Letters: Fairness in faculty pay

SLO Tribune 1/25/07

There can hardly be a group of employees more poorly served by their union than the Cal Poly faculty. The California Faculty Association seems to pride itself on ideologically motivated knee-jerk hostility to the California State University administration. The union’s petty whining and its lawsuits on trivial issues hardly foster the collaborative spirit that could genuinely benefit students and faculty.

The faculty received a 3.4 percent general salary increase last year, the first in a long time. Meanwhile, the union has done quite well for itself: Before the voters threw him out, Gov. Gray Davis paid it off for union support with an agency fee from nonmembers. Not content with that windfall (still not justified by any actual results), the union has meanwhile granted itself a 10 percent raise, increasing its dues from 0.95 percent to 1.05 percent of its members’ salary. Where is the faculty’s 10 percent raise?

Finally, the CFA prides itself on solidarity with students, which means that it is ideologically opposed to raising tuition, even to help fund faculty wage increases.

The CFA would no doubt agree that the CSU provides an undergraduate education on a par with the University of California. Why doesn’t fairness demand that tuition go up to reflect that?

CHARLES HAGEN, SAN LUIS OBISPO