Where Hiring Leads, Achievement Follows

Higher education has been very good to me, as I always said to my students at Cal State Northridge. So I’m pretty sure many of them will be surprised to learn that their Professor Friendly is now a hot-eyed litigant in an age-discrimination suit against the California State University system.

The class-action suit was filed recently in San Francisco by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As a former member of the CSU faculty early retirement program (FERP), I can sum up my personal reasons for participating in two phrases: faculty hiring and student achievement.

With respect to faculty hiring: I had high hopes when I joined FERP that the $4-million salary savings produced each year for CSUN by this program, along with money from escalating CSU tuition increases year after year, would be used to hire able, young tenure-track professors from this nation’s excellent graduate schools. But to my dismay, I discovered that CSU administrators instead chose to employ droves of underpaid part-time instructors, very much like in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons, thereby freeing millions and millions of dollars for use in special-purpose administrative projects.

Practically considered, CSUN alumni who want to emulate Watergate and “follow the money” on their campus can easily do so by checking the faculty-staff roster at the back of this year’s CSUN catalog. If they do this, even on a small-sample basis, they will quickly discover that the proportion of non-professors to full-time professors has more than doubled from what it was 20 years ago.

And they will discover, via this year’s schedule of classes, that most of CSUN’s full-time professors have been shifted to the professor-administrator category, so that they are now teaching only two or three courses a semester, a far cry from the four-course loads of 20 years ago that are still mandated under state law.

Millions of dollars for an administrative country club and precious little to offer evening courses for students who work day jobs--that’s the way CSU and other high-tuition public universities are spending their money now. And they’re doing so in a non-accountable climate that has “permitted a veil of obscurity to settle over their financial operations,” as charged recently by the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education (quoted in a Jan. 22 Times article).

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Obscurity or no obscurity, my criticisms would merely be those of a professional grumbler if CSU administrators could justify what they’ve done by pointing to higher levels of student achievement. Unfortunately, alumni who check CSUN commencement programs each June will discover that the number of baccalaureate degrees is now more than three times the size of each entering freshman class, a clear sign that CSUN’s general education courses no longer prepare CSUN freshmen to compete on the junior level against transfer students from local community colleges.

As for the June graduates themselves, their career expectations regarding acceptance by graduate and professional schools are demonstrably far below what they were back when CSUN’s reputation was high and the performance of its graduates even higher.

I should emphasize here my conviction that there is nothing inherently wrong with CSUN students, past and present. My internist at Kaiser Permanente’s Woodland Hills clinic was a CSUN graduate, just as was my dentist in Granada Hills. It’s been CSUN students for the most part who built up the San Fernando Valley (we were originally “San Fernando Valley State”), and they’re still helping the Valley and its neighbors to grow and survive its recent challenges.

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But if CSUN and the CSU system as a whole are to do their best, what’s called for right now is a higher level of outside accountability. This is a key recommendation in the Commission on the Cost of Higher Education’s report; and in conjunction with the EEOC suit it’s a clear signal that California needs to have its own single-state, federally sanctioned accreditation agency. Accountability by California schools to a publicly accountable California accreditation agency--what’s wrong with this as an agenda item for our legislators and political leaders?

If our EEOC suit, successful or not, helps to improve the level of external accountability regarding money matters in California higher education, I for one will feel it’s been magnificently worthwhile. And so, I hope, will many of my former students.