College to Reassign 3 Administrators in Cutback : Budgeting: Fullerton posts would be eliminated, departments combined. Faculty petitions against action.

Forced to cut $824,000 from its 1992-93 budget, Fullerton College plans to reassign three program administrators and eliminate their present positions in the face of faculty protests.

“There is a big schism on campus,” said communications professor Larry Taylor. “We weren’t given the chance to give our ideas in an open forum.”

Fullerton College officials say they have to trim that amount from the school’s $37.6-million budget. As the biggest campus in the North Orange County Community College district, Fullerton bears the lion’s share of the whole district’s recommended cutback, which totals $1.9 million, Fullerton President Philip W. Borst said. The district has a total budget of $100.7 million.

The faculty senate on Thursday discussed the reassignments and accepted a petition signed by more than 130 instructors, calling for reconsideration of the reassignments. The college has about 300 full-time faculty members.

Most faculty members learned of the proposed cuts when the petitions were circulated earlier this week. Select faculty had heard of the proposals while serving on advisory committees to the administration.

Under the cutback proposal, the three deans who run the communications, physical sciences and applied design departments will be reassigned to teaching positions. Those departments will be merged with other departments for administrative purposes. Other savings will come from reassignments in the non-teaching staff and attrition.

“We are making cuts based on the least impact on students,” Borst said. “We have to do with less managers.”

However, some instructors say the elimination of the positions might hurt teaching programs in a variety of ways, particularly if faculty are asked to assume administrative duties.

Rumors of the proposed reassignments spread through the 20,000-student campus this week as flyers were widely distributed, urging faculty members to attend the senate meeting.

No faculty members will lose their jobs, said Associate Prof. Julie Davey of the communications department. But no one has been told where the affected departments will be reassigned.

“But they could put us in the English division, the technical education department, or we could go into the business division,” Davey said. “We have no idea where we would end up. It was a decision based on money, totally.”

Borst rejected charges that faculty committees were unaware of the recommendations. The college has an advisory board, which includes faculty members and other campus employees, Borst said, and they were advised.

But Taylor said faculty senators were not fully informed about the reassignments.

“They did not understand the significance of what was going on because it was run by them so fast,” Taylor said. “It was decided in the dark.”

Davey said office duties, which are usually handled by the deans, would be passed down to instructors. As a result of this and other administrative cuts, students would then have fewer office hours with their professors.

“I will have to spend my time overseeing work that the dean did,” Davey said. “If teachers stopped and did all this paperwork, we would not be available for students.”