As we are all most likely aware of by now, the California State University system has finally agreed to grant the faculty their requested salary increase they’ve been disputing for several months.
The agreement came right before the scheduled strike, which was set to be an entire five days.
This is most likely for the best, as finals loom in the rapidly approaching distance and projects, homework and topics of study continue to pile up ever higher. An entire five days without classes for many could mean the difference between lower and higher letter grades.
Also, there’s that old saying that is applicable as well: time is money.
We all pay quite a bit to attend school here as San Diego State University. With tuition, cost of living, fees and books – even those of us on scholarships or using financial aid – the fees we have to pay make a difference.
To put it simply, there are so many things we have to pay for and some, if not all of the costs, are going to have an effect.
This brings me to my main point.
As the strikes were looming, I recall being told in more than one of my classes about how this strike was not only for the faculties raise, but for the lowering of our fees as well, which was not one of the points that was agreed on by the tentative arrangement they came to.
I recall one of my professors mentioning how the faculty also did not think it was fair that our fees and tuition costs were being increased the way they were and it was why they were striking.
Another professor of mine in a different class, talked about how the strike was for us, and even mentioned the rising fees and costs of tuition in an explanation of the strike on the class syllabus.
However, this tentative agreement they have reached only mentions the faculty pay raise.
Was it just coincidence that I had two professors give this similar embellishment on the strike? Or maybe perhaps others had professors or lecturers who said similar things? Now whether or not they were told to say such things by the strike main organizers or that it was only a select group who chose to use this kind of encoding I cannot say.
However I do believe their intent with saying such things was a subtle manipulation to get the students to advocate for their strike on our school time.
If it had come down to the strike, as I mentioned above, our money and education we pay for would have been squandered. If peoples’ grades were affected, it may have caused quite the outcry at the faculty.
Whether you believe in the faculties’ plight for their raise or not, that is up to you, but we as students are not going to be seeing a fee reduction as I or perhaps more of us were mislead into thinking with this unnecessary “exaggeration” of the truth.