10/24 CSU San Jose Action To Defend Public Education

FOR IMMEIDATE RELEASE:

Contact: Sue Pak; Organization: California Faculty Association; phone: 510-684-1414; email: spak [at] calfac.org; fax: 510-658-2087
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San Jose State University Faculty to Stage Car Wash to Expose Crisis in CSU Education
Over the lunch hour on Tuesday October 24 on the 9th Street Plaza, faculty will be washing Chancellor Reed’s car to showcase need for second job till their next pay period.

Too little money is flowing to instruction, while class sizes are increasing dramatically and faculty are overworked. The CSU administration needs to step up to their obligation by coming back to the table to negotiate a contract with realistic wages and less punishing workload.

Faculty can no longer properly perform the functions of their profession. "For one," stated CFA Chapter President Liz Cara, Associate Professor of Occupation Therapy, "faculty at SJSU, who are so highly educated and so dedicated to teaching the next generation of Californians, are not paid enough to actually afford the cost of living in the South Bay. We cannot hire enough new faculty to teach at SJSU, with starting salaries below $60,000 and their student loan debts usually much higher than that. Even when new faculty do come, they leave after a year or two."

The latest "crime against education" was when eleven seasoned lecturers were laid off in the School of Business. They were terminated because the program of teaching business students how to write effectively was supposedly abolished. The work was parceled out to departments in other colleges on campus "for administrative reasons," not because this improved the learning environment for students.

The action will read out all crimes from a list found in the Chancellor Reed’s

Lecturer Elena Dorabji, who teaches political science states, "I want to believe that I am working in a secluded ivory tower where I am given the resources to teach my students to the best of my ability. But everywhere I look I see the evidence of mismanagement, willful neglect and general malfeasance. According to our campus administrators it has not hurt students to replace experienced tenured faculty with temporary part-time instructors, and then to replace those instructors with graduate assistants. It doesn’t hurt anything - student or faculty – to underpay faculty, disrespect their contributions, and load ever more work on their weary shoulders."

Elena Dorabji concludes, "Everyone in the community is welcome to join our action. Witness our crime scene, the squandering of university resources and callous mismanagement of public funds. Demand that the CSU Chancellor do right by his faculty. Insist he come back to the bargaining table and give long-suffering, hard-working CSU faculty the sustenance they deserve by rights. Visit our website http://www.calfac.org and send the Chancellor a letter demanding he give us what we need. After all the future of your children and of California is in our hands."