Tom Campbell wants LA and Berkeley to cost as much as Stanford

[FindAPlace]

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The other reform that Berkeley should make is to simply reduce the size of certain departments, especially those that have relatively few students. For example, I don’t know why Berkeley has a whopping 55 regular faculty members, and that doesn’t even count the visiting faculty or the emeritus faculty, when Berkeley graduates only ~75 math majors and another ~80 applied math majors per year. An even more striking example would be the German department that actually has more full-time faculty (12) than it has students graduating from the major (about 10) every year, all at a time when certain majors such as the engineering majors, business administration, and economics are all heavily oversubscribed.

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<p>This is a much better argument for the German department than it is for the Math department. I confirmed my thoughts after chatting with DH, who’s a math professor at USC and knows some of the faculty at Berkeley. The size of a math department is not properly measured by the number of majors within it because a math department must provide feeder classes for so many other majors. You could consider the size of the Berkeley math dept (which is top drawer, by the way) as a result of the strength of the engineering and other science departments on campus.</p>