The CSU needs to look forward, not backward, in funding to support its students

Note: The Friday “special topics” post this week is on higher education! Data for this post come from CSU statistical reports.

As a faculty member (read: professor) at California State University (CSU) San Bernardino, I am also a member of the California Faculty Association (CFA), which is the union which represents CSU faculty. The big news out of our union this past week is that negotiations over our next contract, between the CFA and CSU management, have collapsed. We have been allowed to declare an impasse after 18 months of negotiation and will now go into a phase of the negotiation process called “mediation”. If mediation fails, there are a few additional steps of fact-finding and negotiation, but it is possible that after we pass all those phases, that we will need to vote on whether to strike. You can read the link above to learn about the CFA and CSU demands.

The last time the CFA was planning to strike was in 2016. It was our first new contract since the Great Recession, and faculty had gone many years without a raise. A few days before the week-long strike was set to occur in April 2016, the CFA came to an agreement with the CSU which protected many of our benefits and offered us about 10.5% in retroactive and future raises. So, the strike was ultimately cancelled and we could celebrate a few victories.

About a year after that strike, in 2017, the CFA published a report titled “Equity Interrupted”, which argued that the CSU had been drastically underfunded for many years. I cannot find the report online anymore, but you can email me if you’d like to read it. The main chart showed that funding per student had been trending downward for at least the past 10 years. This is a big deal because the CSU plays a very important role in generating social mobility and equity across California. It seemed like the CSU was abandoning that mission.

Last semester, a student in one of my classes (thanks Axel!) wanted to update that chart. Since 2015 (which is where the data ended), has funding continued to decline? Here is what they found:

Funding has gone up continuously, and is now higher, even after adjusting for inflation, than it has been in almost 20 years.

If the CSU can’t support faculty in the work they do to promote equity and achievement at “The People’s University”, it will be going against the grain of many years of public funding success. The ball is obviously in the CSU’s court.