SDSU Faculty Is Poised to Vote on Ouster of Day : Education: Even those sympathetic to the president say the resolution may pass. However, only trustees could fire him.

The four-month budget crisis at San Diego State University comes to a boil Thursday when the faculty will take the unprecedented step of voting on a demand to oust President Thomas Day.

Many professors believe a resolution to remove Day has a better than 50-50 chance of passing. Even several professors sympathetic to Day are resigned to the probability, given the anger that has built on campus throughout the summer.

“I haven’t talked to a single person who feels the resolution will go down in flames,” one professor with a campus leadership role said. “The best-case scenario . . . is to barely lose or to see it only win by a small majority.”

A growing number of SDSU faculty members simply refuse to accept Day’s argument that he had no responsible choice in May but to propose eliminating nine departments and cutting deeply into nine others, laying off almost 200 professors and lecturers, 146 of them either tenured or tenure-track.

Day’s recent moves to delay the layoffs of tenured faculty members for one semester by dipping into $6 million of equipment, supply and library money have done almost nothing to deflect the anger. Rather, they have intensified criticism that Day acted too fast in May without adequately consulting the faculty.

At least 600 professors out of 1,400 eligible faculty members are expected at Thursday’s meeting, which the California Faculty Assn., the faculty union, requested by petition. Already this summer, the smaller and generally conservative Academic Senate narrowly voted no confidence in Day for his handling of the budget crisis.

The meeting comes only four days before the start of the fall semester, with the lowest number of students expected in a decade because of the turmoil surrounding SDSU’s future.

Day said Tuesday that he won’t resign, no matter the outcome Thursday. “It’s not in the institution’s interest for me to get out at the present time,” Day said, adding that while he understands faculty frustrations, he doesn’t believe that professors understand the harsh budget choices he faced.

Day can be removed from his position

only by a vote of the Board of Trustees of the California State University system.

“You can’t make the hard choices that I have had to do and retain a lot of trust and friendship . . . but we’ll go on with things. I’ve never been loved very much” by the faculty, he said.

That trust and friendship, nurtured gradually by the rough-hewn Day during his 14 years at SDSU, has indeed largely disappeared, said one longtime professor who supported Day until this summer.

The professor, like other campus veterans interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified. He and his colleagues expressed sadness at the turn of events, because they have supported Day in his long-term efforts to make SDSU into more of a research university from its base as a teacher-training institution.

“He has lost any effectiveness that he had built up over recent years,” the professor said. “He no longer is an effective president for us here in San Diego, although he may still be effective within the (CSU) system with trustees and in Sacramento.”

The nub of the disagreement comes down both to the actions Day took and to their timing.

Day will speak to the special faculty meeting Thursday for about 10 minutes before the vote. Though he declined to release a copy of his speech, administrators close to Day said he will once again emphasize three major points.

First, Day will say that he generally followed an Academic Senate report from February that recommended, should budget problems continue, “narrow and deep” cuts in a few academic departments rather than random, across-the-board reductions by seniority that would hurt younger, nonwhite faculty members more.

Second, Day will assert that he selected departments for elimination and reduction based on how to get the biggest savings and affect the fewest departments, while trying to protect academic areas that offer unique or vital programs to SDSU and the community.

Third, Day will tell the faculty that without cutting some tenured professors, he could save money only by virtually ending SDSU graduate programs--with 400 graduate teaching assistants--and thereby eliminating the programs he believes distinguish SDSU from other CSU campuses. While tenure is an important concept, Day believes he cannot defend it regardless of the cost to other university programs.

Day will offer to consider faculty alternatives to his proposed cuts--which at this point will take effect in January--but not if they call for elimination of graduate programs or other offerings that range across a majority of SDSU’s 70 some departments and academic programs.

But one professor close to Day said that most faculty members already have their minds made up, especially because Day appears to have compromised the sanctity of tenure, which is near and dear to the hearts of professors.

“Some people agree with the ‘narrow and deep’ philosophy, but almost everyone feels that Tom just did this all too quickly, all too arbitrarily (in May) without the consultation that the faculty expects,” the professor said.

In addition, many faculty members find the list of departments Day elected arbitrary and subjective, the professor said.

“The process is the real problem, and it’s accentuated by the fact that he’s just not a charismatic guy who’s popular in the trenches.

“If he had a lot of personal chips to call in, this might be weathered,” the professor said.

Another faculty member who helped write the February faculty report said that “we thought such drastic changes would have to take place over time, at least a year. That’s the difference between him and us. Tom just went ahead and made his decisions (in May) instead of coming back for consultation” on an action of such magnitude.

Day has said he could not afford to wait for six months or more of faculty recommendations given the size of the budget crisis. But now that he has postponed layoffs for at least six months by using infrastructure money, many professors argue that Day all along had the flexibility to ask the faculty in the spring for alternatives.

“Many, many professors would have worked with him had he told us (then) the magnitude of the problem we were facing, to give us a chance to do creative thinking,” another professor said.

Should the faculty ask for Day’s resignation, campus morale will only get worse, the professor said.

“I don’t see how you can have a faculty against the president and have the president last forever on a campus,” the professor said. “I have no idea what the Board of Trustees will think.

“It’s going to be a hell of a mess.”