CSU Bracing for Huge Budget Cuts : Education: Students flock to take summer classes in face of massive cancellations for fall term. Campus presidents worry 8% decrease in state funds could triple.

From redwood-spotted Humboldt State in the north to the bustlingly urban San Diego State in the south, the 20 campuses in the California State University system are rippling with tension and uncertainty over looming program cuts and staff layoffs for next fall.

Fearing massive cancellations of fall classes that would delay their graduations, students are enrolling in summer school in larger numbers. Tenured faculty are torn between possible salary givebacks or seeing longtime colleagues laid off. Campus presidents, who are meeting today in Long Beach on painful plans for an anticipated 8% dip in state general revenue funds, are worried about cuts as much as three times that large.

“I spent five years trying to get a degree and now I may not get it in the end,” said Cal State Long Beach student Gary Larson, waiting in the registration line this week. A German major, he was shut out of advance registration for all four fall classes he needs for a December graduation and hopes to get around that by taking a summer course and beseeching professors to squeeze him into fall classes.

“I think people are apprehensive. There’s not a positive mood on the campus,” said Albert Baca, past president of the faculty Senate at Cal State Northridge, where there is talk that an 8% decrease in state funds would kill 716 of 4,200 fall classes. “Even if things are not necessarily going to turn out as badly as some people fear, I think the campus needs some reassurances by knowing what the situation actually is.”

Similar fears are being expressed throughout the Cal State system, which enrolls about 362,000 students and employs 36,000 teachers, staffers and administrators. Initial cutback plans have been dribbling out around the state, accompanied by many rumors and protests.

San Diego State has set off a national controversy by announcing plans to eliminate nine academic departments, severely reduce nine others and lay off 193 of its 1,400 tenured and non-tenured teachers. The American Assn. of University Professors is challenging the timing and scope of the actions, saying they threaten academic freedom.

Debates are brewing at Cal State Chico about a planned phase-out of agricultural studies; at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo over possible elimination of home economics; at Cal State Long Beach over anticipated closure of some master’s programs in nursing and foreign languages. Money for sports programs, library acquisitions and grounds maintenance are in jeopardy throughout the system.

At today’s meeting at Cal State headquarters, campus presidents are expected to project enrollment limits, staff layoffs and program cancellations. Nothing will be final until the governor and Legislature agree on a state budget, a process that could take weeks or months.

To be sure, some worst-case scenarios are being offered in hopes of arousing public and legislative support for Cal State funding. An example occurred Thursday when the Joint Legislative Conference Committee heard Cal State system Chancellor Barry Munitz and UC system President David P. Gardner testify about the impact of a hypothetical 25% drop in general state funds due to the recession’s effect on tax revenues.

“To suggest cuts of this scale is equivalent to saying the state no longer wants to provide public higher education. The socioeconomic implications of that are incalculable,” Munitz told legislators in Sacramento.

Partly because of advance notice requirements for staff layoffs, Munitz last month ordered his 20 campus chiefs to plan for an 8% cut in state support. A 25% cut, Munitz said Thursday, would mean a loss of $400 million from an already lowered level of support--equivalent to the budgets of one medium-size campus, such as San Bernardino, and three large campuses, such as San Diego, Long Beach or San Jose.

Under Gov. Pete Wilson’s budget presented in January, the Cal State system would receive about $1.6 billion in general revenue funds and about $524 million in student fees, including a 40% fee increase to $1,308 annually, not including room and board. Since January, the state’s fiscal condition has worsened, putting extraordinary pressure on the state services, such as UC and Cal State, that have no constitutional guarantees of funding.

UC receives so much federal and private money that only a third of its budget depends on direct state aid. In contrast, Cal State campuses rely on the state for 80% of their budgets. Therefore, Cal State cuts are expected to be worse than at UC, which enrolls half as many students.

Union leaders for Cal State faculty and staff face some pressure to consider salary rollbacks. But they, along with student leaders, contend that administrative expenses should be reduced before class schedules and rank-and-file salaries.

Meanwhile, earlier protests about the fee increases have become more muted as students face difficult economic choices: Will higher fees provide for enough classes to graduate within a reasonable time?

“To me, it doesn’t make any sense,” said Yvette Velarde, a premed biology major at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “We’re paying more and more money and getting less and less. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand where our money is going.” She is particularly worried that the upper-division laboratory sections she needs will be offered less frequently, making it very difficult to juggle school and her job as a dispatcher for a plumbing firm.

As a precursor to what’s ahead, signs this week all over the Dominguez Hills campus in Carson warned about fall class cancellations “due to budgetary limitations.”

Hansonia Caldwell, dean of humanities and fine arts at Dominguez Hills, said the school used to offer enough upper-division courses so that a student could theoretically satisfy major requirements over one year. That has now been stretched out to two years and will probably be 2 1/2 years in 1992-93, she said.

More basic classes are also affected, Caldwell said. Under the 8% cut scenario, the number of fall sections in elementary English composition are being reduced from 12 to nine. “That makes student matriculation longer, especially for a commuter campus like ours that really has a constituency for morning, afternoon and evening classes,” she said.

At Cal Poly Pomona, an 8% dip in state revenues would mean the layoffs of about 100 part-time lecturers and a loss of at least 750 sections next fall, a 10%-12% decrease in catalogue offerings, according to David Edmonds, acting vice president for academic affairs. The ratio of students to faculty, a prime measure of schools’ reputations, used to be 17 to 1 four years ago at Cal Poly Pomona. It worsened to 22 to 1 this year and could rise to 24 to 1 by fall, Edmonds said.

“That’s awful,” he said. “If we start to jack it up more, in a sense, it threatens a good portion of the academic nature of the university. . . . We can’t pack classrooms beyond their capacity.”

Faculty part-timers took the brunt of cutbacks in the current school year, their ranks reduced by about 2,000, or 22%, across all 20 campuses. In addition, 740 non-teaching jobs, such as clerks and gardeners, were eliminated systemwide, a 4% drop this school year.

CSU officials agree that those groups will take it on the chin again next year. However, tenured professors and those on their way to such positions will not be sacrosanct in the future by most accounts, even though Munitz has asked that no layoff notices be sent to tenure-track teachers for fall. A sweetened early retirement package is being studied in hopes that highly paid professors will leave and save the jobs of less senior ones.

The system is debating whether cuts and layoffs should be evenly distributed across the board or focus on programs deemed to be academically weak or unpopular. San Diego State President Thomas Day, a forceful proponent of the latter “deep and narrow” approach has angered faculty who contend the school’s name will suffer badly if, as Day has proposed, it has no departments in anthropology, religious studies, health sciences, Russian and German.

Meanwhile, worried students are attending summer sessions in higher numbers than last year, even though summer fees are higher than in fall or spring. A 5% increase in summer enrollment is reported at Cal Poly Pomona, 30% at San Jose State and 60% at Sonoma State.

At Cal State Long Beach, where a slight increase is expected, computer engineering student Massoud Khalil was waiting to register for a computer graphics course he fears won’t be available in the fall. “I don’t want to take any chances,” he said, explaining he is only four courses away from his diploma.