CAL POLY - One out of every three lecturers at Cal Poly won't be teaching there this fall if anticipated state budget cuts become a reality.

Cal Poly officials estimated Tuesday about 140 full-time and part-time lecturers on year-to-year contracts are not expected to be rehired for the fall. Sixty-two nonteaching staff positions are also slated to be eliminated, achieved mostly by not filling 40 vacancies.

Lecturers are different than tenured and tenure-track professors.

Including part-timers, Cal Poly has about 1,100 faculty members. The university has about 1,200 nonteaching staff, not counting the private Cal Poly Foundation and Associated Students Inc.

In addition to the staff cuts, the university will enroll about 500 fewer students this fall than last fall, reducing overall enrollment to about 17,000 students.

Employee union officials called the plan devastating and said it would have a ripple effect beyond campus.

The loss of the lecturers is expected to put more of a load on professors, who will have to take over some lower-division classes, ultimately making it harder for students to get into upper-division courses.

University officials said the cuts were inevitable but stressed they are tentative and based on estimated impacts of the governor's state budget proposal, which is subject to change as it goes through the Legislature.

The number of instructors not rehired could be lower if a retirement incentive plan for faculty is approved, said Larry Kelley, Cal Poly's vice president for administration and finance.

The governor's proposal would reduce funding by $240 million this fall to the California State University system and by $9.3 million to Cal Poly. His plan calls for reducing first-time freshman enrollment by 10 percent at each campus.

By eliminating state-funded summer school for this summer, Poly saved about $1 million in additional cuts that would have been required for fall, said Robert Detweiler, the university's interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.

"There will be sufficient classes overall, especially for the upper-division students," he said.

Student body President Alison Anderson was unconvinced Tuesday, saying the cuts would mean fewer classes and programs.

"It's obviously going to have a huge impact on students," she said, blaming the state rather than the university. "I don't know what the university could do given the cuts. The state needs to understand what they're doing to us."

The governor's proposal also calls for fee increases of 10 percent for undergraduate students, 20 percent for nonresidents, and 40 percent for graduate students.

Faculty union president Manzar Foroohar shared Anderson's concern and said upper-division students would likely face fewer classes to choose from as they approach graduation.

She agreed with Detweiler that the lecturers expected to lose their jobs teach predominantly lower-division courses, but she said it would fall upon tenured or tenure-track professors to teach these courses next year.

That means the professors will have less time to teach upper-division courses.

"It's going to be a major disaster for us," she said.

Sally Anderson, president of the classified union, said she was surprised the estimated cuts are so drastic. She said one of the five employees from her union who were given layoff notices had worked for the university for 25 years.

University officials said three managers and five other staff members received layoff notices this week and that 14 custodians were reassigned to vacant, non-state funded positions on campus.

As employees learned of the anticipated cuts Tuesday, there was plenty of uncertainty about the impact.

"The key issue is that nobody really knows what the final end result will be until we see the budget," said Jim Conway, chairman of the speech communication department. "It could get worse."