More than salary at stake for CSU faculty
San Bernardino County Sun 2/8/07
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, California experienced a serious budget crisis, which hit the CSU budget with a severe cut a reduction of about a half billion dollars. Still, more and more students wanted and deserved a chance at a university education.
Recognizing this situation, the CSU faculty agreed to do more work - teaching more students in bigger classes and helping to govern larger campuses without new tenure-line faculty - even though they recognized that they would not receive promised salary increases. They did this, because they are dedicated education professionals who are committed to the best for the students and public they serve. They also figured that when better budget times returned, their salary and working conditions would likewise improve. But that did not happen.
In 2005, the California Faculty Association entered into contract bargaining talks with the management of the university with the hope that a fair agreement could be reached. Faculty had not received a cost-of-living raise since 2002, and newer faculty in the CSU had never received promised "step increases."
Young faculty in the CSU no longer earn a middle-class income nor can they afford to buy housing in the communities that surround their campuses. CSU faculty reasonably expected that Chancellor Charles Reed and the board of trustees would recognize their needs and those of the university with fair contract proposals.
Instead, they ran into a chancellor and board of trustees who seemed time and again to make unwise decisions based on misplaced priorities. Eighteen months later, there is still no agreement.
No longer constrained by the state's tough budget times, the trustees lavished a two-year 23 percent compensation increase, including substantial housing and car allowances, on CSU executives and doled out questionable retirement packages to departing and already departed executives totaling around $4 million. At the same time, the chancellor and trustees made it financially more difficult for working-class and middle-class students to attend the CSU by raising student fees by 86 percent over four years, promising more fee hikes into 2010.
While executive salaries and allowances skyrocketed and student fees nearly doubled, faculty pay stagnated. Between 1996 and 2005, student enrollment in the CSU has grown by 24 percent, and the number of CSU managers has grown by nearly 33 percent, but the number of tenure-line faculty grew by a mere 5 percent.
CSU faculty salaries have fallen 18 percent behind salaries at comparative institutions, some of which are in locations where the cost of living is much lower than it is in California, and below that of their colleagues in community colleges. CSU campuses employ higher and higher percentages of temporary faculty, working for lower pay with inadequate resources (some do not have offices or computers) and without access to health benefits or retirement pensions. CSU classroom sizes grow, and class offerings shrink. And students accrue ever higher levels of personal debt while taking longer and longer to graduate.
During bargaining, the chancellor and trustees offered CSU faculty a package that (after removing stated contingencies and paybacks) amounted to a 15 percent increase over four years for the typical faculty member, barely enough to keep pace with inflation. When the CFA refused to accept this offer and countered with a proposal that might fix the system's broken salary structure, the chancellor and trustees declared an impasse and walked away from negotiations.
Now, the faculty are considering job actions to bring the chancellor and trustees back to the negotiating table with a more reasonable offer. While they hope to stage actions that have only a minimal impact on students, they see no other way to get bargaining restarted.
They would not be taking this action for their salaries alone. The seemingly endless series of fee increases for students, the readiness to fund executive salaries and perks rather than employee salaries and other misplaced management priorities raise concern for the future of the CSU.
Throughout its campaigns over the last few years and over the last decade and a half, the CSU faculty union - the California Faculty Association - has fought to reduce student fees, raise the number of permanent faculty on CSU campuses and direct spending to instruction and the classroom in order to protect and promote quality education at the nation's largest public university. As they showed during the budget crises referred to earlier, CSU faculty will make personal sacrifices to continue to educate their students; however, they cannot and will not sacrifice their university or their students (present and future) to the misplaced priorities of the chancellor and the board of trustees.
So, if the faculty strike, it will be about more than their salaries. It will be about the very soul of the California State University. That is why throughout the state, CSU faculty are declaring: "We don't want to strike, but we will!"
Tom Meinsenhelder is professor emeritus of the Department of Sociology at Cal State San Bernardino and chapter president of the California Faculty Association.