SR 11-06 - Resolution in Support of Tenure-Track Hiring

Senate Resolution File:
SR 11-06 Resolution in Support of Tenure-Track Hiring

Drafted By: Senate Exec: Jim Meriwether, chair; Cindy Wyels, vice-chair; Simone Aloisio, Jeanne Grier, Andrea Grove, Beth Hartung, Antonio Jimenez-Jimenez, Sean Kelly, Dulce Lopez, Ching-Hua Wang; ex-officio: Nancy Deans, Therese Eyermann, Dawn Neuman
Senate Resolution
For the past decade, the faculty at CSU Channel Islands have worked to build a university from the ground up, helping to create an institution to be admired and respected in the CSU, the State of California, and beyond. The faculty have dedicated themselves to building and offering innovative and quality programs and a campus of which students, staff, faculty, and the broader community in which we live can be proud. It has been a labor of love.

Yet that labor has not been without costs, and potential long-term negative effects were highlighted during WASC accreditation in 2007:

Faculty and Staff Workloads. Each site team has reported a high degree of faculty and staff engagement, not only with the WASC self-study process, but also with the staggering number of tasks associated with building a new institution. While this has not led to reported indications of discouragement among the faculty or staff, the Commission shares the teams’ apprehensions that such demanding workloads may, in time, lead to burnout or lessening of “reach” to cover all requisite tasks. Knowing that the University is seeking to hire new faculty and staff at a pace that matches enrollment growth, the University will also need to be vigilant in protecting faculty and staff from the exhaustion of such sustained engagement.(emphasis added)

Now, the faculty are asking the administration to once again endeavor to build the ranks of tenure-track faculty. The renewal of hiring this year is to be commended; nevertheless, the faculty note that even with these new hires, over the span of the past five years the campus has seen no net growth in the number of tenure-track faculty while there has been a projected 27% rise in FTES. For too long, CSU Channel Islands has been the 23rd campus of 23 campuses in the CSU when it comes to the ratio of instructional TT/lecturer faculty.

The numbers and concerns can be enumerated at length, but lead to the same conclusion: that there must be a sustained and deep commitment to hiring tenure-track faculty at CI. To that end, the Academic Senate strongly urges that the hiring of tenure-track faculty be made a top strategic priority now and in the years to come. The rate of tenure-track faculty hiring at this point needs to outpace the rate of student growth so that the instructional TT/lecturer ratio improves. The Senate further requests that the CI administration, in consultation with the Fiscal Policies Committee, address concerns identified above by WASC by developing, publicizing, and implementing a plan to address this priority.