The campus's core humanities and arts departments must grow for UC Davis to achieve excellence as a top-tier institution, says Elizabeth Langland, dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. In the division's new academic plan, Langland says her strategies focus on departments such as English and Spanish in which quality may be added to existing strengths and where there is a high student demand for courses. She aims for a total of 24 to 28 new faculty members in her division during the next five years. "Aside from institutions like MIT and Caltech, which define their mission differently, no major research university can claim the top ranks without key departmental core strengths in sciences, social sciences and humanities," Langland says. "A brief examination of the top 20 research institutions indicates that all have top-ranked English departments and one or two other top-ranked humanities and arts programs." It is logical, then, for UC Davis to invest in English, a department that is already attracting national attention for its recent success in hiring distinguished faculty, Langland says. Yet the department is severely understaffed, she says. It has 29 ladder faculty compared with an average of 44 at comparable top-ranked research institutions. It has a profile unlike any other department at a major research university, with lecturers outnumbering ladder faculty, Langland says. Such an imbalance weakens the department and "drastically reduces faculty available for service and advanced teaching functions, such as Ph.D. direction," she says. The Association of American Universities recommends that lecturers make up no more than 25 percent of any faculty. "Several studies have documented that size of faculty (and corollary production of graduate students and research grants) is a very significant factor in the National Research Council rankings; thus, the department's 1993 rank of 53rd is, perhaps, not surprising," Langland says. (However, she points out that the department ranked 26th nationally in the latest U.S. News & World Report survey for English graduate programs, a measure of the department's hiring success in recent years.) To remedy the imbalance and place English on a path toward achieving greater excellence, Langland suggests the department should reach 44 or 48 ladder-rank positions in the next five to six years. Investing in Spanish Spanish is another core department in which to invest, Langland's plan notes. "Spanish, like English, is already highly ranked and capable of attracting a distinguished faculty," she writes. "In addition, the increasing prominence of Spanish-speaking peoples in the state, demand for the courses and the popularity of Spanish as a major give further weight to arguments in favor of investing in this department." Again, like English, the Spanish department suffers from smaller numbers of faculty members compared with those in other programs at top research institutions, Langland says. Yet it was ranked 16th nationwide in a 1993 National Research Council report and last year secured an endowed chair. Langland recommends adding three to five new faculty members during the next five years, noting that, with the investment of the Fiddyment Chair and other new faculty members, the department "has the opportunity to move into the top 10." Enhancing the arts Other division programs and departments targeted for reinvestment and growth include: o Studio art, which is down five faculty members from its 1989 strength, and art history, which may be involved in developing a curatorial studies program; both programs comprise the art and art history department. The suggested growth for the art department is eight to 10 new faculty members. o Theatre and dance, introducing a Master of Fine Arts degree in performance to replace its master's degree in acting program, is slated for an overall four to five new faculty members. o Music, which has plans to develop new areas of expertise in ethnomusicology and enhance its investments in 20th-century music. The arts programs will also receive a significant boost from the development of the ArtsVision Initiative, one of 10 campuswide initiatives that will be a focus for research and teaching innovation in the next decade. Nature and Culture, second-language studies Finally, the division plans to invest in additional areas of innovation: * Nature and culture, an interdisciplinary program, to which Langland suggests adding six faculty members, two of whom would be housed in the division. * Second Language Acquisition Institute. UC Davis has been identified in the UC system as "the" campus taking the lead in this area. An additional two to three new faculty members are suggested for the institute, in French, and Japanese or Chinese or both. "Hiring in second-language acquisition represents an exciting opportunity for the campus. In the past, we've focused our strength in literature, as did the other UC campuses. Now we've taken a leadership position in the system in reclaiming an important dimension of our instruction: language teaching," Langland says. "Just as English is rethinking its delivery of composition and lower-division teaching to involve the ladder faculty, so our language departments are embracing a key component of education in the humanities: how language is learned and how it can be most effectively taught." Langland notes that cultural studies programs have increased their faculty numbers substantially during the past five years due to being a priority in the allocation of division faculty positions. She is recommending that an additional investment of six faculty members be made in the cultural studies area, depending on program growth, course demand, faculty workload and numbers of majors. Further, Langland says, those cultural studies programs, while housed in the division, are genuinely interdisciplinary and tend to draw faculty from a wide variety of disciplines. This means, she says, it is now appropriate for the entire campus to contribute to the campus's investment in these areas.