Senate
asks for more tenured faculty
By Tina Page
On-line Forty-Niner
A
plan to increase the percentage of tenured
and tenure-track faculty, ACR 73, will be
considered by the governor of California
in his budget for next year. This plan will
require additional funding from the state
despite an already frugal budget.
The Academic Senate voted Thursday to send
the ACR 73 budget request to the governor.
The plan would require additional annual
funding for the California State University
system for the first year of $35.6 million
and could drop from $4.8 to $12.3 million
in the second year, according to the ACR
73 Task Force Report. ACR 73 calls for eight
years of funding.
The need for an increase in the budget is
due to the high cost of the recruitment
and hiring of new faculty. The process alone
costs $18,500, and the annual salary plus
benefits paid to new tenure-track hires
is around $70,200, the committee responsible
for the ACR 73 report stated.
“From the point of view of the students,
having tenured faculty is important because
a student may need a letter of recommendation
from a teacher after graduation,” said Dave
Hood, the CSU Senate Vice Chair. “A lecturer
may not still be here to provide them that
service when a tenured or tenure-track faculty
member will.”
ACR 73, if accepted into the budget, will
increase the ratio of tenured faculty to
lecturers, decrease the student-to-faculty
ratio and increase the marginal cost funding,
which is the amount of money universities
get from the state based on admission, the
committee reported.
Hood also explained that tenured and tenure-track
faculty are expected to bear the primary
responsibility for student advising, program
development and revision, and are expected
to participate in shared governance. When
there is a decrease in permanent faculty,
the quality of those services declines.
Currently, the report estimates that lecturers
now deliver more than half of all the instruction
(in terms of student credit units earned)
offered by the CSU. ACR 73’s goal is to
achieve a tenured/tenure-track to lecturer
faculty ratio of 75:25.
A problem the CSU system has been experiencing
in attracting new faculty to California
is the high cost of living. This new plan
may help to attract more prominent professors
to the CSU system.
“The whole state of California has had a
difficult time getting teachers to come
here,” Cal State Long Beach President Robert
Maxson said.
Maxson said he believes that the CSU system
does not pay its faculty nearly enough.
Even with the high cost of living in California,
CSU faculty are paid the same as other states’
faculty.
The student-to-faculty ratio is another
problem in the CSU system. ACR 73, if approved,
will reduce the ratio from 18.9:1 in 2002
to 18:1 in 2010, the Academic Senate of
the CSU estimates in its projection.
Although ACR 73 has been approved by the
Academic Senate, the plan still requires
additional approval before it can be implemented.
The governor must include the ACR 73 plan
in his budget and the Senate must vote to
allow the budget proposal. If the proposal
is approved, then the CSU system will see
the funds in the summer of next year.
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