CSUN to Rehire Some Teachers of Key Courses : Education: Many students cannot graduate without taking classes taught by instructors whose positions had been eliminated. Spring semester funds will be tapped.

The Cal State Northridge administration, discovering that a budget squeeze canceled too many introductory courses that students need to graduate, has decided to tap next spring’s funds in order to rehire dozens of instructors whose jobs were recently eliminated.

The action by CSUN Acting Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald Bianchi is intended to ease the registration bottleneck created by the cancellation of more than 500 of the 5,600 or so courses that CSUN originally planned to offer for the fall semester, Bianchi said in an interview Tuesday.

Because of expected state budget cuts, the fall schedule shows dramatic reductions from the previous year in the number of introductory classes offered in subjects such as freshman composition (down 36%), Western civilization (49%), mathematics (34%) and computer science (26%), said Margaret Fieweger, associate vice president for academic programs.

Those cuts come on top of about 600 classes canceled from the fall, 1991, schedule because of state budget cuts last year.

About 75 of the eliminated classes must be restored because of the backlog of students who cannot graduate without attending them, said Bianchi, who is restoring them on a class-by-class basis this week. That means rehiring temporary instructors--who often teach lower-level courses--told in June that their positions had been eliminated.

Money to pay the rehired instructors will be borrowed from spring semester budgets and will come from the anticipated savings on salaries for about 100 faculty members expected to retire this year, Bianchi said.

Some academic department heads said they fear running out of money in the spring if they use too much of the semester’s money to provide classes in the fall. The money will be available because both semesters are in the same fiscal year.

“We are taking a risk,” Bianchi conceded.

But Bianchi said approval Monday by the Legislature of retirement incentives for California State University faculty members reduces that risk by increasing the likelihood that many more longtime professors will retire. Part-time instructors earn about half the $60,000 or so that tenured faculty members earn each year.

Officials of the 20-campus CSU system are bracing for cuts of between 8% and 11% for the 1992-93 school year as Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature remain deadlocked over the state budget.

As a result, most of the approximately 500 non-tenured teachers at CSUN have been told they would not have jobs this fall. CSUN officials have so far been able to spare the jobs of the more than 900 tenured and tenure-track professors who remain.

Paul Klinedinst, dean of the School of Science and Mathematics, said that although the percentage of cuts in introductory courses and those for advanced students are roughly the same, a single beginner’s course enrolls many more students than most upper-division courses. Restoration of an introductory course in biology and another in astronomy will, for example, accommodate about 200 students, he said.

The remaining class reductions are certain to increase the time it takes for most students to graduate from CSUN, which for years has been criticized for being unable to provide all of the general education courses its students need to graduate within four years. Students at CSUN are required to complete 52 units of general education courses that cover subjects such as math, science, English, humanities and social sciences.

Students have long been frustrated, for example, trying to complete a required course in critical thinking. Budget reductions have prompted philosophy department officials to reduce the number of classes offered by 44%.

“We were already turning down 800 to 900 students a semester, and take 44% away and that is several thousand more,” said Will Forthman, a philosophy professor and president of the CSUN chapter of the California Faculty Assn.

The plan to rehire some part-time instructors, while good news for students, is still a far cry from the magnitude of budget increases needed for CSUN to keep pace with student demand, Forthman said.