Cal State LA Faculty SIGN THE PETITION

As the faculty of the California State University, Los Angeles, and as union members of the California Faculty Association, we hereby declare S.O.S! 

S.O.S. is our faculty union campaign — Sustaining Ourselves and Students. It is the faculty – we who choose to remain in the classroom, in the library, in the counseling center, on the courts and fields with students – who care deeply about and understand most intimately the lives, minds, and needs of our students, students who deserve the highest quality education with faculty who have adequate time to nurture their minds and spirits.

We are in crisis at Cal State LA. We are putting on our organizing oxygen masks, so that we can build a university that better supports our students and ourselves. We declare S.O.S.!

We are calling out S.O.S.! because we do not have the adequate time to be the teachers we yearn to be. Whether we are Lecturers or Tenured/Tenure-Track (T/TT) faculty, our workloads are too onerous, our days stretched too thin, and our tasks too numerous to be giving our students our best. The university is failing our students because of its failure to invest in us, the faculty. Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.

This problem is structural, and it is multifaceted. It is true that public higher education is underfunded in California, and nationwide. (CFA has organized with students, faculty, and legislators to lobby for a freeze in tuition and more funding for the CSU – and quite successfully!) We will continue this fight.

And yet, it is also true that the CSU’s spending patterns, including at Cal State LA, are upside down. After our big budget victory in 2018 (led by CFA), the first item on the CSU Board of Trustees’ agenda in the meeting following the budget announcement was increasing campus presidents’ and other CSU executives’ salaries. We are astounded and disappointed by that fact – as was the California legislature, and rightly so.

Moreover in June 2019, an audit conducted by the California Legislature found that the CSU Chancellor failed to disclose $1.5 billion in reserves, while continuing to raise tuition on students.[1] We demand accountability for all administrators who are responsible for ongoing financial improprieties and want greater transparency on future budget allocations. S.O.S.!

At Cal State LA:

• We teach, mentor, and counsel in a teaching-intensive university system where only 39% of the CSU budget[2]goes to instruction. However, in 2012 expenditures on instruction constituted 43.3% of the budget.[3] Thus, we are expected to do more with fewer resources. We declare S.O.S.!
• We challenge the growth in administrator (MPP) density at Cal State LA, which grew 55% over a six year period (2013-2018), and has rapidly outpaced the hiring of tenure-line faculty.[4] S.O.S.!
• At Cal State LA, nearly 70% of the faculty are educators to whom the administration refuses to make a long-term commitment. Lecturers teach the majority of classes on campus, and in most cases, they are paid the least. Administrative hiring practices have cemented a two-tier faculty system, which produces a harmful culture where some faculty are valued (both culturally and monetarily) more highly than others. Tenure density is at an all-time low.[5] We declare S.O.S. and instead pledge our solidarity with one another, as Lecturer and T/TT faculty working together to fight for Lecturer pay equity, and for a more just university.
• We worked incredibly hard to convert our campus from quarters to semesters (Q2S), and as we underwent this change, administrators assured us that T/TT faculty would not be teaching a 4/4 load on a permanent basis. Former Provost Vaidya wrote that there would be a phased approach to creating a fair balance for faculty between teaching and research duties, where phase 1 would move 25% of T/TT faculty onto a 3/3, with additional phases to follow for the remaining T/TT faculty. When President Covino arrived, he stated on several occasions in public meetings that as long as T/TT faculty taught 120 FTES per term, that he would permit faculty to teach any configuration, ranging from one large lecture course (of 120 students) to two courses of 60, etc. Administration has not kept its promises to move T/TT faculty away from a 4/4 teaching load, which prevents us from doing the best by our students, and from maintaining a productive and creative scholarly life. We declare S.O.S.!
• In the aftermath of Q2S, Lecturer faculty at a full timebase are now teaching 5 classes per term, rather than 4 per term under quarters – but for less pay! As full time Lecturers, we have gone from 16 units of pay under quarters to 15 units of pay under semesters, even though we are teaching one more classroom community at a time. We are exploited on this campus, and Cal State LA is notorious for being the CSU campus that pays Lecturers the least, and offers them among the highest proportion of temporary appointments in the CSU. To this, we declare S.O.S.!
• T/TT faculty are not paid (in assigned time) to conduct research, scholarly, and creative activities (RSCA) – even though it is required of us for tenure and promotion. Lecturer faculty are not paid (in assigned time) to perform service to the university and especially to students, even though thousands of recommendation letters would go unwritten and many students unmentored without the unpaid labor of Lecturers. To the growing creep of faculty performing free work for Cal State LA, without the compensation (in time/units), we declare S.O.S.!
• At Cal State LA, President Covino has hired zero counselors on the tenure-line since he arrived in 2013. Also, while the counseling profession recommends a ratio of counseling faculty to students of 1 to 1500,[6]here, the ratio is 1 counselor for every 2700 students (one of the highest ratios in the CSU).[7] In a time of rising white nationalist attacks, growing inequality, attacks on Black students, immigrants, the #MeToo movement, and attacks on transgender people, Cal State LA should be recruiting vastly more counselors – and offering them the secure employment of the tenure-line. To this, we declare S.O.S.!
• In the CSU and at Cal State LA, shared governance is a shadow of what it should be – precisely because faculty are so overworked. We know that if we didn’t have such debilitating workloads, we could participate more meaningfully in the campus’s shared governance structures. Moreover, Lecturer faculty are either excluded from shared governance or not compensated for their labor when they do provide service to the campus community. Whether the impaction/exclusion policy or the proposed GE changes, if we had more time to participate in the life of university shared governance, students would be the ultimate beneficiaries.  We declare S.O.S.!

The structure and culture of Cal State LA are unsustainable for faculty and for students. As we have witnessed in the teachers’ strikes here in LA and up in Oakland (and beyond), it is we, the educators – organized in our labor unions – who fight for students, as well as for ourselves. While school boards, administrators, and other university executives offer us “austerity talk” as alibis for why they cannot fund instruction and for why they cannot hire more TT faculty, we are in the classrooms, libraries, and counseling centers educating and mentoring students. We know that students are best served when faculty are adequately supported.

Cal State LA is failing on both counts. We are not asking for the extravagant salaries, housing and car allowances of administrators. We are demanding a sustainable and respectful university, where our students – who come to Cal State LA with great needs and even greater dreams – are taught by faculty who are not frazzled by a harrowing workload and stressed about making rent at the end of the month.

In declaring S.O.S., we are first and foremost making a pledge to one another, as Lecturer and T/TT faculty, to stand together and to organize for a more just, sustainable, and truly student- and classroom-centered university system. We know that CFA is our tool, and it is only as powerful as our grassroots faculty movement to declare S.O.S.! and to push for the necessary changes we seek at Cal State LA.

Endnotes:

[1]https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article231540798.html

[2]https://www2.calstate.edu/csu-system/about-the-csu/budget/2018-19-operating-budget/Documents/2018-2019-Operating-Budget.pdf

[3]https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-in-california-institutional-costs/

[4]https://www.calfac.org/sites/default/files/file-attachments/mpp_trend_2012-2018.pdf

[5]https://www.calfac.org/sites/default/files/file-attachments/tenure_density_2012-18_summary.pdf

[6]http://www.iacsinc.org/staff-to-student-ratios.html

[7]https://www.calfac.org/sites/main/files/file attachments/csu_mental_health_counselors_numbers_by_campus.pdf