Sacrificing the Student Body, from April 2009

Sacrificing the Student Body

April 2009

(Note: This article was submitted to the SF Chronicle  last year, and an earlier version was published as an op ed in the Daily Cal last spring.)

A March 19 article on the previous week’s UC Regents’ meeting (“A major revision in tuition for UC is dropped”) reported that 45% of UC students said they suffer from stress and 17 percent said depression has frequently or always interfered with their academic success.  In the past year alone, 1 in 10 of our UC students seriously considered suicide; 1.4 percent attempted it. 

Responding to these statistics, Chancellor Birgeneau sent Berkeley faculty an email asking them to tell students about “Mind and Body Awareness Week,” a campaign to publicize the risks of stress and the resources available on campus to help students deal with the pressures they face at Berkeley. 

That same month, lecturer faculty in Berkeley’s very old and distinguished Physical Education Program, with enrollments of over 5,000 students each year, were informed of a plan to cut the Program’s budget by fifty percent in 2009-2010. 

Berkeley’s Physical Education Program is all about mind and body awareness.  For many years, the program has taught Cal students stress management and coping skills and given them lifetime fitness tools.  Today it is the only resource on campus that offers students semester-long, credit classes in activities, fitness, and stress management.  The program has been especially effective in serving an increasingly diverse population of students, including disadvantaged groups and students entering Cal through the Bridge Program. 

Administrators say this reduction will create savings they can use to spare other academic programs.  But are those savings, projected to be a mere $250,000 annually, worth the personal, academic, and financial cost to the thousands of Berkeley students in all majors whom this program serves?  These classes already turn away thousands of students each semester.  They’re popular because they meet so many student needs.  Students tell us these classes change their lives.  Physical Education classes may be a low priority for administrators, but can Berkeley students afford to lose them? 

As the Chancellor reminded us, UC students are under more pressure than ever.  The Physical Education Program is a critical campus resource for supporting students’ health and self-care, and preventing illness.  In physical activity classes (yoga, swimming, dance, martial arts, team sports, resistance training, etc.), students learn to manage stress, to move skillfully and safely, to take pleasure in skillful movement, and to cooperate with fellow students.  The program also offers lecture classes in Fitness for Life, Physiological Assessment, and Cultural Sources of Dance, Rhythm, and Movement.  The cut will eliminate most lecture classes and drastically reduce activity classes; what’s left will not come close to meeting student demand.

The Physical Education Program powerfully supports the University’s educational mission in two ways: 1) by engaging and educating the whole student, body and mind, and 2) by supporting students’ physical fitness, which is correlated to academic performance generally.

We know cuts are unavoidable in this crisis.  But Physical Education is already an extremely lean, efficient program.  It is also the only program on campus that incorporates mind and body awareness into the academic curriculum.  A fifty-percent cut to this phenomenally successful and inexpensive program would mean turning away half the students we currently serve.  It would also give the lie to the Chancellor’s stated commitment to the health of the student body and mind. 

Are administrators really prepared to sacrifice the curriculum that most directly supports students’ health and fitness?  Will the body again be sacrificed to the mind, the well-rounded undergraduate education sacrificed to the more prestigious and lucrative pursuits of the modern research university? 

We ask the campus community and the administration to support the physical fitness, mental health, and academic success of all our Berkeley students by continuing to fund a strong and diverse Physical Education Program.

The 12 Lecturers of the Physical Education Program – R. Ahn, J.E. Britton, W.J. Caraway, T. Cheney, S. Johannessen, J.M. Lee, S. Li-Jue, T. Mar, R. Morris, L. Rork, E. Stefke, D. Wong.