Day’s Harsh Vision of SDSU Caused ‘No’ Vote

I am one of the majority of faculty members who voted to petition the board of trustees of the CSU system to declare the presidency of San Diego State University vacant and appoint an interim president while we search for new leadership.

It was not an easy vote. I have taught at SDSU for 23 years, and I am not happy about contributing to the divisiveness and deflated morale on campus these days. I don’t wish to make Tom Day a scapegoat for the ongoing California budget crisis, which has immense implications for the future of higher education in this state.

But Day’s vision of what a university should be is at odds with what most of us who teach at San Diego State believe. His relations with the faculty, never cordial, have reached the breaking point.

The day before the vote, I read in The Times that Day didn’t think professors understood the harsh budget choices he faced. That remark, typically condescending toward the faculty he is supposed to represent, serve and lead, made it clear that Day, unlike other California State University presidents who avoided drastic cuts aimed at the hearts of their academic institutions, just doesn’t get it.

The faculty understands only too well our president’s priorities. We just don’t share them. We understand that the next few years will be extremely difficult ones for all the CSU campuses. We need someone to preside over the restructuring of our university who can work with the faculty toward a shared vision of a smaller, but still excellent, SDSU that remains unfaltering in its commitment to our primary mission: the education of our students. We cannot have the president pulling in one direction and the faculty pulling in another, because as we all know, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Neither can a university.

So those of us voting with the majority in this unprecedented gathering of the SDSU faculty had an advantage, because we have already seen what our president’s vision of a reduced SDSU looks like. That vision sees a university without an Anthropology Department, where the study of humanity’s cultural heritage cannot be pursued. It encompasses a university where outstanding young teachers and scholars are summarily dismissed, and internationally known senior scholars are treated like replaceable spare parts. It is a university that someone wishing to help solve the enormous health care crisis in this country will have to avoid because there is no Department of Health Science there.

It is a university with a gutted Sociology Department and a university where a science as universally studied as chemistry is offered only minimally, because most of those faculty members have been fired.

It is a university where you cannot study the diversity, scope and persistence of the world’s religions, because it has eliminated its Department of Religious Studies. It is a university that, like the neutron bomb, destroys people’s lives while it leaves buildings and equipment intact.

But don’t despair. If your son is an NBA or NFL prospect, he can still go to this university since it aspires to having a first-rate athletic program--it pays its coaches well. If your daughter wants to be an academic administrator, she might get a job there someday because, despite all these cuts, the administrative structure of the university has hardly been touched.

The majority of the faculty at SDSU do not share Thomas Day’s perverted vision of what direction our university should take. We believe there are humane and academically sound alternatives to his vision and that we need to be able to freely consider those alternatives without being thwarted in our attempts by a man who has so distanced himself from the university community and its values.