Narrow and Deep Slashes Hurt at SDSU : Education: Day says there was agreement on how cuts in the faculty should be made, but when they came there were still cries of anguish.

San Diego State University President Tom Day says the faculty agreed early this year that any further budget slashes should go “narrow and deep”--but, when the cuts finally came last week, everyone said, “not me, not me.”

“I think that some people are losing their sense of proportion about all of this,” said Day, SDSU president for 14 years, in an interview defending his actions. “The reason why we did things the way we did is to try and affect as few people as possible, and still keep as many of our academic strengths as we can.

“Those who get named under the (cuts) don’t want to agree on narrow and vertical, but most people (at this university) want to go this way.”

The “narrow and deep” cuts eliminated nine academic departments and cut deeply into nine others as the primary way so far for San Diego State to cope with an unprecedented second year of a state budget crises.

The moves contrasted with across-the-board cuts of 15% that Day made this past year in almost all university programs. That brought a round of criticism of him last summer after almost all of SDSU’s 550 non-tenured part-time lecturers and instructors were terminated, hurting in particular large departments such as English and history that relied heavily on non-tenured faculty members.

The campus has been awash in rumor and despair for more than a week since professors learned the latest Draconian moves, eliminating 93 fully tenured professors out of a total 193 faculty positions. They came in response to an order from California State University Chancellor Barry Munitz to cut more than 8% from already frayed 1992-93 proposed budgets. And, although no one knows for certain, more reductions on the order of 15% might become necessary within the month.

Almost everyone on campus concedes the need for the cuts, however debilitating to specific professors and students.

But many criticize Day, saying he failed to consult with them and acted precipitously, drawing up his list and handing it down within a matter of days. Others argue that he should have made the latest $11.5 million in cuts across-the-board once again so that only the most junior faculty members would be laid off and no departments eliminated, or decided to eviscerate the athletic program and end big-time football and basketball programs.

And many students point out that there are no plans as yet to cope with their peers who were majoring in those departments targeted for elimination.

The large academic reductions, almost 25% in two years, fall particularly hard at San Diego State because its 1,400-member faculty has considered its campus the intellectual flagship of the 20-member CSU system.

“I’m scared, and I believe that everyone on campus is scared,” said Maria Senour, a professor of counselor education for 15 years and a member of the Academic Senate’s executive committee.

After last fall’s reductions, that committee spent several months writing a restructuring document, approved by the full senate in January, which called for any future budget woes to result in narrow but debilitating cuts in a few areas based on six broad criteria, instead of across-the-board reductions.

But Senour and others said that, despite the intent to insulate a majority of the university programs, the entire academic community is frightened.

“There’s tension that is really causing a lot of morale problems, because no one any longer feels the security (of tenure) that they used to have, that they themselves no longer are guaranteed protection.”

Day by no means downplays the serious morale problem on his campus, saying in the interview that he already has contemplated how to motivate his campus for the fall semester in light of the terrible financial uncertainty.

“It will be a very, very serious problem,” Day said. “But I will tell them that, at least we have left most of the university completely unemasculated and that, while I can’t guarantee what the future will bring, those departments not under the gun must continue to do the best they can do in their fields.”

In his interview, Day defended the academic senate’s restructuring document, saying it “is in my view a correctly drawn contingency plan calmly and coolly considered.

“It gives special care to protecting our newest hires, and our search for diversity (nonwhite) faculty, who are the future of our university. It makes sense, and that’s why I adopted it.

“But now those people who are personally affected by it are not so cool and rational, and they claim that I never consulted with faculty, and I find those kinds of statements unprofessional.

“The fact is that we have a situation where everyone agreed after extensive discussion on how to go about cutting, but now nobody is volunteering to be part of it.”

The document set forth criteria to consider when cutting departments: protecting junior faculty members; a department’s overall quality; its importance to the university’s central function; its size and cost and the need for its offerings.

Using those criteria, day said, he eliminated the departments of anthropology; religious studies; family studies and consumer sciences; industrial studies; health sciences; aerospace engineering; Russian and German; natural sciences; and recreation, parks and tourism.

Significant cuts will be made in art, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, and teacher education. Part-time faculty members still remaining in all other departments despite last year’s cuts will be laid off as well.

“I offer you or anyone else a challenge,” Day said in explaining how he and his top staff came up with the specific cuts. “Take my report and take a catalogue (of courses) and find a single department of comparable size where deep and vertical cuts would have satisfied the criteria better, where we could continue to discharge the mission of this university and be sensitive to recently hired faculty . . . .

“I had to ask myself how to protect those programs and those students who, in five or 10 years, will be out in society trying to solve the problems of the world.”

One administrator, who asked not to be named, said the reductions in the chemistry, sociology and other departments with large numbers of longtime professors have been planned with the expectation that a hoped-for early retirement incentive will make few forced layoffs necessary.

Day pointed to religious studies, with 15 undergraduate majors and course offerings for 244 other students this year, out of a total of 31,000 undergraduates and graduates.

“I’m well aware that philosophy and religious studies are necessary for a well-educated person,” said Day, a physicist by training. “But you have to face the fact that some decisions had to be made.”

Added Day: “The only person who can make those decisions on the campus who does not have a personal interest in a particular department is me.”

But most in affected departments fail to see how the criteria applied to them.

“It was done in haste, clearly too fast,” Julian Wulbern, a 29-year SDSU veteran and chair of the Russian and German department. “If there at least had been genuine consultation, if we had been apprised of the nature of the crisis, if I had had some word of warning, it wouldn’t be so devastating to all of us.”

Michael Seitz, speech professor and the local faculty representative for the California Faculty Assn. said, “There is no way to sugarcoat what had to be done, and Day really had a Hobson’s choice.

“But it happened so fast, it was so brutal, it was so large, that Day should have conferred more and not just used the restructuring document to say, ‘Here’s how I carried things out.’

“This would have been a time to come back to everyone, and I believe the campus would have rallied around Day . . . but because of how he did it, there’s an extra psychological blow now that is so devastating to faculty and to students.”

For his part, Day said that “if I had had all of these students and department chairs sitting around to talk about picking a list that everyone would have agreed upon, there would be no list.”

John Weeks, a 19-year member of the sociology department, is one of seven professors being laid off under reverse seniority rules that apply when reductions and not eliminations are made in departments.

Weeks expressed bitterness that tenured professors such as himself are being terminated while faculty members more junior in other departments will be retained.

“In my mind, the whole concept of tenure is dead, so, in the future, if a person is contemplating (a new offer) from Dog Breath University or San Diego State, they’ll take Dog Breath U. because they’ll have more confidence in tenure.”

Weeks said his department could “understand that our jobs would be in jeopardy if we were not servicing large numbers of students, if we were a unit within the university that wasn’t paying the bills, but we have 300 students majoring in sociology, so that’s not true.”

Further, Weeks is bitter that “there are associate professors in sociology who have more seniority than (we) full professors but have not published in a long time and have lower teaching evaluations” who are being retained. “I’m not saying this egotistically because others in the department have made this case to the dean as well.”

Day, asked about the termination of professors like Weeks and Ruben Rumbaut, an internationally respected sociologist on immigration, expressed regret that “I could not be true to the criteria completely.”

“If you don’t touch anybody who is new, and if you don’t touch anybody who is good, then you don’t touch anyone,” Day said.

In addition, several longtime professors, who asked not to be named, said some departments on the elimination list--including anthropology and Russian and German--have not been highly regarded academically for years, although they include individual professors who are well respected.

“Some (cuts) were obvious as you try to keep the core of the university as much as possible,” one professor said. Of course, added another, everyone has their own concept of what the core should be.

Day said that most of San Diego State’s academic departments meet the criteria of quality. “For example, I look at the department of recreation and, while it is a good department and Southern California is leisure-oriented, I asked whether the university could continue to discharge its mission without it.”

The faculty sources, along with Day himself, all denied that the cutbacks resulted in deans and other top administrators taking the opportunity to “settle scores” by firing unpopular or iconoclastic faculty members, although anonymous letters have been circulating to the media alleging such cases.

Many professors, however resigned to the cuts, believe Day should have eliminated interscholastic athletics, to save about $2 million that could instead be applied to classes. Others argue that the “infrastructure budget,” used for buying books, equipment and for providing travel and sabbatical money for professors, should be scrapped and applied solely to saving jobs.

Day, buffeted for months regarding athletics, refuses to “burn all of the furniture everywhere” although he doesn’t “expect faculty to be sympathetic” to arguments that a top-flight university athletic program is a vital part of student life and an important enticement to some alumni to donate money for academics.

Day is willing to consider applying the books and equipment money to saving jobs next year, even though that would mean no new library acquisitions for an entire year.

“These are dire times, and I have to balance things between perpetuity and immediate student needs,” Day said.