Following the June 13 Board of Trustees budget ratification meeting, Florida State University has begun initiating changes in order to cope with the recent $32 million loss in state funding.

"We've come up with several ways to reduce expenses," said FSU English Department Chair Ralph Berry. "We've eliminated office telephones for all of our TAs and for about one-third of our faculty and we've begun to ration paper and photocopying."

The English Department is enacting several other money-saving procedures, explained Berry.

"We have decreased the number of public lectures and readings we sponsor each year, and we've reduced the money we spend on grad student recruitment," said Berry. "Last year we prepared a plan to reduce our support for faculty and student travel to research sites and conferences but were able to avoid implementing those cuts. Next year we expect to implement them. And, of course, all of our faculty hiring has been eliminated, which means that we have about 10 percent fewer faculty than we had 18 months ago, reducing our salary budget substantially."

Several other changes, according to Berry, will help to minimize the repercussions of the changes.

"In addition to cutting expenses, we have also appealed to our faculty to teach larger classes, and several have volunteered to do so," said Berry. "They're paid nothing extra, so that represents a pure savings. Other faculty are teaching overloads in exchange for a lighter teaching load later, once we've started to hire again. And we are reducing the number of classes we offer in specialized areas, since those are less likely to enroll to capacity."

Fewer professors and larger classes are just a few of the changes students can expect to notice when they return to FSU, said Berry.

"The most noticeable change is that an already bad situation is going to get worse," said Berry. "As FSU students are painfully aware, Florida provides fewer professors for its college students than any other state. Even much poorer states such as Louisiana and South Dakota hire enough professors to offer moderate-sized upper-division college classes, but Florida's political leadership has since the early '90s been growing its university enrollments faster than its university faculties. As a result, the FSU English Department now has 1,589 majors and 201 graduate students, which makes it about the size of Rollins College. Rollins has 173 faculty to teach that many students. Our department has 48. Those numbers tell the whole story. So, students can expect to have more of their classes taught by adjuncts and grad students, to be in larger classes if there's a professor in the room, and overall to be competing more energetically for every professor's time and attention."

Aside from class size and faculty changes, Berry said that advising will have to cut back on hours as a result of the budget cuts.

"Undergraduate advising is likely to remain very difficult," said Berry. "In January of this year English had two advisors for its 1,589 majors, and during the first four days of drop/add those two advisors saw nearly 500 students. If you do the math, it's about eight minutes per student, assuming the advisors never take a break. Students waited hours for appointments. That was the situation when the second round of budget cuts occurred and FSU's advising office was told to reduce the number of its advisors. When you hear politicians talk about cutting the 'fat,' they evidently mean that Florida undergraduates should receive only four minutes of advising."

Laura McNamara, an FSU senior expressed concern over the budget situation.

"I'm worried that these changes are occurring too quickly, and re going to hurt the school and the Tallahassee area more than anybody is expecting," said McNamara.

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