Faculty in departments across the College of Liberal Arts, mainly those facing budget reductions next year, on Tuesday said the plan to restructure graduate education adversely affects areas with the most underrepresented minority and female graduate students.
Last semester, CLA Dean David Reingold laid out a five-year initiative to boost pay for graduate teaching assistants and reduce their teaching load by shrinking the size of incoming graduate student classes and requiring faculty to teach more undergraduate courses.
With the proposed plan, departments including English, communications, and languages and cultures will receive budget cuts next year.
The anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, sociology and the visual and performing arts departments will receive additional funding.
Some faculty argued that departments receiving more money have the least amount of diversity, while departments taking cuts have the most.
History has the smallest percent of underrepresented minority graduate student staff. Only one person out of the school's 28 graduate staff members was an underrepresented minority in 2015, according to university data. The philosophy department had two underrepresented minority graduate staff members out of 31, while political science had three out of 33.
Philosophy also had the highest rate of males in its graduate student staff pool last year. Twenty-five of its 31 students were male.