Next week, November 19-20, the CSU Board of Trustees will convene
for its bi-monthly meeting at the Chancellor’s Office in Long
Beach. The meeting has been much anticipated because the Trustees
were supposed to vote on a controversial proposal that will
change CSU admissions requirements, adding an extra year of high
school math, or “quantitative reasoning” coursework. Responding
to pressure from many students, faculty, education advocacy
organizations, and community groups and a request from the
Governor, the Chancellor has pulled the vote from the November
agenda and instead will continue discussing the proposal. This
discussion will take place on Wednesday morning at 8:00 a.m.
Outside the meeting room at the Chancellor’s Office, CSU Students
for Quality Education will be protesting the proposal.
The first two forums to provide input on what qualities the next
CSU Chancellor should embody kicked off this week, with students,
faculty and staff calling on the search committee to select a
leader who is focused on the student experience and increasing
diversity among faculty.
Next year’s Equity Conference will be CFA’s ninth such
conference, and for the first time it will be organized as a
project of the Council for Racial and
Social Justice. The renaming of CFA’s Council for Affirmative
Action reflects the intentional progression of CFA’s Anti-Racism
Social Justice Transformation. That transformational work is also
visible in the selection of three themes that will be examined at
the 2020 Equity Conference: Decolonization, Liberation, Joy and
Resistance; Intersectional Continuums of Violence & Power;
*(In)/(Hyper)Visibility, all of which are chosen to move us
closer to “co-liberation,” the understanding that, just as our
experiences of oppression are connected, so too are our struggles
for freedoms and our pursuit of a better world.
Wildfires are sweeping across wide swaths of the state, in both
Northern and Southern California, resulting in large scale power
disruptions and evacuations, as well as the shuttering of public
agencies, businesses and schools. CSU campuses including
Maritime, Humboldt, Sonoma, and San Bernardino were closed this
week and another wave of high winds and fire danger is forecast
in those areas.
As our union gears up for our contract campaign, we must work
hard to build power through active and engaged membership efforts
on the campuses, educate and activate the faculty, and to
reinforce relationships with community allies. But there is work
to do at the bargaining table with management. To that end, we
want to extend an invitation to union members to join our efforts
on the Bargaining Team. As a member-run union, we have a
Bargaining Team made up of faculty who develop proposals and
respond to management’s proposals. In short, CFA’s
Bargaining Team is tasked with negotiating a tentative agreement
for the full successor contract, which must ultimately be
ratified by CFA’s membership at the conclusion of the contract
campaign.
CFA members gathered for a three-day weekend packed with meetings
of caucuses, committees, and councils; interactive workshops; and
time to re-connect with peers from around the state while gearing
up for the upcoming bargaining campaign.
Yesterday morning news broke that CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White
would be retiring at the end of the academic year in June 2020.
White has served as Chancellor since 2013.
The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) no
longer maintains a financial interest in private prison operators
CoreCivic and GEO Group, which run the largest family migrant
detention centers in the nation. Marking the culmination of
a months long campaign, CalPERS executives informed CFA’s
board of directors last Friday that it had made the decision to
pull its financial interests from two of the nation’s most
notorious private prison companies.
Around 200 faculty activists met in Los Angeles for three days of
meetings and CFA’s semi-annual Assembly of delegates. These are
some of the images from the weekend weekend.
Both at the Fall Leadership Kickoff and at a recent meeting of
the CalPERS Investment Committee, CFA members proudly showed
their solidarity in calling on the pension system to stop
investing in private prison operators CoreCivic and GEO
Group. At the committee meeting, CFA Associate Vice
President Margarita Berta-Avila and others provided a series of
emotional and direct remarks to the assembled members.
On Tuesday, April 30, faculty and students were at the Capitol to
urge lawmakers to #FundTheCSU and support state budget
allocations that would strengthen the People’s University.
To learn more about CFA’s budget advocacy and sponsored
legislation, click
here.
CFA held a reception on Monday, April 29 honoring Senator Holly
Mitchell and Gov. Gavin Newsom for their efforts on behalf of
public higher education.
Both Newsom and Mitchell were at CFA Headquarters in Sacramento
to accept their awards during the reception, which also was
attended by numerous legislators, faculty, and students.
CFA hosted a rally in support of gubernatorial candidate Gavin
Newsom on Friday, Nov. 2 at San Diego State.
The event drew hundreds of students, faculty, and community
allies to the East Commons, where the crowd heard more about
Newsom’s commitment to protecting quality public higher
education.
BARGAINING SURVEY TO CLOSE SOON – RESPOND
TODAY: CFA’s Bargaining Team is working hard to
construct a strategy for success as we edge closer to the
expiration of our contract on June 30, 2020. As has been
mentioned previously, a key part of that strategy is involving
CFA members in defining priorities for our next contract.
If you are one of the thousands of members who have already
responded, thank you! If you
have not done so yet, please take a few minutes to share your
feedback. The survey will close on November 25.
Recently, the effort to qualify the Schools and Communities
First Initiative for the November 2020 ballot took off in
earnest as supporters set out in droves to collect the nearly 1
million required signatures. Also known as the “split roll”
initiative, the measure would alter Proposition
13 by allowing for the reassessment of commercial and
industrial properties at current market levels.
LECTURER SHARED GOVERNANCE CONFERENCE: The 4th
CFA Lecturer Shared Governance Conference will be held on
Saturday, November 16th at Cal Poly Pomona. This day-long event
will bring together lecturers, temporary counselors, temporary
librarians, coaches, and tenure-track allies from across the CSU
to engage on shared governance. The conference will include
sessions onShared Governance is a Faculty
Rightand Anti-Racism and Social Justice through Shared
Governance.
The CSU Trustees’ search committee for the next Chancellor
announced a series of public forums to collect input from
“stakeholders and interested parties.” Following White’s
announcement two weeks ago, CFA President Charles
Toombs outlined
some of the priorities our union believes the next Chancellor
must focus on.
CFA SUPPORTS CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION (CTU), ONGOING
STRIKE: In a powerful show of strength and solidarity
25,000 Chicago teachers
went on strike on October 17 to, as CTU president
Jesse Sharkey put it, “bring justice and high quality
schools to the children and teachers of Chicago.” This marks the
seventh time in seven years that CTU members initiated a strike.
CTU’s primary objectives are to vastly improve the workplace for
teachers and enhance learning conditions for students.
