Everyone who has been inside Tydings Hall knows how poor a state the behavioral and social sciences college is in. The classrooms are overcrowded and the conditions of the desks and facilities are mediocre at best. More than 100 students are piled into 400-level classes, but they are still luckier than their waitlisted counterparts. While BSOS is home to four of the five largest majors at the university, the college’s per-student funding is significantly lower than funding for other colleges.
For BSOS majors, this means we are given less of a chance to succeed than other students. Due to the large class sizes, it is much harder for us to form relationships with professors who not only help us academically but help us transition into either graduate school or the working world. In addition, it is very difficult for students to get into the classes they need, causing them to either concentrate in fields they are not interested in or take longer to graduate.
However, this affects more than just BSOS majors — this affects every student at the university. Under the current CORE curriculum, students are required to take two lower-level social sciences and history classes, many of which are in BSOS. Most of these classes are so large that students rarely receive individual attention from their professors. This results in more than 400 students cramming into a lecture hall in the basement of Tydings for ECON200: Principles of Micro-Economics. If you are lucky, you get a seat without an obstructed view.
Equal resources between the colleges benefit everyone. The university prides itself on its academic diversity, and it would be beneficial to everyone if students were able to take classes in disciplines other than their specific major. However, this is difficult to do when the largest college at the university receives less than half the funding per student as some other colleges.
Last April, close to 500 students rallied on McKeldin Mall in protest of the unfair distribution of funds among colleges. Largely in response to the nearly 1,500 students who signed a petition, Provost Nariman Farvardin made funding BSOS a top priority and met BSOS’ request for reallocation funds. This was a crucial first step in fixing many of BSOS’s problems. However, due to the budget shortfall for both the state and the university, BSOS, along with other colleges, must cut its budget. Programs could be cut, class sizes could increase, and facilities might not be improved.
This month, there will be a series of events planned by the BSOS Equal Education Committee that seek to educate students about the inequalities in funding. Thanks to your support, we were able to garner 140 signatures for a petition during our first event, a lemonade stand, that took place on Oct. 7. Please stand with BSOS and visit our next two stands, a psychiatric help stand in Hornbake Mall today and an archeological dig by the sundial Oct. 20. For more information, join the Facebook group “I am a BSOS student and I pay for your education.”
Michelle McGrain and Shira Silver are members of the BSOS Equal Education Committee and the Student Government Association. McGrain can be reached at mmcgrain at umd dot edu.
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