Equal Opportunity for Art Majors

With the looming expansion of the UCSC campus, I’m worried for the art department community. As a second year art major, I already know how compacted the department is, and I can’t imagine how much it would suffer from an increase in students. Budgets are continually cut from the arts and focused towards the sciences. Although the sciences are majorly important, and affect the world more directly as far as developing new cures and gaining more scientific information, art is also a crucial part of society. The competitiveness within the art department for classes, and the strain of extra students on the limited number of art professors, is anything but conducive to the creative atmosphere on campus. As equal paying students, art majors should have just as many opportunities to get into classes and have a wider variety of classes that other departments offer. As this is a current issue at UCSC, I can only imagine that it would get worse with more students and few changes within the department. I think before the University makes any concrete decisions regarding how much they’re going to increase, they need to take a look at the state of the campus currently and evaluate their motives.