SDSU Senate Urges End to Academic Cuts

The Academic Senate at San Diego State University has asked that no further eliminations of professors and departments be made should President Tom Day be forced to go beyond the 8% in cuts, about $11.5 million, already announced May 13.

In an emergency document sent to Day late last month, the senate’s executive committee instead recommended non-academic cuts totaling at least $9.3 million in areas of book and equipment purchases, travel, administrative deans for student services and academic support, athletics and health services.

“Our feeling is that the narrow-and-deep cuts already made (which drop nine academic departments and terminate 193 faculty positions) are about as narrow and deep as you can go without crossing the point to where the university can no longer continue to call itself a university,” Prof. Janis F. Andersen, the new chairwoman of the Academic Senate, said Tuesday.

The document, titled “Burn the Furniture,” suggests the alternative cuts as a temporary way to buy a year’s time and avoid further permanent academic damage should more state-mandated budget reductions of 15% or more go through the Legislature as feared.

The action by the committee redefines a previous restructuring document approved in January by the faculty that called for “deep and narrow” cuts in preference to across-the-board academic reductions that would exclusively target the youngest and most recently hired professors for termination.

“It is reasonable to assume that the senate’s policy might have been phrased differently had the dimension of the current problem been better understood,” the proposal to Day states. It adds: “The elimination of entire programs and the impact that these cuts (already made) will have on faculty and students has had a stunning, chilling effect on everyone associated with the university.”

Andersen said that Day was receptive to the senate’s position but made no commitments. Day told The Times last week that he would consider cuts in other areas should he be forced to go beyond the 8% reductions, but that he was waiting to see the results of state legislative deliberations on the 1992-93 budget.

The heads of the California State University and University of California systems have been asked by legislators to detail on Thursday what cuts of up to 25% would mean for the future quality of higher education in the state.

The senate document proposes:

* Cutting supplies and services, new and replacement equipment, new books and periodicals, and faculty travel to save about $3.5 million.

* Taking about $775,000 in lottery funds and applying them to operating expenses, even though they are meant for one-time, non-salary items.

* Closing down the Office of Student Affairs and placing its admissions, financial aid and other functions under the Academic Affairs dean, saving $1.5 million in salaries. The workload of remaining employees would be increased.

* Slashing $2.8 million from student health services by offering only basic care and emergency medical services on campus.

* Merging some of the university’s seven colleges and eliminating deans and administrative workers while keeping the academic departments under them intact. That would save $200,000.

* Making “major, significant additional reductions in athletics. We again implore (Day) to heed this often-made recommendation.” Andersen said Monday that the faculty realizes Day disagrees, though $250,000 was cut last month from the $2 million in state funds given to intercollegiate athletics.

She said that, despite the severe undermining of morale on campus, there is no move by the Academic Senate to reconsider the narrow-and-deep philosophy of the 8% cuts.

Day has 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.