At noon today I'm going to a big Save EOP rally on campus -- for those of you familiar with the California fiscal crisis, Gov. Schwarzenegger's most recent budget proposal, which comes as cuts on top of a whole series of previous cuts, will be hitting the Cal State system very, very hard.
Educational Opportunity Programs are absolutely critical to outreach and providing higher education to low-income students -- many of whom come from first-generation immigrant and refugee families -- and the total 2004-2005 reductions (about $240 million) has led to the proposed elimination of EOP.
At SFSU, the Career Center, Student Health Counseling and Psychological Services, including other so-called academic preparation programs, will be totally wiped out unless the students actually vote in a referendum to voluntarily raise their student fees. All in all, this will be the third fee increase in two years -- making it an increase of 58% for undergraduates and a whopping 110% for graduate students. (I'm also on the Library Advisory Committee, and the library is undergoing a serials review, in consultation with all the departments and programs, to figure out which journals and magazines have lower priority in terms of teacher/student needs.)
The problem is that it gets much, much worse. Ten percent (or 4,200) of incoming CSU freshmen will be turned away and "voluntarily" asked to attend community college instead. In what should be an utter union scandal, lecturers -- my friends and colleagues -- will simply have to be laid off! The impact on the students will be worse than they think: 194 class sections were already cut in 2002-2003, and the proposed budget will mean 575 more cut classes.
I already have to turn away maybe a dozen students for each section I teach -- not because I cannot handle over 50-55 students per class, but because the students simply won't fit. I've taught classes before where students had to take their midterms sitting on the floor -- and this after the University, in an attempt to increase class size, physically crammed more chairs into the rooms until Public Safety hollered that it was a fire hazard!
There is no way one can deliver quality education, without TAs, to classes over 40 -- and that's already way too much for most universities out there! -- and I am simply not willing to change my essay-based exams to multiple-choice ones. Class discussions are difficult enough to coordinate without having to deal with students sitting on the floor. As if the student fee hikes weren't bad enough -- and an overwhelming majority of my students, both in Asian American Studies and in Anthropology, work part-time or even full-time -- the cancelled sections will mean that students can't graduate on time because they can't get the units.
I cannot even begin to express how angry all this makes me.
This is why a coalition of teachers, students and staff -- in conjunction with the CFA -- is spearheading a campaign called Save The CSU. See also www.protestfeehikes.org for more information. (I'll be posting more on this subject from time to time as well.)
Posted by the wily filipino at February 23, 2004 09:45 AM