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President Corrigan's ViewPointViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publications offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu |
Later this month, the Statewide Academic Senate will present a report to the Board of Trustees that lays out the Senate's view of the state of teaching and learning in the system and offers recommendations for the CSU's future. The report draws heavily on CSU statistics concerning enrollment growth, faculty hiring, library support, student-faculty ratio and the like. I expect this document to gather considerable notice, adding to the public attention already being paid to CSU faculty and administrative growth figures. Now that we are about to start a major campuswide strategic planning process, it is particularly important to know that in many respects, San Francisco State differs significantly from the systemwide portrait, as laid out in the draft report.
The last decade was tumultuous for the CSU, as it struggled to recover from the devastating cuts caused by the state budget crisis of the early Ô90s. On this campus, we lost staff, program support and 20 percent of FTE faculty positions. Rebuilding our faculty has been a key goal since then. We have in large measure succeeded. As I pointed out recently in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, at SFSU, tenured and tenure-track faculty have increased by over 10 percent (70 positions) between 1995-96 and 2000-2001. By making faculty hiring a budget priority, we have succeeded in returning our tenure-track faculty to its peak level of 1989, making up the ground lost in the next two years to state budget cuts, and are moving ahead. We are conducting 78 new faculty searches this year. In addition, we are committing $4.6 million in coming years to hire approximately 80 more tenure-track faculty. And those will be new positions, over and above replacement of retiring faculty. At the same time, our part-time faculty numbers have risen by a significantly lower rate than in the CSU.
A slightly different view, measuring changes in student headcount, T/TT faculty and temporary faculty between 1994-95 and 1999-2000, shows that though we grew more slowly than the system as a whole, (6.2 percent vs. 12.1 percent student headcount growth) our T/TT faculty headcount increased by 5.2 percent, while the CSU saw little change (0.64 percent). In those years, our temporary faculty grew by about 21 percent, significantly less than the 51 percent CSU rise.
Our T/TT search success rate is a tribute to this University's appeal and to our energetic recruiting efforts. Despite the Bay Area's formidably high housing costs, we have succeeded in 74.1 percent of our searches, slightly higher than the CSU average of 73.5 percent.
Our faculty includes a higher percentage of women and persons of color than the CSU as a whole. For 1999-2000 (most recent year for which CSU figures were available), 38 percent of all SFSU faculty -30 percent of full-time faculty only -were ethnic minority. Comparable CSU figures were 22.4 and 22.6 percent. Women comprised 49 percent of our faculty (44 percent of full-time faculty), and 43 percent (36 percent of full-time faculty) in the CSU.
Much attention has been focused on alleged major growth of CSU management in recent years - figures the CSU is disputing. It is indisputable, however, that at SFSU, management growth has been minimal. If you look at the category called "Professional, Managerial and Executive" in the Senate report (a group that includes confidential staff, among others), we have moved from 147 to 155 since 1995, a very modest increase. But if you take the group we traditionally consider "management" -those in the Management Personnel Plan -between 1995-96 and 2000-2001 SFSU has grown by just one new management position.
On the other hand, we have deliberately grown in the critical area of technical and clerical support. We've increased state-supported staff positions across campus by almost 19 percent since 1988. Between 1995-96 and 1999-2000, we added almost 200 technical/clerical staff members, while the system saw a decline in those numbers. We plan to continue on this path, particularly looking to the growing need for support of our information technology initiatives.
We can also be proud of another major area of academic support: library funding. As I reported at the August faculty meeting, we have both restored purchasing power and augmented the acquisitions budget to the point that when compared with the CSU campuses closest to our size, we rank first in three key indexes: total expenditures for materials, expenditures per FTE student, and annual growth in books and periodicals added to the collection. Since 1995-96, SFSU's periodical subscriptions and expenditures have risen, while systemwide figures have declined.
Our student-faculty ratio (SFR) may not yet be where we want it, but it is moving in the right direction. From a high of 21.03 in 1994-95, it has declined each year, to 19.38 in 1999-2000. We remain slightly above the CSU SFR of 19.12, but are moving it downward at a faster rate.
The above comparisons have a two-fold point. They illustrate the SFSU individuality that lies behind systemwide statistics and they point out the results of deliberate policy choices and budget decisions we have made on this campus. Our progress has not been accidental. We have consciously sought to shape San Francisco State's budget to its values. It may be even more challenging to do this in the difficult fiscal times ahead, but it will also be especially critical that we do so.
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Last modified September 28, 2001, by Webmaster & Co.