As Layoffs Loom, CSU Chancellor Offers Hope

Layoff notices will be mailed out beginning Monday to 193 San Diego State University employees, including 145 tenured and probationary tenure professors, as part of 2,200 layoff letters planned throughout the financially pressed state university system.

The unprecedented move, which includes 340 tenured and tenure-track faculty at 11 of 20 campuses, would give affected professors the legally required 120-day notice of termination and result in the elimination of nine academic departments at San Diego State alone.

But California State University Chancellor Barry Munitz held out some hope that the tenured positions could be saved for at least the 1992-93 year if the governor and state Legislature approve an enhanced early retirement plan for senior professors and a 40% student fee increase, and hold the system’s budget cuts to 6%.

At a daylong meeting of all 20 CSU campus presidents Friday, Munitz directed them to continue planning for an earlier-ordered 8% budget cut until Gov. Pete Wilson and legislative leaders make clear the outlines of a final state financial package. It’s possible that the system might have to make additional slashes beyond that level if it is ordered to make higher cuts, Munitz warned, even though he said such a circumstance would prove devastating to California’s educational future.

At San Diego State, the 8% plan will mean a drop in full-time student enrollment to 21,000 from the existing 25,000 as fewer courses are offered and the time required to graduate lengthens, SDSU President Tom Day said Friday evening. Systemwide, Munitz expects a drop to 244,000 from an anticipated 280,000 full-time student level originally projected for this fall.

Day said he could staunch much of the immediate pain under the retirement, fee and budget-cut minimums laid out by Munitz on Friday.

“I think that, if we have a decent golden handshake (retirement), and everybody who can retire does retire, and we have the full student fee increase and only a 6% cut, then there’s a reasonable chance we can phase out departments over a year, instead of immediately,” Day said.

“Of the 90 layoff notices to professors in the nine departments, I think 70 of the professors would be eligible for the retirement. . . . In those departments that I’ve cut entirely, there are not very many recently hired professors.”

Day said a large number of retirements would allow him to reduce the number of tenured faculty members laid off to about 40 and give them up to a year to find other jobs while the school could still offer courses needed by students in the affected majors.

“But the departments will still go, this would not be an avoidance, just a suspension for a semester or a year,” he emphasized. “The bottom line is that our budgets are still down.”

The departments targeted for elimination are anthropology; religious studies; family studies and consumer studies; industrial studies; health sciences; aerospace engineering; Russian and German; natural sciences, and recreation, parks and tourism.

Day said he “would go back to the Academic Senate and ask them to figure out how we could still keep some programs and courses alive, even though we might not have a department as such. Even though we won’t have an aerospace studies department, it is crucial to still have some aerospace courses.”

Day’s plan to go “narrow and deep” into certain departments was based on Academic Senate recommendations to avoid across-the-board cuts that would eviscerate all of the more recently hired faculty, where the university’s women and nonwhite faculty are concentrated.

Munitz said Friday that the presidents agreed that “narrow and deep” was a preferred way to go.

But campus criticism of Day’s actions continued.

Speech Prof. Michael Seitz, head of the local faculty union, asked Friday why San Diego State is sending out almost 40% of all layoff notices for tenured and non-tenured faculty in the CSU system.

Day replied that, unlike administators at some other campuses, he has refused to cut back totally on purchases of new library books and manuscripts and equipment, even though he has been urged to do that by some on his faculty.

But nevertheless, the feeling among many professors remains that somehow SDSU is taking a harder hit than other CSU campuses. At least two anthropology professors have filed age discrimination complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And Seitz said that the California Faculty Assn. will begin filing grievances as soon as layoff notices are received alleging that Day is making program cuts in the guise of a budget crisis in violation of collective bargaining agreements. Such grievances could take up to a year to be adjudicated, he conceded.

Statewide, of the 2,200 employees likely to receive layoff notices, 1,345 are teachers, 740 are on non-teaching staffs and 109 are senior administrators, Munitz said. In addition, an estimated 1,005 part-time professors throughout the system would not be rehired. The 11 campuses affected by the tenured faculty notices are: Cal State Los Angeles, Cal State Bakersfield, Cal State Fresno, Cal State Sacramento, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal State Long Beach, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Chico, Cal State Fullerton, Humboldt State and San Diego State.

“We are shoving this institution slowly but surely to an abyss from which it will take a generation to recover,” Munitz said.