Figuring the Human Costs to Budget Cuts in Education : College: The SDSU faculty struggles to provide quality teaching while students bear increased fees, fewer choices.

Having been asked by one of my students to describe the consequences to faculty members of the San Diego State University budget cuts, I wish I could respond with a curmudgeonly, but limited complaint about factory speedup.

But in truth, my colleagues and I are working many more hours a week because we now have even larger classes and thus many more papers to grade, and we need to spend more time in our offices to be available to this increased number of students, etc. Working a 60- or 70-hour week and trying to maintain some semblance of a family and personal life at the same time is not just frustrating, but next to impossible.

Having less access to professional growth necessities like research sabbaticals and travel money to give conference papers means that many of us will no longer be able to do nearly as much of the intellectual work for which we have spent years training, and this translates to less energized and creative teaching.

Many of the younger faculty are deeply depressed as we imagine struggling to provide quality teaching only to discover that those of us who have chosen not to shortchange our students are the ones who will not get tenure, because we did not steal enough time away from students to do what we ironically have been forced to call our “real work”: publishing.

But what has happened at SDSU and at other Cal State University campuses is not simply a colossal, although temporary, inconvenience for faculty members, but an enormous and continuing tragedy for both students and faculty alike.

I want to put a personal face on this tragedy by describing two incidents that occurred last week, the consequences of which are traceable directly to the budget cut.

A student came during my office hours to request additional time for an already overdue term paper. I agreed to her request without insisting that she provide any explanation. Like every other teacher I know, I frequently have found myself with overdue projects. Given that fact, I generally assume that life has a way of intervening at inconvenient times for students as well.

But she clearly wanted to talk. I discovered that this student was simultaneously taking eighteen units while working 30 hours a week (an increasing familiar scenario for SDSU students in the face of a 40% rise in fees and decreasing student aid). It has taken her eight years of going to school while working nearly full time to arrive at her final semester at SDSU. Her dream of being admitted to a graduate teaching credential program and becoming a high school teacher is becoming increasingly remote. This is not surprising. Despite the fact that she is both motivated and intelligent, her grade-point average has suffered seriously from the logistics of her impossibly overburdened situation.

Another student currently in one of my classes came in to talk, ostensibly about a novel we were reading in class. During the course of our conversation, he revealed to me that last year he had been intermittently plagued by a host of peculiar and frightening medical symptoms.

Because this young man is a student at SDSU, an institution whose student health facilities have been gutted by this budget crisis, he has been unable to get the necessary medical tests that would assist him in early diagnosis and intervention of a potentially very serious medical problem. As a full-time student unable to work a full-time job, let alone to acquire that increasing rarity, a job that provides health insurance, he has no alternative but to put off medical intervention until after he graduates. With the current cuts in the class schedule, his plan to graduate in one more semester may be impossible, despite the desperate urgency of his situation.

The Student Health Services provides no follow-up care, no mammograms, no HIV testing--despite the estimates that one in 100 SDSU students has HIV--and after huge and noisy protests, now has relented and does approximately 20 Pap smears a month (up from zero). Graduate teaching assistants learned last year that funding for their health insurance benefits and those of their dependents were to be summarily eliminated, thus forcing some of them out of their teaching positions and out of school altogether, as well as endangering the health and welfare of the others.

SDSU President Tom Day has indicated that he is completely comfortable with totally eliminating health care for students. His comment “let them all get Blue Cross/Blue Shield” is reminiscent of Gov. Pete Wilson’s smug Marie Antoinette-style battle cry “let them get jobs” (in a state with 10% unemployment), and would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

If corporate tax loopholes were eliminated, California could raise enough money so that the governor would no longer be able to encourage a mentality that pits the needs of students against those of the disabled, the frail elderly, or parents displaced from a shrinking job market who nevertheless must find some way of providing food and shelter for themselves and their families.

Sometimes I feel like a doctor treating blindness in an underdeveloped country--blindness that is completely preventable with a few pennies per day for vitamin supplements. I see lives being needlessly ruined because of economic priorities that border on madness.

As teachers, we find ourselves referring to students desperately trying to enroll in our classes as “crashers” in much the same way I imagine Vietnam vets called the Vietnamese “gooks.’ For the sake of our own survival, we must obliterate their individuality, their dignity, their real suffering.

In its own way, this nation really has once again become a country at war with itself. Last week was the 10th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: the Wall. The outrage and grief at our national priorities in the ‘60s are reverberating in the ‘90s. Like that memorial, the protest panels painted by SDSU students on the construction barriers that run a section of campus--and also referred to as “the Wall”--remind us that many thousands of lives are at stake. It is time to take our country back.