The title of Thursday’s public forum (sponsored by CFA) is pretty lofty: The Future of the California State University.

The list of participants for the day-long event is pretty impressive, too: Assemblyman Darrel Steinberg, John Douglass of UC Berkeley, CFA statewide President Susan Meisenhelder, Ralph Carmona (former UC regent) and Linda Collins, president of the Academic Senate of California Community Colleges, among a dozen others.

The forum is a continuation of CFA efforts (through a series of public hearings) to sound the alarm about the threats to the CSU from people who would seem to be more interested in number crunching than education. That might seem harsh, but even the casual observer of the CSU system in recent years has to be a little worried about continued trends towards a CSU corporate model. What trends? Among others:

• A continual drumbeating from Long Beach about something called efficiency.

• The continued forcing of so-called merit pay down the throats of faculty.

• The vast (and growing) gap between administrative and faculty salaries.

• The near religious fervor for distance education.

• The lack of concern by non-faculty about conditions in classrooms.

Efficiency, as administratively defined, seems to mean packing as many students as possible into a class, though even in K-12, it’s been recognized that lower class size makes for a better learning environment. While you would expect the battle cry at the CSU to be “Excellence! Excellence!” the cry heard most often is “Enrollment! Enrollment!”

The gap between faculty salaries and administrative pay has made it nearly impossible for a faculty member to become, say, an Associate Dean for a few years and then return to the classroom. It’s hard for these former professors to take a $30,000-$40,000 pay cut, especially when they face a four-course teaching load again. (This could be avoided, of course, by simply paying faculty and administrators virtually the same. Maybe that will be suggested Thursday.)

Distance education earns bonus points for faculty (at FMI time) who volunteer, but students routinely complain that web-based classes are no substitute for classroom contact and, in fact, just plain don’t really work – if the student really wants to learn.

Whether you agree with any of these points — or many others CFA will be bringing to the podium on Thursday – the public hearing provides a unique opportunity to have your voice heard about what the CSU needs, either to preserve the good, or make changes for the better. Similar hearings held at San Jose State and CSU, Los Angeles drew plenty of comment and attention, some of it quite uncomfortable for the CSU Board of Trustees to hear.

Comfortable or not, some things have to be said. Thursday is the faculty’s chance to say them.

Michael J. Fitzgerald is a Journalism professor and a member of the CSUS Faculty Senate. He can be reached by mail C/O the State Hornet-CSUS, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA, or by e-mail at [email protected].