spanish Linguistics because we have no one to teach them. We have been suffering from the lack of senior faculty and faculty in general for many years now. The consequence is that our department is in crisis. Cuts to permanent faculty positions have been so severe that it is currently possible for an undergraduate student to receive a bachelor of arts in Spanish without ever having a full-time faculty member as a professor.
UNM calls itself a Hispanic-serving university and talks about the importance of its minority students. How can it be that a Hispanic-serving university soon will have no credible undergraduate or graduate programs that focus on Hispanic culture, literature and language? Spanish and Portuguese is one of the top departments at UNM in serving minority students, undergraduate and graduate. Due to a lack of faculty, we will be unable to continue doing so.
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As a faculty member I am deeply concerned with the erosion of our programs and their academic excellence. I believe a university attracts students, both graduate and undergraduate, because of the excellence of its faculty. I am distressed to see a department in which I have worked for 25 years being destroyed. Is this what the people of New Mexico want or deserve?
This is where the leadership of Regents President Jamie Koch, President David Schmidly and Executive Vice President David Harris has brought my department. It is difficult to have confidence that this is the team best qualified to lead us through the difficult economic days ahead.
Dr. Tey Diana Rebolledo
UNM faculty
