SFSU Ethnic Studies faculty and students prepare for worst in state budget crisis

By Maria DeLorenzo

Despite growing enrollments and little “wiggle room,” San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies is preparing for the worst because of statewide budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Associate Dean of Ethnic Studies, Laureen Chew says the budget cuts are proportional to the size of each college at SFSU, “but because we are smaller, even though it is a smaller percentage, we are impacted heavier because you can’t absorb the cost anywhere. We have no wiggle room. You have less to play with.”
The College of Ethnic Studies was established in 1969 and continues to grow with more than 6,000 students each semester.
The cuts have yet to be defined, but each college at SFSU has been asked to produce two budgets for the upcoming year. One budget, says Chew, has a drastic amount of classes cut, and the other doesn’t. “Adjunct faculty are the most vulnerable” says Chew. She says this is one of the more substantial cuts she has seen in her 28 years at SFSU, as both faculty and in her current position as Associate Dean.
In the past, Chew says there has been talk of cuts, but always something comes through that saves the situation, “Sometimes you sort of get numb to it, because somehow something always happens that makes it not as severe…but it’s a little quiet right now…it’s a little too mysterious in terms of what the actual cuts are. And we haven’t heard anything. We are just making projections.”
The cuts this time around are nothing new to Gabriela Segovia-McGahan, who is Administrative Support Coordinator for American Indian and Raza Studies. “As a staffer we have long been affected by the budget cuts since time immemorial…I see the cuts everyday. A lot of the staff here have never seen a raise, that is a form of budget cut in itself,” says McGahan.
McGahan also says that because of the continuous cuts to the funds for her departments, the quality of student services has been declining and will continue to decline if these recent cuts go through, “Less people are having to do more work, and it is a big service issue because students do not get personalized attention from staff.”
At a teach-in at Jack Adams hall, Russell Kilday-Hicks, SFSU CSUEU Union Chapter President and university employee adressed an audience of students and faculty about the declining funds, “Do more with fewer employees was the CSU leadership's motto, being the good soldiers and following the governor's orders. But, I wonder, is it really more? This means lowered standards of cleanliness and service, reduced opportunity for employees for career advancement, loss of institutional memory in departments -amounting to a lower quality institution overall in the ways you experience it…”
McGahan echos his sentiments and believes the Ethnic Studies department is especially hard hit, “We are getting starved the most, I walk around campus and see the other departments with designer desks and I’m sitting here on a $20 Craigslist desk,” she says. “How do you take nothing out of nothing? With us it is like, what else can you cut?”
In addition to her concerns about the administrative funding, McGahan says she sees students everyday who are worried the classes that have disappeared from the next year’s schedule. She says there are fewer specialty classes and teacher’s assistants to support the remaining tenured faculty., Tenured professors are facing a heavier course load with less help from the lost adjunct faculty.
Associate Dean Chew wonders where all the support for public education has gone to, “I wonder how committed our leaders are to public education. There is something in our tax structure that is not supporting public education,” says Chew. Chew says this has a direct affect on how SFSU is able to compete with private schools, “This all has to do with slowly removing resources, where we become less and less competitive.”
There have been several protests against the cuts on campus and around the state of California. Chew says everybody is in concert with the fact that that these cuts are terrible, but more people need to write to their legislators to tell them why these cuts are so dire. “They (legislators) have to know that students are totally going to be at the mercy of this budget cut” Chew says.