CSUN Changes Not Necessarily Better

As one of the CSUN faculty who took the “golden handshake” in August and retired earlier than I had planned, I have been trying to figure out what is happening at the university ever since the new president clashed with the faculty in the Senate over the firing of tenured faculty and told them, “This is not an employment agency.”

I was baffled because that was exactly the way President Blenda Wilson was treating the university. An employment agency sends people out to look for jobs. Isn’t that exactly what she was saying? “We’ll possibly be sending some tenured faculty out to look for jobs elsewhere.” I’d be “panicky” and possibly “threatening” too if I were still at CSUN.

I and my colleagues who also took the “golden handshake” (“golden parachute” may be closer to the mark for luckily bailing out as we did) have been gone less than one short academic year, and the headline on your editorial (May 9) says, “Rebuilding a Sense of Collegiality at CSUN.”

Did it go that fast? Where did it go? All under a dollar crunch? It would be nice to think so, since that is typically American (money will solve the issue; that I gather is why President Wilson was hired), but tinkering with tenure isn’t really about money. It is about changing the fabric of the university in a dangerous way. I doubt that President Wilson was hired to do that. It’s a common saying that the function of a university president is to end-run the faculty. It is also said that the function of the faculty is to prevent such end-runs.

There must be some junior faculty who, reading your editorial, are already seriously thinking of using the academic employment agencies in their fields. Certainly there’s not much to be encouraged by in the global abstractions excerpted from President Wilson’s inaugural address and printed on the op-ed page the same day as your editorial. They’re intended to apply to everywhere and anywhere and not particularly to the sweet San Fernando Valley, which is what CSUN was/is all about.

Meanwhile, the president deserves a management team of her own, The Times says. What are they going to do? Administer money?

The old order changes. But not necessarily for the better.

RICHARD W. LID

Woodland Hills