CSUN’s Misery Turns Macabre : If the state budget goes haywire as usual, the ‘trigger’ clause could mean disaster for the Cal State system. It’s worthy of a Poe tale.

A little over a year ago, I described in these pages the not-so-gradual whittling away of the full-time and part-time faculty at Cal State Northridge through an annual budget ritual that I referred to as “death by a thousand cuts.” What I want to say now is that things have changed some since then--for the worse. Now it’s the pit and the pendulum.

I refer for my metaphor this time to Edgar Allan Poe’s gruesome story about a prisoner of the Inquisition who is threatened, first, by a fall into a deep well, and then, after escaping the well, by a razor-edged pendulum aimed at his heart as he lies bound upon a plank. When he escapes this , the walls of his prison cell, heated to a red-hot temperature, begin to close in on him.

That’s what it’s beginning to feel like at Cal State Northridge these days. No sooner do we avoid one catastrophe then another, worse one looms. First, there was last year’s budgetary brinkmanship. We escaped that. Then there was the earthquake. We’re surviving that, too. And now, it’s the “trigger.”

The trigger: That’s what will hit us if the state budget goes out of whack again, as it usually does sometime in the late autumn. For, thanks to the deal we cut this summer between Sacramento and the bankers who agreed to lend California the $7 billion it needs to balance its books, automatic, across-the-board budget cuts may be triggered if the books show red ink on Nov. 15--a day of reckoning chosen by our wily legislators, I might note, to fall safely after the election.

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So the walls are closing in on us. But isn’t everyone funded by the General Fund in the same circumstance, and shouldn’t we at CSUN be willing to pay our fair share to help balance the budget?

Sure we are, but that’s not what we’re being asked to do, because 85% of the state budget is constitutionally protected from the mandated cuts. That leaves only 15% of the budget to absorb 100% of the reductions.

And what do we find in that 15%? Among other things, that perennial California odd couple, higher education and prisons. But what with the “three strikes” bill and similar legislation, prison spending is slated to increase (its direction for years), leaving higher education with little company among the threatened.

Here’s what we at Cal State Northridge are being asked to prepare for. One scenario calls for a 30% cut, which would mean laying off the entire part-time faculty--if not the untenured full-time faculty as well. Another scenario presents us with the specter of a 50% cut. That would mean shutting down the entire CSU system for the spring semester.

Think of that. If the state chooses to balance its books on the back of higher education alone, the walls will close in on a lot of us, including anyone who has children in, or is now attending, a public high school, college or university. Because if the colleges and universities close for a semester, the graduation and progress toward a degree of tens of thousands of students will be delayed, creating a logjam that will affect California’s entire system of public education for years to come.

Unless you or your children can afford to attend a private university, or can afford the higher tuitions charged to California students who attend out-of-state public universities, or can afford to go through life without a college degree or career retraining, you should start caring now about what may happen this November.

I hope people vote for candidates who think that colleges are more important than prisons. I hope they tell their representatives in Sacramento, and the governor, that effective public education doesn’t stop with a high school diploma, that the state has a responsibility to its children beyond the 12th grade. And maybe it’s time to start thinking about a referendum to include the state college and university systems under the umbrella of constitutional protection.

Then again, there might be another solution. We could re-designate all of California’s state colleges and universities as prisons. And then we could also rename California. No longer the Golden State, it will be the Penal State. I think that would appeal to the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, but is it what we really want?