News and Current Events

May 20, 2008
Congratulations to Andrew Jolivette and Melissa Nelson, who have been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure effective in the 2008-09 school year.

Congratulations to Clay Dumont
who has been promoted to Professor.

April 14, 2008
"Instructions for a Healthier Planet" a SF State News web story about the anthology, "Original Instructions Indigenous Teachings For A Sustainable Future" edited by Melissa Nelson.
www.sfsu.edu/~news/2008/spring/35.html

April 8, 2008
"A Report on the Health and Wellness of Multiracial Youth in the Bay Area"
Andrew Jolivette, Ph.D. Principal Investigator
Logan Gutierrez-Mock, MA Research Assistant
Click here to download the PDF doc.

In a meeting between the Dean and the Chair of the American Indian Studies Department on Tuesday, February 12, the department was informed that as a result of the proposed budget cuts to the CSU, SFSU is not able to allocate funds that will permit its departments to schedule any sections assigned to non‑tenure/tenure track faculty (lecturers) for the school year 2008-09 and foreseeable future. This statement will outline the impact of these cuts on the American Indian Studies Department – its faculty, students, curriculum, and abilities to meet its fundamental mission objective, which is to facilitate the self-determination of the Native peoples through education.

Before we get to the statistics, we want to acknowledge that the proposed cuts will have real, life consequences on two of the six members of our department: Phil Klasky and Kathy Wallace. Phil and Kathy are respected members of our department who have made invaluable contributions to our curriculum and students – literally enabling us to provide a meaningful set of courses over the last few years. It is unconscionable to us that the proposed cuts will treat them as expendable. They are not.

AIS Curriculum and the Lecturers

In the last several years, AIS tenure/-track faculty have been enormously successful at securing leave and course release from nationally competitive fellowships, on-campus awards, and administrative assignments.

1. Joanne Barker has held a Vice President's Assigned Time Award (Spring 2004), the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005-06), and has a .40 assigned time as Chair.
2. Robert Keith Collins was granted .40 course release or two courses in his first year of appointment for professional development (2006-07).
3. Andrew Jolivétte has held a Vice President's Assigned Time Award (Spring 2004), the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2004-2005), the M-RISP Fellowship (Spring 2007), a grant from the K & F Baxter Family Foundation (Fall 2007), and a RIMI Fellowship (Spring 2008).
4. Melissa Nelson has had a M-RISP Fellowship (Spring 2003), the Affirmative Award (Spring 2006), and the American Indian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Los Angeles (2006-07).

As a result of these various types of course release, the department has been able to hire several lecturers over the last few years, including Phil Klasky, Kathy Wallace, Natchee Blu Barnd, and Enrique Salmon. As dramatically illustrated by the table below, expanded in the attached appendix, they have covered both core and elective courses within the minor and now B.A. program, enabled us to offer multiple sections of high student demand courses like AIS 150: American Indian History and the U.S. and AIS 205: American Indians and U.S. Laws, and allowed us to maintain a breadth and so complexity of our course offerings at the lower and upper division levels. Losing them will jeopardize if not completely threaten our ability to continue implementing the B.A. program next year, in its only second year of implementation.

*Including counts of sections in 685 and 699.

Without the lecturers, AIS will have to greatly limit not only the total number of courses offered but the range of offerings merely to ensure that the core requirements are on the schedule. Currently, the Fall 2008 schedule provides 9 sections of core courses (including three sections of Community Service Learning) and 4 electives, one of which is housed by another department/college (Sociology/BSS). In Spring 2009, there are 7 sections of core courses (including three sections of the CSL class) and 5 electives. All of the electives offered next year were chosen because they "double" for GE, History and Government, or Segment III requirements and thus tend to be well enrolled (see the appendix for the complete 2008-09 schedule).

As a result of the loss of lecturers for 2008-09, the department is unable to offer any courses next year within its Literature, Music, Art, Film/Media, Science, Health, or Environmental Studies areas of emphases. The curriculum is weighted entirely to cover core courses and higher-enrolled courses that will attract students from across the University – forcing our program to be based on economics instead of the integrity of the department's educational mission and learning objectives. The viable and rich diversity that once characterized the department's curriculum has been all but lost in next year's schedule, save for one section of the Language and Culture Systems' class offered in the Fall.

The department is gravely concerned about the integrity of our new B.A. program and its ability to graduate students next year. We have had to cut 1/3 of our total sections from the schedule – 5 of 16 – for both fall and spring semester. Equally important, because we are a small faculty, we are not able to offer more than one section of the courses we have scheduled in either semester. This will have a severe impact on our majors and minors hoping to graduate in the fall or spring. It will certainly result in an almost impossible scheduling challenge for them – now having to coordinate our pathetically limited number of sections/times/days with offerings in other departments in light of University requirements for graduation. We anticipate an unreasonable surge in requests for course substitutions and exceptions among our majors and minors and in the general stress of all of our students, resulting in increased attrition and drop out rates – especially if they are faced with having to stay enrolled longer at SFSU and so accrue a greater financial burden in order to graduate.

This will be an especially acute problem for Native students across the campus who already have one if not the highest drop out rates at institutions of higher education in the United States, in some regions as much as 85%. Native students will be confronted not only with their unique cultural and social difficulties in finishing their undergraduate and graduate programs but with increased challenges in finding courses that will keep them in school and so moving productively and timely towards the completion of their degrees.

All of these factors make it virtually impossible for us to have any integrity in claiming that we are facilitating the self-determination of Native peoples through education – the heart of our department's unique educational mission and role at San Francisco State University. How can we make the claim while we are forced to gut our course offerings by one-third, grossly restricting student access to our classrooms and community service learning opportunities, and over-burdening an already small department faculty with growing responsibilities for student advising and implementing a new B.A. program? We cannot. There is simply nothing about the proposed budget cuts that will not severely impact the American Indian Studies Department – its faculty, students, communities, or program integrity.

Please download MicrosoftWord document to see attachments:
[AIS Budget Impact Statement.doc]