SDSU President Day Postpones Rest of Autumn Faculty Layoffs

In yet another concession, university President Thomas Day decided Monday that the remaining San Diego State University professors due for immediate layoffs because of budget cuts will be retained at least through the fall semester.

As a result, the 146 tenured and probationary-tenure professors who had been targeted for dismissal will be able to offer up to 600 additional classes this fall. Their future beyond December, and those of affected academic departments, is still very much up in the air, however.

Despite the lack of a final state budget, Day said in an interview Monday that he needed to make final plans for the fall semester, which is only 2 1/2 weeks away.

“We’ll have a full glass this fall and just have to see how much we can salvage for the spring,” Day said.

“This helps the students, especially the freshmen, who need as many faculty and classes as they can get for the fall.”

Day informed the Academic Senate of his decision through its chairwoman, who made the announcement at the senate’s Monday meeting.

He said he is reluctantly using more than $5 million in funds normally reserved for equipment, travel and library books to cover the costs of postponing the layoffs until at least the spring.

Late last month, Day announced that he would retain for at least a semester about half the professors scheduled for layoffs, using some of the university’s money budgeted for infrastructure improvements.

“I’m very much against using the (year’s) infrastructure money for this, but I want to be humane,” Day said in explaining Monday’s decision, noting that the Academic Senate had strongly urged him to delay all layoffs for the 1992-93 academic year by using the funds.

“I also want to emphasize that this cannot be permanent” because the university will have to be 8%-10% smaller next year, he said. However, with an early retirement bonus now approved by Gov. Pete Wilson for senior faculty members, a large number of retirements could free up additional money to retain some professors through the spring, Day said.

Day and the rest of the California State University system have based budget planning on a legislative cut in that range, and Day said Monday that the worst-case scenario out of Sacramento probably will fall within those parameters.

“This is a positive step in the right direction,” said Michael Seitz, campus representative of the California Faculty Assn. and a member of the Academic Senate.

But Seitz said Monday that his group still wants all layoffs rescinded--not postponed--for the entire 1992-93 year while the Senate considers how to down-size the campus with as few permanent layoffs as possible.

And the CFA has issued a blistering letter to all professors calling on them to demand Day’s removal at a general faculty meeting scheduled for Aug. 27. Day can only be removed by the CSU’s Board of Trustees.

Day “is dead wrong in what he did, and his failure has seriously damaged the campus and SDSU’s national reputation,” CFA vice president David Strom said.

“His ‘burn the faculty’ plan led to the largest layoff of tenured faculty in the nation’s history, and he has now been forced to admit that it was a colossal mistake,” Strom said.

“The bottom line is that his credibility is gone and (Day) should go also.”

Day insisted Monday that his actions postponing any tenure or probationary-tenure layoffs for the fall are consistent with his budget statements going back to May. At that time, he first announced plans to eliminate nine academic departments and to severely cut several others as part of efforts to save $11.5 million.

“I said then that I would try to (postpone) as many as possible,” Day said, “that I would try to figure out a way to help students as much as possible.” Day said his staff made calculations over the past weekend that showed he would have enough infrastructure money available to postpone all tenure layoffs temporarily.

Forty-three non-tenured faculty members who were given layoff notices could be recalled as well, Ronald Hopkins, vice president for academic affairs, said Monday, but he said those postponements would vary from college to college.

Janis Andersen, the Senate’s chairwoman, said Monday that Day always lays out the worst-case scenario and then works his way back from that.

“He has talked with us about mitigation efforts, and this could be the best-case scenario,” said Andersen, a speech professor. “We’re still trying to predict the future and, if we are calling it wrong, our spring is going to be really terrible. But, if we laid off people now and (the budget) isn’t the worst case, we really hurt students for the fall.”

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. Last year, San Diego State eliminated almost all of its temporary faculty, which meant the loss of about 500 classes in departments across the board, especially in departments such as English and history that relied heavily on part-time and temporary instructors.

This time, Day determined to go “narrow and deep” by eliminating all professors in 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.

By doing so, Day said he was following the Senate’s general advice from a February document to maintain overall campus quality at the expense of a few departments.

But the move has raised a storm of protest, plunging the campus into continuing turmoil with a “no confidence” vote by the Academic Senate in June and an investigation called for by the American Assn. of University Professors in Washington.

And Seitz said Monday that Day’s latest actions show that “because of the postponement now, the (May) actions never should have been necessary in the first place.”

Day has asked the Senate to to begin a semester-long study of how it would like to reshape the university academically in light of budget reductions.

It could recommend that programs in some or all of the nine departments be retained. The programs might be offered in conjunction with other subjects. Several departments might be amalgamated into fewer departments.

In a related action Monday, the senate asked Day to allow students protesting the budget cuts to move back to the location across from the administration building where they had been for three months until Friday. University police moved their tables and signs last Friday to a free speech area away from the heavily trafficked location near Day’s office.

Day said Monday that the “10 or 12 students who have been protesting” should no longer be exempted from regulations. “I’m not going to treat them differently from any other students,” he said.