Faculty and students voiced their concerns and suggestions regarding the financial future of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the third and final Blue Sky Task Force open forum Tuesday.

Michael Whiteford, dean of LAS, opened by explaining the purpose of these forums and by summarizing the current budget crisis LAS is facing.

“We need to prepare ourselves for future budget cuts,” Whiteford said. “We’ve been protected from the full impact of the cuts in part because of superb student enrollment.”

Whiteford said while student enrollment in LAS is high, the college relies heavily on student tuition dollars, which has the potential to change drastically. Were that to happen, Whiteford said LAS would feel it immediately.

After the introduction, Whiteford opened up the floor for discussion. The group consisted mostly of faculty, with a few students present.

In the previous open forums, Whiteford was criticized along with the Blue Sky Task Force. While no such concerns were brought up at the final forum, Whiteford addressed the criticisms.

“Some have been concerned that the Blue Sky suggestions weren’t going to do much for savings. In fairness to the task force, savings weren’t something they were specifically told to address,” Whiteford said.

One faculty member predicted that cutbacks will likely deal with the number of both faculty and graduate students.

A student was concerned that his upper-level language courses were taught in English. This comment led to a discussion on possible ways to offer upper-level language courses while still saving money. One suggestion was to increase financial support for students to study abroad, something Iowa State has been doing for several years. Another suggestion was for outside instructors from foreign countries to teach students on campus through Skype.

Another student suggested that some classes be combined in order to minimize the overlap of content.

“I’m taking a Latin American history class, and then right after that I go to a Latin American political science class. A lot of the material in one class is also covered in the other,” the student said. “Maybe there are more situations like that where courses can be fused together without losing any of the depth each course gets into.”

Some faculty discussed the fact students frequently come to LAS after discovering what it has to offer through an introductory course. The faculty suggested that broad survey courses should be taken advantage of to import new students from other colleges.

Whiteford said that while some of the suggestions at the forums have been good, not all can be done immediately.

“Many of these ideas would take several years to implement,” Whiteford said. “There’s a general feeling now of both ‘hurry up’ and ‘don’t go too fast.'”

Now that the open forums have concluded, the current goal is to have specific proposals laid out by Spring Break so the discussion can become more focused.

“After the academic year, some students and faculty are gone,” Whiteford said. “We’d prefer to be able to start discussing specific proposals before that happens, so that everyone with something to say will still be here.”

Whiteford encouraged anyone with a suggestion that has not yet been made to contact him.