By Cassady Jeremias
On-line Forty-Niner

Enticed by lower teaching loads and lower cost of living, English professor Dorsey Armstrong packed her bags, and moved from Cal State Long Beach across the country to teach at Purdue University.
 
Armstrong is not the only young teacher to have left the CSU system. While students suffer from recent state budget cuts and class cancellations, faculty too feels the pinch.
 
Some of the more mobile young professionals looking for long range careers have left for universities where they are required to teach two courses as opposed to four, and have individual offices as well as economic support for research and travel.
 
Marty Fiebert, California Faculty Association President said the workload here is the main issue, and some faculty has found relief at Ph.D. granting schools.
 
“The teaching load is higher here at CSU,” he said. “It is higher than national because of budget cuts. The quality of professional life is deteriorating with higher student faculty ratios, less money available for professional development, like travel and research.”
 
Armstrong was not upset with the CSU system that she left in disgust. In fact, her decision was centered on her family. Her husband, also a teacher, was working at San Diego State. The couple survived a commuter relationship that Armstrong said she might have been willing to continue had things at Cal State Long Beach been different.
 
“It was a family situation,” she said. “My husband and I were able to get two tenure track positions together.”
 
After teaching at CSULB for two years, her decision to leave was gut wrenching. Armstrong said she loved the school, she called the Cal State System one of the “best bargains around.”
 
“The decision we made was so terrible in the short run,” she said. “It was hard to leave the students and friends. I was sick to my stomach during those three weeks making the decision.”
 
Despite her misgivings, she had grown frustrated with red tape and “middle management bean counters” that made things difficult. Armstrong said when she tried to start a new class, or get time for a research leave she found it tough.
 
“When I wanted to propose a new class, the course proposal was 25 pages long,” she said. “It was busy work. There are a million forms to fill out and a dozen committees to attend to get anything done. The intention at CSULB is to protect students, but it ends up being counterproductive.”
 
Armstrong stressed how Eileen Klink, English department chairwoman, President Robert Maxson and Provost Gary Reichard tried to reduce the paperwork and streamline things to make it easier for faculty.  She said they seemed to put up a fight in order to get anything done.
 
“Within the CSU system, you have accountability for faculty workloads and any release time,” Klink said. “We have mandated 12-unit teaching loads, and release time is awarded on a competitive basis which requires faculty to justify every unit off they request for research.”
 
“I know that our faculty often feels overwhelmed by the continual writing they must produce to justify any research time they need.”
 
The CSU is known as a teaching institution, and not a research institution according to Provost Gary Reichard. He said the CSU simply could not afford to do that for faculty. As for the red tape and paperwork, Reichard said it is all part of quality assurance for students and their instruction.
 
“Teachers like to spend time with students and don’t like filling out forms. As a public institution we have to provide backup information for things that are done. There is a lot of paperwork,” he said.
 
Lezlie Knox, a tenure track assistant professor in the history department also left. She went across the country to Wisconsin to teach at Marquette.
 
She said her main goal in applying for other positions was to obtain a job at a research university where she could better combine her love of teaching and scholarship, with increased research time and money, and also a reduced work load. She also said since Marquette is a private school, it precludes many state and federal budget concerns.
 
The pay at Purdue is about the same according to Armstrong, but the cost of living is much less in Indiana. For instance, she said a typical starter home with two bedrooms in a nice neighborhood can be found for under $100,000. In Long Beach, that number is more likely to be more than $250,000.
 
“I am getting paid close to the same in the Midwest. The pay is not that bad. It could be worse. But it was not a factor in our decision to leave at all,” Armstrong said.
 
However, pay may be a factor in hiring. The average starting tenure track position at CSU is about $70,000. According to Joe Magaddino, chairman of the economics department, he is having an exceptionally difficult and challenging time recruiting. He is competing not only with rival schools offering to pay $5,000 to $20,000 more a year, but the department is also competing with the private sector, such as the Federal Reserve Bank which starts employees at $96,000.
 
Magaddino maintains that the economics department is set on hiring the best candidates with strong research potential. He said most candidates come from out of state, looking to take advantage of the climate and California lifestyle.
 
The history department, according to chairwoman Sharon Seivers, also has a hard time recruiting teachers, and housing is harder to come by in California as well, making it difficult for out of state residents who are looking for work.
 
According a California Postsecondary Education Commission report, the CSU system would have to increase its faculty salaries by 10.6 percent in the 2002-03 school year in order to “achieve parity” with comparable schools.
 
However, the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the CFA and the CSU Board of Trustees calls for just a 2 percent increase in general salaries for April 2002 and again in July 2003.
 
Another strain on the existing tenure track faculty is the pressure to serve on committees and attend meetings, something that greatly takes away from class time and research time.
 
ACR 73 — an agreement between the Cal State University system, the CSU Academic Senate, and the CFA — is an attempt to raise the number of full-time faculty up to 85 percent, compared with a little over half right now.
 
Lecturers make up the other half of the faculty, a more temporary and less expensive kind of teacher to employ. They are not required to attend meetings or committees, putting the responsibility back on the full-time faculty.
 
“As the system becomes staffed by part-time faculty, the full-time staff are having to pick up larger amounts of the workload,” Fiebert said.
 
For lecturers, the job market is good right now. They have recently negotiated benefits that Fiebert said rivals those of anywhere in the country.
 
ACR 73’s goal was to increase tenure track full-time faculty within five years, but has been pushed to eight and Fiebert said it will probably take even longer.
 
“The important thing was that the agreement was made, and it is a major plus. We are committed to implementing this eventually,” he said.

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