Lesson in Humanity : Academics: CSUN faculty members take their retreat to the inner city for a close look at how less fortunate people live. Some lend a hand.

Call it a day of postgraduate education. More than 100 Cal State Northridge faculty members abandoned their ivory tower Thursday for a downtown tour that included Skid Row shelters, criminal courts and drug recovery houses.

“The academic world is impressed with credentials and degrees, but this is a way to share a human experience with those who don’t have initials after their name,” said CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson, who suggested the idea and spent the afternoon helping sort clothing at the Downtown Women’s Center.

Groups of faculty members visited 30 sites, including the Midnight Mission, the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Inner-City Arts center. Some took tours, while others pitched in and helped.

But besides learning about the city’s less fortunate, the decision to relocate the school’s annual faculty retreat from a posh seaside resort to gritty city streets also reflects some of the hard lessons facing CSUN professors in the coming months.

State budget cuts have prompted Wilson to warn of probable layoffs for the 1993-94 school year. Wilson, in an opening address to faculty members before the tour, refused during a question-and-answer session to guarantee that academic departments will be spared cuts in the coming school year.

“The stark reality is that anyone of us may not be here next year,” said one faculty member there. “People are just starting to realize that.”

School administrators last year narrowly avoided the layoff of tenured and tenure-track instructors, but released scores of part-time instructors and canceled more than 800 courses scheduled for the fall semester.

Additional budget cuts of at least 7% are expected for the 1993-94 school year. Wilson has said she will reduce or eliminate some programs and, ultimately, jobs, rather than continue across-the-board cuts.

That prospect has raised fear among tenured faculty members, whose jobs have historically been considered lifetime positions.

As they trooped out to the city streets, some said the stark economic picture--which for the past three years has reduced state funding for higher education--has finally started to hit home. The great gap between the degreed and the destitute narrowed, if only a tiny bit.

“It’s important to care for other people and to connect with them, to see that we all have the same basic needs,” said Sister Rita Basta, a Catholic nun and CSUN mathematics professor. “The purpose of this faculty retreat is to show our responsibility to one another.”

Basta joined Wilson sorting donated clothing at the Downtown Women’s Center, a privately owned and privately funded Skid Row building that allows homeless women to spend the day, take showers, watch television or eat a meal.

Next door, the center operates a residence hall for 48 women, most of whom had been forced to live on the streets because of mental illness, alcoholism or money troubles.

“It’s important for people outside the neighborhood to understand that these are women, people, and that for a quirk of fate, whether from economics or mental illness, they ended up where they did,” said Debra Garvey, the center’s director. “Sometimes we have to measure our success in small terms, like having someone start to care enough about themselves to take a shower every day.”

CSUN psychologist Kathy Fritchey, chopping vegetables for a soup-kitchen dinner, said this year’s retreat is different from those in past years because before “we shared ideas and were intellectual. This is a much more emotional, out-of-the-ordinary experience.”

And the lesson to all this?

“We need to know we are very privileged, not only in real terms but because we have an education and a notion that we are in control of our lives,” Wilson said.