SF State Vice President Leroy Morishita and Provost John Gemello said that the university would not lay off permanent employees or junior faculty in response to the current budget deficit at the Academic Senate’s town hall meeting on Tuesday.

“There is no plan for any permanent employee to be laid off this year,” said university vice president and chief financial officer Morishita.

Gemello reassured other staff members while responding to questions.

“Junior faculty jobs are not on the table and will not be on the table,” he said.

The meeting was intended to address questions from faculty and staff and hear ideas on how to cut costs while preserving the university’s course offerings.

A number of suggestions were made during the meeting, some more radical than others.

The more drastic measures included restricting student class loads to 16 units a semester and no longer paying fees to the various accreditation bodies.

This loss of accreditation would save the school hundreds of thousands of dollars, but would possibly make students’ degrees less valuable after graduation.

Morishita, Gemello and Shawn Whalen, the Senate chair, assured the audience that while there has been talk of closing some CSU campuses, this is very unlikely, as state government officials do not want to shrink the CSU.

SF State has lost nearly $6 million in state funding since summer and has been forced to cut about 150 classes from the fall 2009 schedule of classes.

Gemello said the current cuts are a more short-term solution because there was not enough time to make “careful reductions.”

Department heads now have to consider where further cuts will be made most efficiently because “nibbling a little bit away from everybody” won’t work over the long term, Gemello said.

“The most important thing we wanted to protect were the class schedules,” Gemello said of cuts made both this semester and in past years.

The most popular idea was lobbying state senators in Sacramento to focus less on cuts to the budget and more on a balance between cuts and raising taxes.

However, Derek Aitken, the associate director of government relations explained that this and similar efforts are consistently blocked by several state senators and therefore hopes of solving the financial issues at the highest level looks bleak.

Other measures proposed included cutting funding for the library, moving more areas of study into the College of Extended Learning, which would make them more self-funded, and petitioning the federal government for a bailout of the education system similar to the recent bailouts of the banking industry.

Some professors asked what could be done to pressure legislators in Sacramento about the issue, but no new or unusual ideas were forthcoming at the meeting.

Morishita summarized his feelings on what is needed most.

The most important thing, he said, is that “the state of California needs to re-commit to higher education.”