Rainy Days and Furloughs

Rainy Days and Furloughs sounds like a really bad Carpenter’s song.  Maybe this is just like being in a really bad Carpenter’s song.

I’ve slowed down on blogging about the furlough year as the semester has accelerated.  Keeping a record of what is going on takes a backseat to papers that need grading, student crises, and the demands of class preps and committee work.  Research and writing–forget it.

For most of the past six weeks, it felt like we were on a roller coaster.  The budget allocations for spring were released.  As the coordinator of our graduate program, I help build the class schedule, so I got to see it.  I was floored (whatever that expression means).   It seemed impossible to reconcile the budget we had been given with our enrollment targets.  People would lose their jobs and it appeared that tenure line faculty would have to teach another class each semester.  The need to deliver the major, cover our graduate program, and participate in general education emerged as competing interests—which mouth do you feed?  Some people began talking about discontinuing the graduate program.  Others argued that we should just bow out of general education.  Outside the department, someone argued to me that the history majors, like other majors across the campus, will just have to take longer to finish up their degree.  If the students don’t feel the pinch and start complaining, they reasoned, then no one will ever realize the folly of cutting back eduction.

Then we learned that the campus received stimulus money for instruction.  At first we thought that meant extra sections.  But now it seems less clear.  The adjunct faculty hang in limbo.  I’ve seen some editorials that regard them as toss offs, that the entire budget crisis would be solved if they were all let go and every tenure line person taught another course.  These are smart people with PhDs, active members of our campus who contribute important components to the curriculum, and the numbers belie that.  The idea that “not renewing” them (we don’t say “laying them off”) centers on the notion that if the lowest paid employees are released, then somehow magically everything will be fine.  That isn’t where the big money goes in the CSU system, I’m sure.

So then the roller coaster hit a wall full force.  Frustration is really the best way to describe it.  The students, who seemed a few weeks back to have settled into a peaceful acquiescence of the furlough year, are now agitated.  The library closure has impacted all of them and it is noticeable in their work.  I’ve heard students exclaim in exasperation “I hate the furloughs” and “the furloughs are so frustrating.”   I came to realize that my digital history class can’t really complete one of their assignments–the video editing can’t be done because the resources are closed all weekend and after 6:00 at night.  One of my graduate students indicated that the furloughs have impeded her progress on her degree significantly.  So the students feel the pinch—anyone listening?

And I shouldn’t say but I’m sure that most faculty are finding that to survive–to deliver this deeply flawed semester of instruction–they must work (in secret of course) through their furlough days.  Of course, you can’t do that, otherwise you could be dismissed.  Fired for working.

Several faculty, both tenure line and adjunct, have told me how hard it is to feel motivated.  “It isn’t the loss of pay,” one good friend of mine observed.  It was somehow all the energy has been drained away.  I think much of it has to do with the students who seem increasingly less motivated—their energy fills the classrooms whether it is positive or negative.  It is apparent that some see the semester as a throw away—like a rainy day in third grade when you know there isn’t going to be any recess and you are going to eat lunch in the classroom.  You spend an eternity playing heads-up seven-up just to kill time.  This semester, probably this whole year, is like one long rainy day in grade school.

One of our alumni who is in Ph.D. program dropped in for a visit.  Although she was homesick for CSUSM and missed the close contact with the faculty, her new environment had opened her eyes up to the limitations of the CSU.  “Why do you stay?”  She asked me.  I know she is pondering her own future.

When people ask me that, and they ask me that a lot, this is what I always tell them:  When I first came to CSUSM, I missed the big research university atmosphere and, while it was exciting to be a part of a new university, it was often wearisome.  But several years ago, I had a terrific student—an ideal student who was totally engaged in everything he did.  He also had an extremely rare and likely fatal disease.  One semester, his condition worsened and the experimental treatment he was undergoing wasn’t working.  He looked horrible but soldiered on.  In office hours, he talked about how awful he felt and his dire prognosis.  I told him, “Take some time off and relax.  Don’t pressure yourself.”  He looked at me with utter surprise and said—I remember his words to this day–“No, no, no.  I love this place.  I love this place.  If this is it for me, then this is where I want to spend the rest of my life.”

So the doubts about what I was doing here were erased.  To be a part of something so meaningful is (or it should be) the highpoint of any university career.

So I’m thinking that the true goal during in the budget crisis is not just to survive as a campus but also to preserve the quality of what we offer and who we are.  Students don’t come to CSUSM to party and they don’t come for the big box university experience.  They come to learn and to be valued as individuals.  (Okay—some don’t but a lot do.)  This is a place where students find their passion for learning; it is not trivial statement to say it really does give meaning to their lives.

Budget crises come and go but the impact that the university makes, the special place it creates, endures.  That is what we need to concentrate on.

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