In Kansas University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, budget savings will be made by cutting faculty and graduate teaching assistant positions and trimming travel and some programs.

Dean Joseph Steinmetz and other college faculty members spoke and answered questions from students for about an hour on Thursday afternoon. The meeting was geared toward students and how potential budget cuts would affect them — but only about a dozen people showed up for the forum.

Though Steinmetz expressed disappointment in the number of students who attended, his office will likely be getting additional student feedback on cuts through a survey to be distributed later.

Feedback from students, faculty and staff were important during this process, Steinmetz said.

“You have a voice, but we’re not hearing it, and I think we need to be hearing it,” he said.

Steinmetz said he hoped to hear feedback in the future from some of the 15,000 or so students in the college who didn’t attend the forum.

With plans to cut 20 of the college’s 600 faculty positions and 23 of the college’s 840 GTA positions, students will feel the effects, Steinmetz said.

Many of the questions from the small audience focused on personnel cuts, including some from GTAs in the audience.

“The major impact in cutting faculty and GTAs is going to be in the number of sections that are going to be available to students,” he said.

In a year, an estimated 125 to 130 of the college’s 5,000 sections would no longer be taught, he said.

Gini Jones, a GTA in communication studies, said she appreciated hearing from college leaders directly about the situation.

“You shouldn’t rely on hearsay,” she said. “It was good for them to be here for this and to hear directly from our dean and to be able to ask questions. It alleviates a lot of concern.”

Steinmetz mentioned that he heard a rumor that he would be closing the entire anthropology department — something that elicited a quick phone call to the department chair to assure that it wasn’t so.

Other cuts in the college would come from scrapping plans to begin a neuroscience initiative with KU Medical Center, 30 to 35 percent cuts in faculty travel, a $300,000 reduction in information technology and a $160,000 cut to a fund that provides for things like student activities and lectures, he said.

Steinmetz said he worked as a priority to keep all the existing academic programs in place, adding that cutting any of the programs, including the more than 30 foreign languages taught on campus, would make KU less of a comprehensive liberal arts college.

“There are no programs currently on the chopping block, and we’re trying to avoid that at all costs,” he said.

Through the budget cuts, the college is working on moving forward, including working to establish new interdisciplinary centers for data analysis and global and international studies, he said.

“We really will not sit still during this process,” he said.