SDSU Scales Back Plan to Lay Off Professors : Education: Administration’s announcement comes despite continued state budget impasse.

A semester’s reprieve was granted Thursday to at least half of the 150 tenured and probationary-tenure professors at San Diego State University on the verge of being laid off.

Breathing space could be in store for the rest of their colleagues targeted for dismissal, too, depending on the final shape of the overdue state budget.

President Thomas Day made the announcement at a special meeting of the executive committee of the Academic Senate on Thursday.

Day’s move was seen by key professors, many of whom have been arguing with the president for more than two months over his budget-cutting plans, as a significant attempt to improve a campus atmosphere poisoned by the recent turmoil.

The Academic Senate narrowly voted “no confidence” in Day last month, and the American Assn. of University Professors in Washington has announced an investigation of San Diego State for its plans to fire tenured faculty members.

“We’re pleased with this positive step and (related) moves toward consultation with the faculty,” said speech professor Michael Seitz, campus representative of the California Faculty Assn. “But we’ve still got a long way to go, and we still need to heal the deep hurt at this institution.”

Even without a final budget, Day modified plans to immediately lay off about 150 tenured and tenure-track professors, and to eliminate nine academic departments to save $11.5 million.

The reprieve will allow those departments--and six others where significant reductions have been planned--to offer a substantial number of courses in the upcoming academic year and allow returning seniors to satisfy graduation requirements.

Day will notify affected departments beginning today how many professors they can keep on, and then the departments will go down their lists by seniority.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Day said. He originally wanted to hold off until he could see if cuts to the California State University system were limited to the 8%-10% that Day and other campus presidents have planned for.

“But we’ll have students here in the next three weeks trying to” finalize their class schedules, and “we’re starting classes the first week of September,” he said. “We’ve got to get this all together and have real people getting relief planning for real classes and teaching real students.” By postponing layoffs of 75 professors, the campus can offer an additional 300 to 350 classes.

In acting now, Day agreed for the first time with faculty requests to take about $3.5 million in money earmarked for library books, equipment, and research and conference travel for the upcoming year and spend it instead to save jobs temporarily.

The idea of transferring infrastructure money into salaries has been anathema to Day, particularly the notion of no new library purchases for a year.

Day said that individual colleges and departments can draw up plans of their own to soften layoffs even further through voluntary leaves without pay, temporary reassignments or other scenarios that don’t substitute a forced layoff elsewhere as a trade-off.

He also repeated a promise made in conjunction this spring with CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz: that, should the state hold its CSU budget cuts to 6%, all tenured and tenure-track layoffs will be postponed for the entire academic year.

Even at the 8%-10% level, Day said, an enhanced retirement plan for professors now being considered by the state Legislature could bring the number of layoffs down even lower than the 75 now contemplated.

If a large number of senior professors retire, and if there are some resignations among others who have layoff notices, Day would have additional money to retain faculty members temporarily.

But both Day and faculty members stressed Thursday that such moves are only palliatives, and that the university eventually will have fewer professors and students next year. The number of full-time students expected this fall will be about 22,000, a 14% drop from the 25,500 two years ago, before the state began its CSU cutbacks.

“At this point there are still 116 (instructors) being let go,” geography professor Ernst Griffin pointed out. (There are a total of 150 tenure and tenure-track professors, and 43 non-tenure professors who have received layoff notices. Day has no plans to bring back any of the non-tenured faculty members.)

“We’re not going to be able to have the same number of courses, the same services” for faculty members and students, “and it’s blind and dumb-headed for anyone to believe otherwise,” Griffin said.

Day reiterated that all the plans announced Thursday are “for this year only . . . they are temporary.”

In that vein, Day asked the Academic Senate on Thursday to begin a semester-long study of how it would like to reshape the university academically in light of permanent budget reductions.

Day said he was open to recommendations about what changes, if any, should be made to his plan to eliminate nine departments: anthropology; religious studies; family studies and consumer sciences; industrial studies; health sciences; aerospace engineering; Russian and German; natural sciences, and recreation, parks and tourism.

The Senate could recommend that programs in some or all of those subjects be retained, even if the department structures are eliminated. The programs might be offered in conjunction with other subjects. Several departments might be amalgamated into fewer departments.

But Day said the Senate will have to satisfy two requirements for his approval: the total dollar savings must add up to what is necessary to balance the budget; and there can be no substitution with layoffs in or elimination of graduate student programs that differentiate San Diego State from most other CSU campuses.