With budget cuts of 5 to 10 percent for individual departments on campus, faculty members and students are now facing larger class sizes, course offering delays and students having to pay for services that otherwise would have been free.

James Nau, professor and associate head of civil, environmental and construction engineering, said his department did not escape the budget cut effects.

“While  we have  been  fortunate  to  have  been  able  to maintain  funding  of research  proposals, we still  had to  do some belt -tightening.  We have cut teaching assistantships, which has made class sizes larger,” Nau said. “We are trying to handle bigger classes, but it impacts the delivery of the courses.”

Departments like that of mechanical  and  aerospace  engineering, the  second  largest  in the University,  and the foreign language department  are  also  now  having  to cope   with larger  classroom  sizes in the absence  of fewer assistantships.

Larry Silversberg, associate department head of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said the department found a way to not dramatically increase the number of assistanships.

“Last  year,  we had  40 to 50  positions  of teaching  assistants,  but  now  it would  be  probably  30 to 40. But  we give  fewer  hours  to more  students  as  we don’t  want  to disappoint  anyone  drastically,”  Silversberg said.

In the  Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, reduced  budgets  may also  mean  a delay  in some  of the  new  programs that  it was considering offering.   

“We are working on offering a major in Asian studies, but  with  tight  budgets, we don’t  know  how long  it will take  for us  to offer the course. We already have a hiring freeze and

we now  have  a class  size of 30 to 35,  which  is not  ideal,” said Dudley Marchi, associate department head of Foreign Languages and Literatures. “It is creating more work for our faculty.”

However, according to Silversberg, budget reductions also have a positive — cuts are forcing  departments to re-evaluate costs.

“It  forces  us to  look  into  how we can improve  efficiency  and services  at  a reduced  cost,”  he said.

One example of this, Silversberg said, is monitoring the machine  shops  or the  research  labs,  which  his department houses.  Until last year, they were available to students for extended hours for free. 

“But now, you  pay out of  research  expenditure,” he said. “So, we track  our machine shops, which leads  to better accountability  and  a small  stream  of revenue.”