CSU undergrads must take an ethnic studies or social justice class starting in 2023

CSU undergrads must take an ethnic studies or social justice class starting in 2023

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In the first major change to general education across its system in decades, all 430,000 undergraduates attending Cal State universities must take an ethnic studies or social justice course, a requirement approved by CSU trustees Wednesday following a fierce two-day debate that left some longtime social activists in the awkward position of voting “no.”

The requirement will take effect starting in the 2023-24 academic year in the nation’s largest four-year public university system. Five trustees voted against it — including State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and social justice activists Lateefah Simon and Hugo Morales — who said it did not hew closely enough to the definition of ethnic studies. One trustee abstained.

Two questions dominated their debate: What should an ethnic studies requirement include? And who should decide: faculty, trustees or state lawmakers?

“I’m trying to hold with fidelity to what ethnic studies is and has been and what those who framed it and have been fighting for 52 years have asked for,” Thurmond said at the meeting Wednesday, referring to the discipline’s focus on the experience of four oppressed groups in the U.S.: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Indigenous peoples. 

Morales asked to rename the proposal as simply a “social justice” requirement. “This is about social justice, which we have championed,” he said. 

But Chancellor Timothy P. White said that disciplines evolve, and the requirement his office was advancing offers students more choices.

“Ethnic studies has matured,” he said. “It’s deep, it’s powerful, but it’s more than what it used to be.”

The new requirement creates a three-unit, lower-division course requirement “to understand ethnic studies and social justice.” The requirement could be met by a traditional ethnic studies course or by a class focused on social justice or social movements. 

Many were opposed to White’s plan — including educators and activists — and prefer a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), that more narrowly defines the requirement, limiting it to ethnic studies courses. AB 1460, which passed both the Assembly and Senate, will go back to the Assembly for concurrence next week before being sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. If he signs it, that requirement will supersede the one approved by the CSU Wednesday.

Stand With CFA 2018

Demonstration : Fund the CSU - April 4

State Spending Per Student at CSU and UC Remains Well Below Pre-Recession Levels, Despite Recent Increases - California Budget & Policy Center

CSU hurts students by relying upon part-time lecturers

Lilian Taiz,

It’s bad enough that the California State University is using more part-time than full-time professors.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that CSU has been choosing, decade after decade, to follow a corporate model that builds its part-time workforce at the expense of recruiting and retaining permanent faculty. That model is bad for the employees, but it also has serious implications for the 447,000 students who rely on CSU for quality public higher education.

That hiring pattern is a long-term policy that the CSU has been advancing regardless of the state of the economy. Moreover, in recent years despite greater investment in the CSU at the state level (though not as much as the system needs), these hiring practices have continued.

Defend public education in California

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/make-or-break-moment-public-education-california

Make or Break Moment for Public Education in California

Posted on 07 November 2011

By Pablo Rodriguez
Communities for a New California

On Friday, November 4th, I proudly joined a growing movement of students, teachers, parents, and workers and sent the open letter below to the fifty corporate elite who serve on the boards of California's public colleges and universities. We are the 99%, and through our taxes we are already paying more than our fair share to save public education and vital social services in California.  We are at a make-or-break moment for the future of public education.

We have endured $17 billion in cuts to public education and 200% increases in tuition for the University of California, California State University and community college students since just 2008. Now, $2.5 billion in additional cuts to education and essential services are under consideration for December.  We call on those corporate elite to sign theReFund California pledge[1] to make Wall Street pay for refunding public education.

A week of actions at fifteen California university campuses[2] will begin at Fresno State University on November 8th[3] (see video below) and will demand the corporate elite on the boards of our colleges and universities sign the pledge.   The week of campus actions will conclude Nov. 16 at the meetings of the University of California and California State University governing boards and reinforce the message, “It is time banks, corporations, and the wealthiest 1% PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE.

Restructuring of the CSU- budget cuts

'Restructuring' of CSU is more a requiem

By Joseph A. Palermo

Like the GI Bill that gave access to a college degree for the first time to a generation of Americans, the creation of the California State University system 50 years ago did the same for Californians. In the decades that followed there was an explosion of innovation in all fields and an era of unprecedented economic growth. These mid-20th century public investments tapped into the talent of millions of people who would otherwise be denied access to a quality education. The highly skilled labor force these investments created helped make California the nation's most vibrant state economy.

In a document titled, " 'Restructuring' the CSU or Wrecking It?: What Proposed Changes Mean and What We Can Do about Them," the California Faculty Association, the largest faculty union in the state (to which I belong), has identified the perilous path our so-called leaders, both in Sacramento and among CSU administrators, are leading us down.

Academic pomposity

Spare CSU a Phoenix Takeover

William Tierney's editorial is astonishing for its elitism. http://www.sacbee.com/1190/story/2227503.html
 Safely ensconced in his perch as a USC professor, Tierney argues that California would benefit from Phoenix University's "acquisition of the CSU system." Tierney sees the state's fiscal crisis as an opportunity to reward a failed private sector, which has pushed California's unemployment rate to over 12 percent, by handing over the CSU system to the profiteers at Phoenix University.  Tierney concedes that Phoenix has "little concern for academic freedom," "lacks transparency and resists any meaningful regulatory oversight," and "would likely increase student indebtedness."

Still, he advocates privatizing a public higher education system that has served the state admirably for over 60 years because "Phoenix is a proven generator of trained graduates ready to enter the work force."  And CSU graduates aren't?  Tierney would rather dismantle a public good than call for renewed public investment in higher education (and he's a "professor of higher education").

The subtext of Tierney's drab editorial is that he'll continue to teach the affluent kids at USC while the sons and daughters of working-class Californians are fed a terrible fast-food education from a Phoenix-style diploma mill.

Joseph A. Palermo
Associate Professor of History
CSU, Sacramento
The Sacramento Bee
Letters
October 7, 2009

CSU Fee increases; $378 - $6,300

CSU Trustees Increase Student Fees for 2009-10 as State Funding Declines

Fees increase $306 per year for undergraduates.

(May 13, 2009) – Facing serious reductions in state funding, the California State University Board of Trustees today increased undergraduate, credential and graduate student fees for the 2009-10 academic year.

Effective in fall 2009, full-time annual fees will increase by $306 for undergraduate students, $354 for teacher credential students and $378 for graduate students. The undergraduate State University Fee will go up from the current $3,048 to $3,354 per year. Including the current average campus fee of $801, CSU undergraduate students will pay approximately $4,155 for one academic year, which is the lowest fee among comparable public institutions.

“It is never an easy choice to raise fees, but we are faced with a dire state budget, and today’s increase is necessary to maintain and operate our university campuses,” said CSU Board Chair Jeffrey Bleich. “It is critical that students get their financial aid requests in. This year, benefits for programs such as the Pell Grant are more generous than ever. Through financial aid and grants, nearly half of our students will see no increase in their fees. In addition, due to financial aid, CSU students with family incomes of $75,000 or less will pay no fees at all.”

The student fee increase, which represents $127 million in revenue, was included as part of the 2009-10 budget adopted by the legislature.The university will set aside one-third of the revenue from the fee increase ($42 million) to augment financial aid to cover the fee increase for financially needy students. Approximately 183,000 undergraduate students will receive grants that fully pay the entire fee, which represents about 80 percent of undergraduates who receive financial aid. All other financial aid recipients will be offered loans and employment to offset the fee increase.

The CSU Trustees voted 17 to 2 in favor of the fee increase with Lt. Governor John Garamendi and student trustee Curtis Grima casting dissenting votes.

New Professional MBA Fee Also Adopted

Trustees also adopted a professional fee for state-supported Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) programs and similar business graduate degrees. The fee adds $210 per semester unit and $140 per quarter unit for an annual cost of $9,174. The CSU’s MBA programs remain well below the price for comparable institutions.

Up to one-third of the new fee revenue will be set aside for financial aid with the remainder used to recruit highly skilled faculty to make accreditation of the MBA programs more secure. The proposed fee would apply to professional business master’s programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB).

The trustees voted 18 to 1 in favor of the professional MBA fee increase with Lt. Governor Garamendi casting the lone dissenting vote.

Rebuild our State Universities

Rebuild America. Rebuild our State Universities & Colleges.
A New Deal in the New Millennium for Higher Education
Resolution adopted by the California Faculty Delegates Assembly, October 19, 2008
A paradigm shift is sweeping the world. The historic financial crisis has created a broad new openness,
not seen for 25 years, to the idea that public institutions are a social good and government should play a
significant role in maintaining economic stability.
Yet, while Congress has infused massive amounts of American’s tax dollars in an attempt to staunch the
financial bleeding on Wall Street, it is not clear what commitment will be made to rebuild our human
infrastructure – to bail out the people of the United States.
We do know that broad access to quality higher education is a key ingredient to a positive outcome for
the American people. Educators and business leaders agree that the very survival of a strong U.S.
economy requires a highly educated work force.
Affordable, accessible, quality education is good for an individual’s personal finance, but more
importantly, it is good and essential for our society’s prosperity.
For years, the California Faculty Association has asserted, argued and demanded attention to and
proper funding for quality public higher education that is accessible and affordable for every Californian,
particularly in the California State University.
Yet for nearly two decades we have witnessed the persistent erosion of public support for our state
universities and colleges across the nation. In California, our state has cheated our students by
surreptitiously and gradually leaching away funding per student over the years. Any hope of relief was
undermined by enormous cuts in 2002 and 2003, totaling more than a half billion dollars in the CSU
alone.
We call on our elected leaders, nationally and here in California, to fundamentally change their thinking
about the role and funding of public higher education. It is unacceptable to praise the university on the
one hand while destroying it with the other; now we must reverse course and rebuild.
Today, we must think of the California State University, and all our nation’s public colleges and
universities, as solutions to a downward economic spiral.
Here in the CSU, just since October 1, there has been a 21% increase in applicants for the Fall 2009
school year. It is well documented that in periods of high unemployment, more people seek retraining
and more people rely on public universities. We need to invest in public higher education today so that
we don’t need to rescue millions of young people in the future.
The bail out of the banks in such a bold and massive way has revealed that we can afford to take
dramatic action when we have the will to do so.
A New Deal for a New Millennium that invests significant resources of similar size into public higher
education likewise could have a dramatic effect – if we can muster the will.
Consider this:
 $70 billion, just one-tenth of the amount of the Wall Street bailout, would nearly double the total
state funding allocated to higher education in the United States in 20071.
 $700 billion is more than ten times the size of the federal Dept. of Education Budget for 2007.2
 $700 billion would cover $20,000 in tuition and expenses in each of four years in school for 8.7
million California State University students.
 $700 billion would provide an additional $318,000 to spend on each of the 2.2 million students
enrolled in the public community colleges and universities in California last year.
 $700 billion could send 5.4 million students to a public university somewhere in the United States
this year.3
 For every $1 invested in the California State University, $4.41 is returned to our state economy.
The CSU contributes $7 billion to California’s economy – revenue we cannot afford to part with
given the deep deficit we already face.4
A crisis of this magnitude calls for bold action. That is why we call on our nation’s leaders to:
 Initiate a “New Deal in the New Millennium for Higher Education” to get our people into college
and to keep them there all the way to a degree. We propose a federal program for higher
education in the amount of $70 billion -- just 10 percent of what our nation is spending on Wall
Street and the banks.
 Establish college-going grants similar to the World War II G.I. Bill, and student loan debt
forgiveness for all students who take jobs in public service. Public financial aid should be
provided to rescue our students from the hands of private financial institutions.
We also call on California’s lawmakers and higher education policy makers to:
 Join us in our call for a “New Deal in a New Millennium for Higher Education” that will enable us
to rebuild the California State University and the other segments of our state’s public higher
education system.
 Restore the $215 million cut from the CSU budget in the 2008/09 state budget. And work to add
funding above the minimal levels established in Gov. Schwarzenegger’s funding promises in
future years. A real commitment will yield real results for California and the nation.
 Reopen the doors to the 10,000 students who were turned away this year due to budget cuts.
New graduates and unemployed adults alike need opportunity to become tax paying participants
in California.
 Roll back tuition and fees to 2002 levels before the intensive period of fees increases began that
now total 113%. We can’t afford to block students from getting an education because they can’t
afford to pay.
Furthermore, we call on our colleagues in universities and colleges across the nation to
 Join with us in working for and inaugurating this “New Deal in a New Millennium” to rebuild public
higher education in America.
###


REFERENCES
1
Grapevine, “An annual compilation of data on state tax appropriations for the general operation of higher education,”
www.grapevine.ilstu.edu
2
US Department of Education, www.ed.gov
3
Columbia Journalism Review, “What Can You Buy for $700 Billion?” 9/23/08, www.cjr.org
4
ICF Consulting, “Working for California: The Impact of the California State University,” 2005.

CFA agrees to 10 day pause on strike plans at CSU

CFA & CSU ADMINISTRATION AGREE TO A TEN DAY CONTRACT EXTENSION; FACT-FINDING REPORT TO BE ‘FRAMEWORK’ FOR POSSIBLE SETTLEMENT



Today the Collective Bargaining Committee of the Board of Trustees agreed to discussions which would use the fact-finder's report as the basis for a possible settlement. The parties have extended the contract by ten days to allow for the talks.



On the campuses, CFA will continue the work of organizing for a strike. "We are cautiously optimistic," said CFA President John Travis. "We hope that we can reach a settlement but if we do not we are fully prepared to move forward with the strike."



The administration will now have until April 6 to hammer out a settlement with CFA before faculty begin two-day rolling walkouts. CFA has agreed to not initiate possible job actions until the bargaining extension expires.





Cal State University faculty agrees to 10-day contract extension

From the Associated Press



Faculty and administrators locked in a nearly two-year contract dispute at the nation's largest four-year public university system agreed today to a temporary contract extension that could ward off a threatened strike.

The 10-day extension gives both sides time to hammer out an agreement under guidelines in an independent report recommending a nearly 25 percent pay raise for California State University's 23,000-member faculty, officials said.

"I'm optimistic that a settlement can be reached during these 10 days," CSU Chancellor Charles Reed said. California Faculty Association president John Travis called the extension a "positive sign," though the union has not dropped its threat of a strike authorized by faculty voters last week.

The third-party fact finder's report cited a double-digit lag in salary between CSU's faculty and their peers at comparable institutions when recommending the pay hike. The independent investigator's recommendations were "close enough" to the union's proposals to merit the faculty's broad support, Travis said.

In comments attached to the report, CSU vice chancellor for human resources Jackie R. McClain wrote that the recommended salary hike "goes beyond the fiscal priority" of the university.

"We have no idea whether the recommendations can be funded within the money available," McClain wrote.

During a news conference Sunday, Reed would not discuss specific details regarding faculty salaries but said he was committed to using the report as a "framework" for an agreement.

"The fact-finder tried to be fair to both sides and kind of split the difference," Reed said.

The administration's own proposal to increase wages by nearly 25 percent over the next three years has been criticized by union leaders who question whether most faculty would receive the promised raises.

Faculty voted last week to authorize a spring labor strike that could start as early as next month.

Union officials said that despite the extension, faculty continued to prepare for a series of two-day strikes in April in case a settlement was not reached.

The rolling strikes would move from campus to campus to avoid disrupting the education of more than 400,000 CSU students, though a systemwide walkout remained an option, union leaders said.

"We're going to do what it takes to get a contract," Travis said.

Legislation seeks to take back the CSU

Capitol bid to rein in CSU execs
Legislation would add oversight of the state university system

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, March 1, 2007
State lawmakers have introduced legislation calling for more governmental oversight of the California State University system, which has come under criticism after reports that some of its top executives were receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra compensation without public disclosure.

The oversight plan, which includes adding two legislators or their appointees to the CSU Board of Trustees and requires that executive contracts be approved in public session, comes in response to The Chronicle's reports on special compensation packages for current and former executives of the nation's largest university system.

"This is an effort to earn back the public's trust," said state Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge (Los Angeles County), during a news conference Wednesday at the Capitol in Sacramento. "The general public must have trust in the institutions of higher learning where we put our children."

Portantino, the bill's author, cited the newspaper's two-day series in July as the genesis of his legislation. The stories revealed that as much as $4 million in special perks and extra compensation has been paid to departing CSU officials during the past decade without public disclosure by the chancellor or Board of Trustees.

Beneficiaries included those who remain on the payroll while taking jobs elsewhere and others who receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting contracts from the CSU after their retirement. For example, former executives Peter P. Smith of CSU Monterey Bay and CSU Executive Vice Chancellor David Spence took paid transitional leaves in 2005, a perk that enabled them to receive most of their six-figure salaries for a year after they left office and took six-figure jobs elsewhere.

The legislation, introduced last week as The California State University Reform, Trust and Responsibility Act, would authorize the appointment of two state legislators or their designees to the CSU Board of Trustees. The additional two members would be appointed by the state Senate and Assembly.

Clara Potes-Fellow, a CSU spokeswoman, said the university system has not yet taken a position on the bill.

Portantino, who chairs the Assembly Higher Education Committee, said the bill would restore confidence in the CSU by "giving the Legislature a voice on the Board of Trustees, open up future meetings on executive compensation and eliminate any suggestion of impropriety ..."

It would also give the governor and lieutenant governor -- who hold ex officio positions on the 25-member board -- seats on the board. Each could designate someone to attend CSU meetings on their behalf.

The bill calls for the trustees to approve all executive contracts in public session and reveal all benefits, not just salaries and housing. It also requires CSU executives who are paid for professorships to actually teach classes, and that their compensation could not exceed the amount a full-time professor in the CSU system would be paid for similar teaching duties.

"The priorities are upside down when a handful of top executives are receiving record raises at the same time that faculty are struggling to negotiate fair contracts and students are being hit with tuition increases," said Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, a co-author of the bill. Brownley, who chairs the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education, served 12 years on a school board.

State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, the majority leader and a CSU professor on leave, called the legislation a "very direct and clear message to the chancellor of this university ... the students, and the citizens who share their outrage. Quality education begins in the classroom, not the upper echelons of the ivory tower. The days of trustees operating in the dark of night, giving away additional perks to executives, are over. This is a sunshine bill."

Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, introduced a bill last month that also aims to compel CSU trustees to meet in public when discussing and deciding executive compensation issues.

Susan Meisenhelder, a CSU professor and statewide political action chairwoman of the California Faculty Association, said the university system's faculty union supports the bill because it will make it more difficult for CSU executives "to further pad their compensation."

She cited a provision of the bill that would require the California Post-Secondary Education Commission to track certain data and report regularly on state funds going toward instruction compared to administration in the CSU system. She said the faculty union has tracked some of these dollars and found that in recent years the percentage of state funds used to pay for CSU instruction has declined while the percentage for CSU administration has increased.

"This is a bill about good government. It's not a partisan bill," Portantino said.

E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/03/01/BAGO7ODAAF1.DTL

Strike vote in the Calif. State University

Mammoth Faculty Strike Looms
Many Californians know the concept behind rolling blackouts, most commonly seen during summer heat waves, in which communities go without power at different times in order to conserve energy while preventing a region-wide shutdown. Print


Students in the massive California State University system might soon need to familiarize themselves with another term: the rolling faculty walkout.
The union that represents roughly 24,000 Cal State instructors is planning to hold votes beginning in early March to determine whether to strike if its salary demands aren’t met by the system’s administration. The California Faculty Association says the faculty walkout, which would be the first of its kind in system history and potentially the most massive in the history of higher education, would likely take place this spring at different intervals across the 23-campus system to send a message to Cal State leaders while preventing a systemwide shutdown. The system enrolls some 400,000 students.
Negotiations between the union and the state system, which began nearly two years ago, are at an impasse. The current contract was already set to expire but has been extended through the negotiation process.
A third-party fact finder is working with the union and state system bargaining teams to recommend a new proposal by the middle of March. John Travis, president of the faculty association and a professor of political science at Humboldt State University, said the union is moving forward with its strike discussions despite the possibility of a deal. (A plurality of faculty “yes” votes is all that’s needed to authorize the strike.)
“Right now, it’s likely — a better than 50 percent chance,” Travis said of a faculty strike. “[The administration] has shown no movement for months and has provided essentially the same offer.”
The sides disagree over what Cal State’s faculty salary raise proposal really means. Cal State officials say the system’s offer would amount to a 25 percent salary increase from 2006-7 to 2009-10. The faculty association argues that the deal would assure just a 15 percent across-the-board raise for all professors over the four years. Travis said the union is looking for what it calls a true 25 percent raise, for all its members, over four years.
The system’s offer is beneficial for junior faculty who are eligible for “step raises” as part of the administration’s package, but it doesn’t work out for the majority of faculty members who aren’t in that position, which is why the union’s counter-proposal offers new step raises, according to Travis.
The union’s offer also intends to provide more money to instructors who were hired at the same level and in the same department as their peers but who are paid less money because of when they were brought in, Travis said. He said the faculty association is upset that executive pay has skyrocketed at Cal State while faculty salaries haven’t kept pace with inflation or the cost of living.
“The concern isn’t just about raises here,” Travis said. “This is a microcosm of the problems in the system and our dysfunctional salary structure.”
Clara Potes-Fellow, a Cal State spokeswoman, said that the system’s offer is “very generous” when compared with other industries in the state, and that the money can be used for either an across-the-board salary increase or for step increases.
She added that years marked by state employee salary freezes hampered Cal State’s effort to keep pace with systems in other states. Both sides agree that Cal State instructors are compensated well below the national average — although they disagree on how much below (the union says 18 percent and the system says 14 percent). Potes-Fellow said the system has always been below the national average in salary and above average in benefits packages.
The average salary of full-time, tenured professors is about $86,000 annually, according to CSU data. Associate professors make an average of $69,000 and assistant professors earn $58,000. About half the faculty members are temporary and earn roughly $43,000 per year.
Travis said if the faculty pay issue is settled, a deal between the two sides would likely be imminent. He said that while negotiations stalled on compensation, workload and tenure concerns are also paramount.
Potes-Fellow said the strike discussion is premature. “The negotiation process hasn’t been completed, and CSU is working hard to make the fact finding process work,” she said.
Richard Boris, who heads the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, said that negotiations involving complex and large university systems are typically the most difficult to complete. He said the flashpoints in this discussion are the same as those in most negotiations.
“When you shed the external factors, which are the state and the culture specifics, the real issues are salaries and fairness to part- timers,” Boris said. “These issues have been there for decades and are very contentious.”
Boris said that negotiations become particularly “nasty” when state resources are thin and a system fails to hunt for adequate public money, which is the case in this situation. “Everyone’s back is against the wall,” he said.
— Elia Powers
Comments
CURRENT CSU SALARIES
The current salaries of CSU faculty have been determined by the California Post-Secondary Education Commission, a state body charged with providing the legislative and executive bodies of the state of California with advice and information about post-secondary issues. In their 2006 report on faculty salaries (found here http://www.cpec.ca.gov/completereports/2006reports/06-01.pdf, the Commission establishes the salary “lag” (the amount necessary to attain parity with a comparable group of institutions) at 18%. Note, in particular, that the lag for full professors is projected at 26.7% for 2006-2007.
T Nelson, Professor at CSU, San Bernardino, at 10:16 am EST on February 27, 2007

From: Inside Higher Education

CSU Progress for Latino Grads

Dan Weintraub reports
The diversity machine
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is the rapid rise of the California State University system as an elevator for moving ethnic minorities into the middle class. While a lot of attention has been paid to the end of affirmative action at the University of California, the CSU has quietly become an engine for ethnic upward mobility.
Since 1996, the percentage of bachelor's degrees granted to minorities has increased from 45 percent to 56 percent, based on the ethnicity students report to the universities. In 2005, the CSU granted about 59,200 degree to students who reported an ethnicty. Of those, 32,900 went to non-whites, including Latinos.
The number of bachelor's degrees granted to Latinos has soared from 7,431 in 1996 to 13,153 in 2005.

http://www.sacbee.com/insider/