Cal State professors, students stage funeral for public university

At their regular meeting in Long Beach Wednesday, trustees of the California State University moved forward with a request to the state that would restore about $800 million to the system’s budget. Outside that meeting, faculty, staff, and students staged a largely quiet demonstration to protest the half-billion dollars in cuts in effect now. KPCC’s Adolfo Guzman-Lopez has the story.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez: Pallbearers dressed in black carried a cardboard coffin out of a hearse parked in front of university headquarters.

["Amazing Grace" on bagpipes]

Guzman-Lopez: A procession of Cal State students and instructors dressed in black ended at a grassy patch near the building’s entrance. The university’s faculty union organized the mock funeral because they maintain that California has fatally damaged its promise of public higher education for the many.

Cal State Long Beach English major Diana Boyd said she’s noticed that professors aren’t spending as much time with students as they used to.

Diana Boyd: I’ve noticed that assignments get cut down, you do less in a class because they don’t have time to grade them or to just teach because now they’re taking furlough days.

Guzman-Lopez: Boyd said she’s angry that all this, including the unpaid days off for faculty and staff, is happening at the same time she’s paying higher student fees than last year.

Dorothy Wills, Chair of Cal Poly Pomona’s Anthropology Department, said she was upset about having to cut courses so her department could save money on instructors.

Dorothy Wills: I’m very sad for our state, I’m very sad for our university, which I think that in the past we’ve had one of the best university experiences for the average person as well as for the outstanding student that you could find anywhere in the country, or in the world for that matter.

Guzman-Lopez: Wills said that the spirit of education is dead at her campus. Cal State Long Beach senior Jaqueleen Larson told the mock-funeral crowd she noticed the change on the first day of class a few weeks ago.

Wills: The campus didn’t feel like it was thriving. It just felt like attitudes have shifted from being inspired to being mollified, and even worse, from being engaged to just ambivalent.

Guzman-Lopez: One university employee told the crowd that the atmosphere may provoke denial and anger, but that it should never lead people who care about the university to meekly accept current and future budget cuts.

California Faculty Association President Lillian Taiz said cuts this year were worse than she’d expected. The state’s expecting a $7 billion deficit next fiscal year. Taiz said the professors' union will continue to push one message: the state should isolate public universities from budget cuts.

Lillian Taiz: We are in a tug of war. If you don’t keep holding on to the rope on your end of things, the other side will run off with the rope. So you may not move the rope a far distance, but you have to hang on to it.

Guzman-Lopez: Even if she and her colleagues gain ground in the tug of war, Taiz predicted that it’ll take years for the 23 Cal State campuses to rise from the dead.