Faculty vote begins on CSUS chief
Sacramento Bee 4/17/07
Instructors campuswide started voting Monday on a resolution expressing no confidence in Gonzalez's job performance. They'll have 10 working days to cast ballots.
Many faculty members are upset about a looming structural deficit, perceived and upcoming cuts to academic funding and the emphasis Gonzalez has placed on university promotion -- an emphasis they say has come at the expense of instruction. Gonzalez has countered that if instructors look at the facts, they'll see that academics funding is not down and that he is doing his best for the school.
The slow pace of the voting created a subdued tension on campus Monday -- all the faculty knew it was happening but there were no lines stretching outside ballot boxes.
Scott Merlino, a lecturer of philosophy, said the vote is not an esoteric debate over a few line items in a big budget. It's about what is happening in classrooms.
"Class sizes have increased a lot," Merlino said.
In the past few years, Merlino said he's seen some class sections go from 35 to 45 students. That's because, he said, the administration isn't putting a priority on funding academic affairs.
"I can't give them as much as I'd like to -- as I used to," Merlino said, referring to students in bigger classes.
In Gonzalez's official response last week to the allegations in the no confidence referendum, he said a lot of bad information was being presented to the faculty, including figures about class size. Citing data from the university's Office of Institutional Research, he said the student/faculty ratio has remained around 20-to-1 for his entire tenure.
"There is no trend and no evidence that it has increased substantially," Gonzalez wrote.
While it's impossible to say how the vote will go, the faculty senate's president, Michael Fitzgerald, has predicted that Gonzalez will lose the vote.
If that happens, said Christina Bellon, associate professor of philosophy, she hopes that Gonzalez gets the message and shows stronger support for academics.
"I don't think he should resign," Bellon said, adding that she is voting against Gonzalez. "He's done a lot of good things. But he needs to put action behind his words when he says he wants this to become a high-quality, destination campus."
A no-confidence vote is not necessarily a death knell for a university president. As Gonzalez said last week in an interview, it's up to the system's chancellor and board of trustees to hire and fire him, and he pledged not to resign no matter how the vote turns out.
In 1998, faculty at California Polytechnic Institute, Pomona, cast a clear no-confidence vote in then-president Bob Suzuki. Suzuki survived the crisis and retired in 2003. Former San Diego State President Thomas Day survived a no-confidence vote in 1992 and led the university a few more years.
On the other hand, in 2003, James Middleton, president of the College of Marin, a community college, resigned following an overwhelming vote of no confidence by the faculty.
Administrators at California State University headquarters have been silent on the Sacramento vote.
"It's a campus issue," said CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow. "We let the president and the campus faculty work through it."
Also relatively silent in the debate are students.
Of the half dozen or so students interviewed by The Bee on Monday only one had even vaguely heard of the no confidence vote, and she had no opinion on it.
"I don't know too much about it," said senior Megan Sullivan, adding that other topics capture her interest. "Fees going up is always an issue."