Dr. Timothy Wandling, Chair of the Faculty
FALL 2007 CONVOCATION REMARKS
Hello to all of you and welcome to a new year and the 2007 University Convocation.
Today I will talk a little bit about my interest in service learning, its recent history here and why it matters. There will follow a spirited defense of dissent, critique and protest as crucial to our academic culture, all related to general education. Yes, there will be budgetary numbers and analyses, but there will be a little poetry too. It falls to me at this time to offer some thoughts on how we might move together in such fractured times.
My first year at Sonoma State I was invited to be part of a Service Learning Task Force. This experience was for me formative, influencing in many ways the next ten years of my career here. Some of you may not know what service learning is. I certainly had a limited understanding of it when I began on that task force. Involving students in how their intellectual pursuits and passions connect to the communities around them. It is inviting them to experience fully the social and cultural aspects of their learning, and to extend their learning beyond the walls of the classroom. I have found that service-learning is the very best way to encourage student to develop social sympathy and/or empathy, and to think critically about the various kinds of privileges that structure our daily lives.
What those of us on that task force found was that although we were working with some new buzz words, we were clearly working through concepts and practices that has a long and rich tradition at this campus. And that tradition continues today, mainly due to the dedication of those who are committed to this time-intensive pedagogy. Those of you who may be interested learning more about this pedagogy should be sure to meet the wonderful new coordinator of Center for Community Engagement (formerly OCBL), MerithWeisman, who joined us this spring.
My experiences with service learning reflect both the promise but also the frustration of working at this campus. We have high commitments and wonderful mission statements, but so often lack the institutional commitment and financial resources to sustain them. You may not know this but our campus is a member of Campus Compact, a 1,100 campus organization dedicated to promoting service learning and civic engagement. The decision of President Armi?ana to join this group is one I applaud. But in 1997 it was apparent that campus needed to do something to build and to sustain Community Service Learning. Then Provost Don Farish convened the Task Force. Jeff Woods, then a student leader from JUMP and Heather Howard, then a recent alum and coordinator of student community service, provided the spark and inspiration that got us going. The late Vice President for Student Affairs, Rand Link, was our chair. Insight and vision was provided by Tony Appoloni, head of CIHS. As we sought funding from CSU grants, Julie McClure from CIHS and Project Serves, proved invaluable. Two new faculty members, Sandy Zimmerman from Counseling, and I, were added to the mix. Working with this group of visionary thinkers jazzed me up about being at Sonoma State. I saw vision, leadership and a passion for connecting student learning to our communities.
Times change and almost all of these folks have now left or are leaving the campus. Heather, who brought so much passion and commitment to service learning beginning as a student leader, remains as a valued colleague in student affairs. Others of course have stepped in or will in the future, but I cannot help but feel that we have lost too many valuable people out of that group and that loss is indicative of systemic problems here.
I find the university administration’s commitment to so many of the ephemeral things that we value to be lacking. Student learning is enhanced:
Let’s face it – we are all aware that too many decisions around here revolve primarily around what we call “making target.” For this understandably important goal it seems that all these other crucial aspects of a vibrant and supported intellectual community must be sacrificed. Too many of those (staff and faculty) left behind to do these important things are getting stretched far too thinly.
I believe this faculty has come to the point where it is no longer merely asking if some other way can be found to achieve our enrollment target without destroying everything else; this faculty is demanding that new ways and better answers be provided.
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What is the larger context in higher education in which these demands are made? Let me quote from Henry Giroux and Susan Seals Giroux excellent 2004 book, Take Back Higher Education.
Against the increasing corporatization of the university and the advance of global capitalism, educators need to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language that embraces an insurgent utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or punish and dismiss those who dare look beyond the horizon of the given. (239)
“Educated hope” the Girouxs tell us, is crucial to an educational process that can and must challenge the status quo of power, privilege and hierarchy. All of the five things I listed earlier are crucial (yet ephemeral in terms of budget) to student learning and to fostering this kind of hope in our students. We must, they continue, address the “failure of academics and intellectuals in a variety of public spheres not only to conceive of life beyond profit margins, but to imagine what pedagogical conditions might be necessary to bring into being forms of political agency that might expand individual rights, social provisions and democratic freedoms. (241).
Now this may seem a bit didactic to some. It is certainly not our job as educators to prescribe for our students a particular ideology or set of political values. But what are “our” values and how do we convey them? If we do not make manifest, through our actions and work as public intellectuals, our contestation of the status quo, are we not then in fact prescribing a politics of quietist acceptance of hierarchical systems of power, prestige and privilege? We must ensure that our classrooms continue to be places where the minds of our future can see beyond the limitations of our own historical moment but also of our own limited imaginings.
These questions face those in our profession in the 21st century and go well beyond our local concerns at Sonoma State. But the tensions on our campus exemplify these larger ideological concerns. We have so much to offer and so much promise: The programs and educational opportunities found in campuses such as ours provide some of the last remaining bastions of free thinking, where sustainability can be meaningfully counter posed to globalization and where analytical and animated discussions of social justice, peace, and diversity can be discussed in meaningful contrast with societal structures that reward profit, militarism and power. Programs such as Project Censored, which involve a collaborative effort of many students, staff and faculty under the guidance of Peter Phillips, exemplify the crucial role we can play in providing alternate ways of seeing and thinking about what so often passes for truth. Tenure and academic freedom have thus far carved out and preserved a space for critique, a space increasingly denied to those in the corporate-dominated worlds of big media, big politics and of course big business.
We need to worry then, when we start to seem like “big education.”
At this point, I would like to repeat some questions that occurred to me a few years ago as I reflected upon the situation at our university:
These questions will continue to motivate my actions in service of the Senate and this faculty during the coming year. I am inspired by the teaching and writing of bell hooks, whose book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, challenges us to work together to fulfill the libratory promise of education: “It is crucial,” she tells us, “that critical thinkers who want to change our teaching practice talk to one another, collaborate in a discussion that crosses boundaries and creates a space for intervention (hooks 129).
We must be steadfast in preserving our curriculum from further erosion; we must also seek to improve its quality, especially in the crucially important general education courses that provide so many valuable learning opportunities for students to explore the complexities of culture and society. I encourage all of you to engage in debate and discussion about the need for and shape of reform to our general education program. The mission statement of our general education is wonderful, but I believe institutional practices and priorities make it very hard to achieve with sustained excellence.
I want to highlight one section of this mission statement because I believe that many of the actions of this faculty in recent years embody the values embedded in these statements. Under section 2, “Develop social and global knowledge,” we have the following:
To my mind, these kinds of intellectual activities we hope to inspire in our students have been modeled by our Academic Senate in recent years. I am proud to serve on a body that takes seriously its own engagement with the communities that surround it. We are often taken to task for being unmanageable, political, too unwilling to accept the way things are, too locked into a model of dissent and protest. I say we are modeling the actions we hope to inspire in our students. What good are educational goals and objectives if we don’t see ourselves now doing the kinds of things we hope our students will continue in the future? While we should readily accept criticism of our ideas or proposals, we should adamantly reject the claims that we have no “business” speaking about matters that do not concern us.
Consider numerous senate resolutions and actions requesting that more campus resources be allocated to support the diversity of staff, faculty and students on our campus, and to encourage. Further, faculty concerns about the switch to a national corporation for our campus bookstore need to be understood within the contexts of concerns for sustainability within a global context. I am glad to know that a committee of staff, faculty and students continues to examine this issue; however, I was so dismayed by the dismissal of faculty concerns on this issue. This was really one of the most shocking things to me during my year as chair-elect. Positions and arguments put forward in alignment with our intellectual and pedagogical goals were consistently dismissed. I believe this is what the Girouxs describe as the punishment heaped on those who attempt to look beyond the horizon.
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Now I promised a few numbers so perhaps I should leave the theoretical for the moment.
Something I observed last spring was a rather critical piece in the SF Chronicle identifying an increase in salary for some noteworthy state employees:
A state commission voted unanimously Monday to give the Legislature a 12 percent salary increase, boosting most lawmakers' annual pay to $110,880. Leaders like Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata will make $127,512, according to the new salary structure, which goes into effect in December.
The raise increases the distinction the state already had as the most lucrative legislative gig in the nation. Tuesday, May 24, 2005 (SFGate.com)
So how many state-supported people on the campus of SSU make more than that $110K per year made by those elected to run our state? At least 24. How many of those are teaching faculty? 0. Faculty average salary was $67K. How many work in Student Affairs? 1 How is this reality justified? If you look at the salary study I did (posted on the Senate webpage) you’ll see a link to the CSU HR site indicating typical salary costs for various positions.
http://www.sonoma.edu/Senate/Referendum/procon.html (“Salary and Budget Analysis 2007”).
http://www.calstate.edu/HRAdm/pdf2006/TL-SA2006-06SUP1MPPReport.pdf
Note – numbers throughout this address are derived from 2005-2006 budgets.
Numbers intrigue me. Two years ago our direct instructional budget was reported to be about $21 million. Students paid about $23 million in “fees” at our “tuition-free” campus. I think it is only fair to the taxpayers and to our students to ask where the rest of the state money goes.
We receive $8,900 per new student (FTES). Figure out how many FTES you taught last year and see how little of the figure goes into your salary and benefits. For an average professor, one four unit class of 40 students takes care of all of your salary and most of your benefits.
Since the early 1990s, only about 40% of state monies have been allocated on this campus for academics. The state legislative analyst’s office budgets the CSU thinking that 74-78% of dollars should have been going to academics during this time. That is millions of dollars over those years. And that is just the budget figure. In reality, the schools usually wind up with much smaller portions due to various assessments that take back their funds.
One other thing: Somehow, despite the fact that our largest schools received hardly any of the $8,900 in growth money (after assessments) for their new students, SFR somehow dropped again last year. I have been personally researching this issue all summer and cannot yet explain this miraculous occurrence. Somehow the number of FTEF has increased on the books dramatically here despite the fact that we have not actually had funds to hire that many new faculty. I will continue to work with the administration to find out how this has happened. At this point I believe that anomalous statistics and a change in reckoning have led to this oddity, but I do not find to be credible the public claim by the administration that SSU has addressed its SFR issue in any meaningful way.
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Okay enough numbers talk.
One of the questions many people ask me is: how confrontational should we be in the situation that confronts us? My answer to this is that we should be steadfast but not antagonistic.
The good news is that legal documents guiding CSU governance support our role as equal participants in jointly planning the future of this university. HEERA says “joint decision making”:
The Legislature recognizes that joint decision making and consultation between administration and faculty or academic employees is the long-accepted manner of governing institutions of higher learning and is essential to the performance of the educational missions of these institutions (HEERA3560.2).
Further, the Board of Trustees’ statement on Collegiality says “The collegial process also recognizes the value of participation by the faculty in budgetary matters, particularly those directly affecting the areas for which the faculty has primary responsibility.” Note that despite repeated statements by the administration here that the faculty has no say in budget, this statement does not say “Only” it says “particularly” those areas where the faculty has primary responsibility. I am not for micro-managing the university budget or for second guessing every administrative decision. I am for jointly involving the faculty, especially in the expressed views of the deliberative body that is the Academic Senate, in the planning of campus priorities from whence sound budgetary decisions should flow.
In spring 06, the Senate provided a clear statement of academic priorities, focusing on many of the issues I have talked about today, as well as on workload and SFR. For a while, it seemed those priorities would be folded into and prioritized within the ongoing strategic planning processes. A year and a half later we are still waiting to see the outcome of that process, but events last year left us less than sanguine. We must continue to insist that a restoration of balance to academics and services directly supporting student learning be central to any strategic planning.
But again I would say we need not be antagonistic. Perhaps the state legislature, through HEERA, put us in this “joint” role precisely because it new that we would provide balance to the administrative way of thinking. Not just here at SSU, but throughout the CSU faculty have lost that joint role but we need to reclaim it.
One thing I observed last spring was how personally and thoughtfully my colleagues wrestled with the no confidence vote. Many people I know voted for that resolution yet have a high personal regard for President Armi?ana, a regard I share. The two positions are not exclusive and the crisis we face here is not about personalities or communication styles, but about institutional priorities. And I think the faculty has made itself clear that past practice just won’t do any more.
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Here are some things we can do together this year.
Continue to do things worth doing. Support student learning. Find balance to create and write if you can. Support efforts to improve diversity on this campus.
Which leads to an announcement: Please if you can do attend what promises to be an exciting first day for our freshman scheduled for this Monday, AUGUST 20. Faculty meet at the Stevenson loading dock at 11:30.
As the year begins, consider the following:
Refuse work speed up. Work with Department Chairs and in your departments to implement the workload resolution passed by the Senate last semester. Work with CFA. This is an opportunity for faculty to take matters into our own hands and to refuse self-exploitation. If we do that, the students will eventually gain from our refusals. Use CS codes and stick to class size limits that are appropriate to the instructional goals of the course. While making target must remain a university goal, departments need to resist this being done on their backs and with ever decreasing resources and at the expense of their students.
Understand what is happening with the changes in the RTP policy. Read and comment upon the proposed revised policy. Insist that your department’s criteria make sense given the work that needs to be done. The RTP document will be crucial place around which conversations about workload will center this year.
Understand the workload implications for you and your department of the new advising policy. The students supported this policy and the senate passed it last year even with the understanding that it was somewhat “aspirational.” I think we need to provide excellent advising for students so how are we going to do that? How is doing that figured in to the RTP process?
Support faculty governance as it insists upon a restoration of balance in SSU’s budgetary processes.
Consider attending Senate meetings or joining FAACT to become more involved. The more of us who get engaged the more we will be heard.
After this thought I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from that pacifist quasi-socialist Romantic Poet Percy Shelley. Our power as a faculty and as a community lies not just with legal definitions and policy statements but in our numbers
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.
Percy Bysche Shelley, “Mask of Anarchy” (1819)
We are many and we can work together this year to bring about needed change.