LONG BEACH – California is losing some of its best and brightest professors, and that will diminish the quality of education in the nation's largest public university system.
That was the message delivered yesterday to California State University trustees by more than 250 faculty and student protesters from all 23 CSU campuses. They cited studies showing that salaries of the system's more than 22,000 professors, librarians and coaches lag 17 percent to 25 percent behind comparable institutions nationwide.
“We didn't get into this business to be rich, but we didn't get into it to be poor, either,” instructor Chris Whitson of Sacramento State University said.
Cal State San Marcos student Cheyenne Barr was one of scores of students joining faculty members in protesting what they claimed were wrong-headed priorities of the CSU administration.
Last fall, trustees voted to raise tuition 8 percent for undergraduate students – a fee hike that the state may waive – while at the same time raising salaries of 27 top administrators by 13 percent.
CSU faculty members got a 3.5 percent raise this year, their first in three years.
CSU presidents at San Diego and San Marcos make $261,744 and $230,232, respectively.
Whitson reminded trustees that they pay their top administrators more in housing subsidies – $60,000 per year for most presidents – than they pay junior professors in salary.
CSU trustee Roberta Achtenberg assured the crowd, which was crammed into the Long Beach headquarters and spilled over into the hallways and anterooms, that trustees were paying attention to their concerns.
More than $1.5 billion has been cut from CSU during the past three years of California's budget crisis. That is translating into problems retaining and recruiting faculty because of the pay issue, trustees were told, and it's hurting students.
Cal State Northridge sociology student John Luskin said that he and his fellow students are not able to get into the classes they need to graduate because of overcrowding, that they couldn't get space in underequipped computer labs to do their work and that they even had to supply their own paper for campus computer printers.
In other business, auditors from KPMG LLP told trustees the majority of their campuses were late and misstated their financial information during the most recent annual audit.
No financial problems were found in the more than $3 billion CSU budget last year, KPMG's Mark Thomas said. The CSU received the highest grades accounting gives, “but we encountered serious issues in the reporting process,” he said.
Fourteen of the 23 campuses – including San Diego State University – were late handing in financial documentation, and some filed incomplete or erroneous information.
