For the first time in several years, San Diego State is not expected to have a significant decline in faculty members from the previous fall to this semester.
This year, 42 new faculty members are expected to balance out the number of lecturers and tenured professors lost in the past year: However, SDSU Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs Edith Benkov said, “we are nowhere near out of the woods.”
Benkov said while this hiring period was relatively larger than others in the past few years, it is possible the next hiring period will be significantly smaller next fall.
“We’re not really hiring for next year at this point,” she said. “We don’t plan on this recent spike as being a trend that will continue next year.”
The exact number of faculty gained and lost during the past year will not be available until October when all of the facts will be released, so commentary at this point is an estimate.
Benkov, however, has confidence in SDSU’s budgeting ability during the currently challenging economic times.
“SDSU has always done well in managing its money. We’ve always found ways to get around budget cuts, but with the recent increase in cuts, everyone is stretched as thin as they can be,” Benkov said.
Several faculty members in SDSU’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics share Benkov’s skepticism. The entire SDSU College of Sciences received only three of the 42 incoming faculty, and the department was forced to reduce its five full-time lecturer staff to one part-time lecturer.
In October of last year, the department wrote a letter signed by the division of mathematics and applications’ 13 faculty members to Provost Nancy A. Marlin. It outlined the crippled state of SDSU’s mathematics department in comparison to those of other California State Universities.
SDSU has a ratio of .48 math professors for every 1,000 students that the letter states, “puts us at the level of universities of the lowest academic standards.”
This proportion is significantly lower than other schools in the CSU system, such as Cal State Northridge and San Jose State. Both have more than twice as many math professors proportional to their student bodies.
“At our current critical levels of staffing, the education of our students and our research are both being jeopardized,” the department wrote. “We are offering fewer and larger undergraduate classes, and (have) canceled many upper division and graduate-level classes.”
These cutbacks have been occurring steadily across the entire CSU system for the past decade. Since the late ‘90s, student enrollment has increased by 18 percent. Instructional faculty has only increased by 7 percent during that period and tenure-line instructional faculty has not increased at all.
According to the California Faculty Association, executive salaries, such as those of the campus presidents and the CSU chancellor, have increased by 71 percent while student fees have increased 263 percent.
“In short, we are over-stretched beyond our limits,” finished the letter. “We are asked to do more and more with less and less.”
