Dear Bulletin Editor,
Thank you for your multi-part series (part 1 ran April 11) on the different types of faculty at CSUDH. This is a very important topic which exposes a dirty secret of public higher education in the U.S. today: students are paying more for less. Even as students’ tuition and fees have gone up, their class sizes have grown, and a growing number of their faculty are temps who are paid poverty wages.
The problem is especially bad at CSUDH, which has, along with CSU Channel Islands, the lowest tenure density in the CSU system. The reasons for the decline of tenure at CSUDH are multiple: politicians have failed to maintain per-capita funding of the CSUs, the CSU Chancellor’s budgeting system disadvantages CSUDH (and probably other schools) in a way that has racist effects, and CSUDH administrators do not sufficiently invest the resources they have in instruction. As a result of these multiple failures, when I’m teaching my Intro to U.S. History course to 60 students, only about 12.5% of students’ tuition and fees goes toward my salary and benefits.
In addition, the data that you presented in the first part of your series describes tenure density by full-time employee (FTE), not by headcount, making the situation look better than it actually is. For the past 3 years, more than 60% of all 25,000+ faculty in the CSU system have been ineligible for tenure, and it’s been even higher at CSUDH. That’s why more than 50% of all classes at CSUDH are now taught by temps. This is worse than at nearby community colleges, where a little over half of all courses are taught by tenure track instructors, and class size is generally capped at 40 and not 60.
Thanks again for your reporting,
Trevor Griffey,
California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH)
