‘Sociology 7’ Symbolizes Feeling of Betrayal at SDSU : Education: Anger runs deep despite one-semester reprieve on layoffs granted by college president.

Last January, Ruben Rumbaut turned down a full professorship at UC Berkeley out of loyalty to San Diego State University, where he has built a national reputation and garnered $1 million in grants.

But, on May 13, Rumbaut and six other sociology professors got termination letters from the university’s president, Thomas Day.

So much for loyalty.

The anger of Rumbaut and his colleagues runs as deeply today as it did in May, despite the temporary one-semester reprieve that Day gave on Monday to all 146 professors he ticketed for layoffs in 14 academic departments.

The “Sociology 7,” as they call themselves, have come to symbolize the betrayal that much of the faculty feels about Day’s efforts to balance the university’s budget by dropping more than a hundred tenured professors without warning. They have emerged as the most outspoken faculty group on a campus that has taken the biggest hit in tenured faculty layoffs in the California State University System.

Personal and professional lives have been disrupted by what the professors say is the capricious manner in which Day made career-threatening decisions and tossed aside the tradition of tenure. Nine departments were eliminated; nine others, including sociology, were deeply cut.

“I will not accept an illegitimate decision by a man without a shred of an idea of what my discipline is about before he trashed it, who thinks of sociology as ‘social work’ or ‘socialism’, who has no notion of the value of the work that’s come from his own campus,” said Rumbaut, an international expert on immigration and ethnic issues who has taught at San Diego State for seven years.

In a letter to Day decrying Rumbaut’s layoff, San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen lauded the professor’s work improving police-community relations in San Diego.

“Professor Rumbaut has become a priceless resource in this community’s effort to deal effectively with the challenges of a culturally diverse population,” Burgreen wrote. “ . . . He is one reason why the streets of our city were peaceful in the wake of the Rodney King beating verdicts.”

But Rumbaut and some of the “Sociology 7” say they would rather leave the campus than grovel for positions that might open in other departments at San Diego State. Rumbaut will look for work while finishing up a book with a colleague at the University of Michigan.

Sociology Prof. William Sanders, an expert on criminal justice and gang issues with a dozen books to his credit, leaves next week for a new position as associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso.

Richard Hough, a specialist on mental health and homeless issues who has received almost $8 million in research grants since 1983, expects to get a visiting professorship in psychiatry at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Hough is bitter that his chances for a $13-million federal grant went up in smoke with his tenure.

Even faculty members who would like to stay in San Diego feel bruised by having to worry about jobs instead of lectures and research.

“It will certainly affect my outlook toward this university, toward putting in all the time I did in the past toward chairing university committees, toward increasing our visibility,” sociology professor Charles Hohm said.

Hohm, a campus instructor since 1973, said that, if he remains at San Diego State, “I’m just going to teach, get grant money and publish books--all of which is transferable” to another institution.

Prof. John Weeks, whose book on demography is the best-known in the field, will transfer to the university’s geography department, a move that will allow him to maintain San Diego State’s International Population Center, which he founded.

Prof. Phillip Gay would also like to stay in San Diego and has already turned down an offer from the University of Northern Colorado, said department chairman Jim Wood, who also received a pink slip. But Gay, an African-American and one of only a handful of minority professors being laid off, wants to go where he can still teach sociology, Wood said.

The group is angriest over its inability to get a straight answer from Day or his top assistants about how Day applied his budget-cutting criteria to the department.

The department’s professors have been deeply involved in the community, received strong evaluations from students and been prolific, including 57 books authored by the seven professors alone, many used throughout the nation’s universities.

Strong teaching, scholarship, community links--all were criteria high on the list that Day said he used in deciding what stayed and what went.

“That’s why we feel so betrayed,” Sanders said. “We were too successful, we published a lot, we were not troublemakers, we were well-known nationally and in San Diego--we were the goodest little sociology department that you can imagine.”

Added Wood, who had to write himself a termination letter as department chairman: “We even had season tickets to Aztec football,” a sardonic reference to growing faculty disgust over Day’s refusal to consider a major cut in big-time athletics to salvage some academic courses. (Wood demanded and received a refund for the tickets.)

A top administrator who asked not to be named said sociology was cut because the department has a large number of professors at top pay scales and Day felt “there ought to be less of a need for them,” given the 25% forced reduction in San Diego State’s budget over the past two years.

The administrator said Day at first wanted to eliminate sociology and merely pare anthropology--the reverse of what he finally did--but was talked out of it by assistants who were more concerned about the loss of the larger, highly ranked department.

Hohm and his colleagues say Day had little idea whom he was terminating.

“We were told that they had no idea of whom they had laid off because no one bothered to read the (resumes) of the affected professors. . . . They said it would have taken too much time,” he said.

Rumbaut added: “It’s a bunch of incredible mendacity and double-talk by so-called leaders.”

The sociologists now resent attempts by the same administrators, who admit to misjudgments in some layoff decisions, to place the professors in other departments. Day has said he will “take care” to retain “name” professors like Rumbaut, using so-called “soft” or non-state money if necessary. Much of the soft money is generated through grants won by professors like Rumbaut, Hough and Weeks.

“I was offered a spot in criminal justice administration in the urban studies school, but damn it, I’m a sociologist and how do I know that the anxiety I’m going through won’t be around next year?” said the El Paso-bound Sanders.

Hough also said he doesn’t want another position elsewhere in the university. “I couldn’t believe them anymore about tenure,” he said. “I’d have to say to myself, ‘I had one of those tenured positions before, and look what happened.’ I just no longer have a basic trust level.”

Hough was in the final competition this spring for a $13-million grant from the National Institute of Aging to study Alzheimer’s disease among Latinos in San Diego and Imperial counties. But, less than two weeks after he got his “Dear Richard” letter, he received a call from grant reviewers asking whether they should go ahead with his application.

“Look, these committees get very nervous if there’s any question about the stability of the institution where you’re at, or about your own situation,” Hough said. “Yes, I am bitter. I worked two years on that proposal.”

Word of their layoffs spread quickly in the academic world, Sanders said. “I got a call from my publisher in New York. They get very, very insecure” about issuing an academic book if the professor no longer has an institutional affiliation.

Similarly, Rumbaut--recently appointed a senior research fellow at UCSD’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies--will use that institutional identification for an upcoming PBS series on Latin America on which he served as a consultant. The UCSD position is unsalaried.

“I’ll land on my feet, but it will be outside of a community I’ve come to love,” Rumbaut said.

He turned down a position in San Diego State’s economics department teaching statistical economics.

“Why should I go teach economics, when I’ve spent my whole life in sociology teaching, educating, researching? I’ve never taught economics.

“For Day to (rescue) some people by moving them a la musical chairs simply because they bring in lots of grant money displays a complete ignorance of what a university ought to be about.”

Wood, the department chairman, is, at age 51, the only professor eligible for early retirement. (Minimum age is 50.) But, even with a bonus enticement plan passed by the Legislature last week, he would take an 80% pay cut.

Though he was promised a temporary reassignment in political science, Wood--also with several books to his name--worries about finding a new position at his age.

“It’s not a pleasant thought, to say the least,” he said. “After 30 years, I’ve ended up writing my own layoff.”