TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1999

Solution far away

Faculty will be scrambling over the next week to meet the May 3 deadline to submit its "required" Faculty Assessment Reports, a demand being made by the California State University system to deem who is worthy of a merit pay raise that is already two years overdue.

Because the whole procedure is somewhat sudden, some professors are less than thrilled about writing the eight-page, single-spaced proclamation.

Still, forums are under way for teachers to write the best FAR. FAR forms have been sent to each department.

Isn't the fact that they are teachers, devoting themselves to educating students, valid? Or is it now necessary to rise above other teachers to win the praise of the university system?

The sheer number of words that some poor person will have to read is ludicrous.

Take each teacher's essay of four pages and multiply that by the total number of part-time and full-time faculty here and you have approximately 7,496 pages.

And who, you say, is going to read each report? Then combine Cal State Long Beach's reports with the 21 other campuses' reports and you have some serious truckloads of paper heading for the Office of the Chancellor, all on the same day.

Apparently, no one knows exactly what is going on, who will ultimately read the reports or if they will end up being of any significance at all.

This is unclear because the California Faculty Association is voting on whether it will cooperate with the FAR process.

If the vote is "no," the CFA still recommends writing a report, but it will not be mandatory for individual departments to form commissions to evaluate its own FAR reports.

Our suspicion is that faculty members are secretly praying they do not have to form the commissions to read and evaluate the reports.

And who would blame them? As if teachers do not have enough work to do already.

For now, maybe a more appropriate name for the FAR reports would be the FARFETCHED reports.