Provost Elizabeth Hoffman announced Wednesday the budget cuts Iowa State will implement in the forthcoming year. The department of sociology was singled out among all departments for the largest cuts. Sociology’s budget was reduced by 40 percent, making the cut more than two-and-a-half times larger than the next closest reduction in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and one-and-a-half times larger than the next closest cut in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Sociology is in both colleges.

Why was the budget reduction for the department of sociology so extraordinarily large? It is easy to assume that sociology must in some way deserve to be singled out for this huge loss because of its poor performance. This letter is intended to correct that assumption. Here are the facts:

Contribution to the teaching mission of Iowa State. The department of sociology had 205 undergraduate majors, according to the Iowa State University Fact Book 2009-10. This number is higher than the number of majors in 10 other LAS departments and two other CALS departments. It is true that the number of majors has declined since the criminal justice program was split off from the department a couple of years ago. However, the split was not a department of sociology decision, and all the criminal justice faculty are members of the sociology department.

A vast number of students who are not sociology majors take our courses. Each LAS sociology faculty taught an average of 326 student credit hours in fall 2008, which was second highest of all departments in LAS. The CALS sociology faculty averaged 586 student credit hours each, again the second highest in the college. If department budgets are supposed to be tied to the tuition revenue generated by the faculty in the department, sociology should have had the second lowest reduction, not the largest.

Faculty in the department have won numerous college and university teaching awards. For example, in 2008-09, three faculty were honored by receiving the LAS Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award, the Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Honors Program. In 2009-10, two faculty were recipients of teaching awards: The LAS Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and the Jerry Shakeshaft Teaching Award.

Contribution to ISU diversity values. One of ISU’s core values is “the diversity of ideas, peoples and cultures.” Faculty in the sociology department make a substantial contribution to this core value. Three sociology faculty have co-appointments in Latino/a studies, women studies and African-American studies. Other faculty are heading up or involved in projects to study women in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines and to improve rural quality of life with partners in Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Two faculty received the 2009 CALS Faculty Award for Diversity Enhancement.

Contribution to the research mission. Faculty in the department conduct research on a wide range of topics including stepfamilies, white-collar crime, internet dating, rural community vitality, white supremacists, career criminals, Latino/a immigration, food systems, the environmental impact of watershed management, biofuels, entrepreneurship, business social responsibility, and aging.

These and other research activities have resulted in a total of $25,801,587, or $889,709 average per faculty member, raised in the last five years through grants and contracts. That includes funding from highly competitive and prestigious sources like the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since 2005, sociology faculty have published hundreds of academic and applied articles and books. Currently 65 graduate students are enrolled in the master’s and Ph.D. sociology program. These numbers have remained relatively consistent since 1995.

Contribution to the outreach and extension mission. The department’s efforts intersect with ISU Extension’s strategic plan, in that it builds human and community capacity, strengthens local governance and fosters community development. To demonstrate our achievements, one of our faculty was just named to the task force on Haiti, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Board for International Food and Agricultural Development. Last month, another was appointed as the interim director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

This record demonstrates the achievements of a department dedicated to the university’s mission of teaching, research and extension and outreach. Given these facts, it is hard to understand why we have been targeted for the largest budget reduction of all departments at the university.

Terry Besser is a professor of sociology.