 Victor Garlin
Good Morning. I’m Victor Garlin, a professor for 36 years in Sonoma’s economics department. My university teaching career has spanned 50 years in the CSU, and at UC. Berkeley and San Francisco. I was a gubernatorial appointee to the state’s Health Facilities Commission and its elected chair for a year. I am also a member the State Bar of California. I am here at the request of CFA, whose chapter at SSU I headed for ten years.
The CPEC gap continues to plague our contract negotiations. I have seen successive chancellors push relentlessly for faculty-compensation plans that undermine the teaching priority assigned to the CSU by the California Master Plan. Attaching self-serving titles like “performance pay”, “merit pay” and the recent incarnation in the present negotiations, “incentive pay” cannot hide that these plans denigrate good teaching, reward those who shift their professional priorities from teaching to research, deter robust participation by faculty in shared governance and undermine the system of peer-reviewed tenure and promotion that is the bedrock of University systems of standing in the country.
The demand for constant, relentless comparison among colleagues, and the insistence by presidents that faculty members be marginally differentiated from each other promotes a culture of meaningless differences, in the mistaken belief that competition among teaching faculty is the most effective means to enhance students’ educational experience. On the contrary, it encourages junior faculty to reprioritize teaching to achieve the measurable outcomes of publication as the best means to compensation advancement. This false analogy to the market mechanism, still prevalent in the thinking of CSU leadership, is consistently rejected in the literature, and in the practice, of the business community when dealing with the motivation of a highly skilled and creative workforce.
A plan that gives presidents a pot of money taken from the compensation pool, to distribute at their sole discretion, without the possibility of impartial review in the grievance procedure, gives them the means arbitrarily to reward favorites and punish critics. Such a system is indeed an incentive plan, and the incentive is for faculty to keep their heads down, which undermines the integrity of the system of shared governance to which the CSU is committed. That integrity, so necessary to the esprit de corps on the campus, is seriously compromised when faculty participants fear that speaking-out may cost them when it comes to compensation decisions that are wholly discretionary with the president, and unreviewable for fairness by an impartial arbitrator.
In order to recruit and retain qualified faculty, and more importantly, to motivate junior faculty to develop and refine their teaching skills, salaries need to be fair, predictable, and remain firmly embedded in the peer-review process established on each of our CSU campuses.
I urge the Board to seek an accommodation with the CFA in the area of compensation that is free of outdated, counter-productive and ideologically-oriented approaches to the relationships among professorial effort, teaching effectiveness, and financial reward.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning.
 Margo Kasdan
My name is Margo Kasdan. After nearly a quarter of a century teaching at San Francisco State, I was awarded Emeritus status. I served as chair of the Cinema department there and as Associate Vice President North of CFA. Since retiring, I have taught as a lecturer for a couple of semesters at Cal State Long Beach and am currently taking classes there. I have therefore seen the University from several different vantage points, and I must say I find it impossible to ignore the deterioration of the system.
For years you’ve heard that the faculty work load is unreasonably high and the salaries unreasonably low. For years the response has been there’s no way to change that. For years you’ve heard that fee increases limit student access. For years the response has been to increase fees. For years you’ve heard the concern that full-time tenure track faculty are being replaced by part-time lecturers whose lack of job security and benefits threaten both academic freedom and quality. For years the response has been that nothing can be done about it. For years, we’ve been told that resources for public education are lacking. Resources are only lacking when it comes to faculty and classroom needs; there’s plenty for administrators who have for one thing, multiplied at a great rate and, along the way, received great executive pay packages, huge raises, fat bonuses, and golden handshakes regardless of budget crises, and even during contract-bargaining years when faculty have received nothing or crumbs.
If you’ve heard dismay, distress, disappointment, anger in the statements of my retired colleagues, I would have to say that having dedicated our working careers to the California State University, we are outraged at what we see as the logical outcome of destructive policies, serious neglect, power politics, and what seems to be a fundamental disrespect for public higher education -- some say it’s Barry Munitz’s great legacy.
We as retired faculty are not speaking out for ourselves – our pensions are safe – we hope! But we stand now, looking back at the situation of our working colleagues. We speak for them, and for the student population, young people who must be educated -- for their own good, and for the good of the state of California. We may well have reached a tipping point here, and we call upon the CSU Administration to bargain in good faith, reasonably and productively, and to work with CFA because it is possible to resolve most, if not all, of the structural problems in the University system. We call on you to support the people who do the educating – the professors and the staff.
 Dieter Renning
We are concerned about the future of our university. Whatever comes out of this round of bargaining doesn’t affect us but does affect our colleagues who are still teaching. If the salary issue is not resolved it will hinder the university’s ability to attract quality faculty in the future.
I am also concerned that we are turning away qualified students from our university. With the student fee increases there is a number of people who would like to attend our schools but cannot due to financial constraints. I hope that the CSU will resolve this in a way that is beneficial to everyone and with mutual respect between the parties.
 Leni Cook
My name is Leni Cook I am an emeritus professor of education from CSU Dominguez Hills. After 20 years in the public schools teaching English, ESL, drama, Latin and serving as English department chair, I moved to Dominguez Hills in 1984. First as a full time lecturer, a tenure track hire, then tenured professor, where as well as teaching and initiating teacher preparation programs, I became the primary investigator for a series of teacher preparation and induction research grants.
After my retirement in the fall of 2001, I have returned to the university on multiple occasions as a consultant for various education initiatives connected to teacher candidate content and school district/university professional development. I also continue to be active nationally, recently having been appointed to be the director of English education accreditation process for the National Council on Accreditation of teacher education.
My time on the campuses here in California and nationally has given me the opportunity to compare and contrast the way faculty and students are viewed. What I have seen in the CSU disturbs me greatly. Higher fees and lack of resources hurts the ability of the institution to educate. Once students are enrolled, they have trouble getting the courses they need. This extends their time at the university and consequently increases the number who drop out. Students from low-income families are particularly vulnerable to this.
This vicious crush of high fees, low salaries, withdrawal of vital curricular resources, and declining working conditions including maintenance of physical plants, can only be abated by a return by the academic and institutional principles that once made California the top educational state in the nation. It will not be achieved by a continuation of excessive administrative salaries and perks at the expense of hardworking faculty and deserving students.
I look forward to the time that the CSU joins with CFA to remedy past failings. But, as my sons, both graduates of the CSU, tell me, “always the optimist mom, always the optimist.
Yes I am an optimist, it is what has kept me going all these years. But as an advocate for education, my patience with the CSU is running out. How much lower must we drop before we begin to rise back to the institution we once were? At this stage, this atmosphere, I fear my grandchildren will have to seek their higher education elsewhere. And that for me is sad.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
 Milt Dobkin (excerpt)
I have served on the board of trustees for the Redwoods Community College for almost 20 years. In that role, I was instrumental in developing the board’s understanding on what the roll of the trustee in higher education should be. As part of this effort the board was able to change the former adversarial relationship with the college union to interest based bargaining in which all parties worked to solve problems.
However, the trustees send the wrong message to the faculty, who do the work, after all, to enhance student learning, by implementing sharp increases in compensation for executives while offering minimal, if not non-existent, increases for the faculty.
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