Strangling Our Future : Cal State system faces devastating cut in funds

An English professor, John J. Clayton, writing some months ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recalled a lesson from his New York boyhood when “ . . . a refugee named Theodore would come every few months to wash our windows. I remember his buckets and the black leather straps he hooked onto the stone ledge, seven floors above an alley. . . . One afternoon my mother called me in to watch him at work.

“ ‘You see that man? What do you think he’s doing?’

“ ‘Washing windows,’ I suggested.

“ ‘Let me tell you what he’s really doing: That man is putting two sons and a daughter through university! You understand? And that’s America.’ ”

That is indeed America. Clayton summed it up in two words: Public higher education is “America’s edge.”

America is about to destroy its edge. At a grim news conference Friday, Barry Munitz, chancellor of California State University, spelled out the consequences of an 8% budget cut for the 20-campus system he administers.

They are nothing less than staggering: an overall cut of 2,200 CSU employees; including 1,345 faculty, 340 of whom are tenured or on tenure track at 11 campuses. The first dismissal notices go out Monday. The resulting projected cut in enrollment is 40,000 from the expected 1992-1993 enrollment of 284,000 (current full-time enrollment is 269,000).

And please note well: Eight percent is not the cut that the state has proposed to Chancellor Munitz. The state has proposed cuts of double, triple or even quadruple that amount. Munitz, doing his level best to come up with a contingency plan, scarcely exaggerates when he says that the state is pushing CSU into “an abyss from which it will take a generation to recover.”

Negotiations are under way. There is reason to hope that a two-year budget may buy the state a little room to maneuver. Munitz’s counteroffer, including a 6% cut, may make it possible for some of the dismissals to be temporary layoffs.

One thing, however, is clear: California’s decline may be at hand.

Never in the history of American higher education has there been a mass layoff of tenured faculty. Prison, health and welfare programs are faced with comparable cuts.

Gov. Pete Wilson has imposed a panicky gag order on the relevant officials in his Administration, forbidding them to testify before a key legislative committee on the impact of the proposed cuts. But Californians need to know whose throats are about to be slit. Collectively, those throats are the life of the state.