CSUN Group Urges Meeting With New President : Education: A faculty committee asks that Blenda J. Wilson attend talks on the school’s budget crisis. She wants to stay at her Michigan post through August.

A group of Cal State Northridge faculty members has requested that the Faculty Senate call an emergency meeting with incoming President Blenda J. Wilson, who wants to remain in Michigan for several months, to discuss the school’s impending budget crisis.

The Senate Executive Committee will ask Wilson “to come here or they will go there to see her,” said Ronald L.F. Davis, chairman of the senate’s academic planning committee.

Wilson, named successor to CSUN President James W. Cleary earlier this week, is currently chancellor of the University of Michigan at Dearborn. In an interview with The Times, she said she hoped to stay at the Michigan school through August and begin her duties at CSUN in September.

The request for the emergency meeting was made in a letter from faculty members of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences delivered Friday to the Senate Executive Committee.

Faculty members have said that the social science school could lose as many as 50 teaching positions if state university officials cut the school’s budget by 11.5%, one of the scenarios that CSUN administrators have discussed as the state’s money problems grow worse.

“We are in very, very bad need of decisions,” said Jane Bayes, chairwoman of the political science department. “Faculty are going away for the summer and many decisions will have to be made by the summer. That creates a great deal of angst. “

The letter asked that the Senate Executive Committee hold a “special emergency meeting as soon as possible to deal with the budget crisis facing CSUN.”

“It is also urged that the Executive Committee invite President-Designate Wilson to attend this meeting (or another one in the immediate future),” the letter reads.

The committee will meet next week to consider the request, Davis said.

On May 14, the Faculty Senate, in its last official meeting for the school year now ending, passed a resolution asking Cleary to declare the school in a state of emergency and to create an emergency planning committee that would oversee the entire university’s budget.

The resolution asked that the committee be run by the vice president of academic affairs, whose first priority would be preserving classes and faculty positions. The faculty group said maintenance, sports and other non-academic activities should be sacrificed before classes or teachers are eliminated.

Cleary, who will retire next month, rejected the request, saying he did not want to tie the hands of the new president.

Some faculty members already have sent letters to Wilson urging her to implement the recommendations and to come to campus as soon as possible to deal with the crisis.