Here’s an Idea: Throw Money at CSU

As a California State University faculty member on leave this year at Stanford University, I have had a vantage from which to observe the ongoing contract battle between Cal State faculty and our administrators and trustees. Visiting on a campus where money flows in and around continually, and where, as a result, splendid programs and events run daily that together generate a rich intellectual and educational environment, has opened my eyes to the main problem facing Cal State: Inadequate funding.

It’s true that money won’t buy everything, but it can buy quality when it comes to education. Donors who give to Stanford know that, deans and other administrators who take their money know that, and students and their families know that when they select places like Stanford. Only those who fund and lead Cal State seem not to know this. Their ignorance is revealed in their mistaken belief that the system can take 10%-25% more students over the next decade with no increase in the level of funding Cal State receives and yet suffer no decrease in the quality of what we offer. With this mandate, no wonder that Cal State is in a state of turmoil facing a possible faculty strike.

The funding situation in Cal State has created a climate of worry, if not panic, in which various plans to meet the “challenge” of maintaining access under conditions of increased demand and level funding proliferate and interrupt our work. Attempts by our leaders to treat the funding shortage merely as a problem of “better resource management” are destroying trust and collegiality among faculty and administrators. This, in turn, is hastening the deterioration of the educational environment and creating new worries, even paranoia, about our future. And this leads to even more planning, resistance and frustration.

Given the grim situation faced by Cal State--the educational system that makes advanced degrees available to the masses of California citizens--I have wondered during this year why none of our leaders is calling for increased funding, especially in this period of relative economic prosperity. Such a request would be politically unpopular and, of course, it’s much easier for them to entertain the illusion that we can meet any challenge. Yet if we are concerned about having high quality education available to the vast majority of California citizens, someone needs to ask.

At Stanford this year I have seen up close what adequate funding can buy. Students get lots of attention from some of the brightest and most productive minds in their fields. Talented scholar-teachers are recruited and then given the resources to create stimulating intellectual programs and events.

Just down the freeway, I spent a day recently at Cal State San Jose, a campus that serves 30,000 in the middle of prosperous Silicon Valley, and I was reminded of the current conditions in Cal State. There I observed working conditions that would strain even the best relationships: cramped offices with the names of five or six “temporary” or “part-time” faculty on the door, “maintenance-deferred” buildings and a generally demoralized environment in which no one knows what new accommodation they will have to make to increased work loads and decreased (tangible and intangible) rewards.

Those who want to rationalize the disparity of wealth between institutions such as Stanford and San Jose State say that most students can get by with much less individual attention and that our students don’t really need to work with the best minds we can recruit--after all, they’re not really the best students. Some of us wonder whether it is a coincidence that we are being asked to believe this at a time when on many of our campuses the majority of our students are nonwhite or the children of recent immigrants.

In any case, why must we accept these rationalizations when we know they are just that? And while the leaders in Cal State are too timid to speak up for the masses of college students in this state, must the rest of us keep quiet? Now that I’ve luxuriated in the green grass on the other side of the private education fence, I know I won’t.