Hundreds of graduate students moved as one Thursday to protest proposed cuts to an engineering department.
They gathered on the Reitz Union Colonnade with posters, flooded the Rion Ballroom for a discussion and lined the auditorium walls at the McKnight Brain Institute for a Faculty Senate meeting.
But no matter where they were, their message stayed the same: “Save CISE.”
The Florida Legislature recently passed a plan that would reduce the budget for UF’s College of Engineering by 5.86 percent, according to a proposal by Dean Cammy Abernathy. Combined with other expenses, this totals about $4 million that must be cut or repurposed.
Abernathy’s plan includes moving all computer engineering degree programs from the Computer and Information Science and Engineering department to the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. CISE teaching assistants would be eliminated, as would research and graduate staff, according to the proposal. Half of the faculty could move to another department.
“I don’t know that our college has been through something quite like this in our 100-year history,” Abernathy said at a meeting Thursday.
Distributing cuts equally across all engineering departments would irreparably damage some, she said. The CISE department is one of 10 within the College of Engineering.
Students from Graduate Assistants United fired questions at Abernathy, often interrupting her to call for more specific answers. They raised concerns about the possibilities of losing faculty members, not graduating with the research experience employers want and harming the college’s reputation.
“We feel that we are targeted, and we want a better explanation,” said 26-year-old Ph.D. student Christan Grant.
At the Faculty Senate meeting Thursday afternoon, Provost Joe Glover told attendees that Abernathy is the first dean to publicly discuss her response to the budget. Every dean will have to deal with the cuts, he said.
Jose Soto, co-president of UF’s Graduate Assistants United, presented the students’ demands. They want Abernathy to delay the announcement of the final plan from April 19 to June 15 to allow more time for deliberation. They also want to see improved transparency.
Soto suggested that Abernathy not administer “unjustified cuts,” recurring or not, to CISE. The students want Abernathy to maintain staff members slated for termination and require a majority vote among those affected to approve the proposal.
The senators also passed a resolution that requires administration and faculty to share governance of removing or transferring a graduate program from any department.
Abernathy said she will accept input until Wednesday.
“We want to be included in the dialogue,” said 27-year-old Ph.D. student Sean Goldberg.
Contact Julia Glum at jglum@alligator.org.
Joshua Horton, a 27-year-old fifth-year computer engineering Ph.D. student, protests budget cuts in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering with Graduate Assistants United. He said he is concerned that Dean Cammy Abernathy's proposal to reduce spending on research will weaken the department by provoking some professors to leave UF's program for schools that offer more opportunities for computer science research.
