In early October, faculty members at the San Diego State-Imperial Valley campus voted no-confidence in their school’s dean, David Pearson. SDSU-IV faculty members sent out a statement of no confidence saying Pearson allegedly created a campus-wide atmosphere of fear and retribution.
SDSU Senate Chair William Eadie and Vice Chair Julio Valdes had a chance to visit the SDSU-IV campus and create a report of their findings.
According to the report, which was released last Friday, the reason for the visit was for both senate members to listen to whomever wished to tell their side of the story. The 20-minute meetings consisted of tenured, untenured and part-time faculty, staff members, administrators, alumni and community members.
“We spent a very long day there. We left at 7 a.m. and got back at 10:15 p.m. that night,” Eadie said. “People in the Imperial Valley were very appreciative we came.”
Eadie said some people didn’t want to be seen talking to him and Valdes. Some faculty members would only speak on the phone and one faculty member had them meet at their house.
After talking to many people in the Imperial Valley community, Eadie and Valdes noted two sides of the story. In the report, supporters of the administration described Pearson as “a proactive individual with admirable goals.” Supporters mentioned the dean’s partnership with Imperial Valley College brought undergraduate students together for mentorship activities. The report stated the dean’s supporters implied that his opponents don’t truly care about the needs of Imperial Valley because many of them don’t live in the area and don’t participate in community events.
The faculty’s point of view offered another perspective. In the report, many members who spoke to Eadie and Valdes reported they felt, “the administration has treated faculty as subordinates rather than as colleagues.” The other concern the senate members discovered was some of the faculty members felt the decision-making process on campus was not inclusive and collaborative.
Pearson joined the IV campus more than two years ago from the University of Brownsville in Texas.
“I think Dean Pearson got off to a bad start with the faculty and it never improved,” Eadie said.
After an analysis of their findings, Eadie and Valdes reported the issue stems from Imperial Valley’s approach to shared governance. The report stated SDSU’s model of shared governance is comprised of effective collaboration, shared decision making and a dynamic staff-leader partnership.
Even though SDSU-IV is nearly 100 miles away, Eadie said he still sees the importance of trying to help sort things out.
“They are a campus of SDSU,” Eadie said. “Our administration is responsible for that campus. The students over there are SDSU students and the faculty are SDSU faculty. It’s isolated, and I think that’s a big problem that we can’t solve.”
In order to help the campus, senate members created a list of seven recommendations for SDSU-IV. The underlying message of the report was that faculty and staff needs to build trust with one another once again. The recommendation provided is for SDSU-IV to collaborate effectively on small projects because this will lead to the ability to positively collaborate on larger issues.
“The very first thing is they have to be willing to talk to each other honestly and at the moment they don’t seem willing to do that. We’re hoping our recommendations will spur into thinking about what they can do,” Eadie said.
